Student Leaders: Implementing Twitter and Mozes for Student 2.0 Communication (Part 1: Twitter)

No matter which campus you're on, student leaders have a tough time motivating students to attend events. While some attendance problems may stem from oversaturation, how most events advertise themselves is very 20th century (in the worst way possible).

I wrote a post titled "On Campus, the Disruptive Facebook Flier" for the Portfolio.com tech blog about Facebook fliers back before students' brains started ignoring the left-hand sidebar. Back when HackCollege was first starting out in late 2006, one dinky $5 flier gave us thousands of visits. Those numbers are 1/100th of that these days and people are frustrated, especially organizations already strapped for cash.

And thanks to Facebook applications and lost cell phones, very few people pay attention to events. What was once reliable, free promotion is just white noise. So what is an on-campus event promoter to do? As always, we recommend you turn to technology. This post will make the case why your associated student body, club, or secret society needs Twitter.

The Pitch

As a standalone product, Twitter is dumb. Really dumb. It's a "microblogging" tool that just wants its users to constantly answer the question "What are you doing?" Scanning through the Twitter public timeline, you'll see plenty of "I'm doing homework" or "I'm washing my car." Tell me me something: who the fuck cares?

Okay, but let's say you put this in the hands of the tech-headed student body leader. With the proper promotion and hopefully some word-of-mouth spread, you can get your campus instantly connected. Twitter allows updates to be sent out via SMS and IM, 2 of the easiest ways to get in touch with just about any student. With enough students signed up, any information could be spread around campus in a few seconds.

Implement Twitter on an event night and you've got crowd control. The second tickets go on sale or sell out, every student subscribed to the said organization's Twitter feed will know where to go and what to do. Hell, you could even offer a few free tickets held over as an incentive to get people to use this program. That should be enough to motivate students to sign up for (yet another) service.

Why Twitter?

Good question. Twitter's bare-bones approach makes it ideal. It does one thing and it does it well. You can plug it into Facebook, put in on the club's site, and subscribe to it via RSS quite easily. It's a mechanism-based messaging service, rather than a feature tacked onto a larger system. Something like Facebook mobile might be nice, but it's tougher to blast messages to all subscribers.

Twitter is boring (for me) when it comes to personal updates, but is perfect for student organizations.

Is Your School Already Using Twitter?

If your school is already using Twitter, let us know in the comments! Let us know if this post influenced you to try it our on your campus! Oh, and friend me on Twitter; I don't have many Twitter friends.

And stay tuned for tomorrow's part 2 post about using a little something called Mozes.

Lifehack.org's Gigantic List for Productive Students

Earlier today, Lifehack.org posted a whopping article about software, blogs, and online tools for students today. We are pleased to be a part of the list. Check out the article and support our friends!

The Ultimate Student Resource [Lifehack.org]

HackCollege Podcast Episode 14: Back in LA

The whole team is back at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles and they've found a couch. Scott's a little under the weather from his appendectomy, but still deftly operates the camera nonetheless.

Topics this episode include:

• Living in an Apartment


• Cinder block shelving units


• Bulldozing


• GTD and schoolwork


• iCal


• Scott's Facebook invites


• Your computer does your reading


• Splitting grocery payments


• Apple announcements


• Wii-ing


• Projectors in rooms


• Hard drive disasters


• Moving in efficiently

This episode's music:

• "Date Game" by Christopher Wade

We've Landed on the Moon!

It may not be 1969, but HackCollege has hit a milestone nonetheless. Hardcore readers of the site will have noticed that a new little something popped up on the site yesterday: a feed counter. It tells the world how many RSS subscribers we've got.

We vowed to not put up the little counter until we reached 500 steady readers. Fake it 'till you make it. And now we've made it--to 500 at least.

So welcome everybody and let's make a difference. We'll be announcing a new plan to take over the world later this week and we'll need your help. Look for it around the next episode of the podcast.

If you're not already subscribed to our RSS feed, do it here.

Digital Textbooks - The Latest Scam

It's the first week back at LMU and everyone is running around trying to find the cheapest place to buy books before their professors start noticing. Four months abroad made me momentarily forget what book companies in the States are allowed to get away with. I present to you the latest scam I have discovered--which I am sure is not new to many schools: textbooks sold in tandem with an online "workbook." As always, it's difficult to tell who exactly is to blame: the publisher, the school, the department, or the professor.

I went to my German II class earlier this week and was informed I would need a book and a workbook. No problem, I thought. I ballparked the package around $80 online. You'll see I was pretty close.

Digital Textbook Extortion

Enter a lovely service called Quia Books. They offer online course workbooks. How environmentally conscious. They are trying to save paper. Except the cost of the workbook does not decrease. It's still $43.25 for a glorified PDF.

So, for the time being, let's think of high textbook prices as a "necessary evil" of the American education system. The biggest problem with Quia is that it locks me into their system. The only way I could get a key for the course, since their search functions are--what's this?--limited, was to get one from my professor. There's no ISBN search. And it's a surprise that she actually provided her "Quia Course Code" on the syllabus; she's of no obligation to do so. I imagine many professors don't even know what the hell this alphanumeric "Quia Course Code" is or what it does.

I'm lucky. I can buy my textbook on Half.com for $42.99 and the online workbook for a mere $43.25 for a grand total of:

$86.24

My ballpark was pretty close.

The Campus Bookstore to the Rescue!

But what if my professor hadn't given me the course code? Thanks be to the deities, because my campus bookstore will come to the rescue.

They offer the textbook and a code for the workbook for a mere

$176.88

That's a $90.64 difference for those of you without calculator watches.

So the semi-free market purchase of Half.com/Quia is $90.64 less than the school bookstore price. Quia has a fixed price and a product that is only available through them. The Half.com part is the online free market link in this mess. I realize you pay a premium for having the on-campus resource, but there's a point when the premium becomes absurd. Especially when the bookstore prevents you from copying down the ISBN numbers of your books for some price checking.

Here's the big point: If you were taking my class with a bundled online workbook and the professor didn't give you the course code, you would be forced to buy the book and workbook from the bookstore. No Half.com. No Amazon Associates. No AbeBooks.

And if you think you'll just open the book and see what the course code is on the inside of the book, think again. Most books with online workbooks are sealed to prevent theft of the workbook code (the thing that you redeem to get your PDF). Once unsealed, these books can't be returned.

The Problem and the Solution

There are two problems here:

1. People can't decide what an online workbook is worth. It can only be obtained through one site for a fixed price. No free market in sight.


2. In the case of a technologically-ignorant professor, the student will be forced to buy the book from the bookstore, being charged one inflated price and one fixed price. While it is possible to find the book through the Quia Books search, the search fields are limited and the prices--again--are fixed.

The solution is pretty simple: Stop doing this. This system preys upon the ignorance and tight schedules of professors and leaves the students to pick up the inflated cost.

Ask the Readers

Does your campus institute a similar system? Have you ever had a professor refuse to give you the course code? Let us know in some comments.

Related posts from fellow bloggers:

• "The High Cost of Learning" [Mindful Ink]


• "A (lack of) future for books?" [University Blog]


• "Textbook Torrents Founder Says His Site is Civil Disobedience" [Chronicle]


• "As Textbooks Go 'Cutsom,' Students Pay" [Wall Street Journal]

Five Mini Mac Hacks

Kick off the new semester with five little shortcuts that'll turn you into an instant Mac fanboy. Five simple shortcuts, no installation required. Follow along:

Simple Screenshots: There's a way to take a screenshot of the whole screen, but I don't care about that one. With Command + Shift + 4 you can draw a box around something on your screen and crop it just to that. I usually use this in lieu of printing receipts or flight information -- stuff like that. Instead, it just hops on to your desktop. This is also good for grabbing pictures or video frames from a site that won't let you right click.

The Speedy Start-Up: I have several programs that are scheduled to start as soon as I boot up my computer: Quicksilver, SizzlingKeys, Actiontastic, iCal -- just to name a few. There are countless others that start without my authorization (Microsoft AU Daemon -- it makes me cringe). For a fast start up to check a quick email or the weather, hold down Shift while the OS is loading. It'll stop all of those programs from running and get you right to a blank desktop. Also handy if you'll just be using a RAM-intensive program like Final Cut Pro. Things like the Dashboard won't suck your speed.

Target Drive Mode: Turn your Mac into a firewire hard drive. Forget all that messing around with networking and file sharing ports -- this is the easiest way to do a file transfer. Boot your computer while holding down T and it'll dumb itself down to just a Hard Drive. Plug in a 6-pin Firewire cord and you're a target disk jockey.

Quick Delete: I didn't know about this until just a few days ago. You know how you can't delete a file by simply highlighting it and pressing "Delete"? It's Command + Delete. Wow. And press Enter to rename it.

Move a Background Window: Hold Command while you click and you can move a window without bringing it to the front. This is really handy if you're copying something from one window to another and you need to reposition it without causing a chaos collage of windows.

PocketMod Updates

Our very favorite personal organizer, PocketMod, has released some new features and a cleaner interface for the year 2008. Check it out:

PocketMod: The Free Recyclable Personal Organizer

January Site News and Updates

Yesterday, Chris and myself finally made it back to LMU. Chris took a cheap flight whilst I opted to drive down to LA. Everyone traveled and arrived safely. Scott's also been here for a few days. Here are a few things:

The three of us will start taping shows again, instead of Skyping them.

We'll get around (finally) to the Adult Swim contest-winning suggestion of stocking a bar with only $100 seeing as how we're doing the same thing.

We won the runner's-up award for the editor's choice category of the Performancing blog awards. Our friend Cal Newport took home the gold in the reader's choice section.

It's great to be back and all of us look forward to a great semester/term/quarter. Don't forget to check HackCollege.