Contributed by: Meg Gwaltney
Web Content Manager, Stein Communications

Over the past few years, you’ve probably heard those three letters creeping in and out of conversations. Your boss uses it to get the latest news headlines. The English lit teacher uses it in her class to assign homework, receive assignments, and give feedback on student work. Darren uses it to share online articles and other resources with his students. Even young Alex uses it in his blog (a type of online journal) about playing little league baseball.

The big “it” is not email. “It” is RSS — a recent technology that is easy to use (even for non-IT people) and has extraordinary benefits to those in both secondary and higher education. Here, you’ll learn what RSS is and how you can try it out for yourself. We’ll also share helpful resources and some amazing ways the education community is using this widely adaptable technology.

What is RSS?
RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, and Rich Site Summary. Each label hints at RSS’s ability to easily summarize web site information and distribute it to a select audience. In short, RSS makes it easy to do two things:
1. Administrators can deliver content to a select readership that chooses to opt-in.
2. Users can receive content from frequently-visited web sites, especially news sites and weblogs that utilize RSS technology.

RSS-enabled web sites rely upon XML (Extensible Markup Language), which creates a behind-the-scenes code called a feed. With software programs (as well as some online services) called feed readers or aggregators, you can subscribe to web site feeds you are interested in reading. In fact, Stein’s e-newsletter, the Scoop, is now a blog with RSS capabilities (you can subscribe to the RSS feed at http://www.steincommunications.com/thescoop/?feed=rss2).You’ll find more suggested feed readers and other blogging tools at the end of this article.

There are several ways to find out if your favorite web sites are using RSS technology:

• Look for links to feeds or RSS feeds
• Look for graphics like these somewhere on the site, usually in a sidebar or at the very top or very bottom:
• If you’re using Firefox (version 1.0.7), look for this icon at the bottom right of the status bar:

To help you better understand the feed reader, take a look at the screenshot below (or click on it for a bigger view). Some feed readers, such as NetNewsWire, resemble email clients like Mac Mail and Microsoft Outlook.

Screenshot: NetNewsWire Lite, one of our favorite RSS readers for the Mac.
It allows you to organize your subscriptions into groups, and conveniently shows which subscriptions contain unread posts.

RSS also goes hand-in-hand with blogs. While blogs include personal online journals, it can also encompass any web site with periodic updates, such as news sites for media companies, educational institutions, and corporations, and more. RSS and its behind-the-scenes programming allow users to subscribe to their favorite blogs. When updated, the user’s feed reader software collects updates and makes them instantly available to the user. Currently, almost all blogging software is equipped with the option to automatically incorporate RSS feeds into one’s blog.

How is RSS being used in education?
It’s mind-boggling the many ways RSS can be used, even for the field of education. Here, we will point out a few of our favorites. We encourage you to explore the internet and talk to your peers and colleagues to find out how they’re using it as well.

Higher ed: RSS is highlighting current students and recruiting prospective students.
To give prospective students a sense of what life at a college is really like, many college and university web sites offer brief profiles of their current students. These profiles often include a picture of the student and information such as the student’s hometown, major, graduation date, hobbies and interests, and even a brief interview.

RSS gives institutions the power to take current student profiles to the extreme by giving students their own blogs. These student journals are unedited and uncensored — and they allow prospective students to learn about college life straight from the horse’s mouth. They can read about a current student’s first day in orientation, the argument she had last week with her roommate, and even her excitement over just having passed her first test five minutes ago. Some blogs also allow students to share photos, podcasts (audio blogs), and more.

Most student bloggers are hand-picked by the admissions office. Some colleges also provide incentives for student recruitment bloggers. At Westminster College, for example, students who are photobloggers receive a digital camera; podcasters receive an Apple iPod. Other colleges also provide additional financial aid.

Check out some examples of how colleges and universities are using RSS and blogging to recruit prospective students:
Houghton College
University of Dayton
List of schools using student blogs for recruitment (brought to you by mStonerblog.com)

Secondary schools: RSS is a community-building, interactive tool for students and teachers, for class notes and resources, homework and feedback, quizzes, student questions, and more.

Today’s students spend a lot of time online. They chat with friends, they email, they listen to music and watch videos, they explore the internet, they read online journals — they also do homework and participate in class discussions.

Teachers who recognize the internet’s impact on students’ lives are stepping up to the plate and extending their classroom to the internet, making use of extroardinary tools like RSS and blogging. Better yet, they’re getting phenomenal results from their students and peers.

One Canadian math teacher, Mr. Kuropatwa from Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute, uses a blog for each of his high school math classes. He set up his class blogs using Google’s Blogspot service, which comes equipped with automatic RSS feeds. He posts assignments, expands on topics covered in class, and shares online resources with students. Students participate as “scribes” to post summaries of the day’s classroom lecture, complete with math problems, graphs, and other helpful illustrations. The daily scribe also has the honor of choosing the next day’s scribe — this way students must check the blog to see who’s up next.

Classroom blogs have become an excellent way to keep the conversation rolling even after students have left the classroom. Mr. Kuropatwa is enthralled with the success of using RSS and blogging technologies in teaching:

“The kids have really taken control of the process… Each scribe seems to be trying to outdo the previous one. The kids are doing some really amazing work.”

If you visit any of his class blogs, you’ll see what he means: over time the graphs have gotten better, with visual color cues and helpful hints. It’s obvious his students are becoming masters at effective teaching and communication. What’s more, they’re doing so with a creative flair and through an efficient, ethical use of technology.

Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed.com and Supervisor of IT at Hunterdon Central High School in New Jersey, says his life has really been transformed by blogging:

“I have learned more, read more, thought more, debated more, written more and been more passionate about learning through blogging than I ever was in any classroom with any teacher. And I chalk almost all of that up to the ability to pursue topics that truly interest me and the ability to find and to learn from teachers who are living those interests, not just relaying information about them. The fact that I can access those ideas and those people, and my ability to then contribute back to the community of learners that has developed around these interactions have literally transformed my life.”

Secondary schools and higher ed: RSS allows the immediate distribution of news to the people who want it.

Any secondary school or higher-ed institution with news it wants to share easily should welcome RSS as a saving grace. This technology makes information distribution extremely simple. RSS gives your readers an additional venue through which to access the same information that you post on your web site and, in some cases, broadcast through a daily or weekly email.

Instead of checking your web site every five minutes (as well as their other favorite news sites), readers wait for the information to come to them as soon as it’s available. The feed reader accumulates and makes available to your readers all the updates for their favorite RSS-enabled sites, including yours.

Like email, feed updates can be checked at any time. This instant availability is part of the immense appeal of RSS feed readers, or aggregators, mentioned earlier. For your readership — parents, students, administrators and teachers, and the rest of the world — RSS aggregators make getting information even easier than before.

Here are some of our favorite RSS-enabled education sites and their RSS feeds:

What tools will you need?
Now that you’re excited about RSS and can’t wait to try it out for yourself, you will need to know about some helpful tools.

Feed Readers, or Aggregators
To receive information from RSS-enabled web sites, you’ll need a feed reader, or aggregator. There are several types available:

• Stand-alone software programs. Aggregator software is available for both PC and Mac operating systems; some are free and some are available for a small fee (usually around $25). Some stand-alone programs allow you to organize your subscriptions into groups, and offer syncing and integration with other online readers, such as Bloglines.
  • FeedDemon: PC, $29.95
  • NetNewsWire: Mac, $24.95
  • NetNewsWireLite: Mac, free
  • PulpFiction: Mac, $25
• Online aggregator services. If you plan on accessing your subscriptions from multiple computers, an online aggregator service might be more appropriate for you than a stand-alone software program. Note that quite a few stand-alone programs can be integrated with some of the online services. We suggest you visit the product’s web site and read up on their features for specific information.
  • Bloglines: Mac and PC, free
  • Google Reader beta: Mac and PC, free
  • NewsGatorOnline: Mac and PC, free or various paid subscription plans, depending on licensing and features
• RSS-enabled internet browsers. Some of the latest internet browsers come equipped to handle RSS subscriptions.
  • Firefox (version 1.0.7 and the forthcoming 1.5, still in beta): Mac and PC
  • Internet Explorer (forthcoming in version 7.0): PC only
  • Opera: Mac and PC
  • Safari: only for Mac OS X 4.0 (Tiger)

RSS-Blogging Tools
If you’re interested in setting up your own RSS-enabled web site, or your own blog, we suggest you read MacWorld’s review of the following blogging tools, each of which has the ability to automatically integrate RSS feeds with your web site. You’ll be ready to publish and distribute information in no time.

• Google’s Blogspot and Blogger
• MovableType
• TypePad
• WordPress

Contributed by: Heather O’Neill
Associate Director of Admissions, Vanderbilt University

For those who do not work in admissions, the approach of autumn conjures up images of crisp, cool mornings spent raking leaves or tailgating before a college football game and the scents of apple cider and pumpkin pie. For admissions officers, however, fall means only one thing — travel season, the six to eight weeks between mid-September and mid-November that we each spend visiting high schools and attending college fairs around the country. We associate fall with endless hours spent in our inevitably large, white rental cars, with arriving back at the Hampton Inn after a full day only to forget which room is ours, with eyes straining for signs of a flagpole or football stadium to indicate we’ve located the high school we’re seeking, and, most of all, with the excitement of getting to know next year’s freshmen.

Many prospective students have already visited campus over the spring or summer, so some of the myriad faces we encounter each fall are familiar, but encountering students on their home turf is particularly rewarding and often much more memorable. When I first met Courtney, now a sophomore at Vanderbilt, she looked like an extra from Footloose, complete with side ponytail, legwarmers, and fingerless gloves. “It’s 80’s Day and I’m the class president, so I have to go all out,” she explained. My first interaction with Caleb was when he and the rest of the Testostertones (my all-time favorite name for a male a capella group) serenaded me in front of an entire college fair to demonstrate his love for Vanderbilt. Our visits often coincide with Homecoming week at many high schools, so I’ve also discovered the power of the rivalry between the women’s lacrosse teams at Charlotte Country Day and Durham Academy, the existence of the Coffee Pot trophy to honor the victor of the football game between Coffee County High and Tullahoma High, and the fact that St. Paul’s students are taunted for their supposedly wimpy pelican mascot.

Not only did these encounters permanently imprint the students involved in my memory, but, more importantly, they gave me invaluable insight into the culture, community, and values of each of their schools. What even admissions officers frequently fail to recognize is that fall travel is an educational opportunity for us as well as the students we are visiting. Understanding the school environments from which our applicants emerge is essential to the admissions evaluation process. Fall travel provides us the opportunity to talk with college and guidance counselors about what’s new at their schools, to tour high school campuses to get a feel for the resources available to students, and to spend time observing the culture of the schools we represent in the admissions process.

When I finally read Courtney’s application three months after meeting her on 80’s Day, I realized that she had been modest; she had actually been class president all four years of high school and 80’s Day was part of her idea for a theme week to raise school spirit. I remembered seeing posters advertising the various themes all over the school and that over half the students I saw in the halls wore 80’s attire, so I knew her counselor’s claims about her lasting contribution to the Dover-Sherborn community were true. My visit to St. Paul’s last fall came the day before Cricket Day, a surprise school holiday enacted one day each term. Only the heads of the school’s Missionary Society (a community service organization) know in advance when Cricket Day will be held, so when Megan whispered to me during the college fair that she wasn’t worried about getting her homework done that night since classes would be cancelled the next day, I understood the depth and significance of her involvement in the Missionary Society when she later mentioned it in her application. Talking with a faculty member at Phillips Exeter about their unique textbook-less math curriculum helped me to understand fully how a student might progress through the math sequence at his or her own pace and that only having one term of Geometry or Algebra II would not be unusual for a student able to accelerate through the sequence.

Having this firsthand insight gleaned from visiting high school campuses is invaluable in the application review process. As I read each application, I determine if each student’s coursework is among the most challenging offered at his or her school, what the school’s grading scale is like and where the student’s grades place him or her relative to his or her peers, and what involvement and contribution the student has had in the school community. Visualizing the school environment — the classrooms, the hallways, the student body, the physical plant — fleshes out the picture provided by the applicant, counselor, and teachers and provides the context for understanding his or her high school career. Earning frequent flyer miles, enjoying the fall foliage in New England, learning regional slang (though I’m still too Southern to pull off using “wicked” as an adjective), and discovering the small joy of hotels that give you warm cookies upon check-in are added benefits of fall travel season, but the real reason we pack up and hit the road again each fall is the chance to meet students in their everyday environments and to understand how those environments have shaped them into the people we get to know throughout the application process.

_____
Heather O’Neill is entering her sixth year with the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Vanderbilt University where she serves as Associate Director. Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, she received her master’s degree in education from the University of Iowa where she also worked in admissions, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Contributed by: Ross Lenhart
Senior Vice President, Stein Communications

My son, Clay, the computer guy, called and said, “Dad, you gotta read this book — it’s you.” Now that sparks my interest. His employer, the principal of a successful internet company, had suggested this book would be an effective tool for his employees. I am a reader — mainly non-fiction, love history — especially biography, and occasionally a good novel, but I am not one for diving into business “how-to” books. But since “it’s me” and Clay recommended it, I better take a look. I bought it, turned the first page of Never Eat Alone and, frankly, I couldn’t put it down.

Have you ever read something and, from your own experience, you keep saying to yourself, “This guy has hit the mark”? After 35 years in and around college admission and college marketing, Never Eat Alone made me realize that my work has been based solidly on relationships — the wonderful value of relationships — guidance counselors, faculties, prospective students, alumni, maintenance folks, coaches, competitors, hotel clerks, travel agents, board presidents, plane companions, writers, art directors, receptionists, and on and on. People who fill my memory and who forever will have my gratitude.

Keith Ferrazzi is a successful businessman, and now, in my mind, a wonderful wordsmith. He obviously is not “a high roller,” never to be caught on a reality show. He is more pure than that. He tells a tale of relationships and how success is about working with people, not against them. “Business is a human enterprise, driven and determined by people.” So is education. What makes this book perfect for the academy is Ferrazzi’s obvious gift of merging business with integrity. No Enron here. No compromising principle. Keith Ferrazzi is a self-made hard-nosed Western Pennsylvania guy who probably grew up loving gold and black, the Pirates and Steelers. He talked himself into the Kiski School on a scholarship on the way to a Yale undergraduate degree and a Harvard MBA, and made a lifelong friend of his Kiski Headmaster, Jack Pidgeon. I knew Jack myself when I would visit Kiski as a Director of Admissions from Marietta College many years ago. Jack would host a reception in his home for visitors in the evenings. Jack is a wonderful man who made an impression on me as well. Ferrazzi took away a valuable lesson from Jack and Kiski — “the currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.” — and “relationships are solidified by trust.” In my mind, this ethic is what makes this book special and makes Ferrazzi special. The lesson learned is that profit will only come if trust and integrity precede it.

Keith Ferrazzi makes his point through wonderful examples ranging from Paul Revere to Eleanor Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton to Katharine Graham, plus his own vast experiences. There are fascinating and well-told tales from his triumphs. A man of action, these experiences didn’t just happen, he made them happen. “Relationships are more like muscles — the more you work them, the stronger they become.” How to use the internet in your relationships, how to broadcast your brand, how to expand your circle — it’s all there and it is valuable stuff for you, the dedicated college, university, and school professionals who are in it not for the money, but for the process of education. You will find and understand and appreciate the obvious altruism in the pages of this book.

One last thought. I have never met Keith Ferrazzi. Recently, I felt that he might help me with a project that I was pursuing. I emailed a question to him. An answer came back from him with personal advice within eight hours. Jack Pidgeon built an entire institution at Kiski on his asking people not “How can you help me? but “How can I help you?” As a schoolboy at Kiski, Keith Ferrazzi learned his lessons well.

Thanks, Clay; call anytime with a suggestion of a good book.

New Stein clients for summer/fall 2005:

• Christian Brothers University (TN): Admissions campaign
• Rider University (NJ): Graduate programs admissions campaign
• Solebury School (PA): Market research
• Susquehanna University (PA): Capital campaign
• USC Beaufort (SC): Market research

New campaigns we’re developing for current clients include:

• Anderson College (SC): Adult program admissions campaign
• Belmont University (TN): Admissions campaign
• Converse College (SC): Admissions campaign
• Georgia Perimeter College (GA): Admissions campaign
• Greenville College (IL): Admissions campaign including direct marketing
• Indian Springs School (AL): Admissions campaign
• Lincoln Memorial University (TN): Web site
• Maryville University (MO): Branding study and admissions campaign
• Mississippi College (MS): Admissions campaign including web site with PersonalizationPlus and direct marketing
• Trillium College (Canada): Admissions campaign

New, recently launched campaigns for current clients include:

• Alliant International University (CA): Admissions campaign and web site
• DePaul University (IL): Admissions campaign
• Emory & Henry College (VA): Admissions campaign and web site
• Kingsborough Community College (NY): Advertising campaign
• Mercersburg Academy (PA): Admissions campaign
• Northwood University (FL, MI, TX): Admissions campaign
• Presbyterian College (SC): Admissions campaign
• Webb School-Knoxville (TN): Admissions campaign

Upcoming conferences in fall 2005:

Stein representatives will be attending the following conferences this fall, so please contact us if you would like to schedule a time to meet with us:

• American Marketing Association (AMA) Symposium on Higher Education
• The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) annual conference
• Carolinas Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (CACRAO)

Happy birthday to PersonalizationPlus!

This October marks the one-year anniversary of PersonalizationPlus, Stein’s integrated web site personalization and prospect management tool. We’ve recently upgraded the PersonalizationPlus platform with expanded HTML email capabilities that allow clients to easily set up and transmit HTML email broadcasts to their entire prospect pool or smaller subsets of prospective students. For more information about PersonalizationPlus or to set up an interactive webinar, contact Tia Lane at tlane@steincommunications.com or 404.494.4386.