Here’s an easy way to access the presentations and conversations posted here during April.
Week of April 3, 2006

>> Teaching Master Index

Week of April 10, 2006

>> Blogging in Libraries
>> Podcasting in Libraries
>> Leveraging Web 2.0 Technologies
>> Issues in Libraries
>> Making Information Work Harder

Week of April 17, 2006

>> Admissions, Alumni Relations, and Communications and Marketing Master Index

Week of April 24, 2006

>> Websites and Web Development Master Index

Here’s the list of future Skypecasts on similar topics. We’re doing one tomorrow at 1 pm ET, 17:00 GMT. Here is a time converter in case you need one.

In the end, we posted 41 screencasts, podcasts and papers by 51 presenters. More than 12,000 visitors attended the month-long event on the Web, and an additional 1300 attended the two teleconferences hosted by CASE.

We now begin a process of evaluation and planning for HigherEd BlogCon 2007.

Among our questions:

– What key issues emerged that clearly merit further exploration?

– What steps might we take to increase the amount of direct interaction among presenters and attendees?

– How should next year’s event be organized?

To support a discussion of these issues, we’ve created a page in the HigherEd BlogCon wiki where all are invited to share ideas and observations. That’s at http://higheredblogcon.editme.com/.

Also, we’re inviting all section chairs and presenters to join a live online discussion the subject Friday, May 5th at 1 p.m. EDT.

If you’d like to participate in a long-running discussion of this topic with full access to the full transcript, please contact Dan Forbush at dan.forbush@profnet.com and he’ll add you to the BlogCon chat area as a member.

If you’d like to participate only in Friday’s live chat, you may join as a guest at https://blogcon.campfirenow.com/24c45.

Tags: higheredblogcon

For this week of HigherEd BlogCon, we’ll take a closer look at the technology powering these new tools and examine the development and implementation process for bringing institutions into the 2.0 era. It’s a diverse set of topics, ranging from the nuts and bolts of podcasts to a session covering one of the hottest development tools, Ruby on Rails.

I’d like to take a moment to thank this week’s presenters. They have created some veryinteresting content and presentations. I’d also like to thank Karine Joly and Rob Pongsajapan for their help in coming up with a plan and theme for this week.

-Mike Richwalsky, Section Chair

>> Monday, April 24, 2006

Legal Education Podcasting Project

John Mayer
Executive Director
Elmer Masters
Director of Internet Development

Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction/CALI

>> Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Student To-Do List RSS Feed: Combining Audience and Task Navigation

Matthew Winkel
The College of New Jersey

>> Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Using Web Traffic with a Kaizen Methodology

Tiffany Vincent
Academic Web Services

>> Thursday, April 27, 2006

Know Enough to be Dangerous: Tools for Taking Control of HTML and CSS

Steve Lawson
Colorado College

Bringing Audio to a Visual Medium: Podcasting News and Events

CASE Online Speaker Series
2:00-3:30 ET (Paid registration required.)

>> Friday, April 28, 2006

The Fast Track to Agile Web Apps: Best Practices for Higher Ed Web Development on Rails

Jason Garber
Eastern Mennonite University

Universities are dynamic places where supporting technology must keep pace with vigorous academic and student life. This presentation is a practical look at what it takes to build, deploy, and support web applications in record time using the best tools available today for source control, collaborative development, testing and deployment. Primarily I will demonstrate Ruby on Rails and why it is appropriate for development of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other social and collaborative applications, especially ones requiring AJAX enhancements. Our experiences with these technologies and frank assessments of their strengths and weaknesses will be generously sprinkled throughout.

View the presentation (24:41; .mov; Quicktime required).

Blogs have been hyped as “push-button publishing;” indeed, it is fairly simple for an educator, librarian, administrator or the like to set up his or her own blog with almost no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. But for those who do so, this lack of knowledge can quickly become limiting and frustrating when they want to customize their blog.

This session is designed to help you learn enough about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to feel comfortable making changes to your blogs and other web pages. It will work like a case study; we’ll start with a blog right “out of the box,” and use free tools like the Firefox Web Developer extension to customize and personalize the blog. In the process, you will gain confidence in making small changes to existing templates, preparing you for more extensive, adventurous changes in the future.

Additionally, this presentation has many links and pointers to further reading for those who either need more background on the fundamentals of HTML and CSS or who want to explore the ideas and techniques introduced in the session in greater depth.

Most of this presentation is text, but screencasts illustrate the projects.

View the presentation master page (HTML).

Get the .mp3 of the presentation

Spreadsheet mentioned in the .mp3

- Six sigma
- Kaizen
- TPM
- Lean
- TQM

All are various ways to improve the way an industry works. I first learned of Six Sigma from a friend who worked as an engineer for GE. Six Sigma is, at its simplest, a way to eliminate defects in a process. As a Web developer this had immense appeal. As I began researching Six Sigma, I found its sister methodology, Kaizen. Kaizen in Japanese literally means “improvement,” but the first definition I read of defined it as “continuous improvement.” In this presentation I will discuss ways to use Kaizen with Web traffic metrics to continuously improve a site.

The Excel spreadsheet
The metrics spreadsheet was designed so that you can input your monthly traffic statistics on the page labeled “Data.” (Use the IND DATA column to populate the sheets with the IND prefix.) YTD and YTD CHARTS are automatically generated charts showing your traffic changes over time.

Pertinent links:

Wikipedia Kaizen entry

Six Sigma, Kaizen and Lean

Comparison of Six Sigma and Kaizen

Web Analytics Demystified By Eric T. Peterson

Alexa (useful for doing research into other site’s statistics)
Eduweb

Overview

Higher education portals can offer targeted collections of links for students, faculty & staff, parents, visitors, and alumni. Most users start their portal experience with a time sensitive task to accomplish. An obvious important task in higher education is registering for courses. Students should not be expected to navigate by topic to “Academics” link and then to “Course Registration System.” Instead, a clear link labeled “Register for Courses” should be one click away during the registration period. A time sensitive navigation scheme organized by task can offer one click access to important resources throughout the semester.

The College of New Jersey provides an automated “To-Do List” on the “Resources for Students” page which enables our students to quickly navigate to clearly labeled tasks to accomplish (e.g. Calculate your GPA, Visit bookstore for buyback, Apply for federal Pin to complete FAFSA, Pay next student bill by Dec. 14). The “To-Do List” could be targeted to even more specific audiences and even personalized with current portal technology.

View the screencast.

Highlights

The “To-Do List” navigation concept is fairly simple. Instead of just providing permanent links to a web page of resources organized by topic (e.g. Academics) or an office home page (e.g. Information Technology), we can offer links directly to pages within our site so users can accomplish time sensitive tasks.

At the College of New Jersey, the inspiration for this navigation scheme came from analyzing search and web logs. Popular search terms could easily be tied to distinctive times during the semester. For example, our users searched for the Bookstore and Residence Hall Opening and Closing Schedule at the beginning and end of each semester. They searched for advising and registration information during the middle of the semester. Finally, the GPA Calculator was the most popular search term at end of the semester.

These items were entered into to simple database driven web application that includes fields for: title, link, start date and end date. The College of New Jersey uses this same system to manage news and events and RSS feeds.

Next Steps

Web-based applications are becoming easier to plug into higher education portals thanks open standards. This increase task-based content will require adaptive approaches to portal navigation and information architecture that focus on usability. An effective higher education portal will guide each user to complete specific tasks required to support the education process. Combining audience and task navigation with a “To-Do List” is an effective way to highlight navigation to important tasks that correspond with the academic calendar year. The “To-Do List” may be targeted to even more specific audiences and even personalized with current portal technology. A college senior could see items required for graduation or a new faculty member could view items required at specific times in the tenure process. Portal users could even add their own items and check off completed items on these personalized lists which they can then download to other browser based personal organizers and RSS aggregators.

Elmer Masters
Director of Internet Development
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction/CALI
Website: http://www.cali.org
Blog: http://www.content4.symphora.com/

In the Spring of 2006, Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) launched the Legal Education Podcasting Project where over 50 law faculty signed up to either (1) record their classes for their students or (2) create weekly summaries. In this presentation, we will demonstrate the tools that we developed to make this happen, the support issues we encountered and the reactions from both faculty and students (via the forums and from surveys conducted).

The main blogging tool we used is called Classcaster (www.classcaster.org) which we developed as a combination of Asterisk, pLog (now LifeType) and our own glue script so that faculty could either upload MP3s or make a telephone call and leave their podcast as a logn voice mail. (One faculty recorded a 3 hour lecture this way!).

We also provided all 50 faculty with their own Olympus WS-100 digital recorder which they used to record their courses and their summaries. We will talk about how we came to making that decision and the pluses and minuses of using digital recorders generally in classroom podcasting projects.

This presentation consists of the following components.

1) An 8 minute screencast that provides background about CALI and its project and mission. This was created seperately so that people who are interested can view it and those that are not interested can go on to the other presentation materials.
2) A 20 minute screencast about the Legal Education Podcasting Project.
3) A self-contained wiki file (created with Tiddlywiki) that lays out some of the technical issues with links and explanations about the Classcaster software that we developed in support of this project.

In addition, we have provided two PDFs that contain the Powerpoint slides that were used to create the screencasts: What is CALI; Legal Education Podcasting Project.