goingon.com

Activity streams, by themselves, are a simple concept. They are a list of recent activities performed by a user on a website or system. The first incarnation of activity streams were news feeds, which were all the rage back circa 2004. At the time, many pundits predicted a future where the web would be reduced to millions of autonomous feeds and where RSS aggregators would become the new browser. They had it partially right, they just didn’t imagine that the feeds would come from your “friends” and the aggregator would be called Facebook.

Recently, Yammer received an $800M pre-money valuation and Instagram was sold for a reported $1B. Like Facebook, and Twitter, both of these companies have activity streams and big data concepts at the core of their user experience and technical architectures.  Read Full Article

A few weeks back, I met with the Provost of a major four-year university. We started talking about some of the challenges she faces in engaging her students and faculty. “We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, actually millions, developing programs and resources,” she emphasized, “and I would hazard a guess that the majority of people at this school know about less than 10% of them.” With that, she pulled up her institutional portal and we couldn’t help but laugh. There on the home page was a giant widget showing the campus weather report for the next 5 days (as well as a random list of school news and events). “I may be wrong,” she declared, “but I just do not think that today’s students are coming to our portal to get the weather report.”  Read Full Article

Long before the emergence of Facebook, Emory University pioneered LearnLink, an institution-wide online community and communications environment for engaging students, faculty and staff around both academic and co-curricular activities. Almost 15 years and millions of posts later, LearnLink has become an integral part of the “Emory Experience,” and has helped to set the bar for online engagement in higher education.  Watch the webinar to learn more.   Read Full Article

With our debut media coverage last month in TechCrunch, Campus Technology  and Wired Campus, there have been a lot of thoughts and opinions posted about GoingOn.   Unsurprisingly, not everyone shares our vision.   This is to be expected in any early market.  In fact, one of the things that I love most about working in the educational technology market is the depth and thoughtfulness of the social debate.  You can work insanely hard, find many early successes, but this market will hold your feet to fire until you have demonstrated tangible results.   We go in with our eyes wide open and embrace the challenge (most days).   

As an entrepreneur, I have found that being misunderstood is harder then being dismissed.  Creating new technologies and building new markets can be like trying to deliver your dissertation in the middle of the faculty holiday party.  But if you wouldn’t mind stepping into this quiet corner near the fireplace, I would offer a few points for your consideration.  Read Full Article

As 2011 draws to a close, it is a natural time for reflection and prognostication with respect to some of the trends that stand out above the rest. Since GoingOn’s mission is to improve the quality of the academic experience by innovatively applying social networking and other internet-based technologies to structure and drive academic engagement, the continued growth of online education for institutions of all sizes is of particular note. Clearly, from an administrative and revenue based perspective, online education offers huge potential for gain as witnessed by Saint Leo’s exponential revenue growth that was heavily fueled by building a robust online program. But beyond that, more mainstream institutions of higher learning are embracing online as a viable quality delivery modality for education as evidenced by Stanford University’s decision to allow its name to be attached to an all-online high school program for gifted students.  Read Full Article

I joke with friends that, “I send my son an email and he responds with a text message.” While humorous, this simple phenomenon underpins a more serious question about how we engage and communicate with an ever more mobile, and, dare I say, frenetic, student body. When it comes to engaging students beyond core transactional interactions (such as enrollment and financial aid), student-facing portals are dead.   Read Full Article

Part of the fun of working at GoingOn, is creating a new market.  Institutions of higher education have not customarily had academic engagement networks (AENs) like GoingOn provides.  Thought leaders in the field of student engagement, our clients are a pleasure to work with and keep us moving forward.  Our clients are the ones that were looking for us before we found them.  But it is not always obvious how you might use an AEN.  In this post I will write about a few interesting ways we've seen and/or imagined GoingOn to be used.  Each GoingOn deployment is a network of federated communities that clients configure based on their needs, so each client is able to build unlimited communities .  Here are  a few noteworthy community types that students particularly enjoy  Read Full Article

I am guilty of having survived college on memorization alone.  I'm excited to see that "active learning" is gaining ground as evidenced by a pair of professors at Kansas State University, Robbie Bear and Eva Horne.  They are encouraging students to be more proactive about the learning process in their Principles of Biology course.   Read Full Article

I recently came across a guide for educators using Facebook written by Linda Fogg Phillips, Derek Baird, and BJ Fogg.  It's a well done guide for teaching with Facebook, but I wanted to highlight some of the key takeaways that apply beyond Facebook and to GoingOn.  

9 Best Practices Using Social Networking Tools in Higher Education

1) Develop a social media policy.  Conversation across key stakeholders about how to use social tools is vital.

2) Mandate that students and faculty alike use their real names on all social networking sites, including GoingOn, to promote trust and community.  Read Full Article

We've seen a number of articles lately arguing (with data) for one side or the other. 

Research from a professor at the University of Maryland indicates that students are forming important bonds on social networking sites. “When kids feel connected and have a strong sense of belonging to the school community, they do better in school,” said Christine Greenhow, an education professor at University of Maryland.   Read Full Article