Having content management be in-house allows for the school (or company's) message to be current and real. Our professor used his own company's web site as an example. Members of his team are able to add content to the website themselves through a nimble CMS. Some in the class became so uncomfortable at this idea-- what?! How do you check it? How do you know it is appropriate? What about *gasp* TYPOS? His answer was refreshingly simple. The group got together for a short training to agree on standards and what their message was, then the team was let loose to do the work.
This reminded me of the thinking of Daniel Pink's new book Drive. This is, in fact, how you motivate people to participate. The creation of the Autonomy-Mastery-Purpose trifecta is how you must engage people to communicate, particularly on a school website. Come up with clear expectations, a shared purpose, the opportunity to grow and improve and then provide autonomy.
We then saw an example from UMBC in Maryland in which community members (looks like mostly students) are able to contribute photos, tweets and videos to a Facebook-like forum. It is real, it is live, it is enough to make control freaks squirm! What if a teacher is boring and a student tweets it?! Good! Maybe teachers should be held accountable for their work (thank you @mmhoward). What about an F bomb? Well, adults should be in this community too, modeling good behavior. We are all responsible for what goes on in these communities in the same way that we are for the communication on our actual campuses.
1 comment:
Thanks for writing about this, Emily. Ironically, when I got home from class, I received the fall/winter magazine from my former elementary school. I always look forward to getting it - the pictures, stories, updates, articles bring back memories - but it's such a controlled publication. Everything is perfect and planned in such a publication and it feels so...artificial. I know for a fact that the school has dynamic things going on inside the classrooms. If it's not going to be communicated in a seasonal magazine or on a website, where can a school share what the everyday life of a school looks like? I see no other way than to make the online presence of the school one that's interactive and engaging for parents, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and visitors. It's something that I will be pushing at my next school. We have the responsibility to open the doors of our schools and share what we're doing in classrooms (pursuing best practices - whether perfect or not) with the outside community.
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