Today I am a web marketer and designer for a small, liberal arts college. erelevant.net was started initially in the Spring of 2006 as a way to explore my profession. I have since realized that being “on-topic” was little better than succumbing to the internet echo-chamber called “higher ed marketing blogs.” There were some good times, certainly. Some good people and some insightful exchanges. Mostly, though, exploring my profession by looking at others in the industry meant receiving someone else’s cold innovation leftovers or, worse, being spoon-fed fads by vendors—these were often sugary and filling but provided little lasting nutrition. (WARNING: Metaphor Change Ahead) There is no “on the bleeding edge.” Electronic marketing bliss will not come from a $19.99, syndicated, podcasted, webinar. Either you work hard and, for a meteoric moment, become the bleeding edge, or you’ve been left behind.

I took a summer hiatus that turned into a year-long absence, and I did allot of thinking.

The best way for me to innovate and enjoy what I do is to go native. Time to slip into the digital tribe and move among its peoples—virtual, 3D hands brushing in the darkness of social networked second lives, a million onymous youth dancing hyper-textualy into the night, the thrumming of drum and bass shared via mapped music genomes, and the twinkling glow of liquid-crystal-pixels offering up the entire geo-positioned world like an altar to a social, multi-cultural, semantic, hive-minded, Mercurial GOD.

avra kehdabra

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The biggest development this week was the addition of the Podcast Crew as a subdivision of the Web Crew. Discussion started early in the week between Bossman and the Dean of Work, and it was decided that the Podcast Crew would best serve a mixed internal/external audience and needed oversight from someone involved in the college’s marketing. Additionally, Bossman had been planning on eventually creating podcasts anyway, so it was decided that the Podcast Crew be placed under the Web Crew. All the constituents met Thursday to discuss the arrangement and everyone seemed fine, although it became clear that the current Podcast Crew supervisor did not fully understand his future in the endeavor.

The current situation is: I am still waiting for the Dean of Work to inform the current supervisor of when his services will no longer be required. Until that time, the Podcast Crew will continue to meet in their old office and to act as they have all semester. I will meet with them on Wednesdays at 2:00 to review content. When the current supervisor’s responsibilities end, the singular crew member will move into the Web Crew office with all equipment and we will begin restructuring the crew as necessary.

The Story Behind, published Friday, is a WorldWide-themed piece about Thailand. This week I helped Alumni Relations with a forum issue and discussed future plans and social networks with them; consulted with FMTS about the campus map and some forms they need help with; helped Wellness; and updated the Employee Handbook for Gail.

In blogging, I wrote briefly about how Margeret Spellings’s plan for higher education is playing out, and I put up a copy of the VP for advancement position announcement up. I was disappointed that University Business’s article ‘Call of the Wild’ discussing Outdoor Leadership programs did not mention WWC. The Alma Shippy AP story hit over the weekend, gaining widespread press.

In my personal life, I spent the better part of the afternoon Tuesday going to the doctor and the bank.

Warren Wilson College invites applications for the position of Vice President for Advancement, with a starting date of July 1, 2007.

Position Summary: Reporting to the President, the Vice President for Advancement leads an aggressive fundraising/development operation and supervises the Office of College Relations. She or he must have the qualities and experience to direct a comprehensive capital campaign and to collaborate with all constituencies in seeking major gifts. We seek a creative individual who can guide us to the next tiers of fundraising success.

Qualifications: Candidates should be experienced fundraisers from inside or outside academe. The most important criterion will be a record of fundraising success and evidence of the ability to lead successful fundraising efforts.

College Overview: Warren Wilson is an independent liberal arts college located on a beautiful 1100+ acre campus in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The campus is 15 minutes from downtown Asheville. Enrolling 800+ students, the college receives high praise from many guides and has received awards as a model for sustainability. It provides a first-rate liberal arts education in the context of its Triad model (academics, required service, required work at the college). The college enjoys a solid financial situation, with a $36 million endowment and balanced yearly budgets.

Application Process: Submit a letter, resume, and contact information for five references (including phone numbers and email addresses) to VPA Search Committee, Ms. Gail Baylor, Human Resources, Warren Wilson College, P.O. Box 9000, Asheville, NC 28815-9000. Electronic submissions preferred. Email gbaylor@waren-wilson.edu. Applications should be received by March 23. See www.warren-wilson.edu for more information about the college.

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I did not consider this week particularly productive. At work, the upcoming Presidential Inauguration and several tangential political issues related to the new president kept me fairly occupied. At home, my son contracted Roseola and his fever peaked at the same time that the sewer decided to back-up again. The result is that I was unable to focus attention on programming enough to really accomplish anything.

This week’s largest accomplishment was the drafting and completion of a website for the upcoming Presidential Inauguration. I created a draft Monday and submitted it to the small Marketing Group for suggestions. By Friday, I had received suggestions and the information that will be included in the (paper) invitation packets. I converted the material to the web and organized it in what I hope is a clear manner. The website is currently linked prominently from the homepage and will be linked redundantly from within news stories in the weeks leading up to the event.

This week I learned that David Abernathy and the ELC are working on some interesting material that uses GIS data, YouTube, and Google Earth to create an interactive Green Walkabout of the campus. Unfortunately, Abernathy hasn’t had much time to devote to the project and the video quality is really very poor. However, this may be an interesting solution to creating an interactive campus tour.

Some odds and ends included helping Bossman set up a template for the VP for Advancement search, working more with Podcast Crew, forgetting to check on numbers for the online giving page, Ken Banks, and the SSCA. Story Behind was Peru and will remain Peru until Feb 23 when the first of two WorldWide stories will be published.

This week in blogs and mailing lists: I found out that the first steps we’ve taken towards integrating web and print with XML for the College Catalog are innovative but not new within higher education. Several schools are still using separate work processes for creating their print and HTML versions, but a few have completed the complete integration. One excellent suggestion I saw was to create a new catalog every two years rather than every year. I only wrote one blog entry covering the ‘SCAD Shorts’ set of viral videos put together for the Savannah College of Art & Design.

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Last week was swallowed largely by loose ends and everyday concerns.

One of the largest items I worked on was creating a draft for the Presidential Inauguration page. I have submitted the page to the small marketing group, with a Google link to many other examples of such sites, for critique and suggestions, but so far the responses have basically been that I need to add event details that no one has worked out yet. I said that the page could grow, improve or change as needed as information came in.

In response to the problem of the antiquated WebEvent master calendar and the growing pressure on John Bowers, our Director of Internal Communication, to keep track of distributing information for events all over campus, I worked with Joel, the network administrator, and JB on buying and installing the PHP-based web calendar called Helios. I have not done any work towards setting it up further, but JB and I hope to deploy the system before term 4.

I put up a new Story Behind about service work in Peru. I did some regular website maintenance. I updated the Financial Aid webpage. I changed two of the pictures on the new homepage design to address concerns raised in the site critique done by The Change. I also put up a hacked-up version of the AP credit table into the Admission section of the online catalog. I eventually need to address the problem of tabular data in the catalog’s XML. Finally, I helped the following departments with the CMS: podcast crew, psychology, wellness, and service learning. Off the website, I submitted a purchase order for new computers for my crew.

In browsing and blogging, I explored the possibility of going to the SXSW Interactive conference and found out that I blew my budget at the last Stamats con. I blogged on the death of Cyberspace, the importance of carefully crafted questions in demographic studies, and generally bemoaned the latest broadcasts from the Web 2.0 color guard.

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This week I have focused most of my efforts on continuing preparations for work on a simple PHP MVC Framework to support the rewrite of Marionette, the college’s homegrown CMS. Last week, after writing some preliminary libraries for the framework, I had a realization about how little I really know about Object-Oriented Programming. I began a fevered gathering of information. Monday I received my copy of Martin Fowler’s classic Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and I have burned through the first several chapters. After reading many articles, I have been struck by the enormity of the task ahead of me. I spoke about the problem with Sloan, a friend and C programmer for Mach5. He said something that struck me: writing this software will necessarily be an “iterative process” in which I learn by doing. This means inevitably making mistakes and having to redo work, but it is the only way I can see to achieve anything with my current knowledge level. Trying to cram a Computer Science degree into a few days of reading is simply not going to happen, so next week I start writing code again. My challenge will be to at least create a stable enough structure to support the process of revision that is sure to follow.

This week I learned that the Work Program has created a new Podcast Crew supervised by one of the Residence Directors. I’m waiting to see if the crew will produce content that is worth featuring prominently on the college website.

Thursday my wife and one-year-old son were in the office because there was a serious problem with the sewer at our house. Trying to get this resolved took up the better part of my morning.

I had the pleasure of talking with a reporter from University Business magazine on the subject of cybersquatters and higher education. We talked some about the Las Vegas-based nuisance Robert Wolfson who has committed service mark infringement on colleges and universities across the US, including Warren Wilson (see the entry on cybersquatting for more information).

This week we received the final comments about our new website design from marketing and branding consultants The Change. The comments were very supportive of our direction overall, and the paper is a strong third-party endorsement for the new look. Tweaks and revisions to the design continue.

This week’s Story Behind recycles some old material from last September. Next week will hopefully be some new stuff about Peru.

There’s still an awful lot to do. As you may have guessed, we’re taking the opportunity to migrate from PHP 4.x over to PHP 5. I’m also completely rewriting our CMS. We’re going to be purchasing and installing a Google Search Appliance. From a marketing perspective, the redesign represents an attempt to subtly tweak our brand image in a couple of ways. It’s both exciting and exhausting.

Breaking the Frame of Web Design
Presented by Fritz McDonald, Creative Director
In terms of innovation, the Web is opening up possibilities in a way it hasn’t done since the great dot.com age. Yet, in spite of these gains, many Web sites are only minimally engaging. When it comes to graphic design for the Web, we’re stuck in the frame-a visual approach that cordons off content and photography into neat, highly visible quadrants and may have had its origins in the ‘frameset’ technology developed by Netscape that once dominated site design. In this presentation, we’ll talk about what it means to break the frame of Web design, examine sites that have successfully done so, and explore new graphic design approaches that can help move your site out of the box.

So stay tuned for a report on that. In the meantime, I had the morning to kill.

At about 10:00, I made the 2.5 mile hike to South Philadelphia from the hotel at City Center to visit the birth place of the Cheese Steak. The corner of South 9th St and East Passyunk Ave, just South of the Italian Market, features Pat’s King of Steaks and Geno’s facing off across the intersection.

(Pat’s)

(Geno’s)
Walking from 9th and Market into South Philly was interesting, because the street got progressively dirtier and less polished. The Italian Market was a cascade of sights and smells. Flashy street stalls, the scent of spices and open gabage, and a mix of Italian, Hispanic, Asian, and African American faces. Everyone there looked like they could tell some interesting stories. I passed a car unloading students in the outfits of a culinary school, a woman leading a group of young school children and whistling to them like the pied piper, and a man in a New York Yankees hat that waved a switchblade and yelled through the window of a passing escalade.

I got to Pat’s at 10:40, just in time for brunch. I ordered a provolone steak wit’. Here it is, the genuine article:

Afterward, I picked up a mushroom steak wit’ to carry back to the hotel for lunch. From there it was another 2.5 mile hike back. Fortunately all the walking helped me build an apetite.

This evening I’ll have a report from the pre-con seminar.

(The Swannanoa Valley from the air. Warren Wilson is in the middle-ground, left edge of the photo hidden by clouds.)

After the delayed jump from Asheville to Charlotte, it was a mad sprint across the Charlotte airport to pick up the connecting flight. Fortunately after all the running, this was a larger jet with more forgiving seats.

A couple people told me that Philadelphia was a city full of jerks before I left, describing it as “like grouchy New Yorkers with none of the charm.” So far today all the locals have been very nice, courteous, and helpful. Checking into the Sheraton where the conference is being held, I had enough time to wander the city a bit.

(The Sheraton City Center hotel with a neat church on Franklin Plaza in the foreground.)

I ended up in the Mutter Museum (a museum of medical oddities). I think that place is the single most disgustingly intriguing spectacle I’ve seen in a while. Like rubber-necking on the highway, only educational and very dusty.
My goals for the week are:

* Learn a bunch

* Meet new people

* Blog it

* Eat an authentic, honest-to-god Philly Cheesesteak

Until tomorrow…