Web Sites Development
I develop, manage, and contribute to a variety of web sites at the college. These are a few representative sites.
- Office of Educational Technology – My department’s web presence. The site combines public pages for use by our constituents and private pages for content used internally by the department.
- Service Excellence Committee – A committee that focuses on furthering a culture of excellent customer service at the College. The challenge of this project is to help the group think about communicating with the public using the web. The group while understanding the power of the web are much more comfortable communicating using news letters and other print media.
- Training and Workshop Site – This site assists Computing Services in offering and managing workshops. While much of the site is my work it is also a vary collaborative site with many peers in computing contributing content. The site also contains the Allegheny Workshop Podcast.
- Help Desk Tutorials – This is a true collaboration of the department. Contributors develop and design tutorials for the community based on an agreed upon format. I can not take credit for the layout, design or format standards but I do contribute tutorials on the software that I am currently working with such as Movable Type, WebCT or PowerPoint.
These sites take advantage of various technology
- PHP/MySQL – to deliver content across multiple pages, to build rss feeds, and manage user requests
- HTML – to deliver static information
- Cascading Style Sheets – for accessible style and layout
- RSS -to update constituents of office news, content updates, learning opportunities
- Movable Type Publishing Platform – to post, organize, and share news updates via blog technology
- RSS Aggregation – to tie RSS feeds from related sites together in a user-friendly format. This is powered by zfeeder.
Social Software, Social Networking, User Created Content and Other Web 2.0 Stuff
In the last year, all social software and Web2.0 applications have moved toward the mainstream as web audiences move from users to contributors. I have spent a great deal of time working with blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, podcasting, virtual worlds, and so on. My focus with these technologies was to understand their processes, cultural impact, potential, and limitations so that I am able to apply them in my professional work and in support of teaching and learning.
- Social bookmarking – using the sharing, tagging, and json features of del.icio.us, I developed an easy way to bring audio content and podcasts into WebCT courses for an economics professor.
- Podcasting – I am currently working with a psychology professor who wants to look at how the voice plays into learning as compared to text. She is assigning groups to develop podcast episodes on topics of personality to to replace a writing assignment. She will be podcast the episodes using a blog to publish the feed and allow commentary. iTunes will be used to download and manage the episodes. (The first episode is yet to be published.)
- Blogging Projects – Blogging often gets a bad name as being frivolous or something that angst filled teenagers do. In actuality, it is quite practical for many things including managing project communications and resources. I am currently facilitating the process to select a new Learning Management System (LMS) to replace WebCT. The group chose to blog this process as blogging allows for co-authorship, date-stamped entries, automatic archiving, community feedback, linking to outside resources, and user subscription to site content via RSS/Atom.
Learning Management Systems
- In support of the LMS Evaluation blog, I have blogged my thoughts on Allegheny’s LMS migration and tagged many with the acelms tag.
- Allegheny is Piloting Sakai in the Fall 2007 with three other NITLE colleges. Follow the blog posts we are tagging them nitlesakai.
Workshops and Presentations of Note:
Presentations -
- Podcasting Implementations Experiments in Progress – Podcasting Seminar at the Center For Educational Technology, Middlebury, Vermont 11/2005
- Life as a Training and Performance Professional: Perspectives from Industry, Academia, and Government/Military – Association for Educational Communications and Technology, International Convention, Orlando, Florida 10/2005
- WebCT at a Liberal Arts College? – 4th annual WebCT Users Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, 7/2002
- Designing Educational Web Sites – International Business School Computing Association Conference, Erie, Pennsylvania, 8/2000
Workshops -
- Surf Bored – Riding the Wave of the New Web. An workshop taught as part of the annual Administrative Computing Services employee computer training series. The workshop focused on raising awareness of tools associated with web 2.0 and the habits and trends developing because of web based applications that encourage users to create, organize, and share content.
