Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 11:30AM
Abstract:
Universities have played an historic role in developing innovative uses of technology. Most of the advances in the new social web have emerged elsewhere. This conversation will focus on work by various universities to explore how social media and UX techniques are being used on campus.Three take-aways will be:
* How to rethink social media and UX for the academic setting
* How to get universities to open up to these new ideas
* See what great things are being done at other universitiesSamuel Felder - Sr Designer, University of Southern California
We are here because we also view our inspiration and competition coming from outside our sister institutions - from the private sector.
The tension is where to put the web group - in the central IT group or in Marketing/Communications.
Moderator: sharing group formed - sharing patterns, snippets and centralized ideas. Calendaring, for example, moved to agile web apps - a web services model. This focused upon using small solutions/tool and not huge purchased solutions. This freed development.
Other universities have a stronger branding institution-wide - templates.
Check out the University of Chicago’s new redesign as it is a result of user testing. the entire process started about 2.5 year ago. This is for the entire university.
It seems many places have differing web groups vying for tech and/or branding leadership. How many get a mandate from on high?
Biggest backlash comes from people who are told that the mian pages are not primarily for them. This can be alleviated by creating role-based sub-pages (e.g., researchers, alumni, etc.).
The idea is to build something that is easy enough and useful enough that people who do not need to use central services *want* to use central services.
RSS is a wonderful element from which to build all kinds of interfaces.
Check out the MIT admissions site: 8-12 students blogging about what it is like to be at MIT.
??http://web.lesley.edu/default.asp
University of Kansas and the gators have good branding policies.
Cool idea: Building a pretty output for a Subversion repository to handle those things that are, basically, versioned documents (e.g., the catalog). USC is working on this.
Identity management with Shibboleth for single sign-on for Internet2.
The role of the web council is key.