doteduguru

Matt Herzberger and Brad Ward are the creators of a nice new website called Blog High Ed.

Blog High Ed is a network of nineteen higher education blogs.  These blogs are pulled from webmasters, marketers, counselors, and consultants and this blog aggregate was created to pull the best blogs that Higher Education has to offer. 

.eduGuru was lucky enough to make the final cut!  I thought it might be interesting to ask the creators a few questions to find out a little more about them and their reasons for creating the site.  Here are the findings.  

1.  Do you have a little background information that you care to share?

Matt: I have been a web designer now close to 12 years and in Higher Ed for 8.  Being 27 it has been a good chunk of my life.  I grew up in Iowa and was very active in sports and always had a computer around. Here is more my professional bio.

Brad:  I started with web design at 13, when I bought HTML 4.0 for Dummies.  I ‘ve been working in Higher Ed for 4 years now, starting in  marketing as a student assistant for 2 years of my undergrad and then moving into a professional position after graduation.   I grew up in Illinois.  You can learn more about me at my personal site. 

2.  Why have you created this resource and what do you hope to accomplish with it?

Matt: It is actually something I have wanted to do for 2 years now. I just hadn’t found the right person to do it with me. I met Brad and we just decided to go for it. I think our goal is to create a great resource for Higher Ed people. Another function is to create a community where people are more active, post on other peoples sites and raise everyone’s level of knowledge. Who knows where it will go in the future I would kind of look at these as our found principles or mission.

Brad: When we started talking it was obvious that Matt was also passionate about Higher Ed, and I knew we could get it done.  We kept talking about it and realized there would be no perfect time to start on it, so we devoted ourselves to the project for a solid month, collaborating over lunches and many late nights. I’ve always been big on creating community, dating back to my R.A. days in the dorm, and just love to have others to bounce ideas off of and learn from.   We certainly want to add value to the higher ed blogosphere and be able to highlight the great work our peers are doing.

3. What is it that you like most about working in Web Development on Higher Education?

Matt: I love social media and as I tell people when I speak on the topic our audience is the most active demographic with social media. It’s like it’s meant to be LOL!

Brad: I am more on the marketing/social media side than web development, and I absolutely love the ever-changing nature of my job.  Being only 24, I am still young enough to have a good grasp of the target audience, but still old enough to talk about “before YouTube and Facebook.”

4. How would a Higher Education blog go about getting added, what is the selection process?

Well, it is pretty simple. Just go to the apply page.

What we are looking for is the cream of the crop; people that are motivated. We’re looking for people who have a passion for blogging on Higher Ed, spend time checking out other blogs, reading news stories, and responding to comments. We are not seeking to be an exclusive club that only lets the ‘cool kids’ in. However, we are looking to get people who have insightful blogs and will be around for the long haul. We don’t want a blog that hasn’t had a post in 2 years, or hasn’t been around for long. Most blogs don’t last past the first 4-6 months, so we would like to see a consistent feed of quality posts from our members.  As far as selection, we will gauge the blog and what type of readership it has, and how the author is adding value to the Higher Ed community.  We haven’t quite made decisions about how often/many blogs we will add, but we certainly don’t want to water down the community.

Personally I want to say thank you guys!  This is a wonderful creation and you should be very proud!  This is a wonderful resource and a fits a nice niche of organizing the growing Higher Education online community.