Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56065
Technology Schools Take Web 2.0 to Next Level Now that the mystery and uncertainty surrounding social media are subsid- ing, many schools are moving these tools away from the periphery and more to the center of their market- ing and educational efforts. A new course in the liberal arts program at the University of North Carolina Greensboro may serve as an example of more things to come. The online graduate course, called "Emerging Global Powers," focuses on the growing global influ- ence of countries such as China, India, and Argentina. Its Web site incorporates faculty and student blogs; video "crossfire" dialogues between professors; interactive case studies; RSS feeds from the BBC, The New York Times, and other outlets; and an ongoing Wikipedia page where the results of course collaboration will be refined and published. The public is also invited to contribute to its blogs and Wikipe- dia page. Indiana University's Kelley School of Business in Bloomington has been experimenting with blogs, Facebook groups, and Twitter feeds. Recently, the school decided to go one step further, creating a Web page called "Kelley 360" at info.kelley.iu.edu. The school's old media page included only press releases; Kelley 360 adds to the mix blog entries, videos, podcasts, and slideshows. That information remains stored on the site, so that people can share it with their social and professional networks. Integration of these tools is becoming more commonplace as 52 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2010 organizations do more to bring social media into their outreach strategies, says Anne Massey, Dean's Research Professor at Kelley. "All social media does is enable connections within a community interested in some context," says Massey. "Strategy is the hard part as businesses seek to leverage this." Twitter is betting that more people will join Massey in viewing its offering as a valuable business tool. The company is currently beta test- ing a feature called "Contributors." Designed specifically for organiza- tions, Contributors allows a business to manage multiple contributors to its account—that is, if a tweet comes from @Business but is written by @Employee, the tweet would include @Employee in the byline. The goal is to let "users know more about the real people behind the organizations," according to a Twitter press release. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business in Illinois also recently started a program that combines the Web, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The program targets prospective part-time MBA students. Called the Booth Life, at www. theboothlife.com, the program fea- tures students' assessments of the school's evening and weekend MBA programs. While the Booth Life includes professionally produced stu- dent profiles, it also encourages stu- dents to upload their own videos. A freestanding video kiosk on campus enables current students to record and upload their videos; the school also makes available tiny FLIP cam- eras for students who want to create videos at home or at other locations. The school will continue to uti- lize traditional print methods and information sessions to promote its programs. Even so, it's clear that the influence of online media will only continue to grow, says Chris Iannuc- cilli, executive director of marketing at Chicago Booth. "The world is changing, and we Kelley 360, the new home for the Kelley School of Business' communications efforts, incorporates blogs and video, as well as traditional text-based press releases. are committed to keeping current," says Iannuccilli. "As the Internet and social media evolve, so will our out- reach efforts."