Author: Luis Menchu

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HighEdWeb 2008: St. Louis Community College Design

Discussion on the development of a new web site for St. Louis Community College. There is discussion on a need for discovery. What do students want? They contracted with a vendor to perform research on needs and desires. There were also many discovery sessions internally with content contributors and staff.

As many have found, students want access to registration, resources, schedules, course management system (Blackboard) and the college catalog (I read this as meaning students want info on programs offered). Biggest issue discovered in research is that students can’t find what they’re looking for.

They had an Ad Hoc Web Advisory Committee looking at navigation, structure, organization, and prioritizing inclusions for the first phase, and learning how other institutions handle these needs. It was attempted to contract out content development but ran into trouble with vendor not understanding the intricacies of the college.  Currently they are beta testing of the new site internally, with students and prospective students.

Campus pages provide flavor for a campus and provide a separate newsroom in the separate news application. We could add our newsfeed on each campus web page reusing existing news content.

Mention of a home-grown continuing education registration component. I’ll have to look into this as we also struggle with this and haven’t seen a good model yet.

The focus is on the prospective student.

New site rolled out with 1,600 pages; started with 16,000 page site.

www.stlcc.edu

For presentation: www.stlcc.edu/presentations/

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Last of the Neanderthals

National Geographic is one of those magazines that I read, in general, cover to cover. In the most recent issue we learn more about the Last of the Neanderthals and, based upon the amazing synergy of science and art, get to view our best take of their appearance. Face to face with a Neanderthal female — Wilma.

Experts say that Neanderthals have been extinct for ages, but I am always wary of statements like this. I remember hearing long ago that dinosaurs were extinct. Now it seems that they are not quite extinct but live on via their chirping distant cousins.

Do I have any evidence to support the existence of Neanderthals or distant relations? Of course not, but I’d swear that I have met a few in my day. They are quite lovely people.

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Tyco Zero Gravity Cliffhangers

Memories of childhood excitement found me buying an old Tyco HO Slot Car set at a local garage sale. Five dollars later the Zero Gravity Cliffhangers with Nite-Glow set was mine!

This is one cool set. Zero gravity, cliffhangers, nite-glow. What is all this? We never had any of this fancy stuff growing up. Just oval track, cars, speed and excitement.

Anxiety was also mine waiting to see if a mostly complete set was to be found in the well-maintained box.

A few days later father and daughter had fun puzzling the track together. Piece by piece our anticipation grew. The track was complete (with a few overpass support pieces missing) and now together. Two complete cars are found in the box and look in workable order.

Cars go on the track. Feel the gritty motion of the controller, all seems well. Time to plug in.

We are off and racing. Spiral, cliff climb and descent, vertical loop and a straight-away in a tight layout.

Kids still love this stuff — girls and boys. Kids dropping by have to try it out. Of course the older, greener part of me worries that this is promoting gas guzzling muscle cars, but then I remember that I’m truly promoting re-use and that electric vehicles can be exciting. Here are a few pictures of our set.

Here is a similar set in action.

(Based on this video, I might need to adjust our track layout.)

Is all this silly? Of course, it is fun and can be therapeutic.

And when we’re done with it, I’m sure — after confirming on eBay — that there are others that would give this set more use in their home.

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Fall term

This morning is the start of fall term at PCC. The campuses are bursting with energy yet again.

In my part of this world, all is going well at this point. Our systems are usually stressed during the first week of a term and again on the first day of registration. It is looking like the beginning of fall term may be on par with the beginning of this past winter term — which saw usage in our student portal, MyPCC, grow 50% over last year’s numbers. This implies that winter term 2009 will see continued growth.

If our day holds out in MyPCC, our next big target date is November 19, the start of winter registration and historically our busiest day of the year. We still have some improvements to get in place before then which doesn’t give us a lot of time.

Here’s hoping for a busy, but quiet, rest of today.

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Dipity

Played around a little bit with Dipity tonight. Dipity is a pretty cool tool to develop an interactive timeline on topics of your choosing. The example below (cramped by my choices while playing with their advanced embedding options) includes entries from this blog and activity from my Pandora account.

I could also include events I choose to add to the topic directly, events from other related Dipity topics, any RSS feeds, Flickr account activity and more. The entries can be viewed in a timeline, a list, flipbook or geographically. My Dipity topic invites comments as does each event when viewing the details of the entry.

Here are some more samples of what can be done with Dipity. These are actually newly spawned services from the Dipity crew.

There is even Archaeologist, the Digg Dipity (just had to say that). Dipity succeeds in conglomerating diverse content in a visually informative manner.
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Young Lady

A wonderful night with our little girl as she transforms into a young lady. Crickets serenaded a summer evening of thoughtful discussion and flowing poetry. We learned more of how words mean much to her and how she is growing into a deep and loving person. Crickets, huddled parents, the big dipper, a pencil, paper and an open imagination.

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Oregon Symphony

Our favorite end of summer concert happened this past Thursday on the waterfront in Portland. A beautiful night for great music and fireworks. Music lovingly presented by the Portland Youth Philharmonic and the Oregon Symphony.

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Firefox 3

Patience pays off. Downloaded Firefox 3 this afternoon with no trouble. Install went smoothly and all is well. The “awesome bar” worked well since my open tabs before the upgrade did not get restored after the installation.

Memory usage, at a quick glance, looks better than Firefox 2. Random and most non-scientific comparison between Firefox 3 and IE 7 with same set of tabs open and both playing a TED video of BumpTop shows Firefox using slightly more memory but at least half the CPU of IE.

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BumpTop — the Fun Desktop

The BumpTop desktop resembles mine, just not sure that is a good thing. Tossing something across my desk doesn’t usually result in billiards style reactions. The mess gets worse or something breaks.

Enticing options are the many ways BumpTop allows me to easily sort my piles even while retaining some apparent history of its previous organized (or unorganized) state. I can also flag items or increase the size (and apparent desktop weight) of an item to signify importance. It would be cool to automatically associate item size to priority or an upcoming deadline. If I could also pile items such as email threads and add items to multiple piles without physically creating an additional document, BumpTop would provide all my organizational needs with a very enjoyable interface. The fun desktop.