What are some examples of mobilizing younger people with social media (blogs)? Can you answer Hannah Baral's Question?

I was sitting in front of Hannah Baral when she asked an amazing question in the session about nonprofits and blogging.  Hannah is the Clubs and Student Development Manager at UNSW.  She is interested using social media to connect with students.   (I had, of course, attempted to live stream a video interview with her using my N95 and QIK, but the Internet connection and I lost the streamed video -- went into the black hole of the Internet!)

So, I took a photo of her business card and am posting the questions here.  Please leave a comment so I can share with her.

• If we want to create a project with student blogging, are there examples of guidelines?  What do we need to think about?
• What are some examples in other parts of the world where a university has used social media to connect with students around clubs and student life?
• How can we best interact with young people via social media?

Please leave you advice in the comments.  Thanks

Comments

[Kathy]

Beth, I have students blog in classes as a matter of course -- but these are individual student blogs, not a group blog, and I'm not exactly trying to "mobilize" them. I gave a paper at INTED in March that addressed some of the "lessons learned" (I've been doing this since 2004).

Two group projects using blogs: http://2008prez.wordpress.com, which is a snapshot of the election circa spring 2007, and http://www.seattlepoliticore.org/, which is a student-journalism site led by one of my colleagues, David Domke. The students covered primaries in Idaho, Washington and Texas.

[mike seyfang]

This is something I have thought about a lot since starting my new job at the University. From what I have observed here are a few pointers:

- meet the students where THEY are (could be facebook, myspace, blogger, typepad, spaces.live etc... or a combination). Avoid temptation to provide 'safe' or 'controlled' infrastructure.

- follow the general blogger codes around openness, transparency, honesty etc (don't try to create closed or private environments).

- take the role of community builder (not project manager or infrastructure provider).

Having read/listened to tons of material on this subject, I have been most impressed by a talk given by Susan Metros - referred to in episodes 1 and 2 of my 'TWAM' podcast:

http://mseyfang.edublogs.org/category/twam/

Follow the links to Susan's talk and take a listen.
Hope this is helpful
Fang - Mike Seyfang

[Elaine Aitken]

You may already be aware of it, but Ewan McIntosh's blog here: http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/ covers a lot of the great work going on in Scottish education, and in particular the guidelines here: http://edubuzz.pbwiki.com/guidelines might be of interest.