2020 Student Services

I worked on a presentation about 2020 Student Services for NW/MET Conference Keynote last week. While we didn't get through all of the slides and we didn't get to discuss the info below, I do think these are important concepts...so I'm throwing them up on this blog.

As I look at the work being written about the coming of Web 3.0, my mind automatically goes to "so how will this affect actual online student services?"

Dave McComb, President of Semantic Arts, 2008, states that "Web 3.0 accumulates data and draws inferences through automated reasoning using a set of standards, tools, and engines to increase relevance." And Alex Iskold from Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services, March 19, 2007 lists talks about Web 3.0 transforming web sites into web services.

"Web 3.0 is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.

But it is not a question of if web sites become web services, but when and how.

As more and more of the Web is becoming remixable, the entire system is turning into both a platform and the database."

So from these ideas, I have begun to draw what this online student services world will look like as compared to Web 2.0. See chart below:

Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0

Semantic Wave 2008 Report: Industry Roadmap to Web 3.0 and Multi-billion Dollar Market Opportunity lay out the business sense and direction of the web over then next decade. See http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/semantic_wave_2008_free_report.php. Project10X, headed by Mills Davis, released a 400-page study of semantic technologies and their market impact. Now how does this study have anything to do with online student services?

Check out how Web 3.0 will overcome the fragmentation of information, processes and application functionality by interrelating forms of language that people and machine use to encode knowledge. This means that we will finally get to a place where we actually can have our machines predict the pathways of students based on their individual and collective web choices and then make comparisons that will determine computer generated responses. This is where "collective knowledge systems" can "collaborate to add content, semantics, models, and behaviors, and where systems learn and get better with use."

Students will be able to actually make and save individual computer generated pathways for themselves that show the road to series of successful completions based on the choices they are making in real time and interrelating these choices within net data. "Web 3.0 browsers will understand semantics of data, will broker information, and automatically interpret meta data."

This is a BIG DEAL. In Web 3.0 Online Student Services have the potential of truly creating retention and teaching/learning student systems that respond per individual in real time. Start thinking about the staff and characteristics of what such programs are going to need to be doing at your institutions with these types of interfaces. It won't be long.

How and Why to Choose a Blog Tool

Our boss Cable wants to blog. Two years ago Blogger couldn't reroute a DNS to make a unique URL that we could use within our state agency website. Now is can. TypePad makes categories and Blogger makes Labels. So how does one decide which tool to use?

How to Choose a Blog Tool -

How about a little comparison shopping on the web?
The USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review has the most comprehensive chart that I could find but it is dated 2006. (This is the chart that all you other bloggers have in your reviews.) See http://www.ojr.org/ojr/images/blog_software_comparison.cfm
Of course stuff has changed since 2006 but maybe this chart is a good start point.

Then there are three 2007-2008 charts:

One is from b2revolution - a vendor, so of course my skeptical eyebrow is now raised.
See http://b2evolution.net/about/blog-software-comparison-chart.html
But none the less, there are a lot of great functions listed here that you may want to think about as you choose your tool.

Second is the http://blog-services-review.toptenreviews.com/ Top Ten Reviews website with a 2007 chart. Pretty comprehensive. And as their tag line states, "We do the research, so you don't have to."

Third - a hosting site http://www.siteground.com/choose_blog_tool.htm
compares a number of vendors but no free services.

And as you can see I am using Blogger: easy, free and as much as you want.

Why to Carefully Choose a Blog Tool?

Why Blog?

As I have investigated blogs, I have come up with 3 things that you HAVE to HAVE to create a really good blog. These three things are:
1. A personality behind the blog. - one person with a passion and truly something to say.
2. A right-sized niche topic. - if it's too broad it gets mired, if it's too narrow you run out of stuff.
3. An audience that wants to engage. People have to want to participate, create community and comment back with their own findings.

SOOOooo you choose your blog tool based on what you are going to be saying, your style of saying it and how best to reach your audience throughout the world and then whatever funky little widgets that inspire you.