“Social Media and College Admissions: The First Longitudinal Study” conducted by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Senior Fellow and Research Chair of the Society for New Communications Research and Chancellor Professor of Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Eric Mattson, CEO of Financial Insite Inc. was announced. The new study represents one of the first statistically significant, longitudinal studies on the usage of social media by college admissions offices. The study compares adoption of social media between 2007 and 2008 by the admissions offices of all the four-year accredited institutions in the United States. The findings are based on 536 interviews with college admissions officers. Key Findings include: There has been significant growth in familiarity with, adoption of, and importance to mission of social media over one year ago; Adoption has grown by 24% in one year: 61% in 2007 as compared with 85% in 2008. Usage increased for every social media type studied; Adoption is being driven by admissions departments’ recognition of the increasingly importance of social media. Colleges and universities are outpacing U.S. corporate adoption of social media tools and technologies (13% of the Fortune 500 and 39% of the Inc. 500 currently have a public blog, while 41% of college admissions departments have blogs); Social networking is the tool most familiar to admissions officers, with 55% of respondents claiming to be “very familiar with it” in the first study and 63% in 2008; A growing number of admissions officers use search engines (23%) and social networks (17%) to research prospective students; In addition to social networks, usage of YouTube has also increased substantially. Video is now being used to deliver virtual tours of campuses, virtual visits to the dorms, and sample lectures from the faculty; 78% of private schools have blogs, versus 28% of public schools, and 50% of schools with undergraduate populations of less than 2,000 have blogs; 40% of institutions not currently using social media plan to start a blog; Nearly 90% of admissions departments feel that social media is “somewhat to very important” to their future strategy. The full executive summary of the study is available for download at:
http://www.umassd.edu/cmr/studiesresearch/mediaandadmissions.cfm, http://www.sncr.org
Category: Content technology news (Page 183 of 638)
Curated information technology news for content technology, computing, and digital experience professionals. News items are edited to remove hype, unhelpful jargon, iffy statements, and quotes, to create a short summary — mostly limited to 200 words — of the important facts with a link back to a useful source for more information. News items are published using the date of the original source here and in our weekly email newsletter.
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LinkedIn announced a partnership with IBM’s Lotus to integrate LinkedIn’s functionality and networking capabilities with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections and the just announced LotusLive.com. The companies will work together to provide Lotus customers, including Lotus Notes users, new ways to interact with their trusted professional network. Professionals will be able to start web meetings, add business context to e-mail senders, and learn more about collaborators, colleagues, potential partners and prospects through integrated LinkedIn profiles. LinkedIn plans to integrate with Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections, and LotusLive.com. LotusLive will bring its collaboration capabilities to professionals on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn integration will be available at no additional cost to Lotus users. The partnership is non-exclusive. http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/01/19/linkedin-and-lotus-partner-to-improve-enterprise-software
EPiServer, provider of platforms for Web Content Management and online social communities, announced the acquisition of the product family of Dropit. Dropit’s main product, Extension, called X3 in its latest version, was specifically developed for EPiServer CMS following requests for this functionality from EPiServer’s customers. Extension has been integrated within EPiServer CMS for more than four years. X3 makes it quicker and easier for web editors to administer and alter their sites. For example, page layout can be changed in an instant by dragging and dropping different ‘blocks’ into place. Text, images and film can also be included and moved around freely. Two people working in the product organization at Dropit will join EPiServer. The acquisition also encompasses a number of other products which Dropit has developed as add-ons to EPiServer CMS. http://www.dropit.se, http://www.episerver.com
Alfresco Software Inc. announced an OEM partnership with Remote-Learner.net, the provider of open source solutions for online learning management, record keeping and learning object storage to corporate, academic and governmental clients. The partnership will deliver solutions to allow learning organizations using Moodle’s open source course management system (CMS) to access Alfresco’s open source ECM repository to support content development and reuse. Remote-Learner’s Enterprise Learning Intelligence Suite for Moodle (ELIS) will be made available on February 12, 2009, allowing users to store and retrieve resources from within Moodle and Alfresco. This solution will enable learning organizations and existing Moodle users to access the back-end content repository services of Alfresco Enterprise, helping to ensure security, compliance, and auditability. Users will be able to more effectively manage, preview and track increasing volumes of content and digital assets on Moodle sites using Alfresco Enterprise. Alfresco Enterprise hosted or download trials are available at http://www.alfresco.com, http://remote-learner.net
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced the immediate availability of Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express software, a full version of Adobe LiveCycle ES hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment. Using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) technologies, Adobe’s offering provides a virtual, self-contained development environment where enterprise developers can prototype, develop, and test Adobe LiveCycle ES applications without needing to install and configure Adobe LiveCycle ES themselves. With Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express, Adobe LiveCycle ES applications are pre-configured as ready to run server instances on the Amazon EC2 server. This can help reduce the time required to boot new server instances to minutes, allowing enterprise developers to quickly begin testing and modifying applications. Developers can effectively bullet-proof their applications without having to invest in a development environment or test lab. Old projects may be deleted or saved for future access and new projects can begin without any cleanup required from the last install. Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express is immediately available to all members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program. http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/, http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle
Systems Alliance, Inc. announced the release of Enhancement Pack 4, a software update for the company’s SiteExecutive 4.1 Web content management application. With Enhancement Pack 4, Systems Alliance introduces the SiteExecutive Application Framework, a new mechanism for developing dynamic Web content, along with a blog application, automatic spam reduction capabilities and other improvements. The new Application Framework provides an alternative custom development option for modeling, managing and delivering dynamic or structured content. Content created with the Application Framework can take the form of a Web page, XML feed or virtually any other MIME type. And, the SiteExecutive Application Framework produces search-engine friendly content with human-readable URLs, as well as content-specific browser titles and meta tags.
The Blog Application is the first SiteExecutive component developed using the new Application Framework. It enables the provisioning and management of one or many individual blogs, and offers an easy-to-use interface for managing blog posts and comments.
Other SiteExecutive blog features include: Scheduling posts for advanced publishing, Generating or consuming RSS feeds, Notification and comment approval workflow, Captcha to eliminate robot-generated comments, Keyword and calendar views, and Viewlets for displaying blog content on other SiteExecutive pages or templates.
Enhancement Pack 4 includes a built-in Spam reduction feature which automatically recognizes and rejects robot-generated submissions, saving site owners from the time-wasting task of sorting through junk form submissions. http://www.systemsalliance.com
Percussion Software announced the continuation of a strategy to expand the number of European Union Percussion Partners. Percussion continues to provide Technical Services and Professional Services from its London office. http://www.percussion.com
IBM (NYSE~IBM) announced the availability of Lotus Notes 8.5 collaboration software with social computing features for all Mac OS X Leopard-powered computers. In addition, IBM’s free Lotus Symphony document, spreadsheet and presentation software will be available later this month for the Mac. Lotus Notes 8.5 provides significant storage savings over previous versions. Notes has an intelligent storage savings feature that ensures that only one copy of an attachment is kept on the mail server, resulting in an estimated 40 percent space savings. Lotus Notes 8.5 arranges all collaboration tools on one screen in fewer clicks. This screen shows links to team rooms, instant messaging, to do lists, calendar, Internet browsers and other tools. Social characteristics include new integration with Google, Yahoo, and hundreds of other public Internet calendars. IBM also announced new Lotus iNotes 8.5 software, which allows anyone with a Notes user license to access Notes through a Safari browser from anywhere. iNotes allows the user to integrate the Notes calendar with Google calendar and also supports most standard widgets. One example of a widget is the mapping of a street address in an e-mail note. IBM sells Lotus Notes and Domino in a variety of ways, including packaged with hardware for small and medium businesses; via a hosted service, where the software is stored on a server at IBM; and through Passport Advantage on http://www.ibm.com/lotus/notesanddomino.
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