Program Sessions and Tracks
Content & Site Management
CSM1: Video Content Using Flash
Andy Mrozkowski, Mars Hill College
Video content is becoming more and more important to your institution. Just look at the meteoric rise of sites such as YouTube and Google Video to see how many users — particularly within the prospective student demographic — consume video-on-demand while online. While giving the participants ultimate freedom about what content to present, this one-hour presentation will focus on the methods of delivery, focusing on user-friendliness, bandwidth consumption issues and basic video editing using Sony Vegas Video and Flash software. Who should be interested in Flash for video? *Admissions marketing departments. *Directors of communications and institutional news offices. *Content creators for use on student and faculty profiles. *Fundraising sites. *Events.
This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 9:45 AM to 10:45 PM.
CSM2: From Idea to Roll Out: A Story about Managing a Diverse Online Presence
Chris Nixon, University of Arkansas
Thinking about implementing a content management system? There are a lot of potholes on the road to implementation. This session will discuss how the process at the University of Arkansas unfolded, including administration's realization we were behind the times, committee formation, research on CMS products, purchase and implementation, timelines and timeline revisions, staffing issues, and reassessing our assets.
This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM.
CSM3: Giving Effective Presentations 101
Rob Hornberger, Missouri State University
The more IT blends with the normal processes of an organization, the more techies are called on to perform non-techie duties. A growing common duty and responsibility of an IT employee is to give presentations. This requires a blend of effective communication skills, IT knowledge, and basic presentation skills. This session will cover some of the basic principles of communication and public speaking to help IT professionals prepare and deliver more effective presentations.
This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM.
CSM4: Migrating from a Custom-Built Content Management System to a Commercial Product: Lessons Learned
David DeMello, Cornell University,
Cornell University's School of Industrial & Labor Relations recently migrated their primary Web site from an in-house content management system to PaperThin's CommonSpot. This presentation will describe that process, what challenges we encountered, and what we have learned. We will briefly review the reasons for the move, which included the expense of maintaining a proprietary system vs. purchasing a supported solution, as well as the desire to commit to a standard campus-wide CMS solution to generate opportunities for collaboration and mutual support. We will talk about how the assumptions and features of the new tool informed our reevaluation and redesign of the site's structure and content, and we'll give some specific examples of how we handled problems like navigation, content syndication, preservation of standards-based design principles, reuse of design assets, ease of use for contributors, and distribution of labor and separation of concerns.
Examples will highlight cases where attempts to preserve old strategies in the new framework failed and why, as well as examples where perseverance paid off, as we pushed the product to do things it was never designed for and in the end making it a better product. We'll also discuss the SIG that was formed at Cornell to facilitate communication and collaboration between units who are using CommonSpot and the ways in which that has been helpful.
This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM.
CSM5: Individual Department Design Freedom Within a Strict CSS Campus Web Standard
Dawn Truelsen, California State University, Fresno
Cal State Fresno is no different than many universities, having a five-year-old Web standard with no consideration for accessibility and haphazard adherence to university branding requirements. Due to this outdated and out-of-control state of the campus Web identity, Fresno embarked on the development of a new campus Web standard aimed at addressing five main issues; consistent university branding, accessibility, W3C standards compliance, long-term maintainability, and design freedom so individual departments and programs to establish their own visual identity. After ten months, the university is now pilot-testing a new CSS-based Web standard where page structure and university branding is strictly controlled by accessing university-maintained CSS and SSI files, while the complete visual design is controlled locally by the Web developers of individual departments.
Macromedia Contribute is being used for content maintenance by department staff. As part of the campus Web standard, a new "Web Academy" is being launched to train individuals on all aspects of Web development and maintenance to support the new standard. In this showcase, we would like to share our new standard, its architecture, and implementation.
This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 24, from 4:15 PM to 4:45 PM.
CSM6: Connecting with Your Faculty and Staff: Assessing your HR Department's Web Presence
Claudia P. Jarrett, Snow College
Employees of higher education institutions deserve quality human resource (HR) Web services and functionality—a responsibility that is falling to HR departments to provide. Likewise, higher education HR departments could benefit from intranet usability and user satisfaction evaluation models for guidance in best practices in design, functionality, accessibility, conformity, opportunity, innovation, and (most importantly) customer service in the delivery of their broad and diversified HR services.
Building on two assessment instruments designed for e-commerce Internet sites, a study was done using seven higher education institutions in Utah. The purpose of the study was threefold: (1) to develop a usability model to evaluate HR intranet sites at Utah higher education institutions, (2) to determine if human resource professionals' evaluation of intranet usability was comparable to that of usability experts, and (3) to determine if satisfaction with HR intranet sites is consistent with usability at selected Utah higher education institutions.
The presentation will provide an overview of the procedures used in the study as well as a summary of the findings and conclusions based on an end user online satisfaction survey and heuristic evaluations from HR professionals and Web site usability experts used in this study.
This session is scheduled for Mon, Oct 23, from 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM.
CSM7: Back Door Redesign
Ann Vandor, University of Washington Business School
Whether your Web site covers an entire institution, a professional school, or an even smaller unit, the idea of a redesign can be daunting. Lack of resources and resistance to changing the status quo are of course formidable obstacles. But often, it's the clash between a Web professional and his or her desire to take the time to do things the right way and those who think that a redesign means merely a new look. Running a successful pilot project on a small section of your Web site can be a way to educate and get buy-in, as well as provide a potential model for changes across the whole site.
This session will cover a case study of the University of Washington Business School where we will complete a pilot project, MBA Web Site Renovation, by January 2007. Topics include: creating a project team, getting broad buy-in, conducting renovation activities (e.g. card sorting, interviews, usability testing), and reporting on success.
This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 8:15 AM to 9:15 AM.
CSM8: Workflow at Penn State
Benjamin Homan, The Pennsylvania State University
A workflow management system requires several components in order to manage a business process. We need a form to collect information. We need a roles repository, so that forms can be reviewed and approved by the correct person. We need a workflow engine to link forms, roles, and users, and to manage business processes from initial request to final approval. Forms are built using Java and JSP. A developer creates Web pages (JSPs) based on user specifications. The developer also creates a template or flow model in the workflow engine. The model defines all of the paths that a form must or can take in order to be reviewed and approved by all of the necessary people. The template/model is an XML document consisting of nodes and arrows to other nodes. At each node the developer defines which JSP and which role are needed to act on the form at that point in the approval process. The form data fields and the models' arrows and user choices are combined to build a role that is the next state of the form. Penn State uses LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) for role definition and user authorization. This presentation describes the definition and use of the workflow engine, roles, LDAP and JSPs, and finishes with a walk-through of a simple form through the approval process.
This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 9:45 AM to 10:45 AM.
CSM9: Understanding Fair Use
Scott Lenger, Duke University Law School
The purpose of fair use is to ensure that copyright law does not inhibit the transfer of ideas or creativity. But how do we appropriately implement fair use practices in such an open medium as the Web? Moreover, what additional freedoms and restrictions must be addressed in applying fair use for purposes of higher education? This presentation will begin with an overview of fair use in relation to the copyright act, followed by recommendations and examples of how to implement fair use guidelines towards digital and Web-based content. We will also consider how educational use fits into this equation. Lastly, several resources promoting the public domain, open source, and creative commons will be explored.
This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM.
CSM10: WebLion Project — Open Source Content Management for Higher Ed
Christian Vinten-Johansen, The Pennsylvania State University
WebLion is a project to provide Penn State an open source alternative for comprehensive Web content management and services. WebLion is a customized implementation of the Zope application framework with Plone for Web content management. Other tools and plug-in products are being planned for digital asset management, e-learning authoring environments, blogs and wikis, and other collaborative and educational tools. Integration with existing best-of-breed tools is also being explored. After the first year of the project, there are now more than 25 developers and designers from three colleges and a number of academic departments collaborating in a team environment to create designs, user interfaces, and applications for the CMS.
This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 1:30 PM to 2:30 PM.
CSM11: Mountain of Paperwork, Meet Your Nemesis!
David VanScott, University of Rochester
The only two constants in life are death and taxes. And when it comes to the arrival of new students on a campus, there's only one constant: paperwork. The thought of new students on any college campus is both an exciting and daunting prospect. Managing the deluge of forms, preference sheets, and information cards over the summer can create mountains of paperwork and use up valuable resources. What if there was a way to shave countless hours off the process?
The University of Rochester has just completed its third year using an in-house content management system to collect many of the necessary forms and paperwork from incoming students while interfacing with nearly half a dozen administrative offices. Orientation Online is an easy-to-use solution for both reducing paperwork and streamlining the information gathering process.
This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 2:45 PM to 3:15 PM.
CSM12: Getting Started with RSS
Michelle Tarby, Le Moyne College
You've heard the buzz, you've seen the orange XML icons, but have you wondered how your content can fit into an RSS feed? Get an overview of what an RSS feed is, how you can use your existing database structure and content to generate feeds, and get an idea of who is actually subscribing to these feeds by taking a peek under the hood of the feeds Le Moyne College is using and the code we're using to generate our content.
This session is scheduled for Tue, Oct 24, from 3:30 PM to 4:00 PM.
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