Monday, February 23, 2009

Blogs and SDM

Today, Nisheeth grabbed and chatted about using SDM blogger to promote sdm. I think it's a superb idea. I researched Yoav's blogs extensively before decided to go SDM. Actually, it provided at least as much as information as sdm.mit.edu.

To my fellow sdm bloggers, this is what I am thinking:
  • Discuss our interest areas and have our blogs a little more specialized in those area: SDM Courses, SDM student life, MIT life...
  • Have sdm.mit.edu link our blog entries;
  • This should involve both present and past SDMers. Or anyone who wants to contribute back to sdm.
Nisheeth also mentioned monthly news letter to SDMers (sorry stealing your thunder a little here). That's a great idea too. We should propsoe this to Pat.

Let me know what you think...

8 comments:

Jeremy said...

Having more prominence for those of us blogging couldn't hurt but it's difficult to get people to "commit" to blogging -- Sloan had a section of student blogs linked at one point a year or so ago, but most of them were pretty stale pretty quick. That said, maybe I should revive my idea of setting up a Planet (or Venus) install with SDM blogs.

Also -- what would you want a newsletter to include?

Ben Jiang said...

Yes, I think the specialization should be just a high level suggestion, not a strict rule or anything. There is no commitment, but more recommendations. It has to be something that we are passionate about. Also I think future SDMers rather read the things that are real. Let me know if you need something to host the stuff you want to install. I do have a cluster;).

Nisheeth talks about to include SDM Faculty's news in the news letter. For example, von Hippel had a nice trip to India again;), etc. Anything that is kind of big can be communicated with the SDM community.

btw: I think the news letter should have something to do with either John Grace or Jon Griffith, even though we can run this as a student thing.

Jeremy said...

I can easily set up a Planet install on my server (my blog has moved now, btw -- http://velohacker.com). I'll make a post when I've done so (probably not until tomorrow, but hey, that's not too bad :-)

As for the newsletter, maybe we just need to try to put some life into SDM Pulse. It's quarterly, not monthly, but that was the idea of what it would be about. And I know that both Jack and Jon would welcome more contributions to it.

Ben Jiang said...

Sounds good. Let's wait for Nisheeth, the original thinker. I am sure he got more stuff to say. I really like the idea of a little more systematic way (;)) to promote sdm this way.

I definitely think sdm.mit.edu should link to us.

Unknown said...

I wouldn't try to over-engineer it. Sure, links are fine, but SDM students who care about reading these blogs would find them on Google anyways.

Ben Jiang said...

true, I think link from sdm and a easy common place to dispatch to all blogs are the thing we must have. Rather easy to do but means a lot.

Unknown said...

Ben, thanks for putting together this discussion.

I visited few MBA official websites. Here are couple of observations.

Observation #1
Indirect experience by learning about people at that institute.

People: Students, Faculty member
Learning: Students experience about courses, env. etc.; Professor's stand on particular current issues or some topic
Information source: Blog, Video, Articles on main website

Observation #2
Seminar video on web

* I think we got some amazing faculty in ESD. I am sure they can discuss a glimpse of their work via articles.

* We have enough lectures video taped! I believe releasing few good lectures of core courses of SDM on web would be nice

* SDM guest speaker seminar on web

* I do agree with Jeremy and Yoav. Blogs are stale and they can be located via google. Also, by linking to official website, we are biased to write good stuff.

I still think we do need to give our website a facelift. It is just too dry.

Ben Jiang said...

Good study of sloan site, Nisheeth. I totally agree with observation #1. With the booming social networking and blogging, potential students can gain more knowledge of what to expect. Materials that is for the student and by the student is the best readings available.

As for the seminar on the web, are you proposing student-organized, or sdm office organized? One problem with student-organized is continuity. We will need to get SDM09 people onboard, even though I know some sdm08 will stay here longer.