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  • Date: Friday, October 03, 2008 Time: 10:01 am Category: Events Tagged conference, higher education technology, wv Discussion: 1 Comment

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This is the final installment of our notes on the 2008 WV Higher Education Technology Conference.  If you have any thoughts on the conference, please feel free to post in the comments.

Sarah’s notes on the conference: Wednesday was the final day of the WV Higher Education Technology Conference.  Malcolm Lane spoke at the breakfast session.  I was talking with someone later (either Jay Allen or Chet- can’t remember) and they said it “was a really nice walk down memory lane.  No pun intended.” 

After that I dropped in (a little late) on Lydia Mong’s session called “So, you Expect Them to Read that? Designing Text that Begs to be Read.”  As a designer, it was really great to hear someone actually defining, calmly and very nicely why using some techniques are simply bad.  I mean I TELL my students in PR319 that ALL CAPS is harder to read, but I’ve never really been able to explain WHY that is.  Well, Lydia has a great slide that shows why.  It was also great to hear affirmation that, yes, centering your text really looks amatuerish and that you should never, ever underline text unless it is a link.  Lydia had a much nicer way to explain all that, though.    [If you want to learn more about better text design, I think the ITRC/Extended Learning covers this in faculty development sessions.  Contact them for more info.]

The last session I attended was called “Speaking the Student Language: Leveraging Web 2.0 in Higher Education” by John Cummings from Marshall University.  I loved this presentation too.  He spoke about a lot of the social media services and sites Alisha and I have been researching lately and echoed what Mark Greefield had to say about communicating with Millienials.  There are a lot of fantastic tools out there that higher ed can tap in to.  I’m hoping we can cover a lot of them here on this blog, but if you are interested in what he had to say, he posted much of his infortmation on a Google group to share.  Go to http://groups.google.com/group/wvconference (link corrected 10/9)

Conference Comments: The conference website also has a Thank You message up and inviting comments on the conference.  If you attended, you may want to visit and offer your feedback – even if it is just to “ditto” what someone else said.