Via Wired Campus – Students beg for tuition money online. US only, although in this screenshot there’s a prominent slot for a Google Ads placed banner advert for Kingston University.

Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana is offering scholarships to students publishing YouTube videos promoting the College. An interesting idea, although, as Wired Campus point out, awarding the prizes to the videos with the most views is flawed.

(In other news, if you’re trying to embed a YouTube video and can’t find the embed html on the YouTube page, try uninstalling the Firefox addon Easy YouTube Video Downloader which for some reason hides the embed options….)

A great interview from a recent Net@Night with Jordan Goldman, CEO of Unigo. Unigo is “a new platform for college students to share reviews, photos, videos, documents”. There’s several other sites with similar goals and I’ve no idea how successful Unigo will be in long-term comparison with them, but the 20 minute interview is well worth listening to for the range of topics covered including:

• the increasing influence of student-generated online social networks on the profile of universities
• how to use full-time editorial staff to push the development of a successful social network
• the ability of university-age students to create and run successful startups

[Image created with wordle.net]

Having only discovered JISC TechDis last week, I’m planning to spend tomorrow afternoon, Wednesday 22 April 2009, watching their live webcast Web 2.0 and the Law for Colleges and Universities, 2-4pm.

Here’s the (free, no registration necessary) programme:

• 2.00 – What’s it about? Introducing the webcast, and the relevant law
• 2.10 – Scenario 1 – data protection, negligence
• 2.25 – Scenario 2 – accessibility, defamation, obscenity
• 2.40 – Scenario 3 – IPR, employment misconduct
• 2.55 – A round-up of the issues
• 3.00 – Coffee Break!
• 3.05 – Some frequently asked questions
• 3.15 – Framing an institutional policy
• 3.30 – The tutor’s checklist
• 3.40 – Viewers’ questions and panel discussion
• 4.00 – Close

Frozen lake, University of Bath [creative commons licensed photo from Michael Grogan]

The Web Services Team at Bath report on use of the university’s twitter stream for informing staff and students on closures and travel news this week.

Academia.edu “displays academics around the world in a tree format, according to what university/department they are affiliated with”, relying on user-generated content.

[Via Karine Joly] Alumni Futures have published a free creative-commons licensed white paper to “inform readers about what Twitter is, and suggest ways it might enhance relationship-building and alumni interaction”. The white paper [2.2MB pdf] is an excellent introduction to the subject [including 'The Down Side of Twittering'],  just as useful for those interested in any aspect of using microblogging for institutional public relations.