This is the fouth session in the Marketing, Management, and Professional Development Track at HighEdWeb. Presented by:
- Bob Crisler, University of Nebraska
- Rachel Stewart, University of Iowa
- Doug Tschopp, Augustana College
- Luke Robinson, Calvin College
- Sri Giridharan, Seton Hall University
- Doug Ruschman, Xavier University
We talked about web/style policy guides. Policy guides, as well as their implementation and/enforcement, vary from institution to institution, if they exist at all.
How to account for social media? Xavier has its own social network for accepted students. Calvin picks up accounts on Flickr, Facebook, Flickr. If we keep adding social networks, who’s going to maintain them? Nebraska has its own social network, and is looking into Elgg for a social platform.
Some schools (such as Augustana) are shifting to Gmail for email service. Many have an email newsletter, at least for faculty/staff.
Calvin College has a lot of video production; on Vimeo, YouTube, etc. Xavier has BlueTube, where students can upload their own video (this was presented as a poster last year, if I remember correctly?) Alumni love seeing what students are doing on campus.
How do you handle rogue departments? Mention “talking to the chancellor.” It’s a big help to have allies in the upper levels of administration. U of Iowa College of Business used to be under Communications and IT, now wholly under IT.
Experiences with student workers seem to run the gamut.
This is the first general session at HighEdWeb.
1974 was the conceptual end of the 1960s. Since then, data storage has been commoditized and is much more accessible. More ools for participation + greater scale of data = now we’re surrounded by data. Numbers by themselves are meaningless; we need metadata and/or visualizations for it to make sense. Since people process information differently, it’s good to have different ways of presenting data. However, be careful about “over-decorating” it, or else the meaning is lost.
We looked at a visualization from 1854 mapping the cholera outbreak in London. The visualization narrowed the source of the disease to one contaminated pump. This empirical data helped dispel superstition and class discrimination. Another example is the London Underground map.
- Find a story in the data.
- Assign different visual cues to each dimension of the data.
- Remove everything that isn’t telling the story.
Many designers moved from print to web. Those who gave up control and were most willing to embrace change were the ones to transition best. CSS Zen Garden is a good example of this. Reading sites through RSS rather than a regular website is another. Enable users to find their own stories in the data.
You can use your data ton interact with your system — i.e., Trends in Google Reader.
We need to provide filters to enable clarity and find trends that the designers of data never imagined.
Shift has moved from:
- Storytelling -> Discovery
- Visual cues -> Interactivity
- Editing -> Filtering
Math is easy; design is hard.
We need to shift our perceptions on how students communicate. Teenagers have a much different idea of public vs. private. Older people things information is private until made public; teens think the reverse.
Know yourself — then understand the user.
This is the third session in the Technical: Propeller Hats Required Track at HighEdWeb. Presented by Paul Gilzow at the University of Missouri.
Cross-site scripting is an injection against your users, not your server. 88% of higher ed websites had vulnerabilities, many of these were cross-site scripting These programs trick users to going to the page owned by the attacker. Phishing. Identity theft. Collect emails for spamming. Platform independent. URI/JAR exploit — launch desktop application as you.
Why especially dangerous to Higher Ed? People trust higher ed sites. NC State study: Users unable to tell the difference between fake and real popups 63% of the time, even with warnings.
3 types:
- Non-persistant/reflective: Most common, only lasts and long as the user is there. Relies on social engineering.
- Persistant/stored: Data is stored externally, replayed every time people return. Very dangerous.
- Local: On user’s local machine. Less likely, but still dangerous.
Penetration of others’ websites: legal grey area. Illegal in some countries. We had a live demo where we hijacked NBC.com’s website.
What can we do to protect our applications? Be paranoid. Trust no one. Layers — don’t be the low-hanging fruit for hackers.
Techniques: Input filtering/blacklisting (can’t be your only defense). Input validation, even with dropdowns. Output encoding (for allowable characters, such as ampersands). Intrusion detection systems (e.g., PHPIDS). Tidy the output (e.g., HTML Purifier — only allows valid HTML, AntiSamy).
This is the second session in the Usability, Accessibility, and Design Track at HighEdWeb. Presented by Richard Orelup at Valparaiso University.
This presentation discussed the redesign of the Valpo Athletics website. Options included a “Content Puke” and Flash — but there were no Flash developers on staff, and it would make the site less searchable. The solution? Ajax, which allows you to grab data after the page is loaded. Ajax uses the XMLHttpRequest function for this. And contrary to popular opinion, it does not really need to use XML.
The benefits? Ajax is a buzzword, so it’s great for pitching to higher-ups. It allows you to create Flash-like interface without Flash. There are no extra plugins necessary. Also, unlike Flash, there is no rebuilding of SWFs; you can just make changes to a file. Ajax also allows a rich internet experience on devices like the iPhone, which suport Ajax, but not Flash.
Problems? Some people and devices don’t support JavaScript, or partially support it. So the site needs to gracefully degrade. That way, the site works for anti-JavaScript people/devices, although it might look a little strange.
Pick a framework — most browsers support it by default, and you can save time by not reinventing the wheel. And they make complex things simple.
Negatives of a framework: It can also make a lot of simple things complex (i.e., bare bones JavaScript stuff). Some frameworks are not good for some tasks. Frameworks also add to load time.
Lessons learned: Test in as many browsers and OS’s as possible. “Premature Ajaxulation:” People get excited about Ajax, but don’t know how to use it appropriately. Which leaves you open to SQL injections and cross-site scripting attacks.
This is the first session in the Applications and Standards Track at HighEdWeb. Presented by Lance Merker, CEO of OmniUpdate, Inc.
Social networking has been around since people gathered around the campfire. Social networking moved on to transportation, and later communications technologies. Now, digital communications are the big thing. There have been only 3 killer internet apps: Email, the web, social networks.
Today’s prospective freshmen: big on the internet based social networking. 49% of students use social networks to make new friends. What about email? Reports of the death of email are greatly exaggerated.
Social networks are the new killer app, and they’re not just web-based. They’re also both private and public — have to think about both; not just Facebook. What do social networks replace? Email. Chat. Blogs. Photo, video sharing. Although all of these are essentially rolled into many social network applications.
Public vs. Private. Facebook is public — personal pages and institutional pages. Institutional pages have fans events. Private social networks: Ning. Example of Ning sites: highedweb2008, uwebd. But some universities also ahve their own Ning sites (e.g., Texas Southern University, SUNY Oswego alumni). Why not just use Facebook? Some members might not be on those networks and/or want to share information, but they would want to be in touch with certain groups.
How can we use these technologies: Assign responsibility for site, participate, connect everything. RSS feeds: saturate everything. Social networks, portals, blogs, homepage, SMS text messaging. For example, add an RSS feed on your institution’s Facebook page. Add a Facebook/Ning badge to your website.