Digitally Connected Colleges

There is an interesting article on Mashable entitled “How Digitally Connected Are the U.S. News Top 20 Colleges?”. They have taken a list of top colleges produced in the normal ranking manner (costs, class size, retention etc) and given their own twist by calculating the following, for the colleges’ main accounts:

  • Twitter followers
  • Facebook fans
  • YouTube videos/subscribers

So how would the University of Reading square up on these statistics?

  • Our main Twitter account is UniRdg_News with 1,697 followers.
  • Our main Facebook Page has 5,348 fans
  • There are a number of University of Reading You Tube videos the main channel belongs to the university’s press office: UniofReading, with 37 uploads and 60 subscribers.

These results are on a par with the colleges listed, what I don’t know is the relative sizes of the institutions listed, so its hard to judge the comparability.

I do feel these figures aren’t actually measuring “connectiveness” as they show the universities are trying, but we don’t actually know if people are actually really noticing what is pushed out.

About Shirley Williams

Shirley Williams is a National Teaching Fellow and Professor of Learning Technologies at the University of Reading. She is involved in a number of research projects related to learning technologies, communities, social networks, Digital identity and knowledge transfer. She also enjoys reading and cooking.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *