Anyway, he brings up some excellent food for thought on how universities should to revisit how we think about openness.  Not only in the types of systems and software we employ, but in our academic materials.  He reminds us that the fundamental reason we are in higher education is to educate and share knowledge.  What difference does it make, really, if people can download our course materials?  Why shouldn’t they?  Because they haven’t yet paid for them?  Why is that important?  To get any kind of degree the will actually need to enroll, so I fail to see how that would affect the school’s bottom line.

MIT has for a number of years now offered most if not all of their course materials online for free.  Think of the savings to students in not needing to purchase books every semester.  What if the students did have access to all of the course work ahead of time, wouldn’t that just make it easier for them to complete the work and do better?  Perhaps they would get more out of the course if they were prepared and could be ready when the semester “clock is ticking?”

Here is the video clip of his presentation.  I’d love to hear what the university community thinks about this.

Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness
In this presentation, Professor James Boyle will argue that we have a cognitive bias–he calls it cultural agoraphobia–that leads us to underestimate the potential of open networks, open culture and open productive processes. What is the evidence for such a bias?  What should a university do about it–from the library to the classroom to the archive? Using examples ranging from the development of the World Wide Web to Wikipedia and open source software, this talk will try and answer those questions.

Watch the webcast

Call for Proposals

The West Virginia Higher Education Technology Conference is now accepting presentation, poster session, and workshop proposals for its September 28-30, 2009 conference at Lakeview Golf Resort and Spa in Morgantown, WV.

This conference brings together experts from all over West Virginia for three days to connect, discuss, and learn about the latest in technology and the future of education.

We look forward to building a fantastic program that covers a broad spectrum of topics pertaining to technology and higher education. We hope to see you at the conference and invite you to submit your proposal today! Proposals will be received through June 1, 2009.

Conference Theme: weLearn Technology facilitates learning in higher education every day – every minute. In higher education we are all connected by a common purpose of educating and learning. Students, faculty, staff – we are all linked through information technology. Through technology weLearn.

Presentation Tracks

• Teaching and Learning
• Technology and Sustainability; Green IT: What does it mean?
• Emerging Technologies
• Getting the Message Out
• Legal and Ethical Issues

Poster Sessions

Last year we received a lot of positive feedback about the poster sessions and would like to encourage you to consider participating with a poster session of your own. This flexible format allows for more direct Q&A and is great for networking.

Pre- and Post-Conference Workshops

If you have something you’d like to share in a more in-depth session, consider holding a pre- or post-conference workshop.

We look forward to hearing from you!

- WVHETC 2009 Conference Committee

Subscribe to Our Conference Updates

West Virginia Higher Education Technology Conference
Phone: 304-293-5192
Conference Website: http://wvconference.com

We’ll be there!  Will you?

How to Present While People are Twittering

by Tamar Weinberg

February 27, 2009

People used to whisper to each other or pass hand-scribbled notes during presentations. Now these notes are going digital on Twitter or via conference-provided chat rooms.

Up until now, this back-channel has been mainly confined to the Internet industry and technology conferences. However, a survey of leadership conferences from Weber Shandwick shows that there is a significant increase in blogging and twittering at conferences.

So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops. The challenge is how to adapt to presenting with the back-channel.

Read more on how Twitter helps you and your audience during a presentation.

Creating a College Web Style Guide: Principles, Processes, and Prototypes
Jesse Racine, Web Designer and Developer for McHenry County College, entertainingly presented the importance of keeping things uniformed for your site. He explained the importance of creating a web style guide is to “improve quality of communications by being consistent.” Navigation will be more predictable this way making the site user-friendly. He also explained that having this guide will also save one their time and money.

Colors on the Web: Few Things, Great Results
Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel presented on the fascinating subject of color. I am interested in this subject because of my interest and background in painting. She explained the importance of color and how we physically and psychologically react. Martha is the Director of Technology at New Media Developers, Ltd. She is also a professor of digital design and games design courses at Brazil’s Universidade Anhembi Morumbi. Martha explained that people will notice the interface first and that the color shapes the page’s meaning. So, color is something you feel when looking at many different mediums. So, think about those who will be utilizing the website. What is the best combination of colors for expressing this message?

New Initiatives in Web Standards Education
Chris Mills, Developer Relations Manager for Opera Software ASA, talked about the issue of websites and absence of web standards. He bluntly explained that the lack of education and lack of interest contributes to this issue. He is determined that the easiest clients to work with are web developers who are concerned.

It is interesting how he handles this difficult arena. Again, he stated the importance of education and training material. The group delivers an up-to-date free course on web standards. This free course can be found at http://www.opera.com/wsc which I have previously visited. So, his plans are giving web standards more credibility and providing certification for those who complete the course.

Internet Evolution Through the Eyes of a Deaf User and Web Professional
Svetlana Kouznetsova, Web Designer and Developer for Lehman College, began her presentation announcing the high 97 percent of inaccessible websites. She described a different perspective on the frustration of inaccessibility. She explained how similar having a disability is to handling a stroller in public, like at an airport. One may feel frustrated when he or she is unable to understand the dialogue of a foreign film or you may even be frustrated because of your outdated technology that you are stuck using. To have an accessible website, one can maintain clean codes and follow accessibility guidelines while having a creative design. Many people believe their site will be plain and unattractive which is not true. The presenter showed a video without the sound and captions. As you can imagine, it was impossible to grasp what was happening. I can relate to this because it is impossible for me to watch a foreign film or even a Shakespeare film without the captions. She explains that it is important to include captions with videos as well as include the transcripts for podcasts.

Accessible Video Interface
Many universities are now presenting videos on their websites. It is important that these videos include captions and are manageable. Gabriel McGovern, Web Designer for Portland Community College, explained that one is able to create high quality Flash videos that have a consistent design and is easy to update. By building the right interface, you are able to make changes that will automatically update all of your videos.

He talked about creating the captions using a free application called Media Access Generator (provided by the National Center for Accessible Media). In addition, the creator will need to time the captions along with the video. You are able to determine what is important for buttons (mute, forward, pause, captions, etc.) and customize the buttons in Flash. You are also able to create a transcript page for accessibility so all you see is text. Another feature that allows accessibility is the xml file (smil.xml) which determines what size video to load for an individual machine. The video can be for download or streaming.

What conferences have you recently attended?

How WordPress Changed My Life

Presentation by Sarah R. Barnes at the 2008 West Virginia Higher Education Technology Conference

My name is Sarah Barnes and I work for the WVU Office of Information Technology. Today I am going to talk about WordPress and how it changed my life.

Now this may seem like a rather melodramatic title, but when I was thinking about how I wanted to present on WordPress I started to examine why exactly it is that I have grown so fond of it.
To explain that, I need to put it in perspective.

I got into web design in 1996. I am primarily self-taught and my interest in web development has generally been on the design and usability of websites.  Before I got to know WordPress, my work had been primarily rooted in static html, usually using includes.

About a year and a half ago, I completed a major redesign of the Office of Information Technology website.  Since the site is still mostly static html with php includes right now, I was running into a problem with maintaining the news portion of our site. I was creating new static files for each new news story and saving it in a specific place, uploading it, adding it manually to an XML file (for our RSS feed) to make sure it appeared on the main page. Additionally, if I was not available, my supervisor could not add content.  Also – if both of us were out, no one could post a new story to the main page. Long story short, we had to find a way that we could

1. Update the main news stories easily,
2. When we were off-campus if necessary,
3. Would produce an RSS feed that could be pushed to subscribers and syndicated on our website wherever needed.

I’d known for awhile we needed something database-driven. Unfortunately, I didn’t know anything about creating databases. I’d always relied on “the server guy” to handle that.

Enter WordPress.  What exactly is it?

WordPress was originally designed as a blogging tool competing with other blogging tools like Blogger, Moveable Type, TextPattern, and others. It was created in 2003 and it is currently the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world.

Though one of my colleagues at OIT (Justin) had mentioned WordPress to me before, I didn’t fully explore the option until after attending a presentation about setting up WordPress. The presenter demonstrated how easy it was to set up and use and integrated it into her website.  She even used a press release section of her website as an example.

So initially I asked Justin for help setting up WordPress so I could try it out to serve up press releases.  After I got in and saw what the fuss was about it was really eye opening. I was able, in a matter of a few hours, modify a WordPress theme to look exactly like the OIT website and incorporate it into our existing site structure.

Not Just a Blogging Tool

I realized that this application was extremely versatile and could easily be modified to be used on a variety of websites – not just as a blog tool or a news engine. It could also be used as a content management system.  Soon after that I dove in and tried installing it on my own on my own personal hosting account. I realized I’d been wasting a lot of time by assuming that I couldn’t set up database driven sites on my own.  As it turns out, given the proper tools, it’s pretty durn easy to set it up yourself.  So, this really was a liberating step for me.  I began to see a greater potential for using this platform than just to run press releases or a blog and began to use it to develop other sites.

Its modular nature makes it amenable to different types of websites.  As it turns out, it is an excellent content management system for community organizations, classes, collaboration tools, project updates, diaries, photo galleries, discussion, even ecommerce.

System requirements and installation (the famous 5 minute install)

Installing WordPress is incredibly easy. WordPress needs 2 things: php and a database like SQL or MySQL.

At first I was incredibly daunted by the prospect of setting up my own database. I’d heard of a great tool called phpMyAdmin which is a kind of graphical interface for setting up databases on servers that use php and SQL/MySQL. I hadn’t actually used it before, but I gave it a try and suddenly I was free.

Once the database is set up all you need to do with Wordpress is edit 1 file. A single file – wp-config.php.

Even then all you need to do with this file is edit the database name, username, password, and location.

Once you upload that and point your browser to the website, it’ll take you through a couple of screens and have you set up the admin account.

After that you are done. It is ridiculously simple.

How does WordPress Work?

Using WordPress is also very easy. Let me put it this way. My dad had no concept of what a blog really was or did 2 months ago. Now he has a blog and is managing the content himself (for the most part) posting articles, links, videos, and photos. I occasionally have to explain a thing or two to him about how it works or what he can do with it, but overall I have spent exactly maybe 2-3 hours TOTAL on telling him how to use it.

I would venture to say that adding content to WordPress is as easy as sending an email.
There are several different roles in WordPress: Admin, Editor, Author and Contributor. Admin, has the highest level privileges and can do anything. Editors can’t change settings, but they can manage all posts and pages. Authors can only publish posts. Contributors are only able to send content for review.

Content is divided into Posts and Pages. Pages are not a part of the blog timeline and not added to the RSS feed generated by WordPress. Pages are best for content that is more static. Posts are the way the bulk of your content is generated in Wordpress. Posts are in a timeline and update the RSS feed.

Write – To create a new Post or Page click the Write tab or select either the Write a New Post or Write a New Page buttons on the main WordPress “Dashboard.” You can also add new Links under the Write tab.

Manage lets you go back and edit pages, posts, links, categories, tags, your media library, import or export data, etc.

Design controls which theme you use. Themes are displays based on any that you have uploaded to the themes folder. Select a new theme by clicking on one and applying it. The Widgets link controls your sidebars. This is optional, but it is an easy way to mange certain aspects of WordPress. You can have multiple sidebars.

Comments lets you manage comments made on your Wordpress site.

Administrator Tabs

Administrative management does require you know a little bit more than your average bear, but in comparison to other Content Management Systems it is very user-friendly and uncomplicated.

Users lets you manage all the users of your blog. You can dictate who is an admin, editor, author, contributor or simply a subscriber. You can also change passwords here if you want.
Plugins controls what plugins are active on your website. To add new plugins upload to wp-content>plugins. Then go to Plugins and activate any you want to use.

Settings controls the back end. Turn comments on or off, set Permalinks, edit settings for writing and reading posts, etc. Also options for specific plugins are usually under this tab.

Themes are uploaded to wp-content> themes and activated under the Design tab.

Updating/Upgrading

Right now upgrading WordPress has to be done manually or by installing a plugin called WordPress Automatic Plugin. In WordPress 2.7 (coming out in November) this feature will be added by default.

Updating plugins is also important to keep on top of, and can (as of WP 2.5) be updated easily through the WP interface.

Designing for WordPress (Themes)

Now. After you install WordPress you will want to customize the look and feel of the site. WordPress uses “themes” to customize a basic set of code. The implementation of themes in WordPress is what, in my opinion, makes it stand out from other content management systems. Each theme is self-contained within the wp-content folder. This folder is the only one that stores custom information for your WordPress install. You can modify other parts of Wordpress, but by setting it up this way, they’ve made it so it is unlikely that the average user will ever want or have to.

WordPress is a php application, but it is extremely modular. The application is broken down into several core files which can be modified in limitless ways.

The best way to jump into WordPress, however, is to download a theme and modify it. I feel this is the best way to learn how it works. Once you do this a ew times, you see how different themes are constructed and start to get a better understanding of what is possible. I generally look for a theme that has the overall layout I’m looking for and go from there. However, if you want, you can start your own theme from scratch. A good place to start is with a blank theme (download “Starkers”) and build your own look and feel.

One thing I really like about WordPress is the Theme Editor. You can edit the theme in real time on the website if you want. This is a lot less time consuming that upload it each time you make a change. OTOH, it does require a level of comfort with straight code with no syntax highlighting.

Plugins

Another aspect of WordPress that makes it very attractive and flexible is the plethora of plugins available to extend its capabilities.  Plugins that do everything from improving the backend administrative features to making your WordPress site a full-blown shopping cart.
[In-depth discussion probably not an option due to time constraints.]

…more?

So you may be asking yourself, WordPress sounds great, but can it really manage a large site? What about multiple blogs? Do you have to install it multiple times?

Well, there is another WordPress for those of us who want to run multiple instances of Wordpress and have centralized control over all of them called Wordpress Multiuser or WordPress Mu.

WordPress Mu is a single installation that lets you manage multiple “blogs.” Wordpress.com and Edublogs use it to manage the millions of hosted blogs. This summer we launched a blog for OIT using WPMU (blog.oit.wvu.edu). I can control the available themes and plugins from a central location.  The biggest drawback to WPMU, in my opinion is the lack of a web-based theme editor.

WPMU in iself is a presentation, so I’l go ahead and end here.  I really appreciate your time.  Thank you.

Questions?

Please keep in mind that this was only a 30 minute presentation, so I didn’t really have a lot of time to cover everything in WordPress.

Is anyone else out there using WordPress?  How are you using it?