It was a good opportunity to explain the new approach that EUPRIO had launched and to get acquainted of the rich contribution that Poland could give to the association. Marek Zimnak, the national representative in the Steering Committee stressed the importance of being part of an international networking organisation and tried to convince the 120 participants to become members of EUPRIO.

During the workshops, some colleagues – like Marcin Witkowski (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan) and Agata Kulesza (KRASP, Conference of Polish Rectors) – described how difficult it is to take part to international conferences for the strong financial investment that should be made by each university (this situation seems to be similar in many countries at this moment). Oppositions, anyway, could be bypassed if the return on investments and the benefits are particularly visible.

The President acknowledged the good issues and requests and promised to give them due consideration during the next Steering Committee meeting.

As part of the European Commission funded, ULab project, the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford is organizing an online competition to identify the most innovative outreach and communications / public engagement activities that have been carried out by European Universities.

Both individuals and groups may apply for awards. Competition submissions must be for an activity that has been initiated and sustained at any university or higher education institution within the 27 EU member states, including projects that might have involved collaboration with institutions outside the EU. The entry can be from one or a number of cooperating universities.
The three winning entries will each receive a 5000 EUR prize for their institution plus funding for a representative to attend the award ceremony at the University of Oxford on 8 June 2012. Entries should be submitted by 15 March 2012, 5pm (GMT). After the closing date, all entries will be made public on the website, forming part of an online repository of good practice in outreach. The three winners will be announced on 23 April 2012.

More information

The project “Young Uni” at the University of Innsbruck was launched in September 2001 – the first of its kind in German speaking countries. This year it celebrates its tenth year with the slogan “Setting out into New Worlds”. Read more…

The British daily “The Guardian”, whose Education section is always a source of excellent analysis, came out with a very fine article in December which I would recommend to all EUPRIO members worth their salt. Despite its obvious focus on Britain’s situation (England’s, to be precise), it makes a few interesting points that are, or will become shortly, of universal value.

The main point of the article is that universities are tempted to make promises that they cannot deliver in order to lure prospective students. A worrying sign in this respect is the sharp increase in complaints from students who believe they have been shortchanged.

This is a communication problem, dear friends. At best it’s just poor communication, but I would bet that in many cases there is a wide gap between university decision-makers and communications people (as in “Say this. End of discussion.”). And if that were not bad enough, this may also spring from a delusional attitude over who we really are: the article tells the story of a certain university who had branded itself as “the enterprise university” having supported the new businesses of only two graduates out of 10,000. Ehm.

This is what market research is all about. We need to know how do students perceive us, what do people look for when they choose a university and what deters them from choosing your university: yes, if you only ask your students you miss the most important bit, ie why you lost so many potentially good ones. This is especially true in countries like England (not Scotland, for the time being) where not only tuition fees are going up fast but universities all charge the maximum, creating the idea that they are all top-class. Predictably, students want to know what you are so good at, and will not take you at face value.

But the Internet is rapidly altering how information works, what businesses are viable and what qualifies as a profession. I first noticed this tendency while watching Part III, Chapter 7 of the Frontline documentary News War a few years ago. The documentary discussed how the meaning of news and journalism is being challenged by new media, and how the Internet is killing old media, including a discussion of how websites like Craigslist and Monster.com were killing newspapers by drawing classified listings online. This trend has continued into the present, with a recent report for the US Congress published last year stating that between 2008-2010, eight major American newspapers went bankrupt (also due to the financial crisis) and observing that:

Vin Crosbie, a noted Syracuse University professor and consultant, has predicted that more than half of the approximately 1,400 daily newspapers in the country could be out of business by the end of the next decade.

What does this have to do with education? Simply put, what is true with newspapers is true for the entire economy of information. The Internet translates each information medium into a cheaper, more consolidated form. And it often does this for free.

So telephony moves from traditional phone lines to VOIP applications like Skype. Print encyclopaedias are virtually obsolete, and the much-maligned Wikipedia is about as accurate as Britannica, and you can see sources of information. Book publication is moving from print to e-readers and tablet PCs, and public domain books are free for download. Amazon, EBay and their like threaten the very existence of department stores, allowing shoppers to rate both merchandise and sellers, pay competitive prices and even have goods delivered to your doorstep.

The new media juggernaut is also effecting television, movies, music, magazines, travel agencies, postal services … the list goes on and on. Thus because of the Internet, a vast part of the global economy is being converged online even as the products it sold become cheaper and more diverse. I argue that this represents the slow, long-term demonetisation of all information.

Although recent research by the McKinsey Global Institute indicated that the Internet has created 2.4 jobs for every one it destroys, I find it hard to imagine how that will remain true in the years to come as newspapers, book stores, post offices the entire universe of information converts to digital or falls before it (see the recent demise of Borders Books and Music). The long-term trend seems to be that all information should and will be free (at least for the consumer) and ever more diverse. That includes a university education.

Said a blog by Adrian Hon:

We have a romantic ideal of universities being places of higher education where students absorb knowledge, skills and critical thinking…. We’re wrong. The simple fact is that university lectures never worked that well in the first place…. In fact, the success of top universities, both now and historically, is in spite of lectures, not because of it. … Anyone online can now watch thousands of world-class lectures whenever they want.

And later…

…if universities are going to cost over £7,000 a year, students should think very hard about whether they’re getting value for money.

Indeed. MIT, Harvard, and the rest of the Ivy League offer thousands of university lectures online. These lectures are not limited to the humanities and other soft sciences. There are also highly technical subjects. The Khan Academy, a non-profit website “…with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere” includes hundreds of topics, including Calculus, Chemistry, Trigonometry and Physics.

What this means, to my mind, is this: students no longer buy an education from a university. Whereas in the past a university had a monopoly on knowledge distribution (the ivory tower), today prestigious universities provide thousands of lectures for free. Why? The same reason we ask ourselves what the public is buying with the tax revenue it devotes to universities: the social contract. It’s good public relations for those educational institutions that already have money. It’s not as if the Harvard alumni network isn’t worth the tuition, so who cares if the lectures are free to the capite censi? Plus, as Mr. Hon observes later in his blog, its personal contact hours and knowledge application that actually result in learning, and which are so vital to the university experience. Remember this question of whether journalism and research won’t simply become sets of skills that EVERYONE acquires? If anyone can watch any lecture and access any set of course resources, why not?

Universities do not sell education: they certify it. Tuition buys a certified transcript of educational experiences that demonstrate a person’s pool of knowledge as witnessed by qualified academics. We call it a degree, and it represents the careful oversight of an individual’s development over a long period of time. Plus, universities are great places to grow and try new experiences between home life and career.

I’m not sure what this means for the definition of a university, but it’s most certainly good for students. What is more, just as lectures are open to the public (and does that mean we are all students now, whether we pay tuition or not?) researchers are being empowered by social networks, and not just Facebook and LinkedIn. ResearchGate is a social network for scientists that allows users to create a profile, assemble an online publication library, review other’s research, create groups, share documents and conduct semantic searches of both uploaded researcher publications and (according to Wikipedia) external research databases, “…including PubMed, CiteSeer, arXiv, NASA library and others…” There are also other social networking sites for scientists and researchers, including Academia.edu and Epernicus.

If anyone can join a social network for researchers, does that change the definition of a researcher? Really, if anyone can upload research papers and potentially have them reviewed by qualified peers, does that mean a person can become a ‘researcher’ without making their way through the rigors of a PhD and navigating the politics of a research institute? In how many ways can new media test the borders of university credentialism?

For those whom I have not yet met, my name is Atticus Mullikin and I’m the not-so-new EUPRIO web content manager. I work at Maastricht University for Denis Ancion (whom some of you might know from his publicity stills ?). I’m an American expatriate. I served three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, hiked through the Appalachian Mountains for six months, traveled around the world for another six and completed a bachelor degree in Political Science at Johnson State College in Vermont. Since we all work in education, you might find it interesting that I acquired many of my upper-level credits independently, traveling through Europe gathering data about European history with a notebook, a camera, and my wits. I learned more in those four months than in all the hours I spent in a university classroom. Perhaps that should be a blog in the future.

Although technically I’m a humble English editor in our department, my position has evolved beyond that and into the realm of new media, a long strange trip I’m certain many of you are undertaking as we speak. It is my opinion that new media represents not just a new medium for educational institutions to communicate with, but a complete paradigm shift in the meaning of university education. I’ll be discussing this and other issues – including but not limited to communications ethics, the ‘liberalisation’ of education, English as an international language, and the uses of various social media channels – in my upcoming blogs.

So let’s talk about your new website and what’s in the planning. I’ve been given free range (within reason) to develop our web content. The first step was to switch from a proprietary to an open-source CMS. What’s the difference? Proprietary software simply refers to software you have to buy in order to use, as in ‘property-ary’. Examples include Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. Open-source software is software whose source-code is open for anyone to improve and update. Examples include half the coding language that makes the internet work, the operating system Linux, the website CMS Joomla and the blogging CMS WordPress. The last was used to create the new EUPRIO website.

Why use blogging software for a website? The line between a blog, a website and a ‘stream’ (Facebook, RSS feeds, Twitter) is quickly vanishing. Many university web pages around the world are hosted on WordPress because it is quick, functional and highly adaptable. If we are to talk about communications innovation, we must practice what we preach. Thus the EUPRIO web pages function as both a communications medium and a test environment for some of the new media content we discuss. Plus, WordPress is free. To set up euprio.eu, we purchased web space and a domain name for about $100, installed WordPress for free, and bought a professional WordPress theme for $30. I also get paid a bit to set everything up, but I’m pretty cheap. So although it cost a bit more to host our web content this year, in the future EUPRIO should save money. Nice, huh?

So what kind of content are we planning?

• Blogs – Andrea Costa and I have formed an informal blogging committee, and it is our hope to eventually have at least four weekly bloggers (myself included) and periodic guest bloggers. If you fancy yourself a blogger, perhaps drop one of us an email. Remember, blogs should be informal, informative, and have something to do with university communications or issues confronted by university communicators. With a blog, perfect is the enemy of done
• Facebook updates – including a Euprio landing page, an embedded contact form, and perhaps a set of pages for discussing the European plaza topics
• Clunky bits – should be cleared up, including the Announcement block, the LinkedIn pic and that temporary Flickr plugin. My apologies to all those whose pictures were not very flattering in the previous Flickr plugin
• Member-only log-in environment – this is currently on hold, waiting for me to review the initial planning notes and give my feedback
• Gotenberg Conference pages
• YouTube – to be clear, the video footage gathered during the Prague Conference was to test the viability of gathering video during future conferences, and I hope to have the content converted to a useable format, rendered and published on a EUPRIO YouTube page as soon as possible. It is my hope that we will eventually have enough content to apply for a YouTube Edu page, but this depends on future conference organisers
• Agenda – we should have some type of agenda functionality for both EUPRIO events and others of interest to education communications people
• EUPRIO Portfolio – featuring slideshows and/or promotional videos from EUPRIO award winners. This is a feature already built into our website, but it requires content before it can be published

These are just the ideas I currently have for Euprio, but the sky is the limit. Your feedback and comments are most welcome and invaluable, as are your respectfully-phrased criticisms (rude or disrespectful comments will never be approved for this blog, and will be deleted from Facebook). Incidentally, you should be able to follow our blog posts on Facebook, as soon as I get the feed into our Facebook account.

Talk to you next week.

I know what you think. “Another university blog?”, soon followed by “And where do I find the time for reading it?”

Well, you would be right of course. But as far as we know there is no other blog in Europe specifically dedicated to university communication, and if there has to be one EUPRIO must be its host. This is the beginning of what we hope will be a regular (ok, maybe not so regular but we’ll do our best) playground for debate. Comments are very welcome of course and we will try to raise issues which you will want to comment on.

The EUPRIO Prague conference was two months ago. What do you remember especially? What did you enjoy most, and what was the most valuable experience in professional terms? And if it was your first EUPRIO conference, did you expect anything different?

The 10 months or so before the next conference in Gothenburg will be busy. As was announced in Prague, there will be occasions for discussing next year’s topic (“The Social Contract” between universities and society) at national level; your national representatives will find the most appropriate channel for this discussion and everybody is invited. Moreover, you can also look at this website or our Facebook page and see what others say and voice your opinions. And, why not, propose your own ideas and questions. A bit as if the conference coffee break, that most fruitful moment when you can freely exchange information and advice, was still going on in cyberspace.