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Randolph Hollingsworth's observations on her part in the War on Attrition - discovering and discussing this means at the University of Kentucky, http://www.uky.edu/UGS.  If you have a UK account, please sign in (see top right hand corner of the page) in order to add your comments.

11/18/2009

Everybody's talking about marketing and recruitment but what about students at our campuses searching for the right fit?
Here at the University of Kentucky we have a rapid turn-over in the selection of a college major.  This can be a good thing if the student is moving from a major where there is not a good fit in expectations or background to one where there is more promise for success, persistence despite adversity -- and eventually, ta-da! graduation.  This rapid and repeated changing of the major is a bad thing if the student still hasn't found a good fit and program/degree requirements keep adding on to an already too-long list of courses taken.  So, it seems strange to me that all the energy and MONEY placed on college recruiting activities, including social networking endeavors, doesn't get shared with student support staff and faculty working with currently enrolled students who wander between the various colleges within the University. 
 
Some really good points were raised at a recent CASE online speaker session: "In "Listen and Watch Closely: The Effective Use of Social Media for Student Recruitment," Lipman Hearne's Robert Moore and Stetson University's Gregory Carroll discussed the prevalence of social media use among Generation Y—teens and young adults—and how universities are using these technologies for recruitment and communication outreach efforts.  Moore, managing partner at Lipman Hearne, said 89% of rising seniors visit social networking sites primarily to stay in touch with friends, but only 18% use social media in their college search. However, Moore admitted the power of Facebook, MySpace and other social media as "extremely powerful peer-to-peer and word-of-mouth tools." Carroll, Stetson's vice president of marketing, discussed messaging and brand reinforcement, emphasizing the need for an "authentic voice." Previously, Carroll was vice president of marketing and public relations for Furman University. He noted that Furman's retention rates for students rose to 93 percent after the university implemented its social media efforts, which include using student bloggers. Having a strategic plan in place and being open to new ideas are key to a successful program, he said.  "Don't be afraid to try new things and see if they work," Carroll said.
 
Yahoo!  This is exactly what Chris Rice is doing with our Big Blue Network efforts.
 
Other key points from the session fit really well for any student retention efforts:
  • Successful strategies will include the right mix of traditional and social media
  • Be part of the conversation but engage audience as an individual—not from an institution's viewpoint
    Monitor Twitter, RSS feeds and other communications
  • Know the culture of your institution to determine what strategy will work best
  • Social media success takes people, skills and time
  • Be authentic in your storytelling and represent yourself accurately
Posted at 2:41 PM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Nov 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/27/2009

Does Kentucky have what pundits call an "educational pipeline"?
Dr. Kirwan (President of the U. of Maryland System, and a distinguished alumnus of the University of KY) made a presentation before Kentucky’s legislative commission concerning the activities of The College Board Commission on Access, Admissions, and Success in Higher Education.  Here are his presentation slides (in .pdf format).  The urgency he brings to the conversation cannot be denied: if the US stays on its present course of declining numbers of college-going students who actually graduate, "our 40% degree rate will drop to 29% by the year 2025." 
 
Here some of my thoughts posturing now as a radical historian and educator.  Perhaps our educational systems (holding tight to post-WW2 iterations of academic programming) are obsolete?  Why should we expect our students to graduate when what we are expecting is for them to sit down, shut up, close your laptop/phone, and repeat-after-me?
 
While the US is, according to the latest international statistics (based on those who entered college in the early 2000s), "the only industrialized nation with a declining college completion rate," we also have created a completely unique system of postsecondary education - one that is well suited for embodying American democratic ideals.  Europeans have very few institutions of learning that provide access in ways that we do in the US.  Communist and post-colonial nations are not interested in true access for learning, instead they produce graduates that are highly trained for specific fields to meet desired economic trends... and maintenance of their autocracy. 
 
While Dr. Kirwin - and many people here in Kentucky - are interested in finding the broken parts of an "education pipeline," I propose that Kentucky is so far behind in an infrastructure of educational progression that we can't afford to play catch up games.  We need to try something completely different.  Our adult workforce includes nearly 1 million people who cannot read above the 4th grade level; our middle school dropouts get GED training in jail; our legislators maintain high schools so to keep their relatives in one of the very few wage-earning jobs in their districts instead of improving the quality of educators; despite all our best efforts since WW2 our college-going population contains the same amount of first-generation college-going students as in the 1960s.  We're at the bottom.  How can we revolutionize postsecondary education?
Posted at 9:23 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/23/2009

Social media and the university admissions community
Chris Rice, UK's social technologies strategist, told me about Karlyn Morissette's blog posting on Hobsons' recent survey on admissions information:  http://doteduguru.com/id3839-the-credibility-of-college-info-from-social-network-sites-or-lack-thereof.html
 
I agree that social media is not a replacement for official websites or formal interviews with admissions staff.  However, the "trust factor" in branding of universities in general is not fully explored.  Just think how hard it must be to have really thoughtful, long-term conversations and dialog about postsecondary education with the general public in Kentucky. And what must it be like to have a meaningful dialog for more than just a few minutes (longer than it takes to fill out a quick survey) about a 16 or 17 year old's trust in anything at all.  Do admissions staff listen to these kinds of conversations regularly?  I suspect not.  However, there may be some late night conversations going on among groups of teenagers that could teach us educators a lot about what they think our institutions are or ought to be.  But we don't have access to those conversations as a rule.  But there could be some brief glimpses if we construct those conversations among these high school students' peers.  I imagine that many of us are just now starting to think about peer recruiters, peer admissions counselors, peer academic advisors... i.e., "side-facing marketing." I liked some of the comments appended to Morissette's blog posting:
 
"The most important step is to create communities around meaningful exchanges with others in ways that are relevant to the brand and to the genuine interests and needs of community members."  Notice, this person is talking about "community members" ... not a dialectic pair of university staff talking about their own community to high schoolers (and trying to convince them they want to join a new/different/better community).
 
and
 
"Social websites by their very nature do not provide factual information. It is sort of like asking your neighbor for a restaurant recommendation. Ultimately, I think social websites serve the function of sending students in a direction -to get more information rather than provide it."
 
Ah, now this is why we're experimenting with the Big Blue Network in the Office of Undergraduate Education.
Posted at 8:34 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/22/2009

Impressive milestone by Second Life shows complexities and importance in the growth of virtual worlds in general
Check out Brian Solis' posting in the FutureWorks blog, PR 2.0, on the amazing milestone reached by Linden Labs this month. 
 
Second Life residents have transacted the equivalent of more than $1 billion  with each other while spending more than one billion hours in Second Life.  More highlights from the report from Linden Labs:
  • Second Life (SL) Residents spend an average of about 100 minutes inworld per visit.
  • SL residents create more than 250,000 new virtual goods every day – from clothing to vehicles to buildings to automatic language translators, and more.
  • More than 18 billion minutes of voice chat have been used in Second Life since voice was introduced in 2007; and, Approximately 1,250 text-based messages are sent every second in Second Life, and more than 600 million words are typed on an average dayThe total land area of Second Life is now equivalent to approximately two billion square meters – roughly the size of the state of Rhode Island. 
  • As the creator and original seller of all virtual land in Second Life, Linden Lab is not only the provider of the world's largest platform for user-generated virtual goods, but also a leading virtual goods vendor itself.

See more at the SL press release at http://lindenlab.com/pressroom/releases/22_09_09

Posted at 1:21 PM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

10/2/2009

Despite fears and jeers - BBN is working!
The Big Blue Network project at UK took off in May in a large lumbering flight with hundreds then thousands of students by August.  We started with a high goal of opt-in from our student leaders and incoming freshmen... 75%... and Chris Rice kept it going and achieved that goal!  We're in a glide momentum right now, but I hope to keep up Chris's spirits and start the wings flapping soon so to gain altitude!
 
So, yes, I think this guy is right - Michael Idinopulos - he says, go broad and deep - the best way to launch a social networking experiment is to just jump in and do it:
 
Take "a launch approach that simultaneously achieves seemingly conflicting objectives:
  • Launch quickly and cheaply, without investing a ton of time or money in training and content creation.
  • Achieve scale by inviting lots of people.
  • Minimize risk by making participation opt-in rather than mandatory
  • Generate active participation through interactive launch events that don't require a lot of training or engagement from the new user.
  • Deliver deep value by following up with local champions who want to invest time and effort in more robust, group-specific forms of collaboration.

 

Posted at 2:58 PM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Oct 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/27/2009

Adolescent Literacy and College Readiness
On Monday, UK hosts a summit for discussion between educators and student services staff of UK and Fayette County Public Schools.  The purpose of the summit is to engage educators from FCPS and UK in a dialog on student success. We are specifically interested in eliciting new ideas to promote the academic achievement of FCPS graduates who enroll at UK. Participants from FCPS will include high school teachers, counselors, and administrators; participants from UK will include professors, advisors, professional staff, and administrators.  The summit will be composed of two sessions. The morning session will involve sharing of information about student success and initiatives and programs designed to promote success. The afternoon session will allow participants to engage in conversations within small groups of colleagues representing both institutions. The goal of these conversations is to generate ideas that address barriers to academic success and to recommend new collaborations between FCPS and UK that can have a demonstrable positive impact on student achievement.
 
This is a timely topic as the state legislature has challenged us to work together to increase college-going trends.  The latest report on this effort can be found at the CPE website.
 
A new report from Carnegie Corporation of New York Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Readiness offers recommendations on how to advance adolescent literacy and learning.  It is the capstone report of Carnegie Council for Advancing Adolescent Literacy, chaired by Catherine Snow, professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  The report is based on ideas from experts nationwide.  http://carnegie.org/literacy/tta/  How much of this can be used here in Kentucky?
Posted at 8:48 PM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Sept 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/10/2009

Dynamism or Stasis?  Are you moving forward with reform or just waiting for the market economy to magically get better?
Words from a Cassandra warning us to keep moving, keep dreaming - we must still want to be surprised... even in these bad economic times:
 
“How we feel about the evolving future tells us about who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineering world? Or do we embrace dynamism, a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise?”
 
(Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. Touchstone, 1998).
Posted at 10:30 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: Sept 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

9/1/2009

Internet-derived words - teenagers help pump up the Collins English Dictionary
Heh noobs!  Check it out - 267 words added to this year's new edition of the Collins English Dictionary - many of them from our younger populations' conversations via social technologies.  Texting, gaming, twitters, friending and more - all have been instrumental in the evolution of the English language.  Here's the (UK) Times article on it:
Posted at 9:16 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: August 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

8/24/2009

First day of classes reflection paper - I am...
write for 5 minutes
I am...
I am glad and excited to be here.
I am interested in thinking about the future.
I am fascinated (and calmly anchored) by the many different visions of the past.
I am spiritual.
I am aggressively proud of my children and my husband.
I am loyal to my larger family too.
I am music.
I am secretly wishing I was an athlete again.
I am a reader and a writer - research is my mistress.
 
 
Posted at 7:45 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: August 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)

8/13/2009

In social networking, friend is a verb
Who would have thought it...in just a few years time, the noun "friend" is now a verb.  Friending.  Looks funny if you look at it long enough.  And it is not the same as "fan" - for example, I am a fan of the social technologist Chris Brogan, but I'd have to be physically near him in order to fan him.  Yet, here I am fanning him - because I really like his blog post on how to manage friending.  
 
We can't expect everyone to enter the culture of social networking automatically: we need to be taught the etiquette just as a six-year-old needs to be reminded verbally how to shake hands properly with an adult.  The modelling his parents have already given him isn't always enough.  Here is Chris Brogan's post on the why and how-to on friending in social networks.
 
Posted at 7:22 AM by Hollingsworth, Randolph | Category: August 2009 | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (0)
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