SUNY just announced a tuition hike effective this January. There are numerous stories about budget cuts, hiring freezes and no money for travel. The Boston Globe recently wrote an article on how Financial Chaos Threatens to Besiege Universities. I am feeling the effects myself. My operating budget this fiscal year is 32% less than the previous year, despite a significant increase in workload. And I am being told it will be worse next year.

Yet, for all the pain caused by the current financial meltdown, it is only the warning shot across the bow.

The true paradigm shift is just around the corner. The tipping point will happen shortly when stealth fighter parents will replace helicopter parents on college campuses. Gen X parents are coming and they will demand that colleges reexamine their entire operation from a price and value perspective. They will look at the college their children attend as a calculated market choice. They will view colleges as one of many providers in a large marketplace as new competitors emerge providing alternative choices for much of what college provides.

All of this will put increasing pressure on colleges to provide value and to focus on efficiencies. Consider the following from a recent survey on the rising costs of higher education:

• 64% of respondents do not believe higher college costs are leading to more learning on campus
• 44% believe that waste and mismanagement significantly factor into increasing college costs

I spent much of 2007 writing about how higher education web development will get flattened. The premise is that the same forces of globalization that have flattened the business world will soon flatten higher education and that their will be repercussions for higher education web professionals. What happens when web development becomes a commodity? The services we provide will be disaggregated, distributed, produced and reassembled with amazing efficiency. It may well be that many of our services will be outsourced in the relatively near future.

I recommend we approach this coming storm proactively. Become a web evangelist. Focus on how the web can provide value and how it provides a sound return on investment. Use valuation methodologies like ROI to provide the framework for prioritizing projects and accountability.

Many people who hear my presentation on “Higher Ed Web Development Gets Flattened” leave thinking that none of us will have jobs five years from now. That is not my intention and I don’t believe that will be the case. In fact, I think the opposite is true. The role the web plays on college campuses is undervalued. When the time comes to disaggregate the functions of the university, the forensic accountants will quickly see that the web provides true value and should get more resources, not less. That being said, I do think our jobs will change dramatically. The best approach is to start to think about this now. To quote Will Rogers:

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

Come join Brad Ward, Todd Sanders and I as we explore  how higher educational institutions can leverage the full power and potential of social media to enhance student services. While much of the focus of social media in higher education is on student recruitment, these same tools can be used to provide services and enhance relationships with current students.  The webinar will provide an overview of social media tools, why they matter in higher education, and how they can be applied to student services. In addition, several case studies will be reviewed.

Presenters:

Mark Greenfield (See my bio)

Todd Sanders gets paid to play on the Web and discover new ways to engage both prospective and current students online. For the past six years he’s been the Student Affairs Webmaster at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where he continues to design for the Web and get his hands dirty.

Brad J. Ward has been working in the Higher Education setting for 5 years, After serving as the Marketing and Recruitment Specialist at the University of Illinois-Springfield for 1.5 years, he has now been at Butler University since June 2007, serving as the Electronic Communication Coordinator in the Office of Admission.

If you have any questions or just want to engage in some conversation prior to the webinar, feel free to drop us a line.

First the backstory:

Last year my daughter followed the Iditarod as part of a 2nd grade class project at her school.  We had adopted our new dog Rafe earlier in the year and given his lineage, my daughter was fascinated by the Iditarod.  Part of the class project included choosing a single musher to follow throughout the race.  My daughter chose Rachael Scdoris.

Rachael is legally blind. She made history in 2005 becoming the first visually impaired athlete to compete in the Iditarod.  Rachael’s story of hope, courage, and determination has attracted national and international media attention. She has been featured in numerous newspapers, magazines and national TV and Radio shows, and has been formally honored for her accomplishments by numerous groups.

In typical Millennial style, my daughter e-mailed Rachael to wish her good luck.  In this e-mail I added that Rachael’s website did not meet web accessibility standards. Thus began a conversation that sets the stage for my new project.

Over the next couple of months, I will be working with a group of 3rd graders at my daughter’s elementary school  to develop a new site for Rachael that will focus on accessibility.  Rachael, in addition to being a world-class athlete, is an advocate for people with visual disabilities and hopes this project will help raise awareness about web accessibility and the many myths that prevent people from fully understand accessibility.

The goals for this project are to teach the students about people with disabilities and how they use computers, teach the basics on how to create a web site with an emphasis on accessibility, and have the students help me create a new site for Rachael that will be fully accessible.

This should be a great experience for all involved. The students are excited and hopefully this project will help create awareness about web accessibility.

I will leave you with a 30 second introduction to Rachael and the incredible courage and determination it takes to complete in the Iditarod.

Rachael Scdoris, Iditarod Visionary

Through the power of social media, attending this conference virtually is easier than ever.  You can follow the action live on Twitter . And Karlyn Morissette is compiling all the related blog posts over at .eduGuru (thanks Karlyn).

It should be a great conference with lots to discuss.  Hopefully my travel budget improves next year and I’ll be able to attend in person. Look for an announcemnt this week for the location of next year’s conference.

Shirky’s take is that information overload has been around since Gutenberg invented the printing press.  What has changed with the Internet is when you filter for quality.  In traditional media, this filtering for quality is done by the publisher.  Whether it’s a printing press or a television tower, it costs a lot of money to get started and stay in operation. To stay profitable, a publisher needs to be responsible for filtering for quality.

With the Internet, we have entered what Shirky calls post-Gutenberg economics. The cost of producing anything has fallen through the floor and you don’t have to filter for quality before you publish. The filter for quality has moved way downstream - to the user. This has helped fuel the exponential growth of information on the web. Information overload is here to stay and not only are our tools to filter information inadequate, our social systems to handle both inbound and outbound information is broken as well.

As college web professionals, we need to focus on creating credible content that is easy easy to find.  As Peter Morville stated in “Ambient Findability” , findability is more important than usability.  You can’t use what you can’t find.

Here is the video of Clay Shirky’s keynote at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo:

Matthew Levy and Rachel Beanland did an excellent job of covering the Web 2.0 Expo on both Twitter and at their web site He Types She Talks. Mike wrote this great summary of Shirky’s speech and the implications for higher ed.  I’m planning on attending the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco in November. It should be quite a show.

My webinar is called “Besides and Beyond Facebook: Do’s and Don’t’s for your niche social network” and will borrow many of the concepts from my “Long Tail of Social Networks” workshop. I will explore how niche social networks can meet business objectives and best practices for getting your network off the ground.  In addition, I will share my experiences with launching several niche networks, showing both what did and did not work.

Niche Social Networks are growing exponentially.  On Ning alone there are now over 450,000 sites. Chris Anderson described it best in his blog post Social Networking is a feature, not a destination when he says:

As I think about the current Facebook craze and the notion of it as an all-encompassing platform, sucking in functionality from other sites across the board, I find myself skeptical. With my Long Tail hat on, I think that one-size-fits-all will fail in social networking, just as it has everywhere else (which is why I like Ning, which suppresses its own brand for the sake of those of the microsites it hosts. See this post for more on that.).

Instead, I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have. I’m sure huge and generic social networking destinations will continue to do well, but I’m placing my bet on the biggest impact coming when social networking becomes a standard feature on all good sites, bringing community to the granular level where it always works best.

Descriptions of the other two webinars that are part of this series and registertion information is available at the Higher Ed Experts site. If you have any specific topics or questions you would like to see addressed during the webinar, please let me know.

This week I was sent the online training materials to familiarize myself with PeopleSoft. I’ve been using Chrome as my browser the last couple of weeks and when I opened up the link to the training materials, I got the following message:

“The Player requires Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later.”

I tried to open the site using Firefox, Opera and Safari, and got the same message. (Yes, It works fine in IE.)  I have a very bad feeling about this. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come with our student system.

If anyone of you have expereince with PeopleSoft, I’d love to hear from you regarding how valid their code is.  I sure hope that people won’t be forced to use IE.

I would like to extend my thanks to all the members, especially those whom have taken the time to contribute. I encourage everyone involved with higher ed websites to not only join, but to participate as well. Again, the site is located at cuwebd.ning.com. You can visit my page on the site at cuwebd.ning.com/profile/Mark.

I have had discussions with many people about how to improve the site.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be starting discussion at the site on how best to move forward.  I look forward to the continued growth of this site and hope it becomes a valuable resource for the higher ed web community.

Campus Technology 2008 welcomes attendees to its 15th annual summer conference, where leading innovators and experts in technology for higher education guide faculty, instructional designers, eLearning program managers, information technologists, and campus administrators into the new realm of teaching and learning in a Web 2.0 world.

This year’s conference offers a blueprint for adapting to the new demands of Web 2.0 teaching and learning, both in and out of the classroom, and explores how educators are coping with the ever-increasing demands on their resources, skills and time. You’ll come away armed with tricks, tips and techniques to survive and thrive in the “Next Gen” educational environment.

This is the one conference that I really wanted to attend but had previous commitments.  The good news is that Jay Collier will be providing coverage of the conference through Twitter and a conference coverage wiki (thanks Jay).

I will be following the proceedings and encourage you to do so as well.

• First, I’d like to thank Shelley Wetzel for the invitation to speak at the conference. Kudos to Shelley and her staff for the time and effort it takes to run the conference.
• For those of you interested, Matt Herzberger has done an amazing job of collecting all of the web resources related to the conference. See All of eduWeb 2008. (Thanks Matt, and sorry you couldn’t make it this year.)
• As I have said before, I have recently seen the light regarding Twitter. This was the first conference I’ve attended that provided a real-time commentary on the proceedings via Twitter. It takes the idea of live-blogging to a whole new level. The level of activity was so high that #eduweb2008 showed up as a trending topic on search.twitter.com Many people who couldn’t attend said that following the conference on Twitter and watching the ustream channel was almost as good as being there.
• My keynote speech generated considerable buzz both online and offline with the segment on the future of e-mail getting the most attention. For the record, I don’t believe e-mail is dead. I do believe that e-mail is broken. I’ll be writing about this more in the coming weeks. My goal is to think strategically about how e-mail fits into the myriad of communication channels now at our disposal.
• The “Join the Conversation” workshop on social media I taught with Brad Ward was well received. I enjoy teaching workshops because the additional time allows me to go into greater detail. I look forward to working with Brad on future endeavors. In fact, we’ll be heading to a conference out west together in a couple of weeks.
• I had numerous conversations with several people from the United Kingdom. It was great to get their perspective on the web and interesting to see the differences in how social media usage differs across the Atlantic.
• I found Karine Joly’s closing keynote to be a wonderful conclusion to the conference. In addition to the references to Marshall Mcluhan, I particularly liked her idea about “Build it (with them), and they will come”.  Well done Karine!
• Much of the talk of the conference was around social media. I am a big fan of social media, but I am starting to get concerned that too much attention is going to the social web and some of the basic building blocks of good, effective web design and development are being ignored. Usability, accessibility, information architecture, web standards, etc. still matter. Let’s not lose site of that.
• Finally, the main thing on my mind as I drove home was that the higher education web profession has a bright future. I had the chance to meet and interact with many of the new faces in our profession and was thoroughly impressed. These young guns bring passion, excitement, optimism and talent that will help move college web sites forward.