iammichael - tagged with conference

Presentation Notes from Google Wave in Higher Education

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 07:15:00 -0700

This week I talked to a group at the 2010 HELIX conference, sponsored by MOREnet. MOREnet is one of the high level networking authorities that provides connectivity services for educational entities in Missouri. My presentation discussed Google Wave’s place in the current and future plans of higher education. Below, you can find an outline of the notes and the Prezi used during the talk.

For more reading, I’ve tagged a few articles mentioned in, or related to the presentation:

http://www.delicious.com/tag/helix10-wave

Important takeaways:

Wave is a new communications medium, inspired by today’s information sharing. Wave is not social networking, not the next Twitter – it’s a tool for getting work done. It’s part of a long term game plan that continues for at least the next ten years. Buzz was the opposite of wave: it was launched in haste, for the short term, to capitalize on a market trend. It’s hard to innovate, even for Google The Past

Communication used to be very slow, very analog: phones, intercoms, mail. Classrooms have also changed from the old school: lectures, lots of face to face and small groups, libraries. You had to work at communication and education

Today

Today, communication is fast and easy: email, IM, forums, wikis, blogs Education answered this problem with the LMS

An imperfect solution to a complex problem Pleases some of the people some of the time, never all of the people all of the time. Frequently under or over utilized

The Future

Communication will be:

Multi-vector: Facebook, Twitter (Google Reader) Multi-channel: audio, video, images, text (Skype) Multi-party: Chatroulette (scary)

The future of the LMS is not in management, it’s in enhancement and augmentation.

Right now, wave is an empty tool, it’s not ready for our use yet. Relax, be patient, keep your eyes on the news/articles for now. The launch of wave threw people off. The timing was strange, and released in a very public manner for a tool that is still very alpha in nature. Accessibility is also the elephant in the room, they have a long way to go yet in that area, and we have to wait on that. Looking ahead

Watch for GMail and wave integration (which will be far better than the GMail/Buzz integration). Ubiquitous wave servers, like email servers (it’s been open sourced!). Applications built on top of the wave protocol: LES, project management, help desk… All with the goal of creating simple, flexible, coherent group communication.

Use wave to enable people

Note taking/playback Distance learning Group work Intercampus collaboration Course planning

This isn’t coming tomorrow…but you can begin to prepare and learn now.

Wow, Google Wave! Now what? on Prezi

Related posts:Security in October: Google Wave, Facebook, XSS The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communications: A Guide for Professionals in Higher Education eduWEB Presentation: Email Marketing for Higher Education

Presentation Notes from Google Wave in Higher Education

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 07:15:00 -0700

For more reading, I’ve tagged a few articles mentioned in, or related to the presentation:

http://www.delicious.com/tag/helix10-wave

Important takeaways:

Today

Today, communication is fast and easy: email, IM, forums, wikis, blogs Education answered this problem with the LMS

An imperfect solution to a complex problem Pleases some of the people some of the time, never all of the people all of the time. Frequently under or over utilized

The Future

Communication will be:

Multi-vector: Facebook, Twitter (Google Reader) Multi-channel: audio, video, images, text (Skype) Multi-party: Chatroulette (scary)

The future of the LMS is not in management, it’s in enhancement and augmentation.

Use wave to enable people

Note taking/playback Distance learning Group work Intercampus collaboration Course planning

This isn’t coming tomorrow…but you can begin to prepare and learn now.

Wow, Google Wave! Now what? on Prezi

The Great Keynote Meltdown of 2009

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:27:00 -0700

It all began at 11:59AM with a simple little post from @mherzber. Nothing major, just an observation about some visual displeasure with the first slide of the second keynote speaker’s Powerpoint on Tuesday. And then it got bad. Very bad. Then worse. And worse. And worse. Both the keynote AND the Twitter backchannel during it. Several people outside the conference caught on and have talked about it, and I thought it might be of value to provide a voice from someone who was there, and explain what happened, how, and why it’s not all bad.

So, some background. The keynote speaker was David Galper, of the failed (and mildly infamous) Ruckus service. That was the first sign that things were about to go wrong. I talked to several people the day before that were a little perplexed by the choice, and it was then that I connected the dots (sometimes I’m slow). I hadn’t read the description closely, so I hadn’t connected Galper and Ruckus right offhand. See, Ruckus got a bunch of VC, offered a service to colleges that allowed a way for students to download music legally (with DRM, and only if you used Windows), and then burned out six years later amid a storm of criticism. Turns out, the suspicion was well placed. If you haven’t already, you can go read all the backchannel (the fun starts at 11:59AM). I’ll warn you, it’s long, and it starts to get pretty acerbic about a half hour in. Now, here’s what I want to talk about. First off, I think people researching the incident need some context, because a lot of what has been said about it has come from people not at all related to the event. Two, let’s look at what happened. And last, what you can take away. First off, people who attend HighEdWeb aren’t a bunch of immature, angry, hatemongering lunatics, as some might call us (well, I’m a little crazy, but good crazy. Most of the time.). The very contrary, actually. I know some of the tweets that came through were from people who weren’t there, and they basically said they wouldn’t want to be affiliated with a group that would roast a speaker like that. The proportion of those roasting were small compared to the whole, so I hate that the lumping together has to take place. We have a HUGE tolerance for presentations. The first keynote is a prime example. Many of us disagreed with some of what Jared Spool had to say, but we respected him and appreciated his effort at putting together a thoughtful keynote, content aside. And sure, a few of us poked some fun at Jared too, but it was in good spirit. He was a good speaker, and showed us that he was ready for us. There was also an unfortunate incident where a fellow attendee had her laptop stolen, and the community came together and donated enough money for her to go out on the last day and buy a new one. There was even talk of trying to start up some kind of scholarship type fund to help out people next year who might not have the budget to come, but would benefit from the experience. We are extremely friendly, unlimitedly helpful, and very fun. This is why when things are so bad that it breaks all ability to cope, we push back. Our tolerance is high, and our expectations are such that not meeting them really means you’ve failed completely. It’s the difference between just saying “man, that was pretty bad, hope it’s better next year,” and “that was terrible, and the only way to deal with it is to do something that creates the word harshtag.” We also speak our minds. Being in higher ed means playing a lot of politics. Getting to be with a group of like minded people allows us to break free a little bit, and it’s refreshing being able to be truthful with people that understand you, because we were all pretty equally disappointed. That’s the environmental effect that we deal with, that others can’t really appreciate. So it’s not that we ask for a lot, we just ask for a couple important things. Now, what happened. As I mentioned, it started out simply enough. A few comments about how things seemed to be starting off sort of on the wrong foot. Then it got worse. Then things were off to the races. Believe me when I say that while the backchannel eventually got quite harsh, it was not out of line with respect to what was being viewed. The presentation was what many of us would call a fairly egregious breach of professional protocol on its own. It really was that bad: slides with paragraphs of text, poorly presented video with dated music that was too loud, comparisons and examples that were out of date, and a general feeling like it was a presentation developed five years ago for an audience that clearly had no clue what he would be talking about. But we get it, we’re there, we understand the channels; in this sense, we were well ahead of the keynote. Twitter allows two things to happen very well: mobs feed on themselves, and the slippery slope gets very steep and extremely slick. There’s also the snowballing analogy. Pick your poison. Bottom line, there was a lack of respect for the topic, a clear void in researching the audience, and just bad presentational ability. A perfect storm, if you will. And once the tweeting started, it simply became more fun to be in the stream than put up with the presentation. In a way, it was less about being snarky towards the speaker, and more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain. Personally, I feel worse for the HighEdWeb committee on this than the presenter, because I know it reflected poorly on the conference on the whole, and it puts them under a huge microscope for next year. I also would hate to have put them under any pressure as a result of something that they didn’t have control over. “You can’t stop the signal, Mal.” It brought attention to one negative, and ignored the mountains of positive associated with the conference, and that just plain sucks. I’ll be the first to step up and apologize, not for everything I said, but certainly one comment towards the end that might have went a bit far in retrospect (I’m also so very glad I resisted people’s requests for me to Kanye him). I think that it’s important to admit that several of us might have overstepped a professional line, but I think the event itself was not uncalled for and is an important example that audiences are no longer passive. You can’t just cram what you want down their throats without consequence. Presentational etiquette is changing along with audience expectations. Twitter is there, and people are going to use it, for good or for bad. One comment to me was that no one (at the keynote) came to his defense, no one was a voice of reason to calm down. While that may or may not have helped, the reason it didn’t happen was because there was nothing worth defending. And I do think that in a situation like this, constructive criticism becomes almost unhelpful. For that to work, there would need to be something worth salvaging, but in this case that just wasn’t there. One person mentioned later that for example, in TV, when things are going bad you just pull the plug. There’s also a certain expectation that comes with attending a conference that you pay for, where you are effectively paying for the keynote speaker. The standards are higher, and we expect you to step up, not down. In the tech world, you’re terribly exposed, and you’re expected to hit home runs all the time. If you can’t, there’s a lot of others that can. If you’ve lost your edge, it shows fast and blatantly. When it is so painfully obvious that you haven’t researched your audience, haven’t done your due diligence, then you might as well not bother, because we’re smart enough to see through the bull. All that aside, it excuses nothing, but only in the way that you wouldn’t excuse a tornado destroying a barn. It’s like its own force of nature at some point: destructive but naturally occurring. So what’s to learn? Many of the other blogs mentioned at the start have covered the basics, most of which is common sense. Know your audience, make connections, PREPARE. I won’t really rehash them in any detail, since the other blogs are worth reading too just for their information on being a prepared presenter. There’s two real simple rules though that one can apply: Don’t be dumb, and don’t suck. You aren’t untouchable on stage, and it no longer means you get instant credibility. The web is a savage, competitive field where Darwin rules. And I’m not saying that you can’t shop around the same presentation at several conferences. But you do need to keep it up to date (6 months is really pushing it for presentation age in this era), and you do need to make sure some relevance is tossed in so your audience feels like you know them. Not doing so is like a slap in the face to them, and now the audience can slap back. If you can’t put in the effort, or you aren’t good at it, then don’t do keynotes. I think from the administrative side, a careful vetting process needs to be applied to potential keynotes. There’s no shortage of people out there these days with impressive looking résumés and credentials, but that means a lot less than it used to. A fast preview of this guy’s Powerpoint would have revealed the potential trouble to come pretty easily. And it might not hurt for official Twitter accounts to step into the hashtag and provide a polite nudge to maybe cool it down a little. In the end, it has to be taken as a learning experience for everyone. What’s done is done, and the best thing you can do is learn from it and plow ahead. I hope that if and when David sees all the chatter (thus far it appears he has no Twitter account, yet) he can forgive the comments and use it as an opportunity to improve. He might be a great guy for all we know, he was just a crappy keynote for that particular time and place, and I hope he can find success in the future. I think that it was an important experience that was going to happen somewhere, someday, and it just happened to be HighEdWeb 2009, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen again somewhere else in the future. The important thing is that we take something away from it that can make us better for it in the future, and not let it lower us overall.

Related posts:OmniUpdate Users Conference Next WeekeduWEB 2009 ReflectionseduWEB 2009 in Chicago. Are you Ready?

Student Workers in Higher Ed Web Offices Research Results

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:00:00 -0700

I hope that everyone is having or has had a great time at HighEdWeb 2009 this year! If you couldn’t make it, hopefully we’ll see you next year. For those who missed it or would like to refer back to it, I wanted to make the information related to my session on student workers in web offices available for you to review and use. Below, you can find the Prezi that I used, as well as links to the back channel and full survey results. This presentation is based off of survey results from the beginning of 2009, with comments from both schools and students.

I’m releasing the Prezi and research data under a Creative Commons license (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike), so feel free to build on this information and make it more valuable.

Survey Results

Employer Responses Student Responses

[ Download Presentation ] Twitter Stream (#hew09mmp9)

photo credit: vancouverfilmschool

This work by Michael Fienen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on work released at doteduguru.com.

Welp, another week, another conference. Time to say goodbye to most of you for another few months. Next on my book is the Open Minds dotCMS user conference in February, but most of you won’t be at that. More pictures are up from the Discovery Center excursion last night. My Buddha that food was good. Except the dumplings on the 4th floor. Those were… unpleasantly textured.

Best of track awards went to Kyle James for APS8, Susan Evans and Joel Pattison in MMP8, Tony Dunn in SAC1, Paul Gilzow in TPR3, and Gabriel McGovern in UAD5. Darn, I was hoping to see @tsand’s session that I missed out on yesterday. I think I’ll hit TPR3 and SAC1. Tony’s is on picking a CMS (which we’ve already long since done, but hey, it’s @tonydunn), and Paul’s is the XSS scripting vulnerabilities session. Credit to Tony for the lolcat presentation. Dunn and the boys started off in 2003 with failure in research. Then continued the trend with more failure in purchasing in 2005. One might suggest he is a fail magnet. We shall see. Advice one: STAY AWAY FROM COLLAGE. It doesn’t help that Serena isn’t developing it anymore. They started over in 2007 with a win. You gotta know your own workflows in order to pick a CMS that matches your needs. They started the roll out this year. Make sure you learn what a CMS will and won’t do. Be realistic about the capabilities. Involve the right people in the decision making process. Identify the actual problems you are trying to solve. Know your content processes (mentioned above). A CMS is a tool. A hammer helps you drive a nail, but it won’t do it without you swinging it. “The more foolproof you make something, the better the fools get.” Involve you administrators, tech staff, and content contributors when selecting a system. Make sure that the problems that are being telegraphed to you are translating correctly, so that you can identify if a CMS can actually solve them. For instance, out of date content can possibly be helped through a CMS with reminders, the actual issue might be training, staffing, and caring related instead. Personal note, joking about Failblog images in the middle of Tony’s presentation results in projectile water. Classic. Make a list of initial criteria, and send to vendors. Also check out cmsmatrix.org. Then do an online demo and score features. The make it a base requirement to have a sandbox set up to test in. Hands on testing is not optional. Do some user training and get feedback on their work processes. Evaluate and approve. Update 11:01AM ~ Rocking out in the cross site scripting session now. XSS exploits are designed to play on the trust a browser has for information coming from a site. It is not an attack on your site or server, it’s an attack on your users. They made up just over 67% of all attacks in 2006. 88% of education sites have a high vulnerability problem. XSS attacks are generally the first step in a larger attack. They are platform independent, move fast, and can do everything from spam, to phishing, defacement, identity theft, etc. Educational sites are critical in these attacks because we have a higher general trust among users and search engines. 63% of users will hit an okay button on a popup even if they are told popups are fake. Three types of XSS: non-persistent or reflective (only active when a user is on a page and is social engineered into visiting, and requires the code to be in the URI), persistent or stored (put somewhere like a forum or social site), and local (attacks local files). We’ll take some looks at some demos now. There will be some videos from this session up at HighEdWeb later so you can watch those. For the record, we’re looking at stuff on NBC.com and Cornell. Fixing XSS: be paranoid, trust no one, and make many layers. Do input filtering and validation, do output encoding, intrusion detection system (http://php-ids.org/), and tidy the output. Tools: XSS-ME and Acunetix.

Day 3 of HighEdWeb (now with 50% less wit)

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:22:00 -0700

Sorry, it’s day 3 and I’m starting to drag a little bit. And I didn’t even drink at the Brew Co. last night. I did, however lose at pool. Scratch on the eight ball. How humiliating is that? I did get some of the new pictures posted to Flickr, and I’ll have some Flip videos up once I get home (wifi here not so robust for video uploads). We also broke the eduWeb sushi record and got what I counted to be 30 people into the place. That poor waitress. It was pretty good. The Crunchy Lobster roll I had was the biggest sushi roll I’ve ever eaten.

Starting out the morning in APS7, something on identity management (IM). Yes, I could have read the description, but that would require me to get out The Book of descriptions. Identity management is not an end to itself, and is a collection of processes, policies, and programs (what is with all the alliteration of the letter P around here). You must remain flexible, and know when to establish and describe an identity. I’m not totally lost, but I’m not totally following just yet. Circa 1998, the approach to IM was the idea of one giant database. Now, we have a lot more personal information needs, as well as unfunded mandates (need iTunes U support, other systems that require information not already indexed, etc). There’s also the problem that now we have to consider keeping accounts “forever.” To work on getting to a manageable solution, start with directory services (a la Active Directory/LDAP), build harvesters to aggregate information, add on CAS/Shibboleth. Now holy crap, we see a map of how SUNY is doing it, and it looks crazy involved. They are planning a simpler setup, but it still looks pretty complex technologically speaking. This is way more TPR minded in my opinion. Lots of acronyms flying around. In fact, it’s getting more complex the further we go. Unfortunately, none of this stuff is my responsibility, nor do I have any input on the matter, so really I’m not getting too much out of this. With better IM policies and management, you can simplify data freshness (keeping names sync’d in different systems when someone gets married), enforce global password policies, make account management more “self service” oriented. Facebook is a prime example of how much information is available, but permissioned in different ways, not to mention how it’s changing people’s expectations of directory related information. He’s also tying this in to single sign on. I want to make a point here: single sign on, to me, is about one thing - convenience. As far as security goes, it concerns me, only because we’re coming back around to putting things in a position where compromising one password compromises everything that identity can access. I’m not totally sure that that practice is the best thing for security yet. I’m all for IM, I just haven’t heard what seems yet like a nice balance between IM and security. Something OpenID-ish maybe. Update 10:01AM ~ Kyle, da Guru, is on deck in APS8 talking about Google Analytics. He’s a big nut on analytics data. Also just a big nut. He’s threatened us with 65 slides. I threatened him with decapitation. Consider how you are making decisions. Do you do it based on what makes sense, or what your boss tells you is needed. Keep in mind key performance indicators: sources, content, success, and users. Trying to type fast here. Determine what is important: student traffic, RSS subscriptions, video views, etc? Decide what you need to measure to determine success. Some misunderstood terms: pageviews, average time on site (can’t measure the last page they were on), bounce rate/exit rate (a bounce is always an exit, an exit is not always a bounce), traffic types. Plug: edurank.nucloud.com for ranking colleges. The 10/90 Rule: spend 10% of budget on tools, 90% on people. Google Analytics supports up to 100 profiles now, good for www plus subdomains. Also segment on and off campus traffic. Apply a default filter to everything like filtering everything to always be lowercase. This helps standardize data (unless you have case sensitive URIs). Update 10:26AM ~Tagging and tracking. http://doteduguru.com/hew/urlbuilder. You can force some tracking info into links using onClick events. Same for videos and other non-HTML media. Site Search is a great way to get keyword information on what people are looking for. Set up 404 error reports to analyze links in that need to be contacted to change links. Put dollar values on different actions: campus visits, information requests, etc to help you set up and track goals in a meaningful way. Tracking email, alumni looked at blogs, which were targeted at prospective students. Four rules of web analytics:

Always Be Testing Don’t Get Caught in Numbers, Look at Trends Setup a Schedule and Track Key Metrics Set Goals

Example goals: X campus visits scheduled via web a month, X viewbook downloads a month, lower bounce rate by X% on specific pages, get donor email campaign to generate $X, increase video exposure X%, promote and increase presence on social networking by X%. Update 11:02AM ~ Headed in to the SEO session now. Amazing people with my uber extension cord. First important note, most SEO optimization companies are total snake oil, which is completely true. SEO isn’t something that you do and then walk away from it. It has to be an ongoing practice that involves training in things like good writing, etc. SEO can be good to override undesirable results that might be coming up in search engines that which “true”, are far less flattering images of the university. Might not always be best to try to fight certain groups for Pay-per-click spots, as universities like the University of Phoenix, as an online institution, puts a lot of money behind it. Not that it’s always a bad idea, you just have to target the words right and pick good ones that you know you will rank well on. “Degree” or “Program” related terms have more than double over the past year, many nearing almost $20 per click. At the same time it’s becoming less effective as well. Bid at the end of the day or month, and grab more obscure phrases. They’ll show up less, but will actually be better targetted and should result in more conversions. Conversion rates on organic listings are generally higher, and result in 5x as many views. First 4 results in organic listings are above 80% views, and drop off rapidly thereafter. Google still has 71% of the market share. Update 11:25AM ~.edu sites naturally have an advantage over others in things like PageRank and other scoring systems because our pages are naturally more trusted and higher quality (relatively speaking, of course). Try to make sure you always include www or another subdomain in the paths, include trailing slasheds, avoid usage of things like index.html. Keep in mind that most search engines treat things like example.com and http://www.example.com as two different sites. Try to use nouns as links instead of verbs. Page title is the most important tool for improving page ratings. Keep it under 70 characters, and try to use key words and key phrases. It also serves as bookmark names, and tells people where they are. Also try to keep your site as flat as possible, avoid Flash, SilverLight, iframes, JavaScript navigation, etc. 50% of searches use 2 or 3 word combinations, so pages should be built with key phrases in mind. And don’t be afraid to customize navigation to better reflect how people search for things. Okay, packing in. Lunch time, then poster sessions, then special interest groups. Be sure to drop in on the lightning round table at the SIGs to hear me talk Twitter for five minutes. Update 1:26PM ~ HighEdWeb 2009 will be in Milwaukee, WI, October 4-7, for the record. Post lunch at Kyle Ford’s keynote. He’s one of the brains behind the increasingly popular Ning.com (for customized social networks) as the product manager and is talking about social networking. Ning gives people the power to create social networks about anything that they want. It’s the largest social network you’ve never heard of. They sacrifice their own brand exposure to help you reinforce your network. Lots of examples of groups from every corner of things you can imagine, including the HighEdWeb group. Classroom 2.0 is an example of a site that was developed to talk about Web 2.0 stuff in education, and also led to the development of education.ning.com. Neat idea: set up a network in a foreign language, and even invite people from that country to join to reinforce a language class. The old way of information access was learning about through the information, now it’s about learning potential through the community. It’s like a calculator in that it levels the playing field for basic math. It’s not that you don’t know it or can’t use it, it’s about using a tool to streamline skills. “Big is the New Small.” “Ambient Awareness.” Coined by Clive Thompson. The idea that small nuggets of information are unimportant, but when viewed as a collective of information, you see a cloud of stories and portraits. It’s like passive water cooler chat that you pick up through Facebook statuses, Twitter, etc. Update 1:39PM ~ Increasing control of student behavior on social networking sites. Do you think that’s right? Need to consider the smart way to address these problems. Sneak peak of the new iPhone interface for Ning, which will also be at home in WebKit with Google Android. Bill Joy: “Most of the smart people in the world don’t work for your company.” Using this idea to try and develop a system based on OpenSocial to let third parties contribute applications back to Ning. Update 2:42PM ~ Chris Mills of Opera is presenting a session on where web standards are going. Holy crap he’s English! And a drummer. He also does some kind of barely important web stuff by comparison. Standards are easy, implementing them is hard. The W3C stepped in to try and smooth things out. Opera is releasing the MAMA project soon that will be a search engine for technical data about pages, rather than the content on them. Page validation up to 4.13% from .71% in 2001. Only half of pages showing a W3C validation badge validate. Who doesn’t use standards: corporate developers, existing developers who don’t care, educators, and hobbyists. Vendor lock in is a serious problem that is caused if a bad project that costs a lot of money can’t easily be replaced for the sake of compliancy. Existing developers will take short cuts when not paid to take the extra care, so why should they put forth the effort? MS developers love Silverlight because it allows them to ignore standards and hide bad code made by .Net. Universities don’t teach standards. What can be done? Education is the main issue. You have to teach best practices. And training materials need to be improved. Lot’s of online tutorials are old or out of date, but people still find them and learn from them. This was the motivation behind http://www.opera.com/wsc. They are targeting the specific problem groups. “Accessibility is good for a company’s moral image.” Companies already love standards, look at their messages, language, stationary, letterhead, branding, etc. Poster sessions are next, which I won’t be blogging. Following that, we have special interest groups, where I’m doing a lightning round, so I probably won’t be on for that, either. So, if you don’t hear from me again today, Look for the last day tomorrow!

HighEdWeb Day 2: Electric Boogaloo

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:37:00 -0700

Good time last night, you totally missed out. I know there are possibly some incriminating pictures of me floating around in a wig with my Superman patch out for all to see. I got bested by the Guru himself at the Guitar Hero contest. Next year… I’m coming back Rocky style. For those of you following from here, my planned course is to hit UAD1, SAC2, APS3, TPR4, TPR5, TPR6, APS7, APS8, UAD9, UAD10.

For those not here, UAD1 is about how higher education is responding to accessibility needs. Answer for us: we’re not. Yet. I’m more concerned with making sure crap works at all, heh. Then 508 becomes my bedroom buddy. Terrill Thompson of U of Washington is presenting. Some fun stats: 600 million people in the world with disabilities, 52.5 million in the US, 1 million college students, and 3,025 complaints filed regarding disability related discrimination with the Department of Education. He did not make clear if these were stats related directly to disabilities impeding access to web sites, or if the complaints were web related. Update 8:47AM ~ Going over the basic issues of accessibility: no alt tags, fly out menus, page scaling, closed captioning, CAPTCHAs, etc. Note about CAPTCHAs, has anyone else noticed audio CAPTCHAs seem to be getting a lot harder lately too. Seems that way to me. Measuring outcomes - target higher ed. pages and measure policies, procedures, and promising practices. Too many P’s. Choose a measure of accessibility from among the 14 guidelines of the WCAG in their 3 priority checkpoints. Also Section 508 federal law based on WCAG Priority 1. Update 8:58AM ~ Resources for testing accessibility: Bobby (Watchfire), CynthiaSays (HiSoftware), Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE). FAE has 31 rules in 5 categories. Best success seems to be in HTML standards and scripting. Styling and text equivalents are also close around 50%. Navigation and orientation is craptacular (36.07%). We’re taking a look at the HighEdWeb home page to see how accessible it is. It is very nice. Good job guys. Terrill did a study of 7239 higher ed home pages in 162 countries, as well as 5281 governmental pages in 181 countries. They also did a manual assessment of 127 home pages over time in the Northwest US. This was over 6 months and included varying levels of training. Main improvements were in alt tags, forms, and skip navigation links. Three places that got worse: keyboard accessibility, noscript content, and CSS disabling. Those last two surprise me some. This change over those six areas was more pronounced with those that were trained, so the easy stuff got easier, but the hard stuff got harder. Update 9:15AM ~Note athenpro.org survey on Accessible Technology in Higher Education. Nice spread of location and college levels, though high concentration in the West with respect to US feedback. Roughly half have web accessibility policies in place. About 70% of people in the US have a person or office responsibly for accessibility. That in particular seems high, especially based on the sampling in the room currently. For accessibility when acquiring IT, 44% have a policy in the US. Was accessibility a concern when purchasing an LMS? 44% do in the US. So far, lots of stats, but little in the way of solutions or recommendations. My consideration is that sometimes you have to get features before getting it polished, otherwise you’d never get new stuff on a campus web site, or if it’s between having an inaccessible product or no product at all, sometimes you take what you can get. Being accessible shouldn’t mean short changing your whole community on tools. I’m not sure where the happy medium lies, and maybe that’s the point, is that it’s different everywhere. UW added a .5 FTE for accessibility and added a couple accessibility web sites, one public, one internal for resource building. They also held their own mini conference for campus stakeholders, which even included a couple vendors, to discuss how to tackle things. Update 9:57AM ~One free Pepsi later I am preparing for SAC2, on producing a style guide for a university. This is something I’m hoping to tackle before we get our new president sometime next year. Plus it will really help with twisting people’s arms to do things right. I just realized with the ton of short sessions today and tomorrow will result in fairly long blogs. I apologize. This session is presented by a guy named Jesse. I cannot his last name from here. We’re defining value, process, and content, or why, how, and what of a style guide. The main goal in consistency - improve professional image and legitimacy of content, as well as create predictability. Main reason people started developing style guides was because everyone was doing their own thing and to get everyone on the same page. This saves time and money, speeds up workflow by creating a baseline (this includes when you outsource work to contractors), and manages expectations. Style guides are good reinforcement when you need to tell people “no.” Shows decisions aren’t arbitrary, because they’re “in the style guide.” Swinburne University and San Diego State are good examples of style guides. Start with some info on how to do a corporate style guide, and adapt to your needs. Update 10:14AM ~ Step 1: Managerial buy in. Step 2: Form a committee (if you need to) Step 3: Determine the audience (the end user of the document) Step 4: Create the Content. Pick something like Chicago, AP, etc to base from. Choose the right platform. Work from your needs. Lots of emphasis in guides on colors and palettes, fonts, and accessibility, as well as logos and templates. Update 10:23AM ~ Step 5: Distribute it and get feedback. I am packing up and prepping for the next session now, APS3. See you there. Update 10:57AM ~ Web Services for Web Services is presented by Kevin Bischof and Kat Hollowell of Xavier. Their team is in IT, which they find beneficial, which is interesting because I found moving our team out of IT to be beneficial. Just goes to show you different places work different ways. Prioritize based on A, B, and C levels. So far, a lot of overview on just how Xavier works (CMS, analytics, site features), mostly basic info. They do, however, have a style guide, as a nod to the last session. The host a “web week” where they do training sessions all week (19 sessions) of anything from basic HTML to photo editing, etc. Neat idea, similar to the campus “conference” mentioned earlier. They also “certify” webmasters, an idea I’ve toyed with in the past. Update 11:23AM ~ Explaining the usage of a smarter 404 page. You should explain why a user landed there, and provide index links and search, and perhaps a resource to submit the 404. Xavier uses a “smart” 404 to help find where a user needs to go, first with redirects and a script to look for where they might have been going. Their 404 submission process is automated, and uses an AJAX button that does it anonymously, and submits to a 404 database. Then they do a lot using students for the cleanup. Since January of 2008, they’ve gotten error reports down to 40 or 50 a month from 500. Other ideas for what people are doing: tag clouds on search, popular searches, nightly link check. Overall, pretty light on the info, was hoping for more information on how they handle dev requests and such for departments, and manage workflow of projects. Asked the question, they are using SharePoint for project tracking. Okay, lunchtime. Be back later this afternoon. Update 12:55PM ~ Settling in for the keynote in the theatre. Sitting pretty much center of house, so my fancy extension cord fails me. The Twitter backchannel is up on the huge projector. I never looked so good as a huge avatar. Following the keynote, watch for me in TPR4, the [removed]void() session. The keynote is Jeffrey Veen, a smart web guy. The topic is along the lines of tiny actions and behaviors and how that relates to a collective and emerging patterns. We start in 1974, around the cultural end of the “60s”. Start of the environmental movement. Nixon and trusted advisor Elvis. KISS’s first album. AT&T breakup begins. Pong, the idea of controlling what is on the screen. IBM releases first hard drive, the Winchester (30ms seek time and 30MB storage), at roughly $100,000/GB. Google gives it out for about $0.15/GB per month. Tools for participation + scale of data. Update 1:22PM ~ Nice example of how the UI can impact the usability of a dataset, from a bunch of numbers to a table with labels, typography, and colorcoding. Mind the line between communication and decoration. Aside: The best presenters really know how to put a slideshow together. Veen is a good case in point. Going back to John Snow’s cholera research of 1854 as an example of data visualization as an example of demonstrating correlated fact. Also Charles Joseph Minard in the 1860s. The idea is to not make users think. Let the user find the story independent of the stats. More modern example is the London Underground tube system map. Not at all representative of the actual path trains take, but conveys the important information in a meaningful manner. Google Analytics data visualization in the trend charts inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark. Assign different visual cues to each dimension of your data, then remove everything that doesn’t tell the story of the data. Print item = an artifact you have control over. The web is a set of recommendations over how a page should look, but requires you giving up control. Example: CSS Zen Garden. Also consider RSS aggregators. Give the users the tools to interface with content and data the way they want, let them find their own story in the data. Update 1:44PM ~ Don’t try to determine what is important to people, let them decide. Create filters to add clarity for them. Not only do you not necessarily know the story in datasets ahead of time, you can’t necessarily predict how long it will run, or what new value will come from it later. Storytelling leads to discovery, visual cues leads to interactivity, and editing leads to filtering. “Math is easy. Design is hard.” Is it possible to do too much research, to a point that it gets in the way of innovation? Know yourself, then understand your users. Overall, excellent keynote, very fun to listen to, and very well assembled. In closing, recommending Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map. Also Edward Tufte (several books). Ben Fry’s Visualizing Data. All the info is up at http://www.veen.com/heweb08.pdf Update 2:13PM ~ In to TPR4 after indulging in a refreshing free Pepsi (#2), and swiping another one to take to the hotel room (#3). I know, I’m sneaky like a ninja. This session on avoiding [removed]void() is of particular interest to me, because our calendar is very JavaScript heavy, and working on the accessibility is a high priority for me. This is presented by Jason Pitoniak of RIT. Accessible content doesn’t just apply to people with disabilities. Think about mobile devices, smart devices, smaller screens, lack of capabilities, users with less experience, etc. “Code like it’s 1999,” then use progressive enhancement on the client side. Level the playing field with JS libraries. Ensure things like basic functionality exists, even if it isn’t great looking. For instance, on a form, enable all fields by default, filter on the server side, but use client side code to selectively disable fields. Libraries work to do things like eliminate browser irregularities from the get go. Additionally add support for “missing” events. Generally JS libraries just makes things easier. WAI-ARIA is trying to solve the two biggest issues with respect to accessibility: runtime changes that can’t be seen by assistive technologies, and users that don’t understand the intended meaning of objects on the page. This is done by telling the browser the intended markup which can be passed to the assistive technology and assigned role attributes. States then define the actual current status of an element (checked, unchecked, etc). I’m wondering how all these states and roles work with properly validated XHTML, since they seem to be adding in extra markup to tags. I’ll try to sneak in the question in a bit. ARIA based live regions are spaces on a page identified as likely to change when not currently focused. Keep in mind, ARIA is currently only in a draft state. FF3 does support it though, and he just answered my other question, it’s not supported in (X)HTML. This is really much more of an accessibility over with respect to ARIA more than anything else. Not technical propeller hatty enough for me. I thought we were actually going to go over examples of how to get around javascript linking. Oh well. Update 3:36PM ~ Coming up now, next TPR session: getting schooled on some jQuery. Jaclyn Whitehorn presenting. jQuery is an open source JavaScript library (as if you don’t know that). It gives you access to all the parts in the DOM of your pages. Some assorted uses: applying CSS, changing HTML, control behaviours, and implement AJAX. Good knowledge of CSS helps, as manipulating the DOM relies on it. Nice, simple examples of doing a hover effect on tables. Also taking a look at some plugins, such as Accordion. Keeping in mind that this stuff controls behavior only, not the presentation, which you still need to handle in CSS. Update 3:53PM ~Nice look at Lightbox. I’m a big fan of this myself. Just much nicer looking than showing someone a picture on a white page. Also, jQuery has a “roll your own AJAX” option. Plugins also help make using AJAX much easier. Regarding the UI plugin, it lets you download just the components you need, to avoid needless JS bloat from features you don’t need. Update 4:56PM ~ TPR6 is HTTP 201, all about user agents. It’s also Jason Woodward’s session. Rock on. Sadly, I didn’t got to HighEdWeb last year, so I missed HTTP 101. My loss. Anyway, first up, Wireshark is a nice little program for capturing HTTP header information. It’s available for Windows or OS X. HTTP is RESTful. This stands for “Representational State Transfer.” Actions are performed on Resources and each action is performed independently of other actions, without regard to the presence of the intermediaries between the application and the resource. This goes for anything, not just HTTP. Resources are what you identify with a URI. Actions are things like GET, POST, PUT, etc… Response codes identify as success, failure, etc… This idea of hitting HTTP for JSON type information is almost exactly what I want to do to get data out of our home grown portal into pages on the CMS. Except I’m doing that with XML. But the principle behind the execution is pretty much the same. We’re getting plenty in the way of examples interfacing with a web application over HTTP to process GETs and PUTs. Most all of this presentation was code examples. Very nice for a change. I was not aware that if you were writing an application you have to manually code in responses like 405 and 304. Dinner time. See all of you for sushi, everyone else, catch you tomorrow!