Serendipity35

marketing.edu

Today: a case and a lesson.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, I first read about the case of an online college that is "renting" space on their .edu domain. Criticism is now being directed at both the college and the company that is selling blog space there.

If a blogger is willing to pay $50 per month, he can have the cachet of an educational domain address. Since the edu is supposed to be reserved for accredited educational institutions, the fear is that this diminishes the legitimacy of an .edu domain.

The online college is the Pickering Institute. The Internet company it is working with is LinkAdage.

If you go to the Pickering Institute domain at http://pi.edu, it now redirects to blogs.pi.edu. Perhaps this is now their only business. At least part of the criticism comes from the feeling by some that the Pickering Institute shouldn't even have a .edu address. (Unconfirmed by me, but it seems that it's not accredited by a qualified educational organization.)

Something that surprised me in researching this post is that Educause is the organization that manages .edu registrations. They say that Pickering received its approval for a .edu address before the current rules were strictly enforced (after October 2001), and so were "grandfathered in." This case is unique enough that it's not clear if renting out space on an .edu address violates the rules. Educause officials say they are investigating the practice.

Other bloggers are posting about this too and I found it interesting that the first post I found was on on a blog about Internet marketing. Is that what this is really about - marketing and branding?

Pickering is using the WordPress Multi-User tool to create an online blogging community just as some other colleges (and corporations) have done to offer their faculty/students a blogging home. Of course, colleges have not been charging $50 a month to, as LinkAdage says, “reach an education-minded audience that is difficult to reach with mass-market blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot.”

All this leads me to an educational issue larger than this case. How much legitimacy does an .edu domain really carry (beyond cachet)?

When you teach research and the use of Internet sites, do you teach students what domains like .org, .edu, .tv actually mean? I have done workshops on this topic and I was at first very surprised at the lack of information teachers had about domains. It would be sad to think that students are being taught that information on a .org site is better than a .com because the former is a "non-profit" or that sites that end with .edu are more educationally sound- because that's just not true.

If you teach at one of the larger colleges, you may have personal web space on the school's .edu domain. At NJIT, faculty are given space and the URl looks similar to this http://web.njit.edu/~elliot. That is the NJIT home page for Professor Norbert Elliot. But that tilde (the ~ hiding in the corner of your keyboard is the grapheme I learned about in Spanish I class) is very important.

Tildes used in URLs generally denote a personal website on a Unix-based server. Just because some faculty or staff member has web space on a prestigious university website doesn't make the content of that site any less likely to conatin errors than a .com site. (Tim would want me to mention that this comes from the use of the tilde in Unix shells where it indicates the current user's home directory - e.g., ~timkellers for the home directory of user timkellers or /home/timkellers.)

We really need to be teaching about the basics of top-level domains(TLD). For example, the domain .edu was created in 1985 and originally intended for educational institutions anywhere in the world. On April 24, 1985 cmu.edu, berkeley.edu, columbia.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, and ucla.edu became the first six registered domain names. ¹ However, only educational institutions in the United States really use this, and institutions outside the U.S. usually use their country code TLD. The University at Oxford, for example, is at http://www.ox.ac.uk. And there are "other uses" of the .edu domain already - such as Educause's own site or the Smithsonian Institution.

So, does this new use of the domain mean the end of educational sites as we (think) we know them? Probably not. Even the Pickering Institute via LinkAdage has some "rules" for renters: no porn-related blogs, blogs promoting gambling, blogs for prescription drugs, spam blogs or link farms are allowed. "Your blog must contain original content that teaches and educates readers," they say. Tim and I will be working on our application soon.