TechWag

: Image by luc legay via Flickr

Phase two of my social media plan for the school went live this week; you can find the department web site at http://cs.cityu.edu. This is the next major step on the technology side for building out the social media capability of the program, and much like other colleges, introduces the concept of the department web site as both blog and pages using Wordpress as the core CMS platform to work from.

Phase one was to build out some of the more pressing technology needs, integration into friendfeed, twitter, facebook, and social median. With the accounts active there is a nice loop of information that we latch into, not just the stuff we create but the industry leaders and thought leaders that are influencing what we teach, how we teach it, and what is important when it comes to using technology to create a more transparent department. While this at this point is a beta effort, checking to see if we can gain readers, and help drive at least interest in the programs, getting to this point has required significant effort both technologically and politically.

The idea though is that we are here, and can start talking about the computer science department or technology school or how ever the branding needs to happen. The interesting part is as we engage more into social media as a school, can we help people get degrees, or even just go listen to the podcasts of class lectures that we are putting out for free on our open campus web site.

Now it is about collecting metrics, who is coming, what are they doing when they get here, how can we engage, how are the conversations going to go, where are the conversations going to go in the longer run. While I am not much of a conversationalist, the task of measuring and metering is what phase three is going to be all about.