Okay, this is one of those self-deprecating blog entries.  This past Friday I was visiting Augustana College (www.augustana.edu) and throughout the day the clouds opened up, drenching the campus with rain, and the skies turned various shades of black.  The campus is bordered by railroad tracks, and when the "train whistles" started to blow mid afternoon, I was the only one not concerned.  You see where this is going...

Those "train whistles" were tornado sirens.  A tornado had just touched down in a neighboring county and the campus was placed on alert.  It was wonderful seeing their processes kick in and their media relations director talk me through their procedures.  He had confidence in their process and procedures for this situation because it had been reviewed and rehearsed.

That is exactly the can-do spirit you want your campus to have during an emergency.  Conduct tabletop or mock drill tests to maximize your response for varying degrees of alert and campus impact.  After all, you never know when you'll have to convince someone that the trains aren't your immediate or biggest issues.

--Teresa Valerio Parrot

The 2008 AMA Symposium Steering Committee met last Friday in Chicago to work on the content for the program. (Shout out to my fellow committee members!)  We have three of our five keynoter sessions filled. On Monday morning, we will hear from Larry Weber, founder of the world's largest PR firm, Weber Shandwick. Larry ultimately left to become a pioneer in the digital world. And, his second book Marketing to the Social Web, is currently on the Amazon.com bestseller list. On Tuesday morning, we'll get an earful from Neil Howe, author of Millennials Go to College, the 2^nd edition. It contains tons of new data and some scary messages.  (Did you know that helicopter parents are turning into stealth fighters?) Andy Goodman, founder of the American Comedy Network and author of Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes and Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes will talk with us on Wednesday morning about "Storytelling as Best Practice." We are working with our targets for the other two keynotes.  I'll update you when we have them confirmed.

--Elizabeth Scarborough

I read a really interesting article today in Inside Higher Ed about a study coming out that looks at the correlation between ratings on RateMyProfessors.com and IDEA, a well respected student evaluation tool that is used in many higher ed institutions. Many professors don't have very kind feelings towards RateMyProfessors.com, because they think the students base their ratings on elements that are largely out of their control. So there has been some debate about how accurate these ratings are. This study supports the validity of the RateMyProfessors.com ratings, because the IDEA evaluation puts a lot of control in the hands of the professors by allowing them to identify the teaching objectives that are the most important to the class and counting them more. They also use weighting to adjust for factors that the professors have little control over... the same factors they have argued have affected their ratings on RateMyProfessors.com. So it is pretty interesting that they found so many similarities between the ratings. I am really not doing the article much justice, so click here to read it yourself. It is definitely an interesting read!

--Meredith Simpson

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!