Web « IT Community

Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

The foray into Facebook

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

The April issue of IT’s Bits newsletter is out today. It highlights the UM English department’s experiment with Facebook to improve communication with students, and underscores potential pitfalls facing official University departments that choose to use non-UM systems like Facebook.

The English department, in collaboration with UM legal counsel and Information Technology, drafted a Facebook best practices document to help guide other UM departments. The guide was developed prior to Facebook’s recent upgrade, so it already needs modification. Your thoughts are welcome.

Posted in Academic, Administrative, Communication, Innovation, Leadership and Management, Policies, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

Web metaphors galore

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

A campus administrator has invited me to consult on a web project. Now I’m pondering what a 2009 model website should be. What it should do. What others should be able to do with it.

But my ideas are of little value if the administrator’s concepts of the web are different from mine. And they will be. We’re both over 20. And anyone over age 20 has too many ways to think about the web for us all be on the same web page.

By my count, we have created at least 10 distinct and increasingly sophisticated metaphors for the web in 15 years. Moore’s Law apparently applies to technology metaphors too.

Metaphors help us understand something new and unfamiliar in terms of something we already know. But so many competing metaphors conflict and confound. They help us understand what the web is, but they also limit our ability to imagine what the web could be.

The web metaphor inventory in more-or-less chronological order:

Web as a spider’s web

Thus the name. (If you still think of the web as a spider’s web, you might consider investing in some CD’s from the Video Professor)

Web as a transportation system

One route on the information superhighway. (This metaphor has apparently been relegated to Al Gore’s lock box)

Web as real estate

“We developed a new home page on our web site.”
“Our web address is . . . “

Web as a library

A collection of knowledge organized, categorized, indexed, and tagged with metadata.
We browse the web as we browse books on a shelf.

Web as paper/printing

We publish web pages. (The fact that a single web page doesn’t always have the same content vexes those stuck on this metaphor. Damn you Ajax and DHTML).
We (used to) post notes on bulletin boards.
We read websites called newspapers online (Perhaps, not for long. This is sad only for those of us over 20).

Web as telephone

We call up a webpage.
We communicate one-to-one using various technologies.
Voice over IP (VOIP).
Directory services.
21^st century twist: Telephone as web.

Web as TV

WebTV.
Broadcast.
Video.
Multimedia.
Channels.
Surfing the web (A hand-me-down metaphor from TV’s “channel surfing”).

Web as ecosystem

Organisms interacting together within a habitat.
Interdependence.
Evolution.

Web as global village

Social and political activity without geographical or geopolitical boundaries.

Web as software

Web 2.0.

Wait a second. Web as software? That’s not a metaphor. The web literally IS software.

Apparently no one under 20 needs a metaphor to understand the web. Hmmm.

Web as generation gap

Posted in Innovation, Leadership and Management, Web | No Comments »

Facebook connects incoming students

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

Jed Liston, UM’s Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services, was convinced that a social network could help UM’s recruitment and retention efforts. The question was whether to develop a UM social network, or go where students were already gathered — Facebook.

Focus groups initially told Liston to stay out of Facebook. But things change fast in the online culture.

“We were almost to the point of launching a third-party social network,” he says. “We did one last focus group and asked students if they would jump on our site. Everybody said they wouldn’t log off Facebook to visit it. In a relatively short time, perceptions had changed. Now it was OK to have institutional pages on Facebook.”

So Enrollment Services created a “closed” Facebook group for the incoming class. They sent postcards to applicants and admitted students inviting them to join.

“We told them they would only be talking to their fellow classmates, and that we wanted this to be a place for them to converse,” Liston says. “It exploded. In the first four weeks, we had more than 600 people join. We only have about 1,900 new freshmen, so that was pretty good.”

Liston and two staff employees are group members, but they mostly just “listen.” They only enter the conversation to correct misinformation.

“The idea is to let them build a community of their own,” Liston says. “It’s nothing that isn’t going to happen the first week in study lounges and around campus-that exchange of getting to know one another.”

Liston acknowledges the risk of exposing uncommitted applicants to unfiltered dialogue. But so far the experiment appears to be successful.

“We’ve found that these students really started sealing the deal for themselves,” Liston says. One group decided to all meet at the Grizzly statue on the third day of classes. They had already developed friendships. That makes or breaks a person staying here, if they feel connected.”

Posted in Innovation, People, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

Mapping without boundaries

Monday, January 26th, 2009

In IT we have been working to create a mapping application for The University of Montana. And today we’ve released it to the public. map.umt.edu will take you to the new interactive campus map. It should act a lot like google maps but in addition you can toggle on different themes which you can find just to the right of the map.

Map Image

We started with very few requirements.

Make it better than the black and white PDF that is the current map.
You can’t buy any software to make the map.
And you’ve got some AutoCad files and some imagery from 2006

My partner in crime, Jamie, had read an article about creating interactive maps on the web. And having just graduated with a degree in Geographical Information Systems he was intrigued. We started working on an old development server we had and installed Ubuntu Server on it and started hacking away attempting to get all of the pieces in place. It took a lot of tinkering with different products, and arguing over the best way to implement and set up this application, but finally after trying out several different rendering engines, trying it with and without caching the tiles and tweeking the JavaScript we had something we could show to the people signing our paychecks. Since then it seems it’s been non stop development and feature implementations and UI meetings and reworks and polishes and on and on. The limitations of this tool seem to be non-existent.

This kind of application has so many uses for Higher Ed institution or even for a non-profit. It gives you so much flexibility, by allowing you to give your users spatial representations. Small scale representations of campuses or large scale representations of states or countries. Show your users exactly What you want to, and How you want to. Choose your own features show overlays to depict coverage areas in relation to different points or routes. The map we produced was taken from Auto-Cad data and pulled into arcGIS and stretched over ortho-photography. In our case we (and by we I mean Jamie) had to create and clean up the shape files that were needed to produce the map. We did a little test and were able to take files from the states web site and create a new map file, so we were running multiple maps going at once. Of course the unstyled map wasn’t much to look at it but it proves that it can be done, and with a little work those maps could be brought to life.

One last note. All of the photos we’ve used on the map we’ve found on flickr and gotten permission from their owners. So this is truly a community effort

Posted in Innovation, Media, Projects, Web | No Comments »

CAS for celebration

Monday, December 22nd, 2008

On Dec. 29^th, Blackboard will join the suite of UM web systems that are “CASified.”

CAS-Central Authentication Service-is the front door to a growing number of secure UM web services, including OneStop, the Mansfield Library system, iTunes U and now Blackboard. Your NetID and password unlocks that front door and gives you access to all of the systems inside.

The single point of entry, or “single sign-on,” provided by CAS allows users to move among the web systems without having to re-authenticate. CAS also notifies users when their password is about to expire, and eliminates the problem of getting passwords out of sync (one NetID with more than one password).

Posted in Academic, Innovation, Security, Systems, Web | No Comments »

The first 140 characters

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

I’m not a Tweeter or a regular Facebook status updater, but communicating ideas in 140 characters or less is a skill we all should practice.

There it is. A lead paragraph exactly 140 characters long.

Sure, I have more to say, but readers with attention spans the length of a cell phone text message got the gist of my idea. I’m grateful that my first 140 characters enticed you smart people to keep reading.

Technologies like SMS and Twitter force communicators to get to the point through the boundaries they impose. Other emerging online behaviors reinforce the need to strip your ideas down to the core.

Smart people (like you) are using web portals and RSS readers to aggregate and filter vast amounts of information on the Internet. Smart people who have something to communicate are making sure their messages are available through RSS feeds and consumable in web portals.

RSS feeds display a headline and (sometimes) the first 140 or so characters of the message. That’s all readers have to quickly decide if they’re going to follow the link and read more. How do you deliver your message effectively given these constraints?

Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Other Die, say you have to start by finding the core of your message.

“Finding the core means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea . . . It’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine.”

In the first 140 characters, of course.

Posted in Communication, Web | No Comments »

Risk and reward

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

A nonprofit organization I work with has two websites. Both have been down for months. One of them — an online training site — generates significant revenue for the organization. Or at least it did. Now it’s costing the organization precious resources to rebuild the site. Revenues have stopped and loyal customers have dispersed.

The organization has one technical support employee. He’s a systems administrator, a desktop support person, a web designer and a programmer. He’s competent, but he’s stretched ridiculously thin. The organization has always been vulnerable. Now they’re paying the price.

The organization prospered by taking risks and developing web technologies to deliver quality online training. The revenue stream was just part of the reward. The organization enhanced its visibility, reputation and fund-raising capabilities by being on the web and proving itself an innovative leader among peer nonprofits statewide and beyond.

Management and the board of directors supported innovation in good times. Now, technical challenges and economic troubles present a test of leadership.

I sense an inclination to move towards safety. Abandon the experiment. Concede that the organization can’t afford to support technology at adequate levels to eliminate all financial, operational and reputational risks.

The instinct to retreat in hard times is understandable. The better response is to learn, adapt, change, get better and refuse to abandon the innovative spirit that made the organization a leader in the first place.

Posted in Innovation, Leadership and Management, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

Is big turnout a mandate for change?

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

With jobs, education and our economic future at stake, throngs of enthusiastic citizens made their desire for change clear this week by participating in an historic event. I’m talking, of course, about the first ever offering of An Introduction to Blogs and Wikis short course.

Blog and Wiki course participants Cynics depict blogs as too old, or perhaps too risky. They suggest evil intent when they inquire: “What do we really know about these wikis?”

But these slick, mavericky candidates for change have proven they can engage and energize constituents and turn them into passionate participants in the process.

When Undergraduate Advising needed a better way to help students succeed in the classroom, they saw an opportunity to turn an old newsletter into a new way: Yes we can.

When the Center for Ethics had graduate students all over the world eager to collaborate on climate change and biotech research, a wiki was the answer: Yes we can.

When the Alumni Association redesigned their website, they integrated blogs and wikis to engage old and young alumni alike: Yes we can.

You have ideas you want to share about new technologies and the future of the University: Yes you can. (see below)

Posted in Communication, Innovation, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

College students and social networking

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Some new numbers related to use of social networking sites among college students:

85 percent participate in social networking sites
95 percent of 18-19 years olds participate
Facebook is most popular (89%); My Space is next (48%)
59 percent use SNSs daily
97 percent use SNSs primarily to keep in touch with friends
50 percent use SNSs to communicate with classmates about course-related topics
5 percent communicate with instructors via SNSs

Source: The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008; Educause Center for Applied Research; October 2008.

Posted in Innovation, People, Strategy, Web | No Comments »

Ask Monte provides a new answer

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

Ask Monte received a facelift over the noon hour today. It now features a beautiful little orange icon.

Ask Monte now produces an RSS feed.

In case you’re wondering, Ask Monte is UM’s dynamic knowledgebase powered by RightNow Technologies out of Bozeman. Fourteen UM departments and schools currently have 346 answers to frequently asked questions on the system.

In Ask Monte, you can search for answers by keywords or filter them by topic. With today’s upgrade, even filtered search results and topic areas produce unique RSS feeds. Why is that significant?

As a user, you could subscribe to topic areas of interest in OneStop or any other RSS feed reader. Departments that use Ask Monte can now harness the content in the knowledgebase for use elsewhere.

For example, if Career Services wanted dynamic FAQ’s about student jobs on their website, they could simply filter the Ask Monte answers by selecting the Career Services topic and the Student Employment subtopic. That produces this granular RSS feed that could deliver dynamic content elsewhere.

RSS in Ask Monte opens a lot of possibilities. If you have ideas about how the new feature could improve our customer service, please share.

Posted in Communication, Innovation, Support, Systems, Web | No Comments »

News - The University of Montana

IT Community