Just received the audience feedback from my 2008 HighEdWeb presentation and wanted to share. I thank everyone who attended. Got to love that last comment :)

Evaluation Summary

Comments

These are unedited

• This will help me to at least talk intelligently to the people who will actually do this.

• Great presentation!

• Very nice accessible plaer, lot of thought went into the development.

• Well received!

• Gabriel’s talk was really cool. A great talk on accessile Flash video.

• Would like to see this presentation again!

• I will definitely be sharing this information with our IT “media” guy. We don’t have tons of video yet but we’re working on it and I’m very interested in the use of a generic interface so that we spend our time on the video production NOT the web delivery.

• I’m in marketing, so definitely not technical. This was clearly geared more to technical people, but I would love to see a siilar workshop geared more to those as of us who are less technically savvy.

• Best presentation so far. Gabriel is very knowledgable and very giving of information and techniques. Presentation was extremely helpful. I will be implementing information ASAP.

• Very informative session and interesting! Going to look @ videos on my site again!

• Excellent!!!

• Awesome!

• Show your web site first or earlier. That way I can look at it as we go. It was good that he mentioned what was on the site so I didn’t have to take extensive notes.

• Nice that he provided example files!

• Excellent presnetation plus great resources and code online gives me nearly a plug-n-play solution.

• Me, I liked it. Flash all the way!

• Excellent. Thanks Gabriel!

• Wish had more time.

• I think thi was too technical fr UAD track, but not too technical for me

• Great Job!

• Most excellent.

• Good way to get started

• Well done.

• great job

• Thanks for sharing all of your source files!

• vey clear presentation friendly, communicative speaker

• Good Work!

• looks like I’ll just have to struggle with DragonSpeak….

• Too technical for my particular job description but very helpful in understanding the landscape of accessible video. Our institution has a similarly diverse of distance/infrastructure challenged constituency. Great ideas on accessibility and editabiity! -re distance learning. thanks!!

• Nicely done. Relevant.

• Great job explaining and illustrating the steps to take and the options you have available to consider when publishing an accessible video.

• a bit over my head, but a great presentation!

• Very knowledgable, charismatic, and well documented presentation with easy to follow slides.

• Great to have the presentation already available on his web site. good explanation of process and requirements.

• Very informative Liked it!

• Very God presentation

• Best presentation yet. Perfect balance and pacing.

• Nice nose ring!

Currently siting in the Springfield airport, flight is delayed already, but still should leave in time. Randall is on the same flight. And… Traci just showed up! Hurray!

The last few days have been really crazy. Unfortunately,  managing the recorders took a lot of time so I missed several of the sessions and most of the meals. The ones that I got to were really good and Kyle Ford’s keynote was inspiring.

The discovery center was also very cool. Just look at the smile on my face.

Oh, and I won “best of” for my track! Which was great, because I really wanted that red stapler. It was also fun to do the presentation twice more. There were some really good questions the second and third time around.

Update:

Back at home now. We made our connecting flight, but just barely.  Turns out that both Randall and Traci ended up stuck in Denver for the night…

Joel Doepker | Director of Public Relations and Communications, Ozarks Technical Community College

A fellow community college presenter!

His background was in TV news, photography and editing.

Key Partnerships:

• Administration (need buy in)
• Media services (former professionals)
• Web Services/IT

He shows a sample video that they made very recently when the governor came to visit. Very professionally produced. Events like that need to posted as quickly as possible. They posted it on their site, put it on facebook and sent a copy to the governor.

Each year they do a year in review. It contained many of the videos. They sent a copy out to the colleges constituents.

He conducts the interviews himself.

Real time for total production takes about 7 hour for 3 minutes. Longest time is editing, but transcripts also take a lot of time.

Media relations is also a big part of the job. Local TV stations love to get this kind of content. But, they need to trust the quality of the video. Make sure that you have those connections. Make it easy for then to link to you site and videos.

When doing student interviews, make sure you have some background (make sure that they are good students that you want to use as a representation).

News Releases in the Social Media Era
Matt Herzberger | Web Designer, Texas A&M University - College of Engineering

Not started yet, but his opening slide has (cc) on the bottom. I like this guy already. OK - here we go.

He shows the “old school” way of doing  things. Looks a lot like what we are doing now :(

• He highly reccomends WordPress and so do I.
• Social media press releases: www.socialmediarelease.org a good templat for doing modern press releases.
• Need to add links to digg, technorati, etc.

Make the news SEXY!

RSS - the plumbing that pulls it all together.

Your writers can be a problem if they are used to doing it the old-school way.

He leaves the comments open. Decreases barriers of entry. But, not everyone expect/knows that they have the ability to leave them. Make it obvious. I wonder if they have had any problems with racism, sexism and general internet asshats???

Getting images and multimedia can take a lot of work.

They use flip camcorders to grab video.

He shows a short video and then opens it up to comments. There are some really good comments.

Monica Martinez-Gallagher
Multimedia Technologist, Portland Community College

Monica was supposed to present yesterday. Unfortunatly she was stuck in Albany, so we switched her  to this morning. I feel a little bad for her. Not only because she was stranded, but also because the Tuesday morning sessions are a little sparse (I, for instance, ws out till 2am and barely made it in this morning).

So, I ended up rolling in to her presentation a little late. When I entered she was already showing a video demonstation.

Looks like the Oregon Community Colleges Island is up running and funded for at least the next year ($55,000).

• Recommends reading the starfish and the spider.
• Join second life educator’s list (SLED)
• Join RezEd on Ning
• Search for education events on Second life.

Or, What Happens When Your User-Agent Isn’t A Browser?
Jason Woodward | Assistant Director of IT, Administrative Computing, Cornell University

Uses wireshark to show what headers look like.

What is REST?

• Representational State Transfer
• Actions are performed independently of other actions.
• Do something to a resource and tell me if it worked.
• Demonstrates with a homemade restful program.
  • Sends info - just says 200OK (no extra data needed)
  • Gets info - it comes back. How it is stored is irrelevant.

The presentation is good, but way more technical then I ever could have expected. This is defanatly the most TPR session that I have been to in the TPR track.

Building Web Apps That Work Anywhere and Everywhere
Jason Pitoniak | Educational Technology Specialist, Rochester Institute of Technology

I had to sneak in a little late and the only seat left was near the front. Sorry everyone.

Code like it is 1999

• Use plain old X(HTML)
• Follow current standards
• make sure it works for everyone

Use progressive enhancement

• if JavaScript is available add enhancements.
• Form examples. Make sure that they can enter a date even if the JS calendar widget fails.

He uses jQuery and YUI libraries.

He says that document.ready can change the page fast enough that accessibility devices will read the final content.

WAI-ARIA: attemps to solve 2biggest issues when creating accessible JS.

• Helps notify device when the DOM is changed
• Gives better markup to objects (I am not sure what this means)
• Operating systems define “atomic widgets” (labels, fields, tabs, etc…) ARIA works to interperate the widgets.
  • He gives a good example about tabs. Normally a screen reader would only see a list.
  • Add “role” attribute to define widget (long list available)States
• States- define current status of an object.
  • example: aria-checked=”true”
  • stated very by role.
• Live region - section that are likely to change
  • polite , assertive, rude define the importance of interrupting what the screenreader is currently doing.

ARIA looks like the key to  notification in AJAX. Currently only supported in FF.

FireVox is a screen reader plugin for firefox! Cool!

Using Vox, Jason showed several examples that are available on the mozillia site.

Unfortunately, his computer seemed to be posessed and kept skiping around. There were also some mic issues and his laser pointer died. Regardless, it was a great presentation and infortmation that I was really curious about.

During lunch I went around and downloaded all of the recordings.

The ones that were captured, sound great - unforunatly there may have been problems with a few of the sessions. I won’t know until there is more time to take a closer listen.

UsaeKevin Bischof | Web Producer, Xavier University
Kat Hollowell | Web Designer, Xavier University

Web team is located in the “information resources” department. They find that this is working really well. hey now have 9 employees and 3 student interns.

They designate A, B and C level projects. Currently have dozens of prpjects (I didn’t get the exact number of each level)

Kevin recommends a load balancer (uses a great slide of an overloaded ship).

They are also a coldfusion shop

Recommend an analytics package.

165 active content manages (Campus sweet  CMS)

• Send out monthly news letters to these people.
• The even set up an event (58 attendees)
• gave out “webmaster” awards to those who took a class.

Used to take call to get projects started. Now they have request forms.

Published a web style guide. Typography, color, ect…

They are very proud of their 404 page:

• tell user why
• give some nav
• give a search option
• but… keep it simple
• He shows a lot of examples

The 404 page they created  has a button for the user to roport the broken page. This is a little confusing to me. Why not use serverlogs to automagically track the broken links? Or, give the user a chance to explain what they were looking for.

Someone in the crowd suggect an auomatic link checker. Each night it spiders the sites and then sends email to the content managers! Nice!

Also can send email if a site hasn’t been updated in 6months.

Using AJAX to Bring in Content on the Fly
Richard Orelup: Programming Czar, Valparaiso University

I was running around and entered a little late. But, it looks like he is still giving some background on ajax.

Can get a flash like interface  without plugins

• don’t need extra plugins
• good for programers who don’t understand timelines
• works well on the iPhone!

Negatives:

• Some devices don’t support javascript
• Some only  partially support it (even worse).

Graceful degradation is needed to make sure that all users can still use you site. Also important for robots.

“With great power come great responsibility” - If we can do anything, what should we do. Will users get confused or lost? Example - often ajax overrides the back button. This can really confuse users.

Pick a framework.

• They are using YUI - the framework from Yahoo.
• It passes off alot of responsibility to the framework creator.
• Lets you quickly jump in. Many examples will save you time.
• Make complex things really simple.

They use the animation scripts a lot.

Issues?

• Can make simple things more complex
• Some frameworks are good for particular things.
• Add to load time.
• Remember to test in all (as many as possible) browsers. The all have different versions of JavaScript Engines.

Selenium - plugin to script tests. Good for fast testing.