I was discussing the conference wrap up with Alisha and we decided to both post on Days 2 and 3 so that you get more than one perspective. If you attended, please chime in an let us know what you thought. What could have been done better? What was great? What sessions did you attend?
Sarah’s notes on the conference: The second day of the WV Higher Education Technology Conference went really well. I missed the first session I wanted to go to, Adam Glenn’s presentation on the Lessons Learned – WVU Website Design. I did catch Dave Olsen’s sessions on iTunes U and slate/Evaluating a WCMS. Both were quite good. (Nice job Dave!) If you don’t know what these projects are, contact Web Services and find out more. They are both really interesting. iTunes U allows users to search, download, and play educational content from the iTunes Store just like they do for music, movies, and TV shows and other podcasts. This is a really valuable tool that faculty and students should learn more about. It can be incorporated in to almost every kind of class and can really augment the learning experience.
Slate is a web content management system (WCMS) developed using Ruby on Rails and is focused on rapid production of traditional-style Web sites created by WVU Web Services. Dave demoed the system AND shared some lessons learned from deploying it. He also gave some great tips on how to evaluate a WCMS.
I gave my presentation on WordPress – I think it went ok. I’ll post the content here as a blog post soon.
There was also a session called “Web CMS – an open-source approach“ by Shane Jordan at Fairmont State. He is using Drupal for their web presence and I was really interestred to hear more about that. I was considering Drupal for what I want to do with the OIT website, but I am 99% sure we are going to use WordPress Mu instead.
After the Roundatable Luncheon, were Poster Sessions. There were several interesting topics. I talked to Richard Pierce from Fairmont State about his poster titled “Goodbye CMS or Why I Don’t Care What Java Version I Have.” In this case, CMS means “Course Management Software” rather than Content. He’s using Google Apps rather than Blackboard for his classes because it saves time, (doesn’t require Java), and the students become familiar with tools they will likely need to use or want to use outside of the classroom. I thought that was an interesting point because once the students are done with school, they won’t need to use Blackboard again. They probably will need to use Google, though. So it is easier for him and they get more out of it. Interesting point, no?
After the poster sessions, I sat in on Chris Southard’s presentation on “Photography and Multimedia.” Chris works for WVU Creative Services and he demonstrated how Photographic Services is utilizing Smugmug to host and sell photos they take at University events. Smugmug is a website that many professional photographers use to share and sell photos. Think of it as Flickr PLUS. He also demonstrated some interesting things they are doing with capturing audio at the events they shoot and adding it to a slideshow that they put on the web.
The last session I went to before needing to leave for the day was Michelle Rodney and Sucharitha Bachanna’s session on WVU eCampus. I work with Michelle and Sucharitha here at OIT, but I wanted to learn more about WVU eCampus and how it works. It’s pretty impressive what a massive system it is and how much is behind it. I need to check with Michelle on the numbers, but I think they said that the average number of users on at one time is around 3,000. That’s a lot of people on at the same time 24/7.
UPDATE: OK, I did get a correction on the stats for eCampus. The maximum number of concurrent users on eCampus was 2,856 in Spring 2008. So it wasn’t an “average” number but a “maximum” number of users on at one time. If you are interested, they post the stats online here: WVU eCampus Statistics
Alisha’s notes on the conference: Click to go to the post
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