life with a little pizzazz
While at the HighEdWeb 2008 conference I enjoyed a personal tour of the beautiful carillon tower at Missouri State University. Not only did I get a tour, but was amongst the bells as the music rang out around me. The bells even rang out at my hands; I’m sure there are students wondering what happened just short of 1:00pm when the bells rang out a random set of notes. Quite an honor, quite an experience!
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.
A delayed posting of our long trip from Portland to Springfield, Missouri. The short version:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/