In addition to the work on the upcoming eduStyle Awards, I’m also helping to judge the Edu Blogger Scholarship Contest. This is an exciting contest with $2500 worth of scholarships going to a blogger in higher-ed. I accepted the invitation to help judge the contest because it has a lot of the same goals of the eduStyle Awards, to recognize some of the great things going on in the higher-ed web. So don’t miss your chance to get some much deserved recognition. The deadline is quickly approaching, you need to get your entries in by Tuesday March 17.

It is really easy to enter the contest, all you have to do is:

1. write a post about online education or education online,
2. include the contest badge in the entry and
3. fill out the form available on the contest page.

For full rules and regulations, visit the contest page.

Nick Denardis has posted a great video on his blog where he reviews of a few sites in the eduStyle gallery. It is pretty cool use of the site and I’m really looking forward to more of these. In the first episode:

• Bates College
• City University of Seattle
• Durham College

We’re looking forward to the second episode, which Nick promises is on its way tomorrow.

Watch “Live review of higher education websites”

The People’s Voice voting has opened at the Webby Awards (Registration Required). Here are the nominees in the School/University category. While you are voting at the webbys take a minute and add your vote here, and don’t forget to nominate them for an eduStyle Award … if you think they are worthy of it.

Bennington College – A Bennington Timeline

Imperial College London – 100 Years of Stories

Southern California Institute of Architecture

School of Visual Arts

The Los Angeles Recording School

If you spot any higher-ed sites in any of the other categories leave a comment and I’ll be sure to add them to the post.
Webby 2008 Nominees on eduStyle

As soon as the latest greatest web technology takes the web world by storm we in the higher-ed web community are pretty quick to try and figure out how we can use it to reach out to our communities. Pretty soon we have a higher up asking if we have heard of x tool and soon after that we have the marketing folks trying to figure out how we can leverage the tool to drive up recruitment or to reach out to students. Some of these sites are a pretty easy fit for higher-ed. Facebook for example has nice group/page features that allow us to have a presence where our students/prospective students are. YouTube lets us easily create a channel for our videos on the worlds most popular video sharing and freely take advantage of the social features while also using it to post videos to our own site. Digg’s use in higher-ed has been much less obvious to me. Most pages on my college’s site wouldn’t even get a single digg let alone make it to the front page of the site.

I have been a Digg user for several years. When I started thinking back to the college or university pages that have made on to Digg I quickly noticed a pattern. There are really 3 things that get us on to the home page of Digg:

1. Tragedy
2. Controversy
3. Research

The first 2 are obviously not the types of things that we want to do to try an get exposure and they are typically coming from outside sources anyway. The third though, is the piece we should really take notice of (that bolding was no accident). The users of Digg seem to digg the interesting research that is taking place at our schools particularly in the sciences. You can see the results of a search for posts with .edu in the url.

Now your goals with Digg will not be the same as they would be on Facebook, mySpace, or YouTube. You won’t be building very many long term relationships and one story about some groundbreaking, interesting, or often bizarre research project going on at your school will probably not drive a lot of registrations. But it can build awareness and potentially reputation for the school and get your schools name in front of thousands of eyes for free. There are also cases of mainstream media picking up on stories because of their popularity on sites like Digg. So when you are working on those interesting research based features for your homepage or building up a research site from some new grant money, don’t forget to include a “digg this” button. You could be the next gravity lamp or checkers playing computer. Go Digg the latest .edu star on Digg.

Brad Ward and Matt Herzberger just took off the wrapping paper off their newest gift to the higher-ed web community, bloghighed. bloghighed is a blogging community that aggregates many of the highest quality higher-ed blogs and presents them in a nice neat little package for easy consumption. It’ll be an awesome resource.

The organizers have decided to have a competition to design the 2008 conference website. I think it is a great idea considering the talent out there in the higher-ed web design community. The website indicates that the details of the competition will be posted in early December. I look forward to some of the designs that will come out. It would be cool if they took some inspiration from the CSS Zen Garden and let us all get creative with the CSS. I’ll try and keep you posted of any updates on the contest.

via Karine at CollegeWebEditor

Less than one week in on the directory of social sites and there have been 38 submission. Of those 38, there are a few that really standout. Here are some of my favorites:

• George Mason University’s Facebook Page
  They have a nice collection of apps running on the page that feed in GMU info and make this page much more useful than it is with Facebook’s default set of apps for pages.
• Xavier University’s Ning BlueTube Page
  Nice use of Ning’s features to create a self contained and well branded social video site.
• Loyola Marymount University’s Virb Page
  Ok, this page is just beautiful. This is an awesome demonstration of the flexibility of Virb’s templates.
• University of Winnipeg Library’s Flickr Photo Tour
  Beautiful photos and a great way to have an online tour of the Library.

There are many more sites that are worth looking at in the gallery. Don’t forget to submit some excellent examples that you have come across.

According to the news advertisers like Coca Cola and Toyota will now have profile(ish) pages on Facebook. I imagine that this means any company including schools will be able to participate. This will be a welcome tool in any admissions area’s arsenal. I’ll be watching closely for this one to show up tonight … and to see how many of my friends are fans of Coca Cola.

I saw this one in the referrer logs. Looks interesting.