The web team started getting requests to post pages of images. Maintaining photo galleries Flikr style seemed a bit odd for an education site. How usefully would a separate page of random images be for a prospective Mathematics student? However, I do understand that there are times where a single, static image is not enough. So I created a simple slide show interface.
Mark A.Greenfield - U of Buffalo
This was a great one to end on. Mark, a very professional speaker, had put together a great presentation. He covered the changes from mosaic to google earth to the mobile browser. Then he began to look beyond.
One interesting argument covered was that the web page, once thought to be the smallest unit of the web, is being re-examined. RSS feeds, widgets and audio casting are allowing content to flow outside the page container. Just as how we now buy tracks, where we used to buy full albums.
Scott Lenger -Duke Law
Anything created after 1989 has automagic copyright applied to it. The fair use laws were enacted to protect the publics right to still use limited pieces of material without going to jail.
Scott spoke about DRM and the creative commons, but for the most part he tried to explain the fair use guideline. Unfortunately, the guidelines were intentionally ambiguous.
Missed breakfast.
Last night, after podcasting, were a series of poster presentations and special interest group meetings. Again, I had a good chance to speak with the conference organizers.
As the SIGs wore down, the buses had arrived to take us to the planned outing. The HighEdWebDev people had booked the local science museum for the night. It is like OMSI, only about 5 time bigger. There were catered food stations and free, open bars located throughout the exhibits on all five floors. The even booked the planetarium. In the darkened dome, the guide tried, yet failed to stump the drunken nerds on the names of the autumn star patterns.
After several hours, we arrived back at the hotel. I was all ready to go to bed, but when I stepped on the elevator it was full of people and beer headed up to the 25th floor. The organizers, reserved the presidential suite during the duration of the conference and everyone was headed that way…
Daniel Harvey, Eastern Illinois University
This one’s for Monica:
Easter IU not only supports podcasting for their instructors, but they have created an online CMS that allows instructors to to maintain their own feeds. It was scripted in PHP - allows for mp3s and most mp4 codacs. When I talked to him after the session, he agreed to send me a zip of the code base.
Don Albrecht - U of Rochester Medical Center
Polling was so good, that I decided to stick around for the next propeller hat presentation on SGV. Scaler vector graphics, in my opinion are the next step in web presentation. This W3C backed open-source implementation of Flash is created through XLM and play well with both CSS and JavaScript. However, like most good things, microsoft has been slow to implement the standard.
He showed a great graphical example of Edward Tuff’s sparklines created with SVG. Even more examples could have been good- some of the crowd began to nod off after 20 minutes of XML.
Daniel Frommelt - U of Wisconsin, Platteville
Snuck over to the TPR track to hear about polling and feedback from a techie’s perspective. Dan was a very blunt, but impressive speaker and held the crowds attention the entire time. Even though he thought that polling was a waste of time, he found good was to set up an impressive system.
What was the most importing thing that he learned. Filter the comment section before showing the results to the administration.
Cal Anderson - Truckee Meadows CC
Finally, someone else from a CC. He being by running over the basics of PDFs (static vs. dynamic vs. interactive), but quickly ramps it up. Looks like the view version of acrobat pro includes an extra app called “Designer”. It makes creating PDF forms much more exact. Pixel locations, extra input types, expanding text boxes, etc.
Oh, and the non-pro version of acrobat 8 (due out next month) allows users to save data! Very nice.
Just had the chance to speak with Doug Tschopp, the organizing committee chair for the conference.He was great to talk to and offered up a lot of information about the HighEdWebDev. Really good guy. Got a card and I plan to pick his brain a bit more later.
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Stephanie Leary - Texas A&M
Another really great one. The room was packed and I learned quite a bit. Although I had just installed one, it was great to see all of the options and plugins in use. There were also some great non-standard uses presented:
Press releases (James?)
In the press - organizing media trackbacks
Department blogs (for internal or external use)
Sorry about the delay in updates. I have been very, very busy. Between networking, listening, note taking and blogging, well … I swear it had nothing to do with the heavy drinking last night :)
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Ann Vandor - UW Business School
The tag line of the presentation was: “Survival through slow change” and honestly this was very usefull. After several projects going up in flames due to just political reasons, she began a new set of tactics.
1)Choose important project.
2)Get backing/obtain priority
3)Market the project