Gabriel is repeating his presentation again this morning (twice) as the best of track! Listening to him now and won’t offer any details. Just visit his info on the video interface we use at PCC.
Plane, Train, Bus, Minivan, Minivan, Springfield, MO
A delayed posting of our long trip from Portland to Springfield, Missouri. The short version:
- Morning of the lost dog; unrecognized forewarning of the day to come.
- 9:45am, Portland Airport.
- United Airlines check-in process is now completely dependent upon self check-in screens even at the ticket counter, a confusing and unorganized experience.
- Everyone frustrated, even the ticket agents. Are they still called that? Agents are left simply herding customers rather than providing a complete service like I’m sure they would prefer.
- $15 for a checked bag. Not an extra checked bag, $15 for your firsted checked bag.
- Three PCC staff gather at the gate.
- 11:00am, load the 737. We’re all in the same row.
- Uneventful flight from Portland to Denver.
- Layover for two hours.
- Curious, why aren’t we loading?
- Delayed appears at the boarding gate.
- Two hours later we finally make our way down to the runway-level boarding gate.
- Shooed back into the main terminal
- 5:45pm, informed our flight was cancelled.
- A line to learn our destiny.
- “Denver International Airport closes at 6pm on Saturday evenings.”
- All faces show disbelief.
- No more flights to our destination or even anywhere closer.
- Local man takes pictures of terminal, he’s never seen it so quiet. He thinks something is wrong.
- Flight to London is only plane leaving after 6pm.
- Our choice at this point was to take a hotel room for the night and get flights the next day.
- Arrival time would be late afternoon, after our workshops and setup time.
- Group of six contemplates renting a minivan.
- A 12 hour drive.
- Train ride to pick up luggage.
- Visit the rental car counters.
- Most car rental agencies also mostly closed after 6pm on Saturday.
- Only company represented on our first stop had no minivans available.
- Calls start to all rental agencies in the phonebook.
- Avis representative shows up.
- Avis has a vehicle available for drop-off in Springfield, MO.
- The six head to Avis shuttle bus to get minivan.
- Load up the minivan.
- GPS set. Pretty much a straight shot but none of us have been here.
- On the road with Karen at the wheel.
- A little trouble getting out of the parking lot.
- On the tollway.
- Miss exit, so much for GPS navigation system.
- Pay toll on exit.
- Turn around.
- Pay toll on entrance.
- 800 miles to go.
- One hour later.
- RPMs on minivan start jumping.
- Call Avis emergency number.
- After 6pm Saturday, must wait for tow truck to deliver new vehicle from Denver Airport.
- Limon, Colorado, is our stop.
- Denny’s for next two hours.
- Tow truck shows up.
- New van gets off tow truck.
- Unload Toyota van.
- Load Chevy van.
- Smaller van means luggage up front with us.
- On the road, Gabriel driving.
- Kansas!
- Rest area at mile 98.
- On the road, Luis driving.
- Salina!
- On the road, Tracy driving.
- Kansas City!
- Breakfast at McDonalds. When was the last time I ate at a McDonalds. Hunger wins.
- On the road, Luis driving.
- Fantastic Caverns? We can drive through it?
- Springfield!
- Hotel!
- Noon, workshops start in an hour.
- HighEdWeb 2008!!!
HighEdWeb 2008: Kyle Ford
Kyle Ford spoke on social networking and Ning. Great talk on where we’ve been and where we’re headed with social networks. I’ve played with Ning for a while and was glad to hear his take on Ning for educational purposes. Key point for Ning is that it isn’t necessarily a company providing the space for social networks but us. I’ve been impressed with, and Kyle reminded us, how Ning branding stays out of the way.
He noted that there are 500,000 Ning social networks with 30 new sites every minute. Exciting to find out that you can get the code for Ning and customize the platform. This expands greatly even what their API offers.
For education he recommended education.ning.com and classroom20.ning.com.
They are also making use of Google OpenSocial for integrating custom applications into Ning. This is starting Thursday with options such as Box.net integration for file sharing. In this case integration is more than simply a widget but expanded content directly in Ning.
Kyle was asked about FERPA issues and noted that they were still learning and evaluating issues. Also noted that there is currently no option for local hosting. I asked about pre-populating networks with accounts via the APIs. He states this is possible and, afterword, in a follow-up recommends checking out developer.ning.com.
HighEdWeb 2008: Search Engine Optimization
Ads
Go for quality traffic by bidding on less popular search phrases. You won’t get as many clicks but those that do click are better quality matches.
Adwords can be cheaper at end of day or month when others have spent their budget.
Results Page Behavior
Good heat map of Google search results page showing focus on top level pay per click and top of organic results. “The Golden Triangle” at the top-left.
First click selection on Google results takes 6.5 seconds after having read 4 to 5 listings. So real important to have a good title. On average 85% click on organic results, 72% click the first link of interest, and 25% read all listings.
Top three organic links are read then steady linear drop for the remainder of result links.
Search Engine Ranking Factors
- Number one thing to do to improve search results is to use keywords in the title tag. Title tag can be up to 70 characters and include organization name in title tag. We do this consistently and is effective. As I was recently bringing up in a meeting recently when defending our search capability for staff was the limited effectiveness of keywords and how we use the content to build good search results.
- Link popularity
- Anchor text of inbound link
- Age of site
- Link popularity for internal links
- Can use keywords for content you don’t want in the page and misspellings of common words ( I’m curious about the validity of this practice).
- Recommends depth of URL to be no more than two (/one/two/three/four).
Avoid
- image text
- iframes for displaying content
- media without text representations
Poynter Institute reports that readers are more willing to read into a page further than they are for print. The assumption is that the reader is more committed to the content they have spent time drilling down into.
HighEdWeb 2008
Gabriel is also here and posting. He, of course, is keeping much more up to date than me. I have some catching up to do.
HigherEdWeb 2008: Wiki+Shared Drive+ DocMgmt = Our Intranet
Discussion on Intranet need. Library looking to replace shared drive space full of documents. Of course these are almost completely unorganized. They were looking for a better collaborative tool.
They are using Confluence by Atlassian (makers of JIRA). I have also looked at Confluence which seems like a nice tool and it seems to have worked well for this presenter for an Intranet environment. For a wiki this is the solution I would look at when regarding the need for a simplified tool for the staff and faculty I need to consider.
They had considered other solutions like MediaWiki and Drupal. Confluence was implemented because the IT staff already was providing support for Confluence.
I would like a tool that expands beyond the tools that Confluence provides and am now looking at a solution that provides a wiki solution in combination with blog and social aspects as well. I’ll write separately of that investigation.
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/
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.
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.
- Tickr (Dipity for Flickr) for Portland Community College
- TimeTube (Dipity for YouTube) for Portland Community College
There is even Archaeologist, the Digg Dipity (just had to say that). Dipity succeeds in conglomerating diverse content in a visually informative manner.
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.
