New.Journalism.Review

In November [2010] the Telegraph website ran the following:  Universities spending millions on websites which students rate as inadequate.

The intro  says it all:

‘Universities are spending millions on redesigns and maintenance of websites which students say are inadequate and lack basic services, the Telegraph can disclose.’

The report relies heavily on a comparison of data from responses of universities to FOI requests. Data returned was put into a spreadsheet and this was  followed by output into a neat data visualization. All standard stuff.

Pretty Maps

The interactive map is pretty cool and worth checking out.  I discovered that Bournemouth University spends £3.32 per student on its website – now, that’s a little fact to use down the pub. But look at Exeter  -  according to the Telegraph it spends £23.38 per student. Is that a lot? The Telegraph seems to think so…

Is it now time to be outraged by how much universities spend on their websites, at a time when tuition fees are rising? Or do we accept that a well-maintained university websites is pretty essential in the modern, market-driven, world of HE?

The villain in this story is University of Hertfordshire. It spent ‘£278,094 on a redesign by Precedent Communications and Straker UK, completed in May 2008” and is the  most expensive university website.

Other ‘expensive’ sites include those from:  Exeter University, Cranfield and  Robert Gordon.

All these universities were contacted to explain themselves. In fact, alarm bells should have been ringing at the Telegraph newsroom because all the explanations seem perfectly reasonable and some raised questions about the validity of the comparisons that were made.

University accounting structures differ a lot.  In some cases, website work is highly centralised (in other cases, costs are dispersed through different faculties and schools), some figures include staffing costs (s0me don’t), some figures include cost of hardware (some don’t) etc.

Data from the Telegraph appears to suggest all the money quoted is spent on public-facing sites, but most universities also have internal intranets for staff and VLEs for students. I’m not saying this data is wrong, but I wouldn’t want to be the journalist to check all of this on deadline day.

Apple+ Apple + Banana + Apple + Pear + Apple = ?

The Telegraph does its bit for journalistic transparency by publishing the full spreadsheet of data. But there is a warning here. I love reading a good ‘top ten’ in a newspaper.  It’s great to produce a table of data that ‘proves’ a political point – in this case that the public sector spends too much on web white elephants. But journalists must ensure they are comparing like with like.  And guess what? Sometimes this is impossible and you have to kill a story.

It’s fine to send out hundreds of FOI requests to public sector institutions (that’s the easy bit).  But the figures you get back need careful handling, cleaning and authenticating or else they risk becoming HIGHLY  misleading.  Ensuring that you are comparing ‘apples with apples’ is not easy. You don’t want any phallic-shaped bananas getting stuck in Excel.

Social media is becoming an increasingly important marketing tool for universities. Most young people are heavy users of Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It would seem logical that these sites could prove fertile for the recruitment of new students.

The purchasing of banner advertising spots on sites such as YouTube is becoming particularly important for the post-92 university sector (the former Polytechnics) who cannot rely on research reputation alone to bring in the punters. But whilst conducting an old-style, ‘one-way’,  banner advertising campaign during Clearing is relatively low risk, this is not enough.

Social media = risk

It is expected that universities fully engage in the community aspects of social media and understand that online communication is a ‘conversation’ rather than a lecture.

But going deeper and fully engaging with social media sites is not without its risks. The potential ‘damage to brand’ caused by a negative comment posted online can paralyse university marketing departments. The carefully constructed image that universities portray in a glossy prospectus can easily be undermined with a careless post or foolish Tweet.

Even though universities may not engage fully with social media sites, it is clear that their university students post to these sites. On the downside, students are encouraged to see themselves as ‘consumers’ of education. When a student feels that they are not getting ‘value’ (whatever that means!) it’s common to vent anger on social networking sites. This should be expected, although certain lines must not be crossed when it comes to posting potentially libelous comments about individuals. This is becoming a serious problem in all sectors of education. One hopes that universities have a clear policy and encourage responsible attitudes.

‘Authentic voices’ required

Whilst it’s very easy to focus on the huge number of risks presented by social media, there are numerous opportunities. I have seen examples where students have posted videos on YouTube showing funny clips of life in halls of residence and positive ‘reviews’ of university trips abroad. These act to  give a very positive view of life at individual universities and useful online ‘buzz’. Communication is conducted in a language that fellow students understand and it is totally authentic. Any attempt to replicate these types of videos by marketing departments will appear contrived and are sure to end in disaster.

So increasingly it appears that media-savvy students naturally seek out ‘authentic views’ as they search for potential places to study. The Times Higher (Deciphering Code, 19-25 August) states that universities spend huge amounts of money designing slick official websites which present a carefully controlled image of the ‘student experience’.

But the report suggests what prospective students REALLY want to know is what current students think about their courses .Universities have known this for years, but these days it’s not good enough to just include the positive views of a few carefully selected photogenic students.

Universities getting it right

THE praised Bangor, Cambridge, Edinburgh College of Art, Exeter and Falmouth for engaging with social media. These sites often made links to Facebook pages where a ‘warts and all’ view of the university experience could be found.

A separate article in the same issue of Times Higher (All About Me, Dot Com 9th-25 August), suggests that universities are not encouraging academics to blog or create their own sites.

Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton examined academics’ websites. He told THE:

“One of the biggest trends [in the last five years] has been the move by university marketing departments to insist on standardisation for departmental and personal homepages.”

There appears to be an online battle to control the public image.  Where academics are  ‘allowed’ to blog it is often insisted that they use a strict template with a consistent university branding and use a specific CMS.

This tends to discourage technically-minded academics from blogging, although in many cases academics would rather keep their blogs separate from their official work. Those academics without the technical skills need support, but this is often not something that is encouraged.

Whilst universities will continue to invest in online advertising, marketing departments at universities can be very conservative – only adopting social media once it has been proven effective and with only limited risk.

More ‘trust’, less ‘control’

Clearly, it is important that universities understand  that it is the ‘authentic voice’ and real experiences of existing students and academics on social media and blog sites which are surely the most powerful marketing tool. They should be trusted and encouraged to experiment with online tools and universities need to relinquish a bit of control of access to media. Alternatively, we have a situation where fears of  ‘loss of control of the message’ prevent effective marketing to potential students.

Time to wave goodbye to old-fashioned lecture notes (Independent – 19th Nov 2009) reports on how Russell Stannard, principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster, uses technology to mark student essays.

This got me thinking. I’ve been dabbling with Camtasia 3 for a few months. The software came free with an issue of .Net magazine. I was attempting, with not a lot of success, to create tutorials on how to upload content to Joomla! (a CMS) for my students. Camtasia is a screencast tool i.e. it records everything that you do on your PC screen in video format and you can also record an audio commentary. This is useful for a number of purposes, such as those listed on the official Camtasia site.

But after reading the article in The Indie, I’ve found it’s also very useful for providing feedback on journalism assignments. Students submit assignments electronically using our Moodle-based VLE. I then get a student’s Word file on screen and edit it, whilst simultaneously giving a live commentary on the changes that I’m making. This is like giving a student their own personal tutorial. The file produced by Camtasia is then saved, compressed in size and can be emailed to the student for viewing.

The system has worked so well that I have invested in a newer version of Camtasia – 6 is the latest edition. I also bought a decent quality Logitech USB desktop microphone

Pros of using Camtasia:

1. An interesting way to deliver feedback: Getting students to read any feedback delivered in the traditional way (i.e. hand written corrections to their scripts) can be a problem – they normally just want to see the grade! This is a particular issue for weaker students who can sometimes feel intimidated when they see pages and pages of corrections. Of course, it’s the weaker students who really need to see (and understand) their feedback.
2. It’s quicker than correcting scripts the old-fashioned way: It takes ages to mark 60 or 80 scripts, so I always have one eye on the clock. I’m sure that I’m not the only tutor who times how long it takes them to mark each paper. If a bit of software doesn’t improve my productivity – it’s gone!
3. You can go into a lot more detail: It’s like a face-to-face tutorial. You can provide a lot more explanation verbally than you can using written comments. This is really handy for the weaker students. You can also ‘zoom’ in and ‘highlight’ individual paragraphs to provide detailed comments.
4. Good feedback from students: I have done a really small test sample, but I’ve had some very positive feedback from students.

Cons: The files must be compressed quite heavily if you are going to send them via email and this can take up to a minute or so to complete. I move on to reading the next assignment, whilst Camtasia is busily compressing away.

Camtasia 3 is widely available for free, but it doesn’t provide brilliant compression. It’s worth getting hold of a new-ish version. Feedback has to be logged and verified by external examiners, so sometimes it’s best to have it in hard copy format.

Cost: Camtasia 6 costs $299 or around £180. But there is a free web-based screencast technology called ScreenToaster that seems to do a similar job, although I’ve not tried this.

I am keen to find out who else is using Camptasia or similar screencast software.

We’re introducing Second Life to L1 journalism students next week. I normally attempt to cultivate a cool, ‘technological determinist’ image. But in this case, I have had to work extra hard to explain the relevance of SL to our students.

The buzz surrounding SL was pretty high back in May 2008 when I was planning the teaching. Fast forward 10 months, and it seems about as academically sexy as receiving a £70 fine for spending five hours in an Aldi car park (thanks Parking Eye!) 

Statistics – it’s Second Life versus Twitter versus Britney – let battle commence!

In terms of blog coverage, SL was once the talk of the town.
Now that young upstart Twitter is the belle of the ball. Just to keep
it ‘scientific’, Britney is acting as our ‘base’ for blog buzz.    

Keyword popularity across the Blogosphere

This chart illustrates how many times blog posts across the Blogosphere contained the following keywords.

“Second Life” vs. Britney vs. Twitter

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UK universities using Second Life

Like many UK universities, the place where I  work has received research funding to create a cool-looking virtual campus and to investigate teaching possibilities (particularly in distance learning).

Eduserv released a detailed report of  Second Life usage in higher education in Autumn 2008 which outlines some great examples of good practise.

As a journalism lecturer, I have to consider SL’s relevance to unit outcomes.Fashion and interior design courses at the university are already using SL as a means to preview student projects and obtain tutor feedback.

SL in journalism teaching – any use?

SL offers the possibility to stage ‘virtual news events’. We do a number of these mock exercises in “first life” already. But these can be expensive to run, take considerable planning and we would like to do more of them.

Students also study ‘virtual communities’ from a theoretical perspective. So SL gives students real experience of this, outside the normal Facebook arena which most students seem to use. 

CNN is also still asking its iReporters to submit citizen stories, many of which can be found on the CNN iReporters site here. Although other large media brands seem to be scaling back their efforts and I’m not sure whether the CNN experiment has been particularly successful. 

SL is very bandwidth-intensive and this has presented networking problems. Only a few IT rooms have the software installed (the other university PCs are just not up to the job). So the ‘business case’ for teaching SL is starting to look shaky already.

SL also needs to be made easier to use. Philip Rosedale said in a .Net Magazine interview (February 2007) said that it took around four hours to learn the basics, which could be described as quite a ‘barrier to entry’. This need to change before it gets any sort of mainstream acceptance.

That said, I still think that virtual worlds are a key to the Web 3.0 model. And whilst it may not be SL that wins the race, we are fulfilling our duty in getting students’ pointing their heads in the right direction.

This is old news, but Zoe Corbyn wrote an excellent feature on academics who blog in the Times Higher - By the blog: academics tread carefully (October 2008).

Scroll down the article, stop about halfway and stuck between Zoe Brigley of Northampton University and David Petley of Durham, you can read about this blog!

Zoe's article outlines the key reasons why academics blog, which I have roughly summarised here (based on the main article and comments beneath it):

• Test area – float ideas or reflect when preparing papers and lectures etc.
• Obtain Feedback – from students, colleagues and others.
• Enhance reputation -People use blogs for a bit of personal online marketing, although that can also help their university or college.
• 'A day in the life' / diary - explain what it is like to  work as a scientist in a lab – if that's what you do.
• Accessibility – open up a subject / specialism. Some departments do this in a formal way to engage with A Level students and hopefully recruit.
• Personal reminder  – to record key events in the blogger's day or life.
• Feeds directly into teaching – many universities encourage students to blog /reflect online.

This list could  apply to just about anyone who has ever blogged, if you just remove the educational stuff. But there is an interesting debate about how much you reveal in the public space, particularly when it comes to scientific research. Research in the arts tends not to be so lucrative or competitive  – so nobody seems to give a toss if academics in the arts give away all the great 'secrets' for free (not that there are many!).

The article also states that there isn't really a community of 'academic bloggers' , as people seem to stick to their own subject fields. Most academics read blogs written by those in industry, as well as those in their field of education.

My ever-increasingly-long list of articles that I have starred in my Google Reader using my phone reflects this. It tells me I read a wide mix of journalism academics such as Paul Bradshaw and  Andy Dickinson.net in the UK (these have both set the standard in academic blogging and really should have made it into the THE feature), those written by full-time hacks like Martin Stabe, Charles Arthur and Neil McIntosh and those about IT and gadgets in general. These blogs (and, of course, many others) remind me of interesting developments that I really MUST discuss with the students.