redesigning lclark.edu

Institutional Blogs

The Future Home Page?

While I wouldn’t be so foolish as to say this is definitely the way to go, I am willing to throw myself and a few ideas out there for everyone to think on and consider. (With the hope that the end discussion yields that perfect solution.)

Mike Sexton had recently brought up a point I find compelling (and admittedly, I’m reacting here only to a portion of a recent discussion). That is, our current implementation of the spotlights utilizes three primary sources of content: the Chronicle, the Annual Report, and outside stories written about us by the press. With the outside stories to which we link, there is a potential loss for after reading the story, we may not see our site visitor return (or at least not immediately). Wouldn’t it be better if the content to which we link was on our site?

Certainly yes it would, and because of copyright law, we cannot of course simply duplicate their content, nor would I expect that we wouldn’t link to stories about us in the right context, but perhaps we should be trying to develop additional content streams to the home page that would be housed on our site and therefore, give site visitors more opportunity rather than less, to learn more about us.

With that, in the coming weeks, New Media will be moving spotlight management to a new blog which will give us an easy means of storing stories as well as the spotlight text. As yet, I don’t have a good mind as to from where new content streams will come. However, I have had some thoughts about how best to use this new feature.

My ideas are mostly longer-term (for incorporation into the redesign) as they require some form of home page segmentation by audience, where we open up the ability to funnel writing to each audience, hopefully delivering content originating from a member of that audience. Audience content streams available from the home page could look something like:

  • main > national news, etc. (similar to current content stream)
  • prospective students > highlight recent posts from student blogs, segmented by school of course, with audience-appropriate links, etc.
  • current students > highlight recent posts from student blogs, but links, etc. would be likely different than the prospective…
  • faculty/staff > highlight printed and presented, recent posts from faculty blogs… there are some law faculty members that blog, it would be phenomenal to develop some undergrad facblogs as well, but I personally know what a commitment that is
  • alumni > could do the same for faculty blogs… add chronicle + annual report content
  • donors/friends > donor stories? maybe integrated site to learn about our mission and why it’s important to support Lewis & Clark

Basically, I’d be looking to mine all sources for re-distribution if the writing/ideas/content meets the needs for the audience in question. (So, the writing-level, style, voice, etc. required for current students to prospective students is obviously going to vary from that for alumni or faculty.)

Tapping user-generated-content is really our best hope of telling the stories about L&C that we all hope to tell (and from a much more believable voice) so finding ways to encourage that type of content generation and percolating it up to inclusion is going to be a significant factor in our redesign.

All this is just the germ of an idea and needs lots more development, but is I hope somewhere to start. I just keep asking myself, in a perfect world, how would the home page function? I hope you do too.

Thoughts? Questions?

David

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Institutional Blogs

We recently received an email from Hanna Neuschwander from the Grad School regarding blogging:

“I’m interested in discussing the possibility of blogging, and how blogs could be incorporated through our website in the new redesign (much like the redesign blog itself, actually, but that an individual department could start up). My understanding is that currently, it would take a lot of work for you guys to set something that up. Is there a Trillium-like (decentralized) way that blog functionality could be incorporated for department sites? E.g., we’d like to set up an alumni book club for Grad School alumni (perhaps Morgan’s talked to you about this)? We think blogging would be the best way to do it. (We can’t do Moodle discussion groups because alumni don’t have active LC IDs/passwords.) Other possible uses — setting up event blogs for conferences that we host, with information and participatory commentary from attendees as the conference happens. Etc.”

And Noah responded:

“Blogs are on the way (maybe operational by next semester?), and are separate from the redesign, which means it will happen sooner. They are being setup and managed by IT, and are intended to address the exact situations you are bringing up.”

What I’ll add to this discussion is that we really don’t yet know how we’ll test and allocate the blogs. I expect Matt West (IT, sysadmin installing the software) may have some insight on this too. (Matt?)

Another issue is that we’ll need to write some use policies around this new service, since the institution should both protect itself (legally) from the freely expressed ideas of the blog authors, yet also include the ability to limit or restrict the service based on the standard cadre of non-protected speech among other unlawful acts.

Thoughts?

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