Archive for August, 2007
In my final post I would just like to provide some resources that are helpful as a higher ed web designer.
As much as higher ed at times may get a bad rap for being boring or dated, I think higher ed web development is a very exciting and rewarding field. I have been in this field for most all my career and I hope one of these day we will get the respect (pay) we deserve. Web is a very dynamic field that will only become more and more important over time in the marketing mix.
I would like to thank Shelley for the opportunity to speak to you all this month. If you would like to follow me further my personal / professional blog is at mattherzberger.com, where you can find presentations I have given under “speaking”. I also blog about higher ed web at Fuzzy Content. You can catch me in person this October when I present at HighEdWebDev in Rochester, NY. Thanks!!!
- Matt Herzberger -July Blogger
Previous Posts
August 30th, 2007
Watch this great TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson about how education drains creativity out of students. There are great ideas about a new concept of intelligence: an interactive intelligence that should really inform us as to how we design a total user experience for our campus communities. It is our job as educators (Robinson argues and I agree) to provide a space and time for the creative capacity of the student to flourish.
This video posted by a student from MICA demonstrates what I mean by the total user experience and creative capacity It also demonstrates how simple and childlike this pursuit can be. (Also check this post for a discussion of neoteny.) Note that Selina finds both the online experience of stars and the lack of stargazing at MICA inadequate. These are the only two aspects of her experience that we can in any way influence. What she does next is what we should always strive to provide: she creates her own stars, and recreates that experience via YouTube for the world to see. This is Selina’s creative capacity flourishing.
August 24th, 2007
Recently, I reviewed some notes I wrote back in January when I was pulling together ideas for the presentation I gave at this year’s Eduweb Conference and I found a post I made on my EDUCAUSE blog (http://connect.educause.edu/blog/tsimpson) at the same time:
“As I start to bounce some ideas around about how administrative systems (student systems, financial systems, etc.) are integrated into web redesign schemata for a conference paper due . . . soon (!), I am starting to see a trend. I currently sit on a committee that is reviewing web redesign proposals and this question of administrative integration has come up in each proposal.
I am struck by how many web vendors define “integration” very differently than I do. It would seem that web designers (and this was confirmed during a very good conference I attended last summer) are very concerned with making a site sticky and functional (both very good things) but maybe not as concerned with some of the less sticky but no less important tasks that users perform (e.g. generating a purchase order — not fun). My argument is that integration is not a series of touch points that port users to different places, but, rather, a true blending of the web experience and the (admittedly dull) tasks that administrative users perform.”
I find many of these things true today now that we are engaged in several web projects that really do have quite a bit of integration wrinkles to iron out. We are challenging ourselves, for example, to thin out our portal so that it eventually becomes invisible; deciding to take that approach is one thing (and not the easiest approach to sell, when push comes to shove), but executing it is quite another. We are facing the execution of that approach right now.
It is so exciting to be a part of projects that seek “a true blending of the web experience and the (admittedly dull) tasks that administrative users perform“, but it is quite a challenge to pull off. We will keep you all posted.
Any thoughts?
Ted Simpson
August Guest Blogger
Director of Administrative Systems
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu
August 15th, 2007
Susan Miltenberger (who presented with me at Eduweb) is at UX Week this week. Because that is far more interesting than what I am doing (and because she is my boss!) I am posting a blog entry from her:
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Today I’m attending Adaptive Path’s UX Week in Washington DC. Kevin Brooks from Motorola Labs gave an interesting presentation on storytelling. The comment I enjoyed most was about silence being the “space of creativity”. Brooks encouraged listeners to accept silence and to let creativity spark and unfold without trying to change it’s course by influencing the silence.
When I was in college, we spent one session of my foundation design class talking exploring the concept of negative space — this is the visual equivalent of silence. And I think it’s a concept that technologists and web designers often forget. So often we get caught up in maximizing the available real estate (a web page or the ten minutes we have to present to a committee) to deliver a story that we ignore the incredible value of silence. By building applications that use more negative spaces (silence) we could really improve our user experience — because we would be giving them a space to create and collaborate with us to develop the story.
One most brilliant uses of silence in visual design:
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August 13th, 2007
We are not so much into slogans and tag lines and such at MICA (especially when it comes to our technology). We typically call the thing what it is: “the web site”, “the portal”, “Blackboard”, “PeopleSoft”, etc. I am pretty comfortable doing that. This year and next, though, we are hammering out a slew of technology deliverables to our community. The idea is that they will be all (as much as we can get them) integrated. Calling them by their different names seems like a recipe for undermining that integration. I was glad, then, when our president, Fred Lazarus, said to us way back in December “you need to call this something — you need a name.” After a number of go-rounds, we (as an institution) came up with “MICA Connected”. It seems simple and a bit lame, maybe, but I really like it.
In real life, we are taking the name for what it is: we are connecting our various technologies to each other, we are connecting groups and individuals around campus to work on these projects, we are connecting to peer institutions for knowledge sharing. All of these connections are happening, though, so that we can improve the connections so critical to institutions of higher education: prospective student to admissions officer, student to faculty, services to students, alumni to MICA, and on and on.
While we do have our challenges, I haven’t seen many institutions this hopped up on a technology initiative (and I have traveled a lot in the last year). I believe that many at MICA are starting to see some of the capabilities of technology — not for the sake of using it, but truly for the sake of improving what we do here and how we do it. I think this is a killer time to work on technology at MICA and I am so glad to be a part of it.
Ted Simpson
August Guest Blogger
Director of Administrative Systems
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu
August 1st, 2007
My name is Ted Simpson. I work at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). While I am primarily tasked with administrative systems work, quite a bit of what I do falls within the scope of EduWeb. While blogging this month I hope to give you all a sense of MICA’s approach to technology and draw some general conclusions about how that may or may not apply to other situations. Please contact me if you have any questions or comments. I am looking forward to the month!
Thanks for reading.
Ted Simpson
August Guest Blogger
Director of Administrative Systems
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu
August 1st, 2007
