eduWeb2008 Wrap-up
I feel like I have had enough time to sit down and think about some of the things that I learned and experienced at eduWeb2008 this week. The opportunity to network with everyone that I have been tweeting with already was almost worth the price of admission. Unplugging and meeting people face-to-face to exchange new ideas certainly helped me to renew the passion I have for my job. Sometimes just feeding off of someone else’s passion is all that it takes. It is also nice to see those new faces (or followers) in the industry and how they are driving things forward.
Jacob, Kyle James (courtesy of Michael Fienen)
Karine Joly hit the nail on the head when she said “It’s the community stupid!” in her closing keynote. The community was shining brightly at eduWeb and it was demonstrated by Matt Herzberger’s extensive list of blogs, streaming video and photos from people at the conference. All of these pieces will certainly prove to be valuable as time goes on.
The tool that revolutionized the conference the most was probably twitter. While it probably isn’t the next killer app, the ongoing conversation during presentations, and over the course of the three days we were in Atlantic City, helped me to develop and expand my own thoughts. It was even a trending topic on search.twitter.com. Unfortunately, for some presenters twitter also demonstrated how quickly an audience can turn on you. Either way I now have an expanded professional network to bounce ideas off of. Mike Richwalsky did bring up an interesting point on how this could present problems for someone putting on a conference. It will be interesting to see how HighEdWebDev is from the virtual side in comparison to eduWeb.
Left to Right: Nick Catto, Kyle James, Brad J Ward and Bryan Adams tweeting during the conference.
Mark Greenfield’s opening keynote set the tone for the conference with his top 10 Web trends. I always enjoying reading Mark’s blog and listening to his presentations. I feel like he is a living legend in the land of higher education Web marketing. His forward thinking always keeps me on my toes, and challenges me to push on the dinosaurs a little harder to make things happen. He also challenged everyone on the idea that “e-mail is dead.” While there is an ongoing debate happening over on our Ning site, I think email will always have it’s place in the interactive marketing mix. The effectiveness of e-mail just might be in decline.
Jacob, Mark Greenfield and Kyle James at eduWeb 2008 (courtesy of Kyle James)
While I have given loads of praise to the awesome presenters of the conference in my daily posts, there are a few things that were problematic. Most of all having a conference in Atlantic City, which is relatively far from a major airport, can only invite major travel headaches. Lucky for me I could call on family to run me back and forth to Philly unlike others that had to rent a car of take a train. While the location was certainly unique, the glitz and glamor of a casino is one thing I could certainly pass up.
In the end, I think the conference helped renew my motivation for the projects that I am working on right now. In addition to the renewed motivation, it also served as a serious confidence booster since I have more ammunition for all of the battles I have been fighting.
Here are the top five takeaways or ideas from the conference we will try to implement at our institution:
- Cloud computing: Can we move some of our critical functions to the cloud? What about the non-critical functions?
- Blog improvements: None of our bloggers work in the admission office. This would help humanize the bloggers and encourage feedback on the blogs.
- Target ghost applicants: We need to build a relationship with these applicants. Most of them have applied through the Web since it is free at our institution. What other Web services might they be looking for?
- Investigate the SkoolPool application as a one stop shop for social network management. Is it any better than doing this all manually ourselves?
- Improve our email analytical reports so that we can automate and quantify whether or not email is dying for our institution.
July 25th, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Jacob,
Awesome finally meeting you in person! Also for the record I wasn’t twitter in that middle picture… I PROMISE!
I’ve got some crazy wild and creative ideas for the future to bounce off of you soon. In the mean time keep it real!
July 26th, 2008 at 6:24 am
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