Is it possible to run away from the digital footprints you’ve left in the social media ecosystem? Evan Ratliff, a contributor to Wired Magazine, believed he could do it for 30 days. The catch: he had to become born-again, with a new social media persona.
He lasted 24 days, and believe it or not, it was an amateur cyber-sleuth and a gluten-free pizza that finally did him in.
Listen to his story. From NPR’s On the Media.
As more college instructors embrace social media as a way to create, deliver and consume educational content, you can’t help but wonder what the college experience will be like in a few years. Facebook, podcasts, YouTube and even Twitter are becoming common tools for a cadre of social media-savvy professors who are abandoning the “sage on the stage” approach and engaging students in collaborative learning environments enabled by social media.
Missouri sees social media as a way to compensate for budget cutbacks, allowing professors to do more with tools that enhance their productivity. But this is hardly an issue centered on campus financial matters. Many educators see social media as a way to appeal to different learning styles and to bring real-world—if not real-time—events into the classroom.
But aren’t students who come of age in the Facebook era already social media-savvy? Not necessarily. Knowing how to use certain applications doesn’t guarantee that the results will be interesting, useful, or elegant. Indeed, does the ability to type words on a keyboard yield sentences that rival the work of Hemingway?
Apparently Rice, while not trying to produce mini-Hemingway’s, did feel that writing skills are going to be an important part of the social media solution going forward. Thank goodness. Next to email, the web-log or “blog”, as we’ve come to know it, is one of the oldest social media applications on the block. Dinosaur that it may be, the blog can also be one of the most elegant and effective tools around.With Dr. Craycroft in mind, what do you say we take a quick tour and visit a few professors in the blogosphere:
John Lee, a math instructor at the University of Washington uses a blog in his class, Geometry for Teachers.
writes a blog for students and instructors. Patton is also the author of two popular textbooks, so his blog reaches well beyond his own students into the lives of those instructors and students using his books.No, it's not your father's (or mother's) college campus anymore. Social media is changing the way education is created and consumed. But take heart in knowing that content still appears to be king, and thanks to some adventurous academics using social media and the blogosphere to help us find the answers ... that content has never been better.
Or as Hemingway might say: "The shortest answer is doing the thing."
There are over a million college professors listed on RateMyProfessors.com, and he's ranked #1. In this candid interview, Randy Bott of Brigham Young University, talks about the downside of fame and how this particular social media tool has affected his life. Seems popularity has a price.
Bott talks about the good, the bad, and the ugly of RateMyProfessor.com, discusses the correlation between RateMyProfessor.com ratings and those conducted by the university, and offers some practical advice on how to reach your students. He even wrestles with the question “How do you rate RateMyProfessor.com as a tool for students and educators?” His answers may surprise you. (24 minutes)
It's hard to walk more than a few blocks in San Francisco, Chicago, or New York City without seeing the signs. You see them in windows and on doors. Those unmistakable placards are everywhere, at least where restaurants, bars and hotels are concerned.
Zagat has survived for more than 30 years by selling a product that is essentially the result of user generated content (UGC). The company has managed to leverage the wisdom of a nationwide restaurant-hungry crowd and convert those ratings into publications and promotional products that are sold to consumers and the businesses who feed their desires. And Zagat did it before social media and online rating tools were popular. While other rating and review portals have come online and added additional competition and perspective to this space, Zagat has been able to leverage a strong brand name.
Just ask Starbucks, Subway, and Red Robin, who all scored #1 in the 2009 Zagat Fast Food Survey, how much the Zagat brand means to them. Over 6100 respondents rated more than 100 fast food chains nationwide. The CEO's from the top chains are no doubt celebrating, and publicising, their consumer-generated ratings. Some of them have even posted the news on their company Facebook pages--an interesting comingling of old and new media.
If social media is about engaging people in conversation, it can be argued that Zagat was ahead of the curve. Started in 1979 by Tim and Nina Zagat, the Zagat Survey is now the largest source of worldwide ratings of restaurants, bars, hotels, nightclubs and even golf courses. Over 350,000 reviewers (Zagat calls them surveyors) from around the world provide reviews, express their opinion and help others in their search for a good place to eat, drink and be merry. Over 40,000 restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, golf courses, etc. are represented in the Zagat guides. As the social media ecosystem has evolved, so has Zagat. They now have over 1,600 fans on Facebook and 14,000 followers on Twitter.
A typical Zagat Guide is $15.95, or you can subscribe on their website for $24.95 and gain access to their worldwide ratings. There is no charge to do a review. Anyone can be a reviewer of a neighborhood restaurant--just ask President Obama who did a restaurant review himself for a local Chicago public television show while a state senator. Who knows, you might even see a Zagat review 
from this blogger...
Just in case you're wondering if the Zagat name really means that much, Starbucks recently incorporated the number one Zagat rating into their new advertising campaign. It must mean something. Read more...
We don't generally think of college students as customers of a particular school, but as a new fall semester begins let's pause to consider how the transaction between seller and buyer was initiated. It's called shopping, and it's never been easier to shop for a college.
It wasn't always that way. A generation ago, a high school guidance counselor showed you to a room full of college catalogs, the printed words and images beckoning you to come closer. A generation ago, many students, prodded by anxious parents, did the "college tour," sampling campuses and spontaneously interviewing indigenous students, faculty and staff. But that was then.
Leap forward a generation, and these methods seem not only antiquated, but inadequate for power shoppers. Today, you can now learn more about a college in an hour than you could have by enrolling for a semester a generation ago. Really.
Sure, the ThePrincetonReview.com beats the catalog room, and the rankings at US News and World Report is a great place to get some perspective on how colleges compare, but if you really want to experience a college, albeit virtually, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and podcasts are ready resources. To prove this point, take a look at how much we learned about Arizona State University in less than an hour.
Once known for being a party school, ASU now ranks #28 in America’s Best College Buys by Forbes Magazine, and #350 in Forbe's list of the best colleges in the country. Okay, pretty basic stuff. Let's go deeper.
How does Arizona State University rate on CollegeProwler.com, a social media website providing student-written profiles and “report cards” of colleges and universities on such topics as 
academics, weather, off-campus dining, Greek life, and diversity? Looking at the rating for Greek life, for example, ASU currently rates a B-. There are also some “Quick Stats” that show there are 20 fraternities and 13 sororities, and that there are only 7% and 8% respectively of undergrad students in each. So much for the party school rep. Let's take this in a different direction.
Using Campus Buddy, a campus networking site that you sign up with using your Facebook account, you find out the average GPA of an Arizona State University student is 3.14, over 95% of applicants are admitted, and that 78% of second year students return. How much does it cost to go to Arizona State University? A quick search on Unigo.com shows that Arizona State University’s instate tuition is approximately $4,700, and out-of-state tuition is approximately $16,000. Affordable and it sounds like your odds of getting accepted are pretty good.
Next, let's search YouTube, which has become a prime social media tool for investigating a college. You can research and view the US News and World Report campus tour video series, see student interviews and homemade videos about college life, research fraternities and sororities, and preview course material posted on YouTube.com/EDU. A YouTube search of ASU results in a many hits including numerous ASU student interviews.
CollegeClickTV.com is a social media website with video interviews of students, professors and staff. These interviews touch on topics as varied as general campus life, clubs that can reserve lanes at the pool, and campus dining. Other hits include videos of school activities like band performances and practices, ASU football, and guest speaker appearances of President Obama at the May 2009 Commencement ceremony. Now we're rolling.
Is anyone blogging about their life at Arizona State University? First you visit Twitter, since those will be short and sweet. The results on Twitter show students tweeting about reports they are working, that the W.P. Cary School of Business is appealing to business and civic groups to recruit MBA students, and a link to a news story you might find interesting. Moving on, you search Google and find a number of blogs from specialty programs at Arizona State University, such as ASUMetals. This is an unofficial blog about Arizona State University’s metalsmithing degree program and the students who create jewelry and sculpture from metal. As you look further down the Google results page you see another blog, this one called ASU Blog, simply enough. This personal blog provides commentary on a number of "campus life" topics, from the controversial visit by President Obama to ASU security on the patrol for bike thieves on campus.
In less than 60 minutes you've "experienced" Arizona State University, enough to know whether it should be on your short list of college possibilities. Shopping for colleges in the era of social media is indeed easy. Paying for college and succeeding as a college student? That's another story.
Contributor to this blog: Miachelle DePiano
Some people will tell you that life is better thanks to online review sites that aggregate “the wisdom of the crowd” on everything from movies to hotels to restaurants, and they may have a point. Looking for a terrific Thai restaurant in Tampa? Zagat or Yelp have got you covered. How about an affordable hotel in Houston? TripAdvisor.com is there for you. But what if you’re a college student looking for a fun, easy-to-understand physics professor at Penn State? Thanks to RateMyProfessors.com you can now find that too.
RateMyProfessors.com is a controversial website that gives students the opportunity to flip roles and grade their professors on a 5 point scale based on Average Easiness, Average Helpfulness, and Average Clarity. These elements factor into the Overall Quality rating, which is the average of the scores. Adding a little fun at the expense of the RMP’s credibility, students can also rate their professors’ physical appearance, yielding a Hotness total. Though an attractive professor earns a chili pepper icon, this rating does not affect the Overall Quality rating. Students can also add tips for succeeding in a course, something that is arguably helpful for an incoming student who wants to know what to expect.
Over 9 million students use RMP to pick their next professor or to rate one they've had
experience with. Instead of trying to find friends or classmates who’ve spent a semester with a particular instuctor, students can use RMP to find information in less time than it takes to actually enroll in the course. Currently RMP has 10 million ratings on over one million professors in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Owned by the MTV Network, famous for music videos and content targeted at college-age consumers, RMP has been in operation since 1999. It’s popularity, however, has skyrocketed as more students using social networking applications like Facebook tell their friends about the site.
To get a good feel for how it works, let’s take a look at how a real student, frustrated with her math professor, used RMP to self-validate her concerns. Play the video below.
What’s interesting about this video (with over 19,000 YouTube views as of today) is the emotion you can sense from an obviously frustrated and perhaps even math-phobic student. But you also have to consider the instructor’s perspective. After all, it can’t be easy teaching general education math courses to students who may not want to be there in the first place. Let’s just say it’s not a formula for high ratings.
To be sure, there are many critics of RMP, especially among those professors who are getting hit the hardest with low ratings. While some students leave thoughtful posts that professors can use as a means of constructive criticism, others use the site as a convenient vehicle for venting frustrations with a given professor. It’s no surprise that most ratings are posted during midterms and after final semester grades are posted. It also appears, from a review of the site, that most students who post comments write them from extreme experiences, whether positive or negative.
RMP recently added a feature where professors can defend themselves and their pedagogical tactics. Each professor's page also includes a link that reads "Professors add your rebuttal here” where they can add their own comments to the ratings. Some professors have even added video comments, taking full advantage of a social media application that helps them personalize and energize their response. Let’s take a quick look at one such response.
Educators also cast doubt on the validity of ratings for extremely popular professors. Furthermore, RMP doesn’t have anything in place that requires students to have actually taken a class from a professor to rate them, so an individual in California who isn’t even a student could rate a professor in New York. Critics also worry that the majority of students using the site are upset about their grades, so they are more critical of the professor who issued it.
Yet RMP might be more accurate than most might think. A study conducted by Theodore Coladarci and Irv Komfield, at the University of Maine, found that the ratings on RMP are significantly correlated with the formal student evaluations traditionally conducted by the college or university at the end of the semester. Coladarci is quick to point out, however, that the correlations aren’t universally high, noting that instructors who get high ratings on RMP also tend to get high ratings from their own institution’s evaluation system. Instructors with lower RMP ratings don’t necessarily have high correlations.
As a result of their research, Coladarci and Komfield suggest that professors put their official student evaluations online or that colleges create their own rating systems using similar technology to aggregate student feedback, a controversial recommendation itself. That said, some schools are already doing this.
Northwestern University has such a site for their students. In order to have accurate data with several evaluations, the university requires students to fill out evaluations for courses they have already completed before they can view the evaluations of their prospective professors. The result? Student evaluations increased by 80%, suggesting that the incentive to view evaluations while picking a professor could actually help improve the number of evaluations gathered by a university.
Some critics of publicizing student evaluations worry that negative comments, which have a longer half-life than positive ones, could damage a professor’s image, perhaps even a career. However, some observers think it may be beneficial for all parties to have the institutions themselves publish student evaluations. The anonymous founder of RateYourStudents.com, a blog created as a reaction to RMP, states that “publicizing professors who weren't meeting student expectations would encourage professors to try and address their weaknesses.”
Whether professors choose to publish their official evaluations online or not, RateMyProfessors.com won’t be going away anytime soon. Its momentum is worth noting. So is the evolving world of collaborative online ratings. If you can buy it, sell it, serve it, or consume it—it can be rated by your customers and prospective customers and then shared with anyone who wants to see it.
RateMyProfessors.com has demonstrated that even the life of the venerable college professor, the proverbial “sage on the stage,” is subject to the good, the bad, and the ugly of a disruptive technology in the social media ecosystem.
Contributor to this post: Haley Birkeland
Welcome to September, a month (here in the U.S. anyway) associated with football, fall foliage, and going back to school. For this year's 18.4 million U.S. college students the campus experience is much different than it was a 20 years ago. What makes the experience different in 2009? Social media of course.To summarize: Some college students drink too much, parents still worry about their kid's success in school, and everything is more expensive than it used to be.
Social Media on Campus
So where does social media play a role here? Almost everywhere you'll discover, and throughout the month we'll take a closer look at social media on campus and how it is changing the college experience. A sampling of what we'll be covering:
The Social Media Basics
Ever the avuncular one, here's an opportunity to share some basics about social media before we venture onto campus. (Apologies to the social media savvy among you.) Two years ago most people were hard-pressed to define social media, and while applications like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have become ubiquitous names in casual conversation, there's still a lot of people who don't have a firm grasp on this thing called social media. So here's a quick primer that, hopefully, will make this month's theme more meaningful:
*Social Networking *Publishing *Photo *Audio *Video *Microblogging *Livecasting *Virtual Worlds *Gaming *Productivity Applications *Aggregators *RSS *Search *Mobile *Interpersonal
Join the Conversation
Please feel free to join the conversation by commenting on the blog posts you read here. Each week in September 2009 we'll have a drawing and give away two free copies of my book, The Social Media Bible (Wiley, 2009), to readers who become commentors. You don't have to agree. In fact, healthy conversation (especially among academics) often involves disagreement. Just join the conversation and collaborate ... or educate ... or entertain. You get the idea.
And don't forget to enjoy the fall foliage or the on-field conquests of your favorite college football team. (As for me, I'll be watching the leaves change on Arizona's Mogollon Rim and rooting for the BYU Cougars, remembering the national championship year of 1984. It's been 25 years. Time for another one.)
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