3 of the top 12 All Time Most Viewed videos on YouTube are by Billy Ray's daughter. Come on, America!

For anyone who has seen the  rather epic battle of videos between Shoreline and Shorewood High Schools in Washington, it’s no surprise that this generation of high school students knows their way around technology pretty well.  (FWIW, my vote goes to Shorewood doing Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True.”  Shot entirely backward with even lips completed synced. See it to believe it.)  So, it was also no surprise when I recently came across this article about how Tufts has incorporated YouTube videos made by applicants directly into their decision-making.

I applaud any attempts to evaluate students on factors that don’t boil down to crude numbers like SAT scores.  At the same time,  I get nervous about this particular approach on account of two groups of kids out there.  First, there are many kids out there w/o the resources to do this.  And by resources, I don’t mean just computers and audio-video equipment.  I also mean TIME.  I watched more than a handful of these videos and several of them were flat-out terrific.  Props to those kids.  However, many of them also would have required dozens of hours of planning and production.  How many kids applying to an ultra-selective school like Tufts have that kind of time in fall of their senior year?  I certainly can’t think of too many from my own experience.  And while shooting just one might be a fun way to break up some of the drudgery of the process, I can’t imagine if a kid needed to do several of these, personalizing them for various schools.

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No, this is not a mass hold-up in New Haven.

“And what did you tell them?/ Video killed the radio star.”

Probably no one born after, oh, 1976 would even remember that song by those musical giants, the Buggles.  (Trivial Pursuit fact: first video ever played on MTV.)

As someone who loves Pop Culture, it may seem odd that I don’t have cable or DirecTV anymore. Maybe, but technology such a Hulu allows me to remain plugged in without draining any more than necessary from my Pizza and French Fries Rainy Day Fund.  And like everything else in the world, technology continues to shapes the way college admissions works as well.

This new video, That’s Why I Chose Yale, shot with nearly 200 current Yale students, faculty and alumni (backstory here) will likely resonate well with a sizable percentage of their applicant pool if the popularity of Glee with my own students is any indication. It’s a little cheesy–aren’t all musicals?–but does a remarkable job in just 16 minutes of showing you Yale at its best. For what it’s worth, around the 7:15 mark was my favorite segment. Way better than flipping through another boring brochure that looks like the ten others you received that day. (Though those same boring brochures are often packed with valuable information if you’re seriously considering the school.) Click here to read more »

Princess Leia offering a campus tour of the University of Tatooine to a prospective Jedi.

I guess the only surprise is it didn’t happen earlier.  Yes, the first iPod campus tour is here and it’s being conducted by the College of Charleston. (H/T NACAC’s own Admitted blog)  Regular readers of this blog, you may remember a post last month where for a moment I was suckered into believing C of C was accepting applications by Twitter.  This time, C of C really is leading the way…

The application, titled “College of Charleston Tour,” is a free download for the iPhone and iPod Touch and is available at the Apple iTunes app store. It features Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) assistance, 18 videos of campus, and nearly 60 images of life at the College of Charleston. Click here to read more »

Looking at this picture, I'm not sure why exactly I loved Salisbury steak day in the cafeteria so much as a kid at old Waldo Elementary.

Yes, we all have that friend on Facebook whose status updates consist of nothing other than what they ate, what they’re going to to eat or “I’m hungry!”  (Really?  Because it’s lunchtime and that’s SO unusual.)  But oddly enough, with the recent changes to Facebook that makes profile information FAR more public than it was just a week ago, those folks might be onto something.  For users who don’t tighten the default settings, that means status updates, contact information, and even pictures can become part of the public domain.  And all just a quick Google away.

Most people could care less.  They’re not too worried about “My kitten Pookie sure loves his tuna. Lol!” finding its way into the permanent archives of the Internet.  But for teenagers, this could pose a unique problem.  It’s why I’ve asked all my students to keep their profile settings as private as can be.  There’s no reason a tech-savvy admissions officer really needs to see them whooping it up in Cabo over Spring Break as innocent as it might’ve been.  It’s all about context and sometimes, social networking sites like Facebook don’t provide much of it. Click here to read more »

As a fairly voracious consumer of online media, I often stumble so deep into the Internet that I lose any sense of what I’m actually reading.  A couple days ago, while reading through several articles offering lots of truly awful advice on college essays (write 25 college essays in 25 weeks “because practice makes them better”), I came across one announcing the College of Charleston was testing having students apply via Twitter:

“Succinct is the new in-depth,” said assistant deputy admissions director, Chip VanDerveld. “Anybody can make a case for admission if you give them the time and space to do it; the real challenge is to convince us that you belong at the College of Charleston in 140 characters or less.”

Well, after being convinced the Apocalypse was upon us and muttering a few choice four-letter words–totaling less than 140 characters, of course–I realized I was the sucker.

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