Centre Brain

Living Unbranded

Andy — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:36:33 +0000

Last night as I drifted off to sleep I was thinking about living my life “unbranded” – was this was even possible? hmmm??

I woke up this morning to the beeping of the alarm on my Casio watch. I staggered over to the bathroom and brushed my teeth with my Colgate toothbrush using Crest toothpaste. After some more necessary steps my morning routine was completed with the buttoning up of my Tommy Hilfiger shirt. I headed out to the kitchen grabbing my iPod Touch from my nightstand and proceeded to check my Gmail account – my only email was an offer from Starbucks.

Once in the kitchen I poured a bowl of Cheerios (multigrain of course) and just enough Natrel fine filtered milk to make those little O’s float. I sat down at the table to find my son had left his Tony Hawk Tech Deck skateboard ramp on the table – it made me smile.

After eating breakfast and reading my Bible (ESV) for a bit, I jumped back on my iPod to have a quick look through twitter and facebook – to catch up on life. I grabbed my BlackBerry from it’s charger and headed out to work. I plopped myself into the drivers seat of my Mazda when the thought returned – could I live my life unbranded?

I’ll have to get back to you on that one…

Where People Came To Our Website From – October 2009

Andy — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:48:42 +0000

People come to the Tyndale website in many different ways and from many different places. Some arrive through web searches, some from links on other websites – however they got here – we are glad they are here. Overall we had 147,215 pages viewed on our website in the month of October 2009.

Below is a highlight of some interesting places people came from.

Over 30,000 page views originated from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
School finding sites such as schoolfinder.com, gradschoolfinder.com, canadian-universities.net, campusstarter.com, careercruising.com, studyincanada.com, fairs.naccap.org, crosscanadasearch.com, checusout.ca, cccu.org… accounted for about 1,200 pageviews
Over 400 page views came from Seneca College – most of these would have come from http://www.senecac.on.ca/degreetransfer/guide/tyndale-university-college.html
357 page views came from links on Christian Careers Canada – a website run by Tyndale (www.christiancareerscanada.com)
Almost 300 page views came through facebook
ATS (ats.edu) brought 261 page views
Links on denominational websites such as paonl.ca and agcofcanada.com accounted for about 200 page views
Media sources such as Christian Herald, Christianity.ca, WDCX and Life 100.3 brought in over 300 page views
81 page views originated from the Ontario College of Teachers website (www.oct.ca)

New study finds no correlation between Facebook and lower grades

Andy — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:51:36 +0000

Last month it was reported that research from Ohio State University found a link between Facebook use and lower grades among college students. In their attempt to replicate the results of that study, researchers from Illinois-based Northwestern University found no evidence of Facebook use correlating with diminished academic performance. An examination of 3 existing data sets uncovered no significant negative relationship between GPAs and Facebook use. One of the study’s co-authors says more research with more nuanced data is needed to better understand how using of social networking sites may relate to academic performance.

» Read the article
Source: Academica Top 10 (May 11, 2009)
— http://www.academica.ca/node/7528

Research finds link between Facebook use and lower grades

Andy — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:59:45 +0000

Research finds link between Facebook use and lower grades: According to a new study from Ohio State University, college students with a Facebook account spend less time studying and have lower GPAs than students who are non-users. Researchers found that Facebook users in the study typically had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, while non-users had GPAs ranging from 3.5 to 4.0. Those with Facebook profiles said they averaged one to 5 hours a week studying, while those without accounts reported studying 11 to 15 hours per week. 79% of Facebook users participating in the study claimed the site did not have an impact on their academic performance. OSU Research News | Sunday Times

Source: Academica Top 10 (April 14, 2009)
— http://www.academica.ca/comment/reply/7333

I am Heading to Africa

Andy — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:45:36 +0000

I — along with a team from my church — will be heading to Africa on April 16th for a short term mission trip. We will be working with the Villages of Hope Africa in Kitwe Zambia installing/repairing a computer lab in a community school that serves over 700 kids. Some of these kids live right in the village orphanage (~170) while the majority come to the school from nearby shanty-towns.

First let me say — I have raised all my financial support! This is not a plea for financial help — but rather a plea for your prayers and a chance to answer the many questions I have been getting about my upcoming trip.

We do have a website put together if you would like more details about what we are doing. The site can be found at: www.mymission.ca/zambia

One of the things I am looking forward to the most is meeting 2 of our supported children. As a family we support 3 kids in Africa – 2 of those are in Zambia and 1 lives in the Village of Hope orphanage I am going to work at. The second attends the community school. I hope to meet both of these boys and will be bringing some special gifts for them.

I will be traveling from April 16th to May 3rd – I would deeply cherish your prayers for myself and my family while I am gone.

Highlights from E-expectations: Class of 2009

Andy — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:28:06 +0000

Noel-Levitz has recently released their latest E-expectations survey of 1,005 college-bound high school seniors in 2009. Rachael Reuben has written a great summary of the report which is available over at .eduGuru. If you would like to read the full report it is available on the Noel-Levitz website here.

Website: Deferred Launch

Andy — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:40:37 +0000

We (Tyndale Admissions & Marketing) have decided to defer the public launch of our new website to the week of July 1, 2009. The reasons for this change of the public launch date are:

1. The new public launch date will give us more time to carefully engage the thoughts and concerns of the Tyndale Community. This is especially related to the ongoing discussions concerning the nature of the institution and the proposed marketing language of the website.

2. The new launch time will enable us to have more content ready for the public launch. The various development phases of the website rebuild will not be delayed.

3. We will be able to have dispersed training for content managers to these times: June, September and October.

We want to reassure the Tyndale community that the new website will still be up and ready to impact the incoming class of Fall 2010.

Website Usability – and the award goes to…

Andy — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:45:19 +0000

Last Sunday night the 81st annual Academy Awards took place awarding Oscars to actors, writers, animators and other movie industry people. Personally — I could care less — I didn’t watch a second of it!

On the drive in this morning Phil and I were talking about awards shows and it got me thinking about industry awards — and more specifically website awards. There are lots of websites that are there only to showcase and/or judge other websites. EduStyle.net is a great example. Webmasters post there site designs for the community to critique and users can vote with a thumbs up or thumbs down. EduCheckup.com does video reviews of university websites — here is a review of the current tyndale.ca. Of course there is also the webpagesthatsuck.com awards — don’t want to win that one!

Now if Tyndale were to win an award — what would I want the award for? I do like our design, we have some pretty good copy. Most of our recent photos have been stunning. Our php and html code is clean and correct — what about awards for these? Well those are all fine and good — but the award I would cherish the most wold be an award for usability.

David Beyer of the Academica Group said it best when he said

“In order to make Tyndale’s web presence a success we must understand and follow website best practices and this key guiding principle — websites must answer the needs of the users first.”

We are in the midst of a complete rebuild of the Tyndale website. We have had lots of discussions around lots of topics — but none more important than our users and how they want to use our website. We have examined our information architecture and navigation — how do we make this more understandable to our users? We have looked at how our design templates may help the users find the information they are looking for. We have looked at using language that a user unfamiliar with our context may still understand. We are working on functionality that our users need and want to use.

Of course we are looking to have an attractive design — stimulating copy and photography — clean code — good website manageability… but our primary goal: answer the needs of the users first.

We will be unveiling the new website soon and ~~launching it to the public April 1st.~~ I hope that people on eduStyle.net will give it a thumbs up — but more importantly I hope that our current and future students — our alumni — our donors — our users — give it the thumbs up!

…and the award for website usability goes to…

Note: We have delayed the public launch of the new website for the following reasons:
1. The new public launch date will give us more time to carefully engage the thoughts and concerns of the Tyndale Community. This is especially related to the ongoing discussions concerning the nature of the institution and the proposed marketing language of the website.

2. The new launch time will enable us to have more content ready for the public launch. The various development phases of the website rebuild will not be delayed.

3. We will be able to have dispersed training for content managers to these times: June, September and October.

If you have any questions please let me know.

Danger on your Desktop – upcoming seminar

Andy — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 13:03:45 +0000

Danger on Your Desktop are seminars attempting to help parents understand the dangers that internet technologies may pose to their children and teens.

On March 3, 2009 I will be teaching this seminar at Scarborough Christian Academy from 7pm – 8pm. You can get more detail on the event here.

Would you like to know more about the Danger on Your Desktop seminars or download internet safety materials?

Stop Dreaming – Start Flying

Andy — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:23:33 +0000

I so want one of these! I’m gonna fly!

Click here to view the embedded video.