Welcome & Getting Started

Welcome!
This blog will be a collection of my thoughts, observations and musings while I progress through ENGL5377 - Digital Research Methods taught by Dr. Rebecca Rickly at Texas Tech University.

Getting Started
In the first night of class I felt very daunted by the final project in our course. A twenty page paper researching an online community. Hmm, I had no idea what I was going to look at or how I would get it done within the shortened summer session. This is not to say that I have figured it all out and miraculously have finished the project (that would be great wouldn't it) by now less than a week after the first class has started but I do have lots of ideas.

I knew that I wanted to relate what I would do to my interests and my daily work activities. I often do this for two reasons; 1. I can really get into it and be excited about what I am doing 2. If I focus on something that relates to my daily job I can draw on my resources there as well help to advance what I am doing in my current profession as Director of Web Development at Clarkson University.

Idea 1
So my first idea out of the gate was to look at online tools in social communities created by colleges for prospective students. I was thinking about seeing if tools like these decreased the melt in matriculation colleges often experience during the summer before classes begin. Clarkson has often talked of implementing tools like this but in the interest of time, money and experience have yet to do so. There have been a couple of recent articles about colleges that have done so in various forms. SUNY Plattsburgh has created an application for facebook designed to encourage a sense of community before students place foot on campus, https://mymail.clarkson.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/03/facebook . Wilkes University came out with a wonderfully creative advertising campaign to lure prospective students, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89551878 in addition to this cheap but elaborate marketing method they also created a social networking community just for incoming freshman called http://www.hellowilkes.com/. Although both of these projects really excited me we didn't have anything similar and I did not have access to either of the tools or the students to gauge their effectiveness so this sent me back to the drawing board in the quest for an idea.

Idea 2
The SUNY Plattsburgh application gave me an idea and I begin to do some hunting around on facebook to see what I could find. I found a group created by an accepted prospective student for the Saint Rose College in Albany, NY, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8122686977 which had a number of members and had lots of discussion going on around the process and the college. My next thought was to find something similar for Clarkson. I did a lot of searching but was coming up blank so I began to think about creating such a page, seeding it with my summer interns as mentors for the prospective students and then requesting that admission send the link to all accepted students and watch it grow.

A good idea can always get better
My idea was starting to come together but I still had a few bumps in the road that I had yet to figure out. I didn't want to taint the process by having and administrator (myself) or the admission crew involved but I wasn't sure how to get around it. Luckily for me I have a wonderful student that has worked for me for two years that really loves Clarkson and is also extremely helpful to anyone who wants to know anything about Clarkson. I remembered him telling me he answered a lot of questions for incoming students last year via facebook so I sat down with him and had a chat. He agreed that anything with the scent of administration on it would not get me anywhere near the results I was looking for at such a late date and pointed me to the group for the class of 2011 which was started in February of 2007 by a student after he received his acceptance letter. The site has 1314 posts on it's wall and 354 members. I read through only ten of the 67 pages of posts and found a goldmine of information. I think I can zero in on something here and make this work. Thank you so much for your help Dan!