HighEdWeb Wrapup
This was my third year at the HighEdWeb Conference — forth, if you count its earlier incarnation as WebDevShare in Indiana — and this was probably my best experience at the conference yet. This was partially due to the variety of the sessions; they were slightly more techie than last year, and a bigger focus on project management.
The slides from my presentation, “Driving a Hybrid: The Basics of Adobe AIR,” are located here. The presentation included a demonstration of using Dreamweaver and regular HTML, CSS, and Ajax to build a simple AIR application that displays news headlines. The files for that application can be downloaded here.
I also presented “Adobe Flex: Flash for Coders and Programmers” as part of the poster session. A smaller version of my poster can be downloaded here.
One of the biggest differences between this conference and previous years was the active Twitter backchannel. There were several of us who became Twitter buddies a few months before the conference, so it was cool to already know a little about each other before meeting in “real life” (and a little strange to hear people whispering, “Hey, is that cdulude? Yeah, I think so!”) Twitter was also very useful for things like meeting up for dinner or impromptu discussions. People also carried on discussions during sessions using Twitter — someone referred to it as the electronic version of passing notes. There was the occasional “This guy sure is boring!” but for the most part, discussions were fairly constructive. Or at least, fun.
Twitter use at this conference reminded me of one of the arguments for using online forums and discussion boards in a classroom setting: they encourage quieter students to participate who might feel intimidated during the regular in-person classes. Similarly, I felt that Twitter allowed yet another way for people to contribute to the conference instead of sitting passively by.
And finally, I did manage to live-blog some of the sessions:
- Keynote by Kyle Ford, director of product marketing at Ning, Inc.
- Test-Driven Development for Web Applications
- Agile Web Development
- Web Manager’s Roundtable
- Keynote by Jeffrey Veen, founding partner of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map
- Cross-Site Scripting: What is it, and how can you protect your site from becoming a victim?
- Have a Clutter-free Front Page: Using AJAX to Bring in Content on the Fly
- Social Networking: The Web Game Changer