Interview with Geert Hofstede and some followups of last week

Yesterday I recorded an interview with Geert Hofstede, an icon at Maastricht University. The interview was quiet good and will be uploaded here soon and presented at the upcoming alumni event. Some questions from last week are still open and I try to discuss them brief in this post.

First of all, on the right hand navigation at the bottom I added a list of links concerning the wish of some departments to get more information about social media. They will not answer all questions but should suffice at the moment. For the future I hope we find someone who can give an in house training in the use of social media. To freshen up the post here is a video on what to think about before using Twitter in your marketing strategy.



the Another question ask was how to integrate polls, forms and other interactive elements into the website. Contact Forms can be realized in GX. Polls like the one you see on top of the right hand navigation do not. Another way to create forms is by using a free service offered by Google. Microsoft's rival introduced Google Documents quiet a while ago and updates it regularly. It is for free and the only thing you need to do is to register. A more recent update includes a service called google forms. It allows you to create forms that one can embed into the website using the PARAGRAPH element. (I will explain this in one of the videos in the future). The input from users are stored in an google excel file. It is also a good solution to conduct online surveys. But since GX allows for this function as well there is no real need for it. For an example see the form made by postgraduate education here.

For polls GX offers a solution that I dont see implemented anywhere yet. But it is there. Another solution for polls are services like polldady. If you want to know more about your Twitter follower you might want to use Twtpoll. And since the more choice you have the more freedom you get here is a list with polling services you can use and most of them are for free.

The topic of weblogs came up for the IRO office. What they want is to give incoming students the possibility to blog about their experience. Solutions for this vary between the poles of being able to control the message and embracing the chaos. Hosting a wordpress multiple user account on our own facilities or using a hosted version are on the table. Asking the students if they already write a blog another one. After a good night of sleep I think that the solution that justifies the costs and results is the following: We open a free wordpress account and create for every student a user profile. Somebody in the IRO office gets editor rights and manages the blog. In this way we can maintain control over the look and feel of the blog and content while keeping the administrative workload at a minimum. Blogger dot com does not allow for multible users and other blogging platforms don't offer the intuitive User Interface wordpress has.