The migration from my style/not my style voting over to our new 5 star rating system is almost complete. A few things might be a little broken while we complete the transition. If you run into something, please drop us a note at beta@eduStyle.net and we’ll try to get it fixed up. For those interested we thought we’d post some of the rationale for the move and how this will affect some of the rankings.

Why are we changing?

Over the almost 4 years of running eduStyle we have noticed a few things about how people use the site. Having only two choices has led to a common dilemma. If I think the site is ok, but not great I have 3 options:

1. Vote my style and potentially dilute the votes on the truly great sites
2. Vote not my style and risk giving the impression of a more negative view than I actually have for the site
3. Don’t vote

Unfortunately none of those options really reflect how I feel about the site. This most often leads to the 3rd choice. We think this is broken. Two choices just do not give you a very precise way to register your opinion on a site. For a review focused site like ours this is not good enough (the case maybe different for site with a different focus).

There some other situations around abuse and protest voting that we are trying to correct as well but we figured the move would bring benefit all the way around and give us a chance to rebuild some of those 4 year old systems.

What happens to all my old votes?

They have all been migrated to the new 5 star systems. What that means is if you voted “my style” that will be moved over as 5/5 stars. If you selected “not my style” that becomes the lowest rating of 0.5/5 stars. With the new freedom of having 5 stars to choose from you may want to go back and amend some of your previous votes.

I liked the old system, can we go back?

Sorry no, we’re moving forward not back. Just limit yourself to voting either 5 or 0.5 stars it is pretty much the same.

Last thoughts

I don’t have any, but if you do leave them in the comments. Now go vote, the place is pretty useless without it.

There was a time when eduStyle, because of obscurity, was immune from abuse and spammy behavior. Unfortunately that time is over. It started out with spam comments. We put some extra controls in over the last few months and seemed to have curbed that for now, but it has moved into the voting. Some of our users started to notice some curious voting patterns and brought them to our attention. After studying we have decided to take some actions.

The primary action is to add a terms of use to the site. The new terms of use publicly identify some of the behavior that we already considered abusive and hopefully will help to avoid any surprises when we take action on abusive behavior. We have built some tools into the site that will help us take action on these. The first is that new users will now need to activate their accounts via email before they will be allowed to participate in the community. Over the next few days we’ll be forcing some of our more suspicious accounts to reactivate and until they do, their votes and comments will be hidden from the site. So don’t be surprised when see some of the vote counts change, if the users have a valid email account, they be able to reactivate and the count will climb back up again.

We have also launched a feedback forum using UserVoice. If you have any suggestions to help us improve the site, please drop them over there and while you are at it vote of the ideas that have already been posted.

With all of the exciting things going on at eduStyle (awards & book) we want to make sure that we can continue to put out valuable content via the blog. Since there is only 24 hours in a day, we figured the only way to make this happens was to recruit a few top notch people to join us as regular contributors to the blog. The first one we’d like to welcome is Chas Grundy. Chas has been wowing us with his contributions to the eduStyle gallery and on his blog grundyhome.com. so we’re excited to have him as a new author on the eduStyle blog. Chas manages interactive marketing for AgencyND – a marketing agency within the University of Notre Dame. As a web marketer, social media advocate, and former developer, he has seen the best and worst of what technology can do for higher education and will be sharing some of his insights and experiences here. Look for his first post in the next few minutes.

We have had some recent submissions that have included some quality high school sites. We have held most of them as pending while we had an internal discussion about whether or not eduStyle should include high schools, but one slipped past us and has quickly become the most popular site in the last 30 days.

On our “About” page we describe eduStyle as:

“a web design gallery dedicated to higher education websites and powered by higher education web design professionals. “

There may be things we could learn from each other, but high schools out number higher-ed and they could quicky over take the gallery changing the focus of the gallery. So community, what do you think? Should we open the door to high schools sites? Should we limit to higher-ed only?

Karine Joly (CollegeWebEditor.com and Higher Ed Experts), Mark Greenfield (Uwebd Ning site) and I have been working on a little project together. We decided that instead of surveying each of our site’s users individually we’d collaborate on one survey to help us better understand how/where to improve our sites and serve the higher-ed community better.

This survey should take no longer than 5-7 minutes depending on some of your responses (cause it’s intelligent). If you fill it out and provide us with your email address, you’ll get a chance to win one of the 6 cool prizes that will be drawn on October 16, 2008:

1. a free pass (a $300 value) to the 3-webinar series scheduled on October 21-23: “PR School 2.0: How to survive and thrive in the new online world of Public Relations and Communications”
2. a free pass (a $300 value) to the 3-webinar series scheduled on November 11-13: “Social Networks MBA: How to develop and nurture a thriving community online”
3. a free pass (a $240 value) to the 2-webinar series scheduled on December 2-3: “Email Marketing 360?
4. a 1GB (Product) RED iPod Shuffle courtesy of eduStyle (a $49 value)
5. 2 Amazon $50 gift certificates courtesy of Collegewebeditor.com

And when you’re done take a minute and check out the other sites participating in the survey.

• CollegeWebEditor.com
• Higher Ed Experts
• Uwebd on Ning

We have added a few things this week at the request of a few users:

Comments

We have a new RSS feed for the latest comments and a new page with the 100 newest comments on the sites in the gallery. As a bonus we have added an RSS feed for the comments on each site. So for example if you submitted Virginia Commonwealth University – Undergraduate Admissions site and wanted to keep tabs on what the community was saying about your submission you can now subscribe to the RSS feed for the comments on the Virginia Commonwealth University – Undergraduate Admissions. Just look for the RSS link below the last comment on the page.

Thanks for the suggestion ericstoller.

Links in a new Window

For all those who prefer to have the links off-site open in a new window, you can now control this from your profile. Login and visit your account page and click on the “Edit profile/password” link and look near the bottom in the “Email Notifications and Other Settings” section.

Thanks for the suggestion Compie.

There are a number of reason a site might get neither good votes nor bad votes (lots of submissions that day, unflattering thumbnail, site problems, etc). Here are the top five sites that voting left behind.

Eric Stoller. Anyone who has been to the site over the last few weeks will have seen Eric actively submitting, voting on, and commenting on sites. For all his efforts he has earned himself an eduStyle T-Shirt. Thanks Eric. This site wouldn’t be possible without active users like you. You can see who the other top users on the site are on newly redesigned Top User page and you can now see the top 100 users rank on the site on our newly redesigned profile pages (now with profile pictures).

Eric is also one of our Judges in the eduStyle Awards. Here is a little more about Eric.

Eric Stoller is currently an Academic Advisor at Oregon State University. He served previously as a Marketing Specialist in Student Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Eric has over 10 years of web site design experience. His technology competencies include accessibility/usability analysis, search engine optimization, web 2.0 implementation including blogging best practices, and web site statistics. Eric is a student affairs techie who can translate technology jargon into meaningful student affairs action and policy. As an academic advisor, Eric is literally “plugged in” to how today’s student interacts with various web technologies.

Eric has given presentations on web-related technologies at multiple student affairs conferences and is a former regional chair of the NASPA Technology Knowledge Community.

Eric is an active member of the blogosphere and frequently writes on social justice concerns, higher education tidbits and various technology issues at http://ericstoller.com.

Eric holds a BA in Communications/Public Relations from the University of Northern Iowa and an Ed.M. in College Student Services Administration from Oregon State University.

So I made a bunch of changes on the site late last week and over the weekend.

1. Bigger, Better Profile Pages
The new updated profiles will make it easier to network with other higher-ed web people on eduStyle. You can now add links to your profiles on other social networking, bookmarking, and blogging sites. You can also add links to your personally hosted blog, website, or portfolio … or anything else by adding an “other” link. So now when you browse through the profiles you can follow your favorite eduStyle people everywhere they hang out. As a bonus I added a page that aggregates all of the the links into one page so you can build up your higher-ed network.

2. School Search with Suggest
As the gallery has gotten bigger (now over 1000 sites in the gallery) it has become more difficult to find the site you are looking for. To help I have added a new search box that lets you more easily search through the schools in the gallery. It is located on the main gallery page and will offer you suggestions as you type based on schools in the gallery.

3. eduStyle on Twitter
You can now follow eduStyle on Twitter. I’ll be using it to post links to some of my picks for the best sites in the gallery and they get submitted or as I rediscover older forgotten sites.

More and more we are using web 2.0 or social sites like these as part of our official school web presence. As result I have put together a page to collect your uses of “Social Sites” as part of your web strategy. Hopefully this will help all of us stay on top of this fast moving trend. You can visit the page to see what everyone else is doing, but don’t forget to post pages that you are using.

Browse the Directory of Social Sites