Mark Greenfield

For most people, when you mention web content they automatically think of words, perhaps augmented with pictures. But with the recent growth of Rich Media, web content now includes audio, video, animation and other interactive elements. As computer performance continues to improve and broadband access becomes ubiquitous, delivering rich media via the web provides a more compelling experience for users. Witness the popularity of Podcasting (the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year for 2005) and the explosive growth of Youtube.

Using Rich Media to reach millennial students is very effective. They are very comfortable with both creating and consuming all forms of rich media. Rich media also greatly improves training materials. Teaching students how to use web based tools such as web registration has always been a challenge. Using a combination of text, diagrams, and screen shots had limited effectiveness. Now we are using Adobe Captivate to create screencasts with great success.

One big challenge with Rich Media will be accessibility. As much as I like YouTube, I don’t see how someone with an auditory disability could use that site. I’m hoping that everyone involved with the tools that are used to create and use rich media will focus on improving accessibility.

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 - The Web as Platform
• Web Trend #6 - Syndication and the End of the Web Page Paradigm
• Web Trend # 5 - E-mail is So Dead

The new uwebd social network is paying dividends.  The network is just 6 weeks old but I have already met many new, knowledgeable  people with great insights into higher education web development.  One of these people is John Strubel, who has recently launched a new site called eduDesigners.com. The mission of eduDesigners is to connect higher education web developers to share development techniques, tips and knowledge about the web design process in the field of higher education.

One of the main features of this site will be .edu profiles.  John selected me for the inaugural profile and he plans on adding more on a regular basis.  I’m looking forward to this site being another great resource for higher ed web professionals.

Last year I was one of several thought leaders who were asked by the 2006-07 National Association of Colleges and Employers Future Directions Task Force to write an essay on “how college students and employers will interact and connect in the year 2017″. Below is the essay I submitted. While the focus was on Career Advisors, the ideas are certainly applicable to higher ed web professionals. I’m convinced more than ever that our profession will undergo dramtic change in the next 10 years.

Here is a link to the full report called “Through the Looking Glass: The Future of College Recruiting”.

Higher Education Gets Flattened
By Mark A. Greenfield

2017. Welcome to the New World Order.

The World Is Flat, the seminal book written by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Thomas Friedman, describes the fundamental changes that happened at the dawn of the new millennium. Outsourcing, offshoring, insourcing, and the other flattening forces have created a connected world, and business will never be the same. Exponential change is here. While higher education is notoriously slow to change, change will happen, and quicker than you think.

Globalization 3.0, the arrival of the technically adept Millennial Generation, and the ongoing Communications Revolution will create a perfect storm that will forever change the college campus. Rising tuition prices and increased competition for the best students and best faculty will require colleges and universities to operate more as a business. In addition to fundamental pedagogical changes, all support services will be subject to the forces that have flattened the business world. The services and processes provided by career centers will be disaggregated, distributed, produced, and reassembled with amazing efficiency. It may well be that many of the functions of the college career center will be outsourced. If placing orders today at the fast food drive-through is handled by a call center hundreds of miles away, anything is possible 10 years from now.

By 2017, providing guidance to college graduates as they make the transition from college to work will require a new paradigm. Many basic assumptions that exist today will no longer be relevant. How do we prepare our graduates for jobs that don’t exist yet? With the growth of free agency, more graduates will work for themselves or small companies instead of large corporations. Americans working for a foreign company may be as commonplace as working for an American company. (Defining an American company may be impossible). With the half life of knowledge now measured in months and years instead of decades and centuries, lifelong learning will become essential and nontraditional students may outnumber traditional students.

In this sea of change there will be an opportunity to redefine the role of higher education professionals and company recruiters. As Daniel Pink describes in his book A Whole New Mind, we are moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. As many services of the career center become even more virtual and automated, the key will be to focus on the value chain. Automation and outsourcing of the routine, lower level work will allow more time to focus on creativity, leadership, and innovation, and ultimately better services to students. The time to think about these issues is now, before higher education gets flattened.

2017. Welcome to the New World Order.

Previously I posted about the 90:9:1 rule which states that must users of online social networks lurk rather than participate. I decide to analyze the activity on the new uwebd social network on Ning to see if this applicable.

I did the research when the site was one month old and had 249 members. There were two very active members, 37 members who had some activity (at least one post/comment) , and 210 members who had not been active since joining; resulting in a 81:18:1 ratio. If you changed the definition of “some activity” to be two or more posts or comments, the ratio changed to 91:8:1. (Note that this does not include anyone visiting the site who are not members. Based on data from Google analytics, this number is very small.)

Some other quick numbers:

• 60% of members have added a profile picture
• 18% of members have customized their profile page

As of this morning, there are 337 members, 19 groups, and 87 general forum topics. 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.

I want to warn people that my domain name markagreenfield.com is no longer under my control and appears to be being used for unlawful purposes.  The content currently being displayed there appears to be similar to my content, but is not.  I have  transferred my site to the markgr.com.  My web hosting company continues to try to get to the bottom of this. Hopefully I’ll get markagreenfield.com soon.

I’ll keep you posted.

I am pleased to announce that I will be the opening keynote speaker at the eduWeb Conference being held on July 21st -23rd at the Trump Marina Hotel in Atlantic City. I’m also excited that Karine Joly of collegewebeditor.com fame will be the closing keynote speaker.

I will choose a topic for the keynote speech during the next few weeks. Given the exponential change happening with the web, who knows what the topic of conversation will be a few months from now.

The forecast calls for single digit temperatures this weekend so the idea of a trip to Atlantic City will help me with the mid-winter blues. I hope to see you in July in Atlantic City.

On Tuesday, my main domain name - markagreenfield.com stopped working. It appears that someone has stolen the domain and  I’m not sure if I am going to be able to get it back. The good news is that I did reserve the domain name markgr.com which is up and running. I’ll let you know when this situation is resolved.

The Boston Globe just published an interesting article called Colleges turn to Web tools in hunt for ‘08 freshmen. While most of the information is not news to higher education web professionals, it is another arrow in the quiver when convincing administrators that Web 2.0 tools are important in student recruitment. I particularly like the emphasis on being authentic:

Students say they are most drawn to features that give them a genuine glimpse of what the college is like and whether they’ll like it.

“This generation is very savvy to media,” said Karen Giannino, of Colgate University admissions. “They see right through the posed photograph.”

Everyone is starting to realize that we have reached the point where the web is more important than the traditional viewbook for prospective students.

The Pareto Principle states, 80% of the results flow from 20% of the activities. In 2006, Jakob Nielsen wrote “Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute”. When studying user behavior in online social networks, most users lurk rather than participate. They follow what’s become known as the 90:9:1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e. read or observe, but don’t contribute
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions

With the launch of the new uwebd social network, I was curious if the 90:9:1 rule would apply. The site has been live for about one month and participation is definitely following this rule. Given the target audience for the site I thought participation might be higher, but that hasn’t been the case.

I plan to revisit this topic in a few months. I expect membership on the site to grow substantially and people should be more familiar with the features and functionality of the site. We’ll see if we have a greater percentage of people participating.

Over the past three weeks I’ve been involved with the launch of a new social network targeted at higher education web professionals. The uwebd (University Web Developers) mailing list has been around for 10 years and has always been an excellent source of information. Recently a discussion was started on the list about whether uwebd should become a Google Group. I advocated for taking it a step further by creating a uwebd social network. On December 13, we created a site on Ning as a companion to the list. The new site can be found at cuwebd.ning.com. As of today ,there are 217 members, numerous groups, several videos, and many discussions in the forum.

For me, this is the next logical step in the evolution of uwebd. While a mailing list is good for information exchange, a niche social network takes this to a whole new level. With features including user profiles, discussion forums, groups, friends, numerous RSS options, search, tagging, blogs, and integrated rich media, a niche social network is an ideal platform to create a community around a shared interest.

Ning

Ning.com is an online platform that allows users to create their own niche social networks. One of the co-founders is Marc Andreessen from Mosiac and Netscape fame. Technical skills are not required and it has a long list of features and functionality. Ning also supports the OpenSocial API.

Ning has two primary business models. The first allows you to create a network for free in exchange for the network hosting ads that Ning supplies. The other, known as Ning for Business, has monthly fees which provides premium services including control over ad content, extra storage and bandwidth, and use of your own domain name. I have created many niche social network sites using Ning and have always been impressed.

Cluetrain

Many people dismiss social networks as the latest buzzword and/or Internet fad. This is a mistake. The Cluetrain Manifesto was written in 1999 and I still consider the message very timely, especially the value of the social Web. Here’s a quote from the preface:

The Web is not a new medium or a new place to shop or a new way to make a fast million, but instead is a global set of conversations - people talking together, in their own voices, about what they care about.

And another from the introduction:

What if the real attraction of the Internet is not its cutting-edge bells and whistles, its jazzy interface or any of the advanced technology that underlies its pipes and wires. What if, instead, the attraction is an atavistic throwback to the prehistoric human fascination with telling tales. … Millions have flocked to the Net in an incredibly short time, not because it was user friendly - it wasn’t - but because it seemed to offer some intangible quality missing in action from modern life. … The Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.

Alan Moore, co-author of the seminal book Communities Dominate Brands, sums it up by saying that human beings are highly social animals and have an innate need to connect, communicate and interact. This is the heart and soul of the Web, what it does best, and why social networks are here to stay.

Metcalfe’s Law

Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a communications network grows exponentially as the number of users grows. As networks get larger, they also get smarter. The Cluetrain Corollary states that the level of knowledge on a network increases as the square of the number of users times the volume of conversation. Not only do you need members of a network, you need participation.

The challenge for the new uwebd site will be getting enough participation to hit critical mass. Many sites on Ning have been abandoned due to a limited number of members and the resulting lack of participation. For the site to ultimately be of value, membership will need to continue to grow as well as participation.

Wisdom of Crowds

From my travels, I know first hand the collective intelligence of the higher ed web community. I’m exciting about the possibilities of the new site which has the potential to allow higher ed web professionals to connect and collaborate in new and exciting ways.

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. Your feedback on the site is welcome.