How+is+your+campus+implementing+social+media?

=How is your campus using social media? Or, how are you using social media professionally?=

Mary Stevens, Brigham Young University -- I use social media to stay connected to my professional contacts (LinkedIn) and my family (Facebook). I cannot speak to what the campus is doing with social media, but the Department of Independent Study uses Facebook and other social media for marketing purposes. Some of our teachers have students blogging or posting content in some other public forum. We are just beginning to move into Facebook pages for specific courses. We have experimented with VoiceThread as well. We know that our students are already using Facebook, Twitter, and other systems heavily, however, we are concerned about directing our high school-aged students toward platforms which may put them at risk in some way.

Joe Horne @ GSU - The parking decks have Twitter accounts to let folks know where parking is available. Our new football team has a FB page. Our IT department uses a social network system to collaborate on projects. I have my students develop scenarios using XtraNormal.

Group Work: Mary Stevens BYU, Erica Abramson, Lafayette, Eva Tsang, Open University of Hong Kong, Steve Pennell of Memorial University of Newfoundland

We talked about barriers to implementation in our group: Some of us are using more social media than others "officially" but all of our students are using some sort of social media. Eva Tsang from Open University Hong Kong indicates that their administration is not as supportive of social media – very conservative. Steve talked about how an administrator was converted to Twitter when he realized potential applications during a storm crisis – feeding information quickly and efficiently.

Erica says that the Communications group manages the social media accounts – there are several facebook pages for the library, dining services, etc. They have writers who work with various departments to collect information and post it to the appropriate facebook/twitter pages.

Concerns: privacy issues – mentioning patient names, student names in a public setting – is this a problem?

Uses: Erica's students post projects online – one project on Meiosis posted to YouTube which generated 125,000 hits. Also, a digital journalism faculty member is a technology advocate who promotes blogs, etc. We talked about how faculty advocates can drive technology administrators to move forward.

Steve talked about how they tried a second life experience and experienced some technical issues. They are considering using this sort of experience as an introduction to the new students rather than as a collaboration tool. They also use E-live is at Newfoundland, as a collaborative tool. It works well.

Erica mentioned that Dickinson is using Skype for a language lab. So does BYU Independent Study as a foreign language lab - students call a mentor via skype to practice foreign language speaking skills individually or as a group. BYU IS also has professors using wikis, blogs, youTube, etc.

Lora Haasl- West Texas A&M University - we use twitter and text messages for our emergency management system to alert students. We have a university twitter feed that is implemented by the university communications department.