Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

University Communications and the New Media Lab have been pretty busy over the past couple of months working on many new ideas and initiatives. The long term goal (by next summer) is to have an “integrated communications strategy” where the message about Wesleyan is clearly communicated using all different communication outlets. While University Communications is worrying a lot about the “messaging” aspect of this goal, we are partnering with them in all different ways to assist with the execution of this on the technology side. I discuss here some of the short term steps we have taken and what the long term goals are.

Multimedia

It is no secret that use of multimedia has to be part of the communications strategy. When done correctly, these can be very engaging, increases the viewer loyalty and can result in the viewers exploring our website deeper. We began a podcasting pilot during the Spring semester of 2008 and collected a rich set of podcasts for use in Apple’s iTunesU. You can see these at the site: http://www.wesleyan.edu/podcast. We are still working with Apple to see how our site can become a featured site in iTunes store. Because of the non-transparent nature of how Apple makes its decisions on who gets highlighted in the store, this has been difficult.

YouTube has been offering a space for educational institutions for some time and we saw an opportunity there. Once we decided that we were going to use this as yet another outlet for communicating about ourselves, it was relatively easy to set up and get going. I strongly encourage you to go there (http://www.youtube.com/wesleyan) and see how we have been able to pull together some really amazing videos from our existing sites. For example, we have brought in excellent videos from Virtual Instrument Museum (http://learninobjects.wesleyan.edu/vim) into YouTube which are receiving a fair number of views considering that this has been there only for 3 weeks or so and we have not actively promoted the site yet.

You will find a video “Indian Classical Music Rocks Central Connecticut”, which was promoted actively and we are going to hit 50,000 views pretty soon and based on the comments, you can see it has the desired effect. Many are amazed at the quality of the music and are now aware of Wesleyan as a place where things like this are happening.

Our goal is to engage the students in as many ways as we can to show the world how creative and intelligent they are. We have announced a YouTube contest “Minute with the President Elect” where we ask “What would a Wesleyan student have to say to the President if they had a minute in the Oval Office?” We have provided an easy to upload page in student electronic portfolio and have provided links there which explain how to produce videos for YouTube. Soon, we will promote this even further to help students produce their creative videos and upload them.

We are working with Academic Affairs on producing a video series of “Conversations with Faculty” and are also looking at how best to use some of the excellent scholarly communication multimedia (such as Early Modern Workshop and the Rara website ) that already exist on our servers, but are not easily accessible. The idea is to follow the YouTube model of having only a clip of some these, but give the link to the entire multimedia which will live on our servers.

Our strategy here is – help everyone produce great multimedia; create sound infrastructure to use them in multiple output channels (homepage, podcast, iTunesU, YouTube etc.)

University Web Committee

We have formed a web committee with wide representation from the community – faculty, students and staff. We will be meeting shortly to discuss our plans for the new University website, which, we expect to go into production sometime during the summer of 2009. We will be replacing our current set up for maintaining the website with a Web Content Management software which will have a far superior user interface and the ability to support multiple end user browsers including good PDA support.

While we plan ahead, we will continue to enhance the existing website to include more engaging multimedia content.

Better Analytics

We began using Google Analytics on most of our websites in September and the analysis of the results collected so far is alowing us to have a much better understanding of how our website is accessed and used. We will continue to rely heavily on these analytics to optimize our websites.

Web 2.0

We continue to find ways to use the Web 2.0 tools in creative ways. Blogs have been used for their intended purpose by many (the most popular being President Roth’s), but they are also being used as faculty pages because of ease of use. The Wesleyan Connection online newsletter is now a blog and the news items that appear on the home page will soon be directed to a blog. There have been tremendous efficiencies that have been introduced in moving these systems to blogs and hopefully we will soon begin using the two way interactive features soon.

Yes, we have a lot of RSS Channels! We have not been good at marketing them well. WesFeed is an attempt to get some of the RSS channels to the user’s desktops. If you have not yet tried it, I strongly encourage you to do so. It is cool.

We continue to look at social networking and its appropriateness to our goals.

iPhone Development

We are beginning to get into iPhone application development and you will hear from us in the next few weeks on where we are. Again, the strategy we plan to employ here is to leverage a ton of existing application in ways that will help us deploy them quickly for iPhones. iPhone web applications provide that framework.

Bottom Line

It is a new world and with tremendous support from senior administration, we are able to delve into some of the new technologies and outlets in ways that were unthinkable a few months ago. We (University Communications and ITS) will never be able to do all of what we are looking to do by ourselves. That is why, we are building the framework for our faculty, students and staff to be able to provide the much needed content that highlights who we are.

The collaboration between the New Media Lab and University Communication is extremely strong and is resulting in tremendous efficiencies. The results have been slow in the beginning because we have been working on this just for three months, but, you will begin to see some real changes soon.

I am sure you all have great ideas on how best we can accomplish some of what I talked about. Please let us know through this great two way medium…