A few more careers tweeters

Further to I’m looking for more careers tweeters, after attending the AGCAS Heads of Service Conference last week I've found a few more. Coming from a background in learning development and learning technology I'm increasingly finding that I need more careers people in my professional network (it could be just me but there seem to be far fewer careers people on twitter?). So I'm making lists. I have two:

• Heads of Careers (HE)
• Careers & employability

Who have I missed?

I'm looking for more careers tweeters

January 2011 was the first time I attended the AGCAS Heads of Service conference. I was very new to careers stuff then (still am!) and it was a really useful chance to meet people. I'm looking forward to the conference this January, not least because I'm attending an additional day on 4 January for deputies and new heads. Our soon-to-be Director of Careers, Bob Athwal (you'll need to scroll down a bit) will also be there so it will be a good opportunity to spend some time with him too. What I'd also really like is to find some other careers tweeters. My network is mostly made up of learning development and e-learning people (which I love!), but I need to find some good careers tweeters too. Last year on the conference there were only 4 of us tweeting (to my knowledge) but only 2 of us are still current (on careers stuff at least. So, does anyone know any more? They don't have to be heads of service, or even in HE, just people who say useful stuff about careers and employability on twitter.

(Couldn't leave that hot water post at the top of the list for long).

Subtitle

Further to the change of name thing I think we're going to go for

I'm sure you'll all sleep more soundly in your beds knowing that. Thanks for the comments to the original post, especially from Vic and Zara. Now all I need to do is think about how and where to roll out the change, especially do I rename our Twitter account and what about the Facebook page (can't rename that and currently >2,100 likes)?

Google presentation plus live twitter feed

On Friday afternoon I hosted a celebration event for The University of Leicester Internship Programme, otherwise known as TULIP (you remember, the one we got shortlisted for a Times Higher Award for). When putting together some slides quickly on the morning I thought it would be good to have a twitter hashtag feed as part of the presentation. I posted a tweet asking if anyone knew if I could add a twitter feed to a Google presentation. Then I thought about it the other way around and asked if a Google presentation could be embedded in Twitterfall. This would be easier if I just storify-ied it.

So the clever (and simple) way to do it was as per Matt's suggestion of using a Google site. I just used the default theme and stripped out the navigation, then added the Google presentation and found a twitter widget (Insert > More gadgets > Featured > Search 'Twitter Widget' - it's by http://www.gstatic.com - make sure you include the 'Featured' step otherwise you get all sorts of exotic gadgets!). It took me less than 5 minutes.

So here's the google site with the live twitter feed from the #uoltulip tag (and I used <F11> to make it full screen).

I figured that if the twitter feed was abused I could just click on the button to open the presentation full screen, but this wasn't needed, partly due to the specificity of the hashtag and partly due to the fact that Twitter is much better at blocking spammers than it was a few years ago.

Observing Emerging Student Networks on a Microblogging Service

My involvement in actually writing this paper was, shall we say, slim. But nonetheless Alan, Jo and Alex graciously put my name on it because of my involvement with the project as a whole. It's a bit dated as it took a while to publish and it's a fast moving field - but published it is.

Abstract

The impact of social networks on lives of the majority of young adults has been enormous, although their impact on education is less well understood. Some consideration has been give to the role Facebook plays in higher education and in the transition from secondary to tertiary education, but little analysis has been conducted on the role of the microblogging social network Twitter. By examining the use made of this service by two cohorts of students, this study found that Twitter is easy for students to use and popular with the majority once they have experience with it. For this study different patterns of use between individuals in the study and between the two different student cohorts were observed, as was the emergence of informal online peer support networks. The results of this study suggest models for future use of microblogging services.

Joanne Badge, Stuart Johnson, Alex Moseley, Alan Cann. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Vol. 7, No. 1. (March 2011)

HootSuite have finally caught up with me

Since blogging about our post-HootSuite options back in August I've been keeping a low profile on the subject.  That's because, admittedly rather sneakily, I realised that if I neither up-graded not went free then when I exceeded the 7 days grace period colleagues I'd registered as administrators for the accounts could still access it. I couldn't access it but that didn't matter because I'd devolved responsibility for the updates (although, rather pleasingly I was still able to access it via the iPhone ap). Anyway, as of 15 March Hootsuite are, quite rightly, closing that particular loop hole. My email from them read...

Hello Stuart Johnson,

We have you listed as the account owner of the "uolsd" profile on TWITTER on HootSuite. To ensure continued service, we require you to migrate to a current HootSuite plan. We're here to help and are emailing you to encourage you to take action and migrate your account.

For some background, since the new HootSuite plans were announced in August of last year, we grandfathered your account until November 2010, then provided a 7-day grace period to ensure time to decide on how you'd like to proceed. Further, our business sales team unsuccessfully attempted to contact your organization to provide assistance in choosing a plan. To continue using HootSuite, the listed owner of uolsd needs to sign-in to HootSuite [...] then migrate the account to a Pro plan or downgrade to the Basic (free) plan. Otherwise, we will disable HootSuite access to your social networks on March 15th.

Which is completely fair enough. So currently I've downgraded and have simply shared the password with colleagues. But this is very limited as it provides no workflow - which is the most useful aspect for us as it enables us to see who has replied to what. Also there are no analytics on the free account and they're useful too. So I need to think about whether we want to pay for their pro-plan - $5.99 per month for pro and then $15 per month per additional team member. Which is a considerable improvement on their original price plan - I wish I'd taken a screenshot at the time but I'm sure we were going to have to pay $99 per month which was simply prohibitive. Maybe they've listened to feedback from customers and come up with something more reasonable - or am I not remembering that correctly?

HootSuite certainly seem to have cornered the market. Of the options I blogged about back in August only MediaFunnel seemed like a goer for us but when we experimented with it we found it quite slow and limited (although it may have improved since then). With an reliable platform rich in useful features HootSuite have done an excellent job. What do you think? Should I upgrade? Or are there any other platforms out there that I don't know about?

Emerged technologies

Last Friday Marta and I went to the Association of Learning Development in Higher Education's CPD event in Leeds and ran a workshop on 'Using emerging technologies to engage students'. It was essentially a repeat of the Engaging without invading workshop that I did in March last year but a little bit updated.

The thing that was most interesting for me was the change in attitude of the audience from 10 months ago. It was a different audience but one drawn from the same professional group., the majority attitude last time had been 'I'm really not sure about this - convince me'; this time it was 'We really should be using this - how?' Also of note was an interest in using social media for learning as well as simply publicising (I need to get involved in Alan's Friendfeed project again).

I made the comment in the workshop that I wasn't sure how long we can continue to call these 'emerging technologies'. The feedback on the session was very positive but the one comment that jumped out was the one that said 'This wasn't a workshop on using emerging technologies it was a workshop on using Facebook and Twitter'. A lot changes in 10 months!

Using emerging technology to engage students

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The Guardian's social media guidelines

I just saw on a retweet from Richard Hall that The Guardian have just released some social media guidelines for its journalists. You can read them in full here but the main points are:

1. Participate in conversations about our content, and take responsibility for the conversations you start.
2. Focus on the constructive by recognising and rewarding intelligent contributions.
3. Don't reward disruptive behaviour with attention, but report it when you find it.
4. Link to sources for facts or statements you reference, and encourage others to do likewise.
5. Declare personal interest when applicable. Be transparent about your affiliations, perspectives or previous coverage of a particular topic or individual.
6. Be careful about blurring fact and opinion and consider carefully how your words could be (mis)interpreted or (mis)represented.
7. Encourage readers to contribute perspective, additional knowledge and expertise. Acknowledge their additions.
8. Exemplify our community standards in your contributions above and below the line.

Which seems like very good guidance to me.

I've just decoupled the events feed

Having been quite pleased with myself a year ago for figuring out how to automate events notification from our website to Facebook and Twitter I've decided to turn it off. News items will continue to push out automatically but Vic, James and I decided that the events notification was just too noisy. Vic is now taking more of a specific responsibility for updating our Facebook and Twitter accounts and it's a much better tone and timing than the automatic events feed (see this for an example). James is beginning to do the same for the postgraduate researcher development accounts. Would be interested to hear what you think...

Mailing list managers

An update on the Good old fashioned email post - I've now had more than 3,000 people sign up to our mailing list. With that many people on the list I need a mailing list manager. Obviously I'd like to push more of them to our Facebook and Twitter accounts but as Marta said in the comments 'I guess we have to give them what they've signed up to'. They've asked for email. What I want to avoid though is having to reply to lots of emails - so we'll just use it as a channel to push information out - which is why I'd prefer it if they used social media because then the communication can be much more responsive. We can quickly reply to a tweet or a Facebook post and the one-to-many nature of social media means that everybody else can benefit from the answer. With email it's one-to-one and there's no way we're spending time responding to 3,000 questions, many of them probably similar.

So, does anyone know anything about mailing list managers? I think I need to learn about them quickly. We can't use our University CFS system for mailing to such large numbers easily because there's a limit of 1,000 people per email. Also, if we're going to use email then I want people to be able to unsubscribe easily should they want to, again, there's no easy way of doing this with CFS. A good mailing list manager should also give us several other useful features, including easy delivery, tracking and groups that support preferences.

I've heard of MailChimp and it looks good but we'd need to pay for it ($50 a month) because the free accounts are only for up to 1,000 addresses. It also has the potential to integrate with Facebook and Twitter.

Becka told me that they use Majordomo at Bradford. It describes itself as "a program which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. Commands are sent to Majordomo via electronic mail to handle all aspects of list maintenance. "

I've also stumbled across Mailman whic says "Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more."

I'm desperately in need of some advice from this from people who have used such things...

Our post-hootsuite options

Since my post Thinking about alternatives to Hootsuite I've been mulling over what other services we could use to manage our social media for Student Development. I don't mind paying a bit, we just can't afford (and I object to anyway) paying what Hootsuite are charging. I had thought to put up a blog post asking if Hootsuite had plans for an educational licence, but I've just noticed on their blog that they are offering a 20% discount for not-for-profits. I guess this is a start but a) it's not enough for us given we'd still need to pay more than $79 per month and b) as an University we're not CIC registered so we wouldn't be eligible anyway

Alan pointed out this helpful article to me on Top 5 alternatives to Hootsuite, which suggests the following:

• Tweetdeck
• Seesmic
• CoTweet
• Brizzzly
• Buzzom

You'll  notice, if you scroll down the comments in that link that someone also suggested MediaFunnel.

There are a number of things I need a service to allow me to do, the main criteria are as follows:

• Support multiple Twitter accounts
• Support Facebook pages
• Allow multiple users to post to the accounts
• Shorten URLs
• Allow scheduled posts
• Allow attachments (especially images)
• Have a reasonable charging model

So, I've been having a bit of a look at the options and here's a summary of how they match up to the above criteria (as far as I can tell).

Notes

1. I gave up with Brizzly because it kept asking me if I wanted to 'create a picnic'. Very annoying!
2. Buzzom will be including a URL shortener soon - see. Also see comment on this post from the Deep Sherchan from the Buzzom team re premium version.
3. MediaFunnel will be going Freemium but I'm assured there will be no bad surprises. Rumour has it it will be two users and two social media accounts for free., then each additional user/channel pack will be $4.95/month. This is much more realistic than Hootsuite.

Other features that would be good too are workflow, roles and co-tags. MediaFunnel has all of these.

So we'll be trying out MediaFunnel in the next few weeks and I'll let you know how we get on. So far it's looking extremely promising :)

Thinking about Hootsuite alternatives

Today Hootsuite announced a freemium plan. I understand the need for a freemium model and Student Development already have a subscription with Flickr, however Hootsuite's price plan looks like it's going to be prohibitive for us.

Hootsuite has been brilliant for us in the following ways:

• team collaboration - allowing us to have lots of people (currently we have 6) posting to multiple accounts, especially our Student Development Facebook and Twitter accounts
• monitoring response and progress - this is a really handy feature, especially when we have so many people posting to the accounts - it helps us keep track of who's responded to what
• statistics - the stats give us a really useful snap shot - daily clicks, referral data and, most helpfully, most popular tweets
• scheduled posts - great for delaying posts to more appropriate times
• assign tasks - we can even assign responses to individual team members - but we haven't used this feature much yet

All in all it's been brilliant, but at $99 per month for what we'd need (8 team members) I'm sad to say I think we're going to have to switch to something else. So does anyone have any recommendations of something that will do much of the above at less cost?

Networks get things done

I've had several noteworthy positive Twitter experiences, including Twitter and maths homework and Twitter fixed my dishwasher. I had another one yesterday.

I'd been asked by Registry to help them with a data problem (they'd asked IT Services and for some reason they said ask me). My response was that I didn't know enough about Excel so couldn't help - but they replied to say that they were really stuck and didn't have anyone else to ask as the member of staff who'd been responsible for it in previous years had left, so I agreed to have a look. The problem involved allocating guests to seats for graduation ceremonies. On the sample data I was given there were nearly 500 graduands each requiring seats for between zero and four guests. They wanted the name of the graduand repeating the same number of times as they'd requested seats for their guests (here's a sample of similar data). I sent out a quick tweet as follows...

...and very quickly I had a number of helpful responses (several from Leicester, one from Macclesfield and one from Milton Keynes)

But not having fixed the problem I put up a quick blog post on Can you help with an Excel problem? To which I got more responses from Leicester plus Plymouth, and Hamilton, New Zealand. But I got more than just tweets - four people very kindly emailed me Excel spreadsheets or links to Google spreadsheets showing how I could tackle the problem - including staff at Leicester (thanks Rick and Hazel) a friend who's a teacher (thanks Chris) and a member of staff from Imperial College London (thanks Moira). I was overwhelmed with people's helpfulness!

Most suggested solutions involved list functions like =IF($C1>1,$A1,"") which did the job of repeating the surnames the required number of times but then would have involved me converting the columns to rows.

The most comprehensive and elegant solution (within three hours of my original tweet) came from a third year computer science student at Leicester, Chris Bunney, who went to the trouble of writing the following macro using visual basic.

 Sub InsertSurnames()

    Dim LastRow As Long
    Dim r As Long
    Dim surname As String
    Dim tickets As Integer

    Dim surnameCol As Integer
    Dim ticketCol As Integer
    Dim targetCol As Integer

    surnameCol = 1
    ticketCol = 3
    targetCol = 4
    LastRow = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows(ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count).Row
    r = 1

    Do While r <= LastRow

        surname = Cells(r, surnameCol).Value
        tickets = Cells(r, ticketCol).Value

        If (Not (Len(surname) = 0)) Then

            Cells(r, targetCol).Value = surname

            For x = 1 To tickets - 1

                Cells(r + x, 1).EntireRow.Insert
                Cells(r + x, targetCol).Value = surname

            Next x

            LastRow = LastRow + tickets - 1

        End If

        r = r + 1
    Loop

End Sub

And it worked an absolute treat. So thanks everyone for your contributions - I really appreciate them. Another good example of the power of networks. And by the way, Chris Bunney, having graduated, is currently looking for jobs...

Sub InsertSurnames()

Dim LastRow As Long

Dim r As Long

Dim surname As String

Dim tickets As Integer

Dim surnameCol As Integer

Dim ticketCol As Integer

Dim targetCol As Integer

surnameCol = 1

ticketCol = 3

targetCol = 4

LastRow = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows(ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Rows.Count).Row

r = 1

Do While r <= LastRow

surname = Cells(r, surnameCol).Value

tickets = Cells(r, ticketCol).Value

If (Not (Len(surname) = 0)) Then

Cells(r, targetCol).Value = surname

For x = 1 To tickets - 1

Cells(r + x, 1).EntireRow.Insert

Cells(r + x, targetCol).Value = surname

Next x

LastRow = LastRow + tickets - 1

End If

r = r + 1

Loop

End Sub

University of Bournemouth's First Year Experience Special Interest Group

I'm going down to the University of Bournemouth on Wednesday to talk to their First Year Experience Special Interest Group about our experience of using Facebook and Twitter to try to facilitate student engagement with student development issues. Here are my slides. You'll notice an uncanny resemblance to a previous presentation - but I have moved it on a bit with the Trying to get beyond likes thinking - and I'm hoping that in discussing it with the group in Bournemouth my thinking will be moved on a bit more. And while I'm on the train I'm going to read this paper, this paper and this paper - it's about time I read some papers on the subject (thanks to Michael Seery for the useful summary)!

Here I come sunny Bournemouth!

Engaging without invading - bournemouth

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Publicity channels

Part of my role in Student Development involves overseeing publicity. When I started in the role 18 months ago we were using only traditional forms of media to communicate with students; flyers, posters, emails and our website (all broadcast media that allow little or no two-way communication and simply pushes information to recipients). Since last summer I’ve been developing our networks on Facebook and Twitter (social media that does allow two-way communication and recipients select to ‘pull’ information towards themselves) to supplement the traditional methods. So we now have a range of publicity options available to us that I thought it would be helpful to outline – and if you have any suggestions or comments I’d be really pleased to hear them.

Website

Our website is our primary means of communication. I’m concious that we need to reorganise our front page (the subject of a future post) because we’re running out of space to put stuff, but that aside, here are elements I use within the site for publicity purposes.

News items (within Plone) are vital as they keep the website dynamic and also populate RSS feeds which I use to push out to Facebook and Twitter (see how here).

Event items also add a dynamic element to our site and populate RSS feeds in the same was as the news items do.

Top level portlets at the Student Development level of the website to highlight services that we want to give a particular push to at any given time. At the moment we’re doing this with our Graduate Success Programme (but we only have room to display one item like this at a time – which is one of the reasons we need to redesign the front page).

Team level portlets at the relevant team level – in the case of the Graduate Success Programme that’s in Career Development.

Mini sites to create an uncluttered site focussing on a particular event. In order to de-clutter an area I block the portlets above in the folder structure and start the navigation at the relevant level. If the event is to be a regular one Ialso request a specific URL, for example (again) www.le.ac.uk/graduatesuccess.

Social media

As already described I’ve been using social media to try and engage with students for some time now. More recently my focus has switched from Twitter to Facebook and in particular how to encourage interaction not just ‘Likes’. To this end I’ve been trying the following:

• extra Facebook and Twitter updates (as per Helpdesk Hollie’s advice) in addition to our automated RSS outputs
• a specific Facebook push – like we tried recently with Revision and exam skills (which seemed to work)

Digital signage

There are various plasma screens around campus which make up the University’s digital signage one of which is in the Student Development Zone. The screens generally operate on a 10 second cycle; scrolling through the notices set to display. The images and text displayed on these screens, therefore, have to convey information quickly and simply.

More important than our own screen (the traffic that it gets is limited given our location) are the other screens around campus – in particular in the Help Zone on the Ground floor of the Library, the Graduate School Reading Room, the Library Cafe and (especially) the screens in the Students’ Union.

Newsletters

Because not everyone looks at our website or joins our social media networks we also send out a monthly newsletter to all students. This comprises of just a few highlights plus a link to further highlights of the month’s news from our news feeds. Click here for the June edition.

Print

And for completeness I thought I should mention print. Although for publicity purposes we’re beginning to move away from print because it’s usually high cost for a relatively low impact.

Any suggestions? Have I missed anything?

Developments I'd like to see in Plone

After a really useful conversation with Nick and Jeff in the web team yesterday and some useful comments on my The automated feeds are working post (including one from Alexander Limi, the co-founder of Plone) I thought I'd put up another Plone post (my second ever).

I'm not a techie, but I have been using Plone now for more than four years so I know it pretty well from a user's perspective. Whilst there's no such thing as a perfect system I really like Plone and the ethos behind it, I especially like the flexibility of the sharing permissions that it gives us. The web team here at Leicester have done a great job in setting it up and supporting it with very limited resources (and for the record, they should get more).

So, here are some of the developments I'd like to see in the future (apologies in advance if I'm making any techie faux pas).

Selectively cascading portlets

In versions 2 and 2.5 of Plone the portlets were created as pages and you could just point to them from the relevant folder level and so have one portlet selectively cascading at different levels of the site. This system was a little complicated to use but it did give good flexibility and avoided having to create the same portlet multiple times at different levels. In version 3 it seems to be all or nothing - I can block or unblock the portlets above in the folder structure but I can't say 'do block this one but don't block this one'. Consequently, for example, the Contact us portlet on our site has to recreated six times futher down in the structure to allow different teams to have the same Contact us portlet but more specific news and events collection portlets.

Thumbnail images from news items into Facebook

I've set up news items to push out to Twitter and Facebook using the RSS and Twitterfeed (see this post for the Twitterfeed set up). What would be nice though would be if Plone could take a thumbnail of an image attached to a news item and put that in the Facebook post. Currently it doesn't do this so all our automated posts look very similar (look for the posts that come from Twitterfeed on our Facebook page)

NOT statement in collection fields

Within the Title and Description fields in collections it would be really useful if it allowed more logical statements. At the moment you can have AND and OR but not NOT. And NOT would allow more flexibility.

More flexibility in the start date field in collections

In order ro push out events to Facebook and Twitter I use a collection to create an appropriate RSS feed. However, I don't want to push out events to these networks as soon as they are published because often we schedule events as a block a term in advance. So to get round this I've set up collections with the following criteria:

• Item type = event
• Location = (relevant folder + search sub-folders)
• State = published
• Start date = 1 day, in the future, on the day

This works ok but it only lets me push out events the day before...

I've just looked at the criteria again and it looks like I should just be able change the 'which day' field to 2 days or 5 days or a week. That looks like it should solve my problem but I think I tried that before and it didn't work. I set it up more than six months ago though so I can't remember. I'll have another check but if anyone can tell me so I don't have to check that would be great :)

Bookmarklets

I understand there's an addon for bookmarklets (share on Twitter, Delicous, Facebook etc)  but it conflicts with the feed mixer portlet. It would be good to get this fixed.

Editor bugs

I prefer the TinyMCE editor to Kupu, on the whole, but there's a bug in TinyMCE which means that if you add a link to an image in a portlet the image dissapears (but works fine with Kupu editor).

I've probably got some other suggestions but I'll just throw those out as a starter. It's not meant to be critical - just suggestions from an avid user.

The automated feeds are working

I've just realised that if you edit a news item in Plone that's already published and then save the changes it acts like a newly published item. How do I know this interesting piece of information, I hear you cry? Well, it's funny you should ask that...

Yesterday I was showing a colleague how to create a collection in Plone that would pull in not only the news items that she published in her area of the website but also appropriate news items that others published elsewhere in the Student Development website. So in order to demonstrate this I went to a relevant news item and categorized it (that's what Plone calls it but most people will call this 'tagging') and then saved the changes. The collection item was set up appropriately to display item type (="news item"), location (=http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/sd), categories (="Leicester Award") and state (="published") - so the item was fed into the collection accordingly. However, it wasn't until I was on Twitter a few minutes later that I realised that adding a category to a news item (or presumably any kind of editing) and then saving the changes causes the item to be re-published. Not only did the news item appear in my colleague's collection it also re-appeared:

• at the top of the Volunteering team's latest news feed
• at the top of the Student Development latest news feed
• at the top of the news portlets on every page in the above two sections
• and on Facebook
• and on Twitter

Not only that, but within 15 minutes the story was retweeted by University Leicester (followers = 278) and Aaron Porter (followers = 2,031).

The problem was the story was six months old! So we quickly added a sentence to the bottom of the news item to say "The deadline for completion of this year's programme has already passed, but you can register now for the 2010/11 programme."

As my colleague said "It's all good publicity". And at least I know all the feeds are working. Thanks for the retweets!

Amplified staff development

I just ran the event, it was really JayJay, Alan and Jo who wrote the paper :)

Image suggestions outcome

I put up a rather lame post last week called Image suggestions please. It didn't result in any suggestions but it did prompt me to think about it more and do something about it.

So here are the images I came up with.

They look a bit corporate but at least they are consistent and more identifiably us. Though not everyone will like them, as this tweet proved.

Image suggestions please

The little image icons I use on Twitter and Facebook for our Student Development accounts are a bit limited and don't even match (the Twitter one was always meant to be temporary). So bearing in mind we're not supposed to have logos, has anyone got any good suggestions of what I can use instead?