Homecoming Week 2008

Ok, so wow, back to blogging for the first time in a long time! And what a perfect week to start! This past week was homecoming week at UIS and as usual, it was a blast! The pep rally kicked things off on Monday, followed by a really cool group called the Neofutureists on Tuesday. Wednesday there was a comedian, and Thursday was the annual Faculty/Staff/Alumni vs. students basketball game. This marked the first year ever that the FAST team defeated the students in this game. My personal record moves to 5-1 (2 coaching wins, 3 playing wins, and one alumni/staff loss in 2007). Friday was of course the dance, Charles Olivier and Stephanie Gorsuch were named Homecoming King and Queen and then ending the week on Saturday was the parade, BBQ, soccer game, and fireworks! Here are the photos for your enjoyment!

Freshmen Orientation June 30th, 2008

UIS just had its third Freshmen Orientation of the summer. In years past, there used to be time during the Ice Breaker to do photographs. Unfortunately now, after handing out cards, etc. there just isn’t the opportunity. So instead, I’ve been taking photographs after the students leave from registration. However, that has not been that effective because I’ve been running around a lot. So this time, I tried a different location, more towards the end, and it really worked out! I had only been getting about 6-7 shots, but this last time, I got 25!!! And here they are! *WARNING* This will be a very LONG post due to the photos so I will group them side-by-side-by-side. Feel free to add your name if you wish. Also, this group got a late start on blue.i.s. which was my fault (email issues), so don’t forget to check your UIS email!

Freshmen Orientation June 23rd 2008

I know I’m a little late on this, but I had quite a few big projects to do last week. We had our second Freshmen Orientation on Monday, June 23, 2008 and it was another record breaking day! There were 64 people in attendance! There are only three more orientation days left, so if you’re not signed up and are coming to UIS in the fall, you should probably get on that. Anyway, here are a couple of photos from that day! Look for some of these people in our publications! Also, if you were at this Orientation and have not signed up for blue.i.s., you really should join! Your fellow classmates are chattin’ it up. Don’t forget to check your UIS email for your personal invite!

Freshmen Orientation – Friday the 13th – June 13, 2008

So it’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged. There have certainly been a number of reasons for that, but that’s in the past and I’m glad to be back. Blogging is something I enjoy, so I’m going to give this another run.

On Friday the 13th, 2008 we had our first Freshmen Orientation of the year here at UIS. Each summer the incoming freshmen class returns to the UIS campus probably for the first time since their Preview Day visit, or another campus tour. On the Orientation day, the students hear a little more about the services we offer and more importantly, get registered for classes and take that all important I-Card photo.

I get the privilege of operating the camera during the traditional freshmen video. The video always gets shown at the Late Night Breakfast during finals week and that years seniors get to reminisce about what their friends and themselves said four years prior. I also get to take photos for our publications and for various websites, etc.

Here are some of the shots.

Crazy Wii-kend

What a crazy weekend this turned out to be! On Friday night, my friend (and son – not my real son I’m only 23 for crying out loud! Some of my friends call me Dad since I’m a whole two years older than them, but anyway), Justin came over to my house to play some video games with our friend, Chad. If you haven’t played Rainbow Six Vegas 2 yet, you definitely need to get that! Oh yeah, PS3 of course. And an HDTV 32 inches or bigger. So while we were playing my wonderful girlfriend and her best friend Liz came over to drop off my birthday food for the BBQ we had on Saturday. After they left, Justin and I heard a LOUD pop, and we both jumped like crazy! My first thought was that my fish tank broke. I had a tank when I was younger and was watching a hockey game on tv when I was like 10 or so and I heard a loud pop and looked over at my fish tank which had cracked open right through the middle of the side. So I ran to my fish tank and it was fine. Then Justin said, I think some crazy drunk just broke your window. I have a sliding class door that leads to my patio and it was splitting like a spider web (and continued to do so for another hour and a half). So I’m not entirely sure what happened, but my window is now in about a million pieces. So long security deposit..

On Saturday, it was our final preview day for this spring and it would be my only real opportunity to try out my new lens!

I just bought a 70-200 f2.8 last week for my birthday so that I could get better indoor and sports photos. The shots turned out really nicely I think. It was a long morning though of walking around with my now 8 pound camera…I’m really gonna have to start working out again. After that, everyone came over for my birthday bbq and we grilled up some hamburgers and hotdogs. I make some pretty amazing hamburgers if I do say so myself. I’m going to give you my secret because not everyone has the ability to do this. The key is not necessarily in the seasoning or the meat, but rather making sure the hamburger is at least as big as the bun. If you can master that technique (yes there actually is a technique), you will become the “Grill Master.” We then spent the remainder of the beautiful afternoon playing a little football and Frisbee. Well, Frisbee ended when my good buddy Chad broke the Frisbee U of I President B. Joseph White himself gave me.

At 7 p.m., Justin and I were asked to MC a fund raiser for Jump for Joel and UIS students Kenya Trip. A group of six students will be traveling to Kenya this summer to help an orphanage there. More on Jump for Joel here. Everyone had a lot of fun there, and it was a blast getting to do that with Justin. And if you see Justin, ask him what “Pragu” (like the pasta sauce Ragu) is (The answer was “Prague”). After finally leaving around midnight, it was time to go home.

On Sunday, my girlfriend decided to come over and wake me up at 9 a.m. That’s early on a weekend and having gotten no sleep either of the two nights before. We both desperately needed to get homework done, so we were going to devote our day to doing that. Around 4:00 we decided to take a little break. I had to run into petsmart to get another algae eater fish because I thought mine had died. Really he was just in a coma or something for an entire day. He didn’t move for an entire day I swear, so I assumed he lived his life (he was quite old).

Then, I was going to go over to Best Buy to reserve a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV. Now jumping back to that morning. I got my Sunday paper and was reading through it and the ads. I have loved looking through the ads forever. I get to the Best Buy one and I see they have Wii’s. I was like, dang, too bad I didn’t check my computer on Saturday because I would have seen that they were going to have some. I’ve been hunting for a Wii for a long time. I went to a store at 9:30 p.m. one night to wait for them to be put on shelves at 12:30 and was the 16th person in line…they of course only had 15 units… And there was one other time when I went to the store only to see the last one get picked up as I entered the isle…

Anyway, Jordan and I walk into Best Buy and walk past a guy stacking boxes on a table. I was like, oh cool, Mario Cart for Wii. Then I see him put a Wii box on the table. So I ask him, are those for real, and are they for sale? He hands me a box and says yep, so I forgot all about GTA IV and walked happily out the door. It was so tempting once I got home to play some games, but I knew that I had to finish my homework first. Around 10:30, Jordan and I both wrapped up our work, and played some Wii till the Wii hours of the morning. Needless to say, I’m a bit tired today at work. Totally worth it though!

The benefits of high-quality photography in recruiting efforts – Part One.

First off, let me start by saying my apologies for not having blogged in such a long time. Finding that balance between full-time employee, student, and friend has been difficult this semester. The last three weeks have been particularly crazy and have seen me virtually disappear from the social media world (aside from Twitter). But I’m back now and ready for the final semester push that includes final projects and commencement.

Anyway, this is a post that I have been working on for quite some time, and I’m not quite sure that I am done with it yet, but I’m throwing this initial piece out there to start some discussion. I’ll give you some background as well since this is really where this post started.

I’ve been trying to think of what to do for my final in graduate studies. I have three choices: comprehensive exam, thesis paper, or a project. I am not a paper person, so I immediately ruled that out, and I really don’t like taking tests. Not only that, I love working on projects, so that was really the only choice in my mind. The more difficult choice was choosing what to do for it. I wanted to do something that would not only benefit me, but something that I could use in my job. My first idea, however, did not go over so well. So, I talked to one of my professors about doing a tutorial with me this summer that would be the prelude/beginning of the project and he has agreed.

I will be working with my photography professor on a very intensive research and building project. The research will involve studying good photography and really breaking down why the photographs are good. I want to pay particular attention to higher education photography and portraits since that is what I will be shooting most often. I think I have a good eye for getting good shots, but sometimes I feel like my technical knowledge is not put to use. I can explain photography to people all day, but then I don’t always illustrate it in my photos.

Building may or may not be the right word to use here, but it’s all I can think of. I will be building a new collection of photos for the campus for use in admissions recruitment purposes and for marketing. I will be primarily photographing students because we already have plenty of campus scenery shots that are good. And the students are what a university is all about right?

The reason I am doing this is because students nowadays don’t want to see those setup shots. And believe me, they can tell. I’ve co-hosted some focus groups recently which we asked the students a variety of questions, one of which was whether they felt we portrayed the university accurately. Most said yes, but the no’s all referenced our brochures. And that my friends is why I decided this would be the perfect project.

Alright, I think that is it for this post. Over time I have realized that this is something that is really going to take multiple posts, so I’m going to split it up. I’ll bring you along in my progress and hope that you enjoy the ride. I have some other drafts started that will give some examples, etc. of the old verses the new. I will also go into more detail about HOW it will help.

Back to old habits

I have been having a dilemma lately with my blog.  I have been blogging on jeremywilburn.wordpress.com since last year and have really gotten away from the original intention for starting to blog.  I began blogging as a student/staff blogger representing the University of Illinois at Springfield.  So to remedy the situation, I have decided that I will start another blog, and here it is!  This blog will focus more on the personal aspects of my life and the things I do for fun with friends and family.  I will post photos and videos much more often and want this blog to be fun!

And now, I officially present to you jwilburn.wordpress.com!  Leave me some feedback and I hope you will enjoy the journey!

Keyword: Ensure Effectiveness

Effectiveness is a word that I have been tossing around my head for some time now. It started with my post a few weeks ago about Using Twitter for Higher Ed. I posted about trying to figure out a way to put Twitter to good use for higher education. It’s an excellent tool to keep up to date on what my friends and co-workers are doing as well as networking with other electronic media professionals, and while I think it would bee a useful tool for students to be able to use, it brings up the question of would they really use it.

Sometime before my post, Matt Herzberger posted on <uwebd> asking “Do You Twitter?” which has since sparked quite a bit of conversation. If you read through the comments (primarily page 3) there is a debate between Patrick Berry, Brad Ward, and myself about why Twitter would/not be good for a university. Hearing what they had to say was very enlightening. As great a tool as Twitter is, I started asking myself, will integrating this service actually be effective? Would the students even use it? Would they understand how to use it? I am in a unique position on my campus to be able to try any and every new social media technology that comes out. I have signed up for so many of them that I have a two page list of logins that I use. Most are the same, but some sites don’t like the syntax of a password, etc, so they are slight variations. Plus there are some that I have signed up for before I became a professional and so on. But if we were to use all of these services, we would never be able to get any work done.

That being said, I thought Twitter had some real promise, and I think it still does. And recently I found out that we will be searching for a new chat service as well as a message board service. And here’s the catch; it has to be free or cheap. In my other post I detail more about how I think we can use it as a chat feature. But I wonder, would the students really take advantage of it? I have no problem monitoring it and can set it up so that I get a text anytime someone posts, but would the students actually go through the process of signing up and posting a question? Would they understand the 140 character limit? So looking at it further tells me that maybe that’s not the best service to use. We may try it out, but I’m still debating whether it’s worth it.

And Twitter is just one example. Is it worth it to have a presence on Facebook or MySpace? Of course! What about posting photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube? There is a definite value here! What about lifecasting through uStream.tv or other video service? I think if you can pull it off well, then yes. But what about del.icio.us, Google Earth (technically not a social networking site – but maybe not a needed feature), SecondLife, etc? These may be some extra features we could do without. It’s good to push the envelope, but when you’re trying to recruit students, evaluating the effectiveness of your methods is extremely important. If you’re doing all this extra work, then you’re not following the rules of “The Four Hour Workweek.“

When is technology too much?

I subscribe to a blog called Faces of Web 2.0 ★ 21st Century Teachers and over the weekend they posted a very interesting video called 21st Century Classes. Recently, there have been a couple of universities that have decided to give iPhones to their incoming freshmen. I thought at first the idea was absurd, but then I realized when I came to UIS, they were “giving” us laptops as freshman. I mean, come on, a LAPTOP!?! Who could really turn that down… Little did we know that we had to pay for them through our fees for being in the honors program, but none-the-less, it wasn’t a $1500 lump sum that we would have to pay prior to starting college. It was nice to be able to take them to class for notes and blackboard and discussions and whatnot, but really…did they think that we wouldn’t mess around on them? I wasn’t much of an IM’er, but a lot of my friends were.  The thing about college though is that while teachers want their students to succeed and will do whatever they can to help them, if a student just doesn’t care, then there’s not much ANYONE can do about it. Don’t get me wrong, the laptop was an awesome feature, as were the scholarships I got, but would I have chosen one school over another just because of the free perks? Not me, but others might.

Anyway…back on target…how would you feel about your university giving you a laptop upon entering as a freshman? Or an iPhone? Or both? Would students really use them for good, or is it just another tool for them to access the internet at all times and pay no attention during class? I believe if the students are truly interested in learning, they will use them the way the universities hope (plan?). It is a very interesting concept though. iPhone cost < Laptop cost…or is the long run, iPhone Bill >Laptop cost. Depends upon who pays the service bill? I love my iPhone, but I’m definitely glad I got a real computer.

In my spare time.

**WE ARE LIVE**  It took a couple of days, but now we are officially LIVE in Google Earth!  Check it out by downloading Google Earth 4 and fly to “1 University Dr, Springfield, IL” and we will be there!  Make sure you enable 3D Buildings as well in the lower left hand “Layers” box.

**My Jing account only has 1GB of bandwidth that apparently I reached after 5 views yesterday…I’m going to work on fixing that today, but if you cannot view the video, my apologies.**

I’ve had something lately that I haven’t really had for a while: spare time. I’ve decided that I wanted to put some of that time to good use. I stumbled across a video on YouTube about the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO.

So I thought, why not do that for my campus?! I really enjoyed my 3D design class, so I told myself, “Self, you’re gonna do this!” I went to Google Earth to figure out what to do. They have a program called Google Sketchup which I downloaded, and after a couple days of testing and trying to figure it out, I was able to construct something that I thought looked pretty good. Watch the video below that I made using a service called Jing, something I had forgotten I was able to get. @Joe, Jing allows me to do screen captures for free! *Shakes head…

For now, I cannot embed my screencast video. Click here to view the screencast of my Google Earth Video.

I plan to be able to complete all the buildings within a month or two (it took me about 4 days to do UHB). It may not be a very widely used service, but I think some students will enjoy going in and playing around with it. Plus, it gives our online population the ability to see our campus without having to actually travel here. 2D photos can only do so much. So go download Google Earth and type in our address “1 University Plaza, Springfield, IL” and play around with it. Let me know what you think!