Bring up social media in a group of nonprofit leaders, and the conversation stops. There’s often a long silence — the kind that makes presenters wince — and then someone raises a hand and asks, “How?” Not how to do it, not how to figure out what to say, but how can we possibly do [...]
These days, everyone’s looking to cut costs and work smarter. Unfortunately, this has led to a near epidemic of mediocre meetings. That’s the conclusion of a new study on the advantages, costs, and pitfalls of telemeetings conducted via phone, video or web. Based on a survey of more than 1,200 staff members working at public-interest [...]
Think your website is a work of art? Well, Wordle can make that a reality. “Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. [...]
Late last week Masha Alexander and I were at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. Among other cool stuff, I had the chance to hold a hefty Aplysia californica – a.k.a. a common sea slug. Aplysia are bred in quantity at Rosenstiel because their neurons are large and [...]
Wired Magazine’s new-ideas issue is great fun, including the cover articles, “Detroit Re-imagined” and “Googlenomics Explained.” But the most fun may be “Socialism Redefined,” which turns socialism (to some a dirty word) inside out— and predicts a “globalist collectivist society.” (This is only partly serious. Notice in the historical timeline feature, Linux 10 is jokingly [...]
University of Detroit Mercy, a longtime Lipman Hearne client, has launched a new online experience aimed at engaging rising high school juniors. Driven to the special site through emails and postcards, these juniors (soon to be seniors) can explore UDM’s teaching, and residential and student life by clicking on photographic hot spots. Fun and sometimes [...]
Lipman Hearne client American Enterprise Institute (AEI) made headlines today with the release of its report Diplomas and Dropouts: Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (and Which Don’t). The report exposes the dramatic variation in completion rates across nearly 1,400 colleges and universities and found that less than 55 percent of first-time students at the [...]
A recent posting on The Chronicle of Higher Education blogsite worries, “Is it possible that higher education might be the next bubble to burst (pdf)?” Now, I’ve never been one to denigrate hyperbole – believing it, in fact, to be the most outstanding rhetorical device that has ever been employed!!! – but this strikes me [...]
Tight money. Worried parents. As parents deal with the realities of the economic downturn, they’re taking on a greater role in the college decision-making process. Lipman Hearne explores how the economic downturn is affecting parents’ level of involvement in one of the largest investments they’ll ever make – their child’s college education. “The Rules Have [...]
There is a plethora of news stories emerging right now about colleges – particularly elite schools – and the trouble they’re having making their fall 2009 class. The focus is typically on yield — the percentage of admitted students who enroll at an institution. Why yield? Because this metric has long been considered the bellwether [...]