What's new with online school communities?

Our editor says that my blog posts are too long, but I counter that this audience has a deeper attention span than most, so I hope you will prove me right.

What’s new about online communities within school websites? Not much, really. I recall presenting at a CASE/NAIS conference some years ago—I would guess 2002 or ’03—on the topic of online communities. I showed examples from the Schoolyard portfolio and also those of each of the primary vendors in this space. I remember that Silverpoint had just launched a nice site for Madeira that we went through. The event was very well attended, because of the timely topic, and as the session progressed I could sense a level of anxiety among attendees. I asked for a show of hands of how many schools represented in the room had built a robust, personal profile online community system, with push pages and groups and all that, and perhaps 20% raised their hands. I asked how many intended to build such a system and almost all of the other hands went up. I then asked those whose hands were up to keep them up if they were worried about the fact that they weren’t in the first group of hand raisers. Only a handful (sorry) put their hands down. So the anxiety culprit had been outed.

Then I said this: “I am a registered member of online communities at the two schools I attended, at my college, my graduate school, and the school where I am Board Chair. The only time I have ever been to any of these online communities is at the time of my original registration/preference setting session. I’m in the business of selling these systems to people like you, and the truth is, even I don’t use them. I wouldn’t worry too much about the fact that you do not yet have such a system in place.” Years later these online communities are--with some noticeable exceptions--not communities even in the virtual sense, rather they are ghost towns. I heard recently that the University of Southern California has shut down their online community for lack of attendance.

The good news is that online communities are thriving like never before—just not within school websites. Rather they are thriving through social media channels. As a visual artist, I have had considerable interest in a recent body of my work from former Mercersburg classmates, and this interest has flowed directly from facebook. These are connections that would never have been made within the school website, and they are good for me, but they are also good for the school. On a basic level the common bond of those communicating is an association with our school, and that bond is strengthened through communication. Next, Mercersburg posts appear on my “wall” and the Mercersburg logo is a thumbnail in my “following” list. People will be more inclined to read a story on the school site that was tweeted or re-tweeted than they would have been by some other channel, and once in the site they will be more inclined to take a look around. I have done so recently having seen a development office tweet, and then ending up viewing a series of image galleries in the arts, in a very handsome site built by Whipple Hill.

Perhaps the greatest social media benefit for schools lies in the unprecedented opportunity for people to get to know your school who didn’t know it before, just because they clicked on a tweet or post that sparked their interest on the page of a friend of a friend…and so forth. Mercersburg is a perfect example. Most people have never heard of Mercersburg—they know little about independent schools and even less about boarding schools, and as such our schools are generally not well understood—and in extreme though not uncommon cases, viewed unfavorably. Just how big of an impression can a small school in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania possibly make? The answer is it can make an enormous impression. Mercersburg is a spectacularly impressive place, and arguably could serve as the genesis of “who knew”—but I would bet more and more are coming to know, as they land there unexpectedly, having wandered down a path of tweets, retweets and posts. Or perhaps they will get there by reading this blog: www.mercersburg.edu

In closing, we’ll state for the record that newschoolyard will not be investing much development time in online communities and deeply integrated data, beyond pretty standard fare. We expect these communities to thrive outside of school websites, and as such we are offering a robust set of tools for automatically integrating and publishing social media from within the school website. And by the way, for those schools who rely deeply on the integration of web-based and internal data, we are forming partnerships with third-party providers of data bridges and data shuttles for many of the student information system providers in this arena. In the words of Scott MacKenzie, “If you’re going to San Francisco…” we’re in booth 740.