Social Media Directories
Over 2000 organized social media resources from colleges and universities across Canada. These include:
Social Media Articles
Our ongoing series on social media in post-secondary schools in Canada will cover how colleges and universities are employing these new online tools to help promote their schools and related activities. Our first three articles reveal the extent of these rapidly growing social media tools. These include:
- Blogs: Blogs have truly enhanced the post-secondary experience...no longer do you have to actually attend school to find out what's going on, now you can just log onto your school's news blog to find out the latest information.
- Facebook: Since its inception, Facebook has grown to become the primary social media tool for written communication amongst large groups, outdoing blogs and sometimes even email.
- Videos: Whereas Facebook and blogs are very new and represent 2-way communication in real time, videos represent a more 'traditional' method of communication.
Facebook vs. Online Videos vs. Blogs
When examining the 3 main types of social media employed by post-secondary schools, you can see that most schools will prefer one type of media to the others. In most cases that preferred media is Facebook. This is probably due in part to the fact that a Facebook group is extremely easy to create and maintain, and can represent events almost in real time. The added bonus of photos and the like also contribute to Facebook's popularity as the media of choice. The second-most used media is the online video, and most of these videos are available on Youtube. Blogs are relatively rare compared to the prevalence of the other types of social media, and there are only a few institutions that primarily use blogs. This may be due to the narrowness of many of the blog topics, and the fact they are not 'flashy' like Facebook or Youtube.
Which Schools are using Social Media
There are a few schools that seem to use all 3 forms of social media to a more-or-less equal degree. Carleton, Concordia, McGill, McMaster, Memorial, Queen's, and Ryerson Universities all use blogs, videos, and Facebook in similar amounts, and don't necessarily favor one over the others. Note that these are all medium-large to large universities in major cities. This illustrates how well established institutions are at the forefront of utilizing new technologies, which eventually filter down to the smaller schools as they become more popular and accepted. As time goes by, the smaller institutions will likely start to incorporate these types of social media to their websites, just as the larger institutions will incorporate whatever new type of social media comes along next.
|
