Or maybe we’re just waiting for some new PVC piping

This afternoon, we’ll be taking down GeorgetownVoice.com so we can launch a better, redesigned site later this week. (Vox Populi won’t be affected.)

As long as things go smoothly, we’ll be back with our revamped site and our first issue of the semester this Thursday!

Georgetown is inching ever closer to a revamped website.

Last time we checked in, they were collecting input from campus on what students and faculty wanted to see in the site’s first makeover in seven years.

Now, the Office of Communications has finished the “research and discovery phase” of their project to redesign the outdated, unavigable georgetown.edu, and has their hands on a potential outline for a the new site, which it posted on the Georgetown Website Redesign blog yesterday.

The plans, shown above, are encouraging. From the looks of things, either proposed home page will provide access to more different parts of the site than it currently does, advertising heretofore buried links like “Libraries,” “Our Schools,” “Next Admission Deadline,” “Latest Sports Scores,” and, ahem, “Make a Gift.”

For those of you titillated by Blue & Gray, it seems there will be several different ways to organize University news.

The new website isn’t perfect—one can still hold out hope that the Office of Communications will at least think about making the homepages of the different schools more uniform—but there’s only one thing that has Vox truly confused: is the text on the “Subpage” slide placeholder text, or is Jack the Bulldog really going to get a page equal in space and prominence to “Residence Life” and “Diversity on Campus”?

A mockup of The Georgetown Dish, less tabloid-y than its Huffington muse

Ask Georgetown resident Beth Solomon what she envisions for The Georgetown Dish and she’ll tell you she’s looking to create “a cross between a local Huffington Post and Washington Life Magazine.” Specifically, on December 16, she and her partners will launch a website that’ll provide you with all the photos and coverage of Georgetown social events, aggregated and original neighborhood news content, and local listings you’ll ever need.

The scope of the site sounds pretty ambitious. Solomon, a former reporter and speechwriter and current communications consultant, said The Georgetown Dish will be divided into three verticals:  ”The Scene” will cover social events in Georgetown. (She said the party she attended at Cafe Milano on Sunday for Kathleen Kennedy would be a good candidate for coverage).

“The Dish,” for which she already has several columnists lined up, will be for news and commentary, and “The Scoop” will have “informational and commercial listings,” like classifieds, sports schedules, and restaurant specials. Solomon also anticipates getting restaurant reviews from contributors and aggregating coverage “that’s already out there.”

Read the rest of this entry »

From left: Tate, Kaplan, and Redden

As she announced yesterday, after a semester of terrific blogging, Juliana Brint is leaving Vox to become managing editor of the Voice. I’ve been elected blog editor in her place (some of you may remember that I was editor for Spring Semester ’09).

I’m pleased to introduce Imani Tate and Hunter Kaplan, who will be joining me as assistant blog editors. Tate has been a member of the Voice‘s editorial board and a frequent blog contributor for the past semester; Kaplan is a former editorial board member and cover editor. Both are capable writers and reporters and will go a long way toward helping me fill Brint’s big shoes.

Let’s blog!

I’ll never let go, blog readers, I’ll never let go…

Well guys, it’s been quite the semester, but my time as Blog Editor is coming to an end.  Vox will be in the very capable and experienced hands of Molly Redden, who many of you will remember as last spring’s Blog Editor.

Before I leave to go back to the print edition as Managing Editor, though, let’s look back at some of the good times we’ve had this semester:

• We added an extra dose of madness to Midnight Madness
• We had fun with our personal assistants
• We saw into the future with the 2010 Campus Plan
• We helped the freshmen get acclimated to Georgetown

It’s been a great semester for Vox, and I hope that you all will keep reading and keep the comments coming!

The University’s Office of Communication has been working on a redesign of the University’s main website for a few months now, and they recently launched a blog to get feedback about georgetown.edu and issue updates about how the redesign is progressing.

According to the blog’s first post, the website redesign team has heard from over 80 members of the Georgetown community so far.  The main concerns they’ve expressed are that the new website needs to “deliver compelling content in a variety of formats; enhance functionality and use of multimedia; improve navigation, search functionality and user experience; and redesign mobile interfaces.”

The blog explains that this will be the first redesign in seven years, and the Office of Communications hopes to have the new website up in a year.

Georgetown has seen quite a few blogs come and go over the past year—Hoya Insider, FINS, Saxa Speak, The Georgetown Examiner, George The Third, et cetra—but Vox has high hopes for the newest GU-centric student blog, The Venus Flytrap.

Written by an anonymous junior in the College, The Venus Flytrap was started earlier this week and has already tackled classic topics like Chicken Finger Thursdays and SafeRides with aplomb and a lot of expletives.

To give you an idea of the author’s balls-out writing style, here are her thoughts on the new Hariri Building:

I walk in and BAM! It was like I went to real school, a school that cares whether or not our buildings look like Soviet compounds (I’M TALKING TO YOU MR LAUINGER ARCHITECT). Mr Hariri, be proud. As if b-school kids didn’t have enough to be excited about, what with every damn government bailout funding their future jobs (AHEM kid I know that sucks that’s going to work for Fannie Mae), now they have their OWN PERSONAL DEATH STAR.

Seriously, this building’s bricks are really just balled-up hundred dollar bills dyed to look different shades of grey. I’m pretty sure that those lights look so yellow because they’re emitting pure beams of gold and fairy dust. Realistically I know I need to leave Georgetown with an MRS degree since my College majors ain’t gonna help me get shit, so expect to see muh ass parked in the center of this glorious structure every damn night trying to lure an MSB boy into my venus fly trap.

Someday…

When it was announced that the new Gmail-run Hoyamail system wouldn’t include any of Google’s bells and whistles like GChat, Google Calendar and Google Docs, UIS Director Beth Ann Bergsmark said that a working group would be formed in late September or early October to look at possible additions.  But as of now, Bergsmark says, the working group has not yet been convened.

UIS has made some progress, though, by approaching Google to discuss its service capabilities and identifying certain organizations they want involved in the working group.  Bergsmark says UIS definitely wants representatives from GUSA, Interhall, the Office of Student Affairs and the Office of Communications to be involved.

Although these groups have been identified and contacted, the organizations haven’t yet identified who members to serve on the working group, according to Bergsmark.  She is hopeful that the working group can start meeting in the last week of classes, which is the first week of December.

“If we can get people during the first week of December that would be great, but it is the last week of classes and everybody will be busy. If not, we will try for the beginning of January when everybody gets back,” said Bergsmark.

UIS has not approached faculty members to serve on the working group.  Bergsmark said UIS has been focusing primarily on student input rather than faculty.  feedback because the first application the working group will focus on is Google Calendar.

The discussion of Google Docs, which would be used more for academics, will come later and will involve faculty.  For Bergsmark, with Google Docs there are some concerns about privacy and overlap with Blackboard, meaning longer deliberation would be needed.

While receiving your college e-mail address has long been a milestone for pre-frosh everywhere, a new study from Educuse suggests that college e-mail accounts may be on the way out.

Educuse’s “Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report” surveyed 930 colleges and universities about their IT practices and policies and found that about 10 percent of institutions are considering eliminating school-run e-mail accounts because so many students already have outside e-mail addresses.

That figure is significant increase from the findings of the 2004 version of the survey, in which only one to two percent of schools were thinking about doing away with e-mail accounts.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

After Robert Gallucci left us for the MacArthur Foundation last year, the School of Foreign Service has been hunting for a new Dean.  And it seems that Georgetown’s looking high and low—even taking the search to the internet!  Vox recently found an ad for the position on the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s job posting board.

Besides calling up the amusing mental image of Georgetown’s top administrators trolling the Internet for potential Dean candidates, the posting is also interesting in that it reveals some tidbits about the generally secretive Dean selection process.

The posting was put up on October 23rd, and says that “the School of Foreign Service search committee will proceed expeditiously and has already begun reviewing materials, but applications will be considered until the position is filled.”

Interested parties are instructed to send their nominations or “expressions of interest” to an email account run by executive search consulting firm Spencer Stuart.  Unfortunately the ad doesn’t list a salary or position description.