John Robb, UserLand’s President and COO, graciously pointed to me after I gave him a little grief yesterday for pointing at a Kellogg student’s weblog. He also raised an interesting question: what would it take to get MIT Sloan on Radio? (That’s Radio UserLand, not AM or FM, for those of you playing along at home.)
Good question, John. There are three ways to do it that I can see, each with its own merits and disadvantages:
- Centralized push. Have Sloan’s IT services folks set up a Radio Community Server and put Radio on every first year MBA’s laptop.
- In the classroom. Have a few professors start using Radio as a knowledge sharing mechanism and put part of the class participation grade for their students in how well they use their weblogs.
- From the grassroots. Have a few bleeding edge folks get their sleeves up and evangelize it.
Approach #1 is how our last “knowledge sharing” system, a custom version of the open source ACS from the late lamented ArsDigita, was implemented. People are using it for calendaring, surveys, and file storage. That’s about it. There is a little bulletin board traffic, but for the most part outside of course websites and maybe the shared calendar it’s not part of the Sloan academic culture of idea sharing.
Approach #2 might have some legs. There are some classes, including the introduction to IT class, a few of the marketing classes, and a class being taught on virtual communities, with which Radio is a natural fit. You might get the professors on board pretty quickly, with the students doing exercises in Radio for a semester.
Approach #3 is where we are right now. By virtue of my getting out and talking about my weblog, I’ve got George and Adam on board. But that’s three, with no faculty.
I’d love to know how many people at Kellogg are active bloggers, and how they’re using Radio—for personal weblogging, academic reflection, industry commentary, or some combination of the three.
more…