Mining Student-Generated Content: The Quest for Authenticity
by Amy Wong / February 2009
One of the best and most effective ways to represent an institution’s distinctiveness, learning culture and sense of community is to provide real-world examples on a website. “Day-in-the-life” student photos, videos, blogs, profiles, calendars and actual class work can work together to weave a complete and authentic picture of student life.
Q. Sounds good, but how do I organize and identify students to collect all this great content?
A. A little delegation!
Zehno often recommends the creation of a small-group editorial board of students who can generate ideas for new stories, content and functionality that are relevant to their age group and prospective students. These students could be the same as your blogger pool (if you have one) or culled from student ambassadors, campus organization leaders, resident advisors, admission office student workers and media contributors.
Content can also be solicited from graduate assistants and faculty members in relevant programs. Champlain College recently enlisted the aid of its faculty members to develop the student work gallery. The gallery features a wide variety of projects, including poster designs, television commercial parodies, short stories, crime scene reports and Flash games. Questionnaires can be distributed to collect information such as
- Student name
- Title of work
- What class the work was produced for
- Abstract
Q. It seems like there are a lot of different types of content to be mined. What’s the most effective?
A. Whatever will best represent your institution’s identity.
West Virginia University and De Montfort University let their students behind the camera so they could keep video diaries to document their personal journeys. Fresno State holds an annual video contest awarding cash prizes for students who submit the best demonstration of the concept “I Am Fresno State,” which they promote on MySpace, Facebook and iTunes.
Colby College took this notion to a higher plane with insidecolby.com, their student-produced web magazine. With a team of almost 40 writers, photographers, podcasters, vodcasters and bloggers, they give readers a true student perspective of everything from interviews with the Dean of Admissions to hanging out with the Colby Improv club.
News at Princeton keeps the site loaded with student work by inviting readers to submit video, audio and slideshows that may be presented on the homepage, multimedia pages, news stories and on the university’s YouTube channel. Similarly, the students and community of the Massachusetts Institute of Techonology are encouraged to submit images or designs for their home page, which changes daily. What better way to model the capabilities of your students?
Whether you have a group of super sleuths or use your website to do your bidding, fresh student-generated content is within your grasp.
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