For those folks who will be attending the College Goal Sunday forum and other college access initiatives, this is a recorded session of a talk I regularly deliver on social media - a quick rundown of prerequisites and some starter suggestions and tools you can use.
Slides:
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Twitter as a conversation medium is all the buzz, but beyond the buzz, actual work is getting done, actual help is being given. Here’s a very brief case study and followup from yesterday:
carterharkins: Know anyone at Sallie Mae who can straighten out UCLA’s mistaken loan cancellation?
cspenn: eh, no - what’d they do?
carterharkins: UCLA even acknowledges the mistake, but still say it’ll be 3 weeks to get it corrected, and until then she must pay to stay.
cspenn: is that from the bursar’s office or financial aid? sometimes the two never talk…
carterharkins: not sure, & that’s what I told her, too. Earlier today she wasn’t getting any answers, but no update in past 2 hours. It’ll work out
cspenn: make sure that the dir. of financial aid is talking to the bursar’s office - easiest way to get things negotiated.
carterharkins: Thanks, Chris, you are a great help!
carterharkins: Thanks 4 advice yesterday. My sister-in-law was able 2 get bursar’s office talking w/financial aid people and resolved issue. Urock!
cspenn: awesome! solving financial aid problems by twitter FTW :)
For financial aid officers, think about the possibilities of providing yet another contact point for students to interact with your department, yet another way for you to provide your expertise to them and help them get things done.
For students, think about how to reach out beyond traditional means of communication to get financial aid help.
For anyone working at Sallie Mae, you owe me a small beer for handling your customer service issue.
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New signs of the economic difficulties facing all kinds of colleges: Administrators and staff members at John Carroll University are being required to take two weeks of unpaid leave, while faculty members are being asked to vote on a proposal to cut their salaries, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland reported. … The University of Washington is cutting 70 jobs from its fund raising operations, citing a drop of 25 percent in the value of the university’s endowment, the Associated Press reported.
Morris Brown College, a historically black institution fighting for its financial life, lost a classroom building to a foreclosure action on Tuesday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Frederick D. Jordan Hall was sold for $900,000. College leaders vowed to continue their push to revive the college, which is down to about 200 students.
Commentary
Completely unsurprising. At this point, if a university isn’t cutting back, it’s because there’s nothing left to cut. A lot of schools have made public claims committed to tuition freezes, but I wouldn’t expect those promises to hold if the current environment doesn’t improve. Be ready and anticipate “unexpected” tuition hikes, since they’re probably coming one way or another.
Do you have big ideas on how you plan to change the world? David’s Bridal wants to hear about it! To reward you for your commitment – and super fashion sense – you may be selected to win an amazing $5,000 scholarship, a $400 David’s Bridal shopping spree, a fabulous limo ride to take you and your friends to the prom and more!
Twitter’s the new darling of the tech and web world. It’s the shiny new object that is loved and advocated by its users. It’s also a treasure trove of scholarship information, IF you know how to look for it.
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Daily Aid 77: Low cost laptops for low income students
Student Financial Aid News
UNC Greensboro, citing the cost, has ended a mandatory requirement for students to have laptops on campus. That said, if you can afford one, it’s not a bad idea to have one. If you’re doing mainly online stuff, even a basic netbook would do the trick, like the Acer Aspire. [disclosure, paid link] It’s good enough for basic stuff. Let’s talk more about this in a bit…
Let’s talk about a very low cost college laptop. I mentioned the Acer Aspire earlier. Others on Twitter have suggested the Dell9, Samsung NC10, Asus eePC, MSI Wind, and other equivalents. These are small little devices ranging in price from $250-$400. No one is going to mistake them for a powerhouse, and you shouldn’t expect them to do everything that a full size computer does. For that matter, you can find decent computers at bargain basement prices on sites like Craigslist, too. (beware: most have no warranty!)
That said, all you really need is an operating system, a web browser, and access to the Internet. The biggest add-on cost to most computers is the software, which is rapidly becoming a dinosaur of a model.
You might want to consider a USB keyboard and mouse, but you can probably find some for free on campus or even on your local Craigslist.
For students, especially low income students, this sort of setup with free software is exactly what you need to get started, and as a bonus, most of the online equivalents for desktop software allow you to share and collaborate much more easily. Don’t buy into the marketing hype that every student needs a copy of Microsoft Office 2009 Gold Plated Edition. Chances are 99% of the features you’d actually use as a student are in the online free equivalents.
Depending on which university program you enroll in, there might be specialty pieces of software that won’t run on these notebooks, like SPSS, AutoCAD, and Mathematica. Chances are peers will have computers strong enough to run those specialty apps, or on campus labs will have them. They will not, however, be the bread and butter of your computer use on campus, which will probably be Internet-based.
If you’re a student with modest means, take a look at how much stuff you can do and get for free. Check out Edubuntu for Linux and OpenDisc for Education, both of which are huge free collections of software for students.
Above all else, go to a local computer store and try out these smaller netbooks. See if they feel okay, see if they’re right for you - chances are, if you’re doing basic computing stuff on campus, they’ll be more than enough.
Please share this post with any non-profit agencies focusing on college access and affordability to pass along to their students.
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This little eBook is not about how to use Twitter or how to get started with Twitter. It’s not the answer to the question “What is Twitter?”. It’s not about who you should follow or who should follow you. It’s not about being popular, cool, loved, adored, or anything else that was important in the 7th grade.
This little eBook is about how to make the most of Twitter’s power without spending your entire life on it. In other words - how to make Twitter work for you without Twitter becoming work itself.
I presume a lot in this book. I presume you know how to use Google Reader, RSS, Yahoo Pipes, Twitter, and more. If you don’t, get up to speed on the basics of those tools first.
Will this guide answer all your questions? Definitely not. Will it make your Twitter experience a little more productive, a little more helpful? It should.
If you like the Twitter book, please link to this page and share it. It’s licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution, Non-commercial Use Only, No Derivative Works US 3.0.
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The new iTunes Store screenshots confirm that Apple will be delivering over-the-air downloads for both video and audio podcasts. According to Schimanke, podcast downloads will be limited to episodes less than 10MB in size when using the cellular network.
Podcasters - better have at least a few items under 10 MB in your feed. If you roll your own MP3 encoder using LAME (as I do) this shouldn’t be a big deal, as you can just specify a target size. If you use someone else’s encoder, like iTunes, you’ll need to fiddle around with settings to find the best quality for 10 MB of audio or less.
Apple has not indicated when firmware 2.2, which contains this upgrade, will go live, but it’s in beta now.
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Texas State Technical College, Marshall campus is about to become a new case study for intelligent use of 2.0 services. They’ve set up a Twitter account and it’s populated largely with updates about the school’s campus, such as openings, closings, etc.
Sounds good, right?
Here’s the game winner for me - in their message to their MySpace members, Debra McIntosh, TSTC Director of Recruiting Services, says:
To receive messages from TSTCMarshall at nearly the speed of light you can have these messages sent to your cell phone as text messages. To set this service up, log into Twitter and click on “settings”. Enter your cell phone number in the box (include a “+” and leading “1″ so it will look like +19031112222), check the box allowing Twitter to send you text messages, and click “Save”. Twitter will send you a text message to verify you want to receive text messages on the phone number you provided. Depending on your cell phone provider and contract you may incur charges for text messages.
See it? Get it?
TSTC probably doesn’t have the money to set up an SMS gateway, certainly not a large scale commercial installation. Perhaps they don’t even have the need for it on a big scale. By using Twitter’s SMS integration, they’ve effectively set up a free SMS gateway using Twitter’s infrastructure for their students - and those students can text right back, thanks to Twitter’s architecture.
This is a great idea, great implementation, and completely cost-free for TSTC. They can post notices about lines at the financial aid office, campus closings, and much more, and not spend a dime doing it.
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Not bad - a few of our other services aren’t the Chrome-recommended choice, but glad to see a good number of our sites as recommended choices in Google’s new Chrome browser.
Other first impressions - this thing is FAST. Very snappy, much faster than Firefox or IE in my Windows XP installation. I got a kick out of the titles in the preferences:
It’s a great metaphor that gives a clear mental image of what’s about to open up.
Other neat things - it comes with Google Gears pre-installed, but Google didn’t auto-approve their own sites, which is nice. It also doesn’t come with Flash built in, but it does download the plugin and install it without a browser restart, which is also nice.
This I thought was kind of weird:
You can report to Google broken web pages. I wonder - if enough people report, does Chrome ignore the site? Change its recommendations? Inquiring minds want to know.
Other fun stuff - check out the stats!
And finally this interesting tidbit - Google Chrome can create applications on your desktop of web apps, making them function like regular programs on your computer.
Kudos to Google for this release.
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I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb and call Barack Obama the winner of the Texas and Ohio “Super Tuesday II” primaries today.
Why?
Google. Specifically, Google trends search volume for Obama vs. Clinton in those two states. Take a look:
Results for Ohio - last 30 days
Results for Texas - last 30 days
On top of that all, take a look at Google’s AdWords Keyword tool. For February, bidding competition (meaning higher prices) was much higher for Hillary Clinton, but Barack Obama led search volume. Clinton is spending for traffic Obama is getting for free or lower cost.
AdWords Keyword Research Tool
The Student Loan Network does not endorse any political candidate, party, or position. We do, however, use Google like fiends.
I’m making some changes around here at the Financial Aid Podcast. One of the biggest changes you’ll notice is that I actively encourage you to now get the show every day by email. After doing some thinking about RSS and email, I’ve decided to promote email as the way to get the show every day for a couple of reasons.
First, email is EASY. Just about everyone gets email. Folks who are new to computers and the Internet intuitively grasp email. Folks new to podcasting don’t need more technical hurdles to listening to podcasts - and email fits the bill nicely. You’ll receive an email with new shows every day that I publish a show.
Second, email is easy to share. One click on the Forward button and you’re sending it to whoever you want, however you want, and you don’t have to worry about giving your friends’ email addresses to a third party. For those of you using feeds and feed readers, there’s no real easy way to share RSS feeds. OPML was supposed to be that, but how many people can easily share OPML files? Even in feed readers like Google Reader, in order to share an item you… email it.
For all of its flaws and issues with deliverability, etc. email is still one of the best ways to stay in touch. If you’d like to get the Financial Aid Podcast via email every day, just sign up here:
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Texas State Technical College, Marshall campus is about to become a new case study for intelligent use of 2.0 services. They’ve set up a Twitter account and it’s populated largely with updates about the school’s campus, such as openings, closings, etc.
