SuperSatellite

eduWeb 2008 Day 2

// July 22nd, 2008 // Tech, Travel, Web

Sorry, no clever title for the blog.  I wish that I could, but my word maker in my brain is broke down a little at the moment.  I think it’s time to do an SVN update on my brain.  I uploaded a mess of new pictures this morning to Flickr.  There’s an awesome building, I think Hannah’s, a stone’s throw from here that has some awesome video lighting going on with the side of their building.

We learned last night how the better half lives.  A group of us headed over to the Borgata (and I was stupid enough to leave my camera in the car), and man is it night and day between the Trump Marina.  If they are to be believed, and the Trump Marina is a five diamond hotel, the Borgata must be something like 12 diamonds.  Granted, navigating to get there was a challenge of its own, and leaving we ended up driving through a part of Stabbyville.  New Jersey is truly the land of 1,000 smells as well, and I think we found 15 just on the way to Borgata.  None were pleasant.  I suspect it could have been just me… I also finally met up with a number of people I’ve been stalking on Twitter, and I am proud to announce they are just as creepy as me.

The morning started out with a small breakfast of delicious, and complicated, bananas (don’t ask).  I am currently hanging out at the table topic for making your CMS (Content Management System) implementation a success.  Luckily, from the talk I’m hearing we are doing pretty well with how we’re going, and I’m glad I can’t share in the horror stories of others.  But I mock them silently.  Not really.  Sorry, I’m wearing my disco shirt today, it makes me spicy.

Updates will follow…

Update ~9:00AM EDT

Branding is Not For Cows is a marketing track session being presented by Alka Joshi of Evergreen Valley College.  The branding side of stuff isn’t really my concern personally, but hey, I gotta stay well rounded, and not in that “oh my god if I eat any more cheese cake I’m gonna be sweating cream and be well rounded” kind of way.  Actually, with our redesign almost done, I think our branding for the college is the least of our problems now, but it never hurts to get more insight.

She’s giving an example with Harvard University as being branded early on to reflect the kind of institution that they wanted it to be – shaping it as a research institution.  They took stories and branded them as The Harvard Classics, which they used as a foundation for literary fluency that would be associated with them.  However, as a matter of course, I don’t think most of us as universities could get away with such a dynamic step.

Alka’s four keys to successful branding are a strong brand strategy, consistent implementation, a strategic rollout campaign, and create transparency.  People should feel free to give their feedback on what you are creating.  They created a tag line, and also translated it into the major languages used on campus.  That idea is actually kind of neat.  I’m wanting to do something similar with our navigation.  Another thing we are starting on that she recommends is creating a style guide for consistent implementation.  I think that goes beyond just marketing though as well.  They also did outdoor signage that visually tied in to the branding.  One thing we do lack, is coordination between web branding and… everything else.

Add value with buses.  That’s a great idea… if you have buses.  We have the PACT, which isn’t so much a bus, as it is the public transit you take to get to the crack houses or get stabbed in the face.  For the record, crack is a better value. I’m just saying.

Update ~9:21AM EDT

Sorry, got distracted looking up directions to sushi.  Sushi is a delicious diversion.  We are on to transparency now, so I missed a little bit of something.  I’m going to guess that it wasn’t life or death though, given my current breathing status.  As part of transparency, she’s recommending a 2 week rollout period with an open door policy.  Handle controversy, and share results wraps up point.  Trust me, once we win a ton of awards for our new layout (which I’ll totally take credit for) I’ll be sure to tell everyone who listens, and plenty of others who won’t.

She’s noting increased enrollment as an effect of this.  What I wonder is what about schools like us, that aren’t necessarily out to increase enrollment (they’re crammed like sardines into the dorms as it is).  Maybe I’ll ask… They are noting all the general feedback they got on the website to save for later.  She seems to be equating penetration to effectiveness, which I’m not sure I totally agree with.  Just because 100% of a group sees an ad, doesn’t mean they made a decision based on it.

Update ~10:12AM EDT

Okay, after a healthy poop (I’m kidding… no, I’m not), I’m ready for Head in the Cloud by Mike Richwalsky and Josh Tysiachney.  I refuse to spell either of those again.  This is to discuss how to handle the increasing load of things like tons of videos and such on sites.  The idea is to use external infrastructure to solve internal technology problems.  They use the analogy of an air conditioner, used on demand in the summer for added cost, but you just pay for the added cost.  This helps to prevent over spending on resources that you don’t need full time.  Look at people like flexiscale, GoGrid, Joyent, and MediaTemple for some examples.  Also popular services like Flickr and YouTube.

Amazon’s EC2 charges by the hour, starting at a dime an hour.  You also get command line access, stand alone control, browser plugins, etc.  He’s discussing the New York Times as an example: converting 4TB of TIFF files, and 11 million stories to PDF’s in 24 hours using 100 virtual servers at the cost of $240 plus the bandwidth.

S3 is Amazon’s storage service.  Again, you only pay for what you use on data centers in the USA and EU.  Usage is seamless to users.  It’s accessible over REST and SOAP, via browser plugins, and over FTP (File Transfer Protocol).  Consider SmugMug as an example, they saved $1 million on hardware by moving to S3, plus $100,000 in taxes by not buying hard drives.

Now, to use it in higher ed.  Allegheny is using it to host podcasts and video, plus admissions videos, political videos, and online tour media.  This has saved them 207.9GB of bandwidth over 2007.

Update ~10:31AM EDT

Keep in mind the opportunities for raw power related to things like registration systems that peak only at certain times: class registration, library usage, humanities, etc.  I know our portal gets hammered come finals and class registration time, so that might be a good value to a lot of people.  And then the big one, crisis communication.  Virginia Tech got hit with 432GB of traffic over 24 hours.  Using cloud resources with 4 servers, 8 cores, 15GM RAM, and 432GB of bandwidth, it totals $175 ($90 computing, $85 bandwidth).  Another price comparison: the cloud is good for backups, for instance 10.5TB = $392.11/month vs. $14K for a 9TB Dell AX150 array.

I’ve considered playing with the EC2 for some stuff a while back.  I’ve never done it, but sometime I really should just to see what it’s like from a cost vs. usage point of view.  Links: http://aws.amazon.com, http://code.google.com/appengine, and http://del.icio.us/awsbuzz.

I’m currently spying a bus bar up by the podium I might be able to leach off of during the next session…

Update ~11:31AM EDT

Richard Orelup is starting a presentation on AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) right now.  It has a long title, so I’m not typing it all out.  We all pretty well know what AJAX is, so I’m not gonna rehash all that either.  It has its roots in the Outlook Web Access interface back in 1996 though, so that’s interesting.

Interesting idea: do AJAX because it’s a buzzword, which makes it easy to sell to those who don’t understand any of this crap.  Richard makes a good point that if you use AJAX, you must do it right.  Keep in mind things that might not be able to parse it, like spiders, or users without Javascript.  Also, the higher level of interactivity can confuse people, or break other functionality (e.g. the back button, bookmarks).

Selenium is some open source automated testing software that can do screencaptures and such while checking, so that you can go back and review them without needing to test and screencap each browser separately.  This sounds pretty cool, similar to browsershots.org maybe.

I was hoping this would be much more technical in nature, as it is, it was pretty cursory with regard to what AJAX is and some of the security and performance concerns.  You can see his example site at http://www.valpoathletics.com/.

So far, I’ve managed to stretch my battery through two full sessions it seems. Go me.  But I’m hungry as balls, lunch T-minus one hour and counting…

Update ~3:01PM EDT

Okay, back from a brief quasi-nap after lunch and ready for the session on variable printing being presented by Cam Cruickshank and Matthew Allison.  My stomach’s actually still bothering me a little, hoping I’m not coming down with something.  If I throw up in the middle of a session you happen to be in, forgive me and please hold my hair back.  I seem to be doing a nice job of killing the batteries in my camera too.  I know, those two issues are totally related.

These guys are connected to a new university sub brand that is part of a 100% online associate degree program.  They’re also working to make a program that maximizes a student’s ability to transfer credit.

All told, a total of four people in the room are currently doing variable print.  Variable print uses custom content and variables to tailor a document to an individual, such as academic programs, extracurriculars, identifiers, contacts, and financial variables.  I’ve seen some of this before from a school that someone else showed me.  It’s a neat idea certainly, and in an institution like ours I think the biggest question mark would be integrating the different tools.

They’re also showing not just print, but customized email as well, with different topics, photos, and information.  Their custom VIP pages (student portal) are being driven by a separate CRM application.  So we’re pretty much out in the cold on that one. They are capturing data via lists, surveys, interest pages, inquiry cards, and vendor lead forms.  Again, I think in our case, managing all of this would not be easy.  With no clear data path to our student portal, and no idea what’s there in the first place, I suspect we won’t get there any time soon.  I also wonder about information security, storage, and how it passes on.

Update ~3:23PM EDT

All their printing and mailing is outsourced.  I’d be interested to know if our print shop could keep up with something like this.  They are also keeping an account with the postal service that is drawn on for postage.  Unfortunately, this being a marketing track session, it’s not nearly technical enough for me.  I want to know the “how,” not just a bird’s eye view of the path from point A to point B.  Then again, since they are outsourcing, I doubt they even know the “how.”

A lot of what they are suggesting could be done within a CMS, I think, if you are clever with data capture, variables, and PDF output.  I think we could certainly manage that much.

Someone raised a question in the vein of what I was thinking, regarding FERPA, in this case with respect to postcards being sent with information detailing colleges the students have attended.  He says they haven’t gotten any complaints, but the matter seems a little too borderline for me.  Once students are admitted, their data leaves the CRM system, and migrates into the student database.  But it sounds like early collection isn’t given much security consideration.

Overall, this was a little off my mark unfortunately, as it was geared much too far to the marketing side for me.  But that’s just me.  I’d caution anyone though to check with your FERPA compliancy person before collecting and using data in this manner.

Update ~4:09PM EDT

Leading up to the session on catalog management, so far it looks like the unpopular place to be.  Anne Macdonald is the one to run this show.  And we’re starting off with technical difficulties: no projector.  That should make this considerably more difficult to follow.  Perhaps I could assist with clever shadow puppets.

Still no projector, but, I have discovered they used RedDot to build the backbone.  I know I’d like to investigate doing away with a print catalog at our school, largely because it’d make my job substantially easier in that area.  Mostly now she’s just talking about the logistical process to get to the decision to not print.  Now the hotel guy is here fiddling with stuff.  We’re at a casino, anyone wanna take bets on how much quicker I could probably fix it than him?

Update ~4:32PM EDT

Looks like this will be a short session.  On to the Q&A.  Projector never did work, which is unfortunate.

Update ~5:16PM EDT

Better projector luck at @hacool’s presentation on blogs.  Sitting next to @sayitaintjonas, contemplating hijacking his livestream with my beautiful face.

Looks like Case is giving blogs to anyone who wants one: faculty, staff, students, and alumni.  They then have an aggregator to mix them up into a feed.  They are open to personal use as well, not just professional.  No word yet on the platform of choice, unless I missed it by trying to come up with ways to defile Nick’s webcam.  They are actually getting some pretty impressive traffic across their blogs, one in particular had over 13,000 unique visitors in May.  For the record, that’s more than me.

I’m waiting to hear about layout freedom that they have granted, if users are bound to a theme, or if there are some to choose from.  Still no platform mentioned.

Update ~5:44PM EDT

Looking at examples, they are clearly allowing some variation in themes for users.  I’m getting a tweet from @billyadams that Case is using Typepad for their blogs.  We’re getting a lot of screenshots of the various groups using their blog system so far, but not much info otherwise as much.  But, again, this is the marketing track, so my hunger for technical details will likely remain unsatisfied.

They are definitely running with a lot of blogs for different things.  I’m not sure we have enough dedicated people to keep up that much content flowing down RSS pipes.  I wonder what happens if an “official” area blog suddenly loses attention to posting, do they take it down?    I also default back to my old question of what kind of responsibility it creates for the institution to maintain those indefinitely.

Re: dead blogs, Heidi says they’d just contact them and leave it up them as to what to do with it.  Regarding hosting the blogs, they haven’t thought that far ahead really.  And they aren’t using Typepad, they’re on Moveable Type.  Billy lied to me.  He will pay.

And that’s that ladies and gentlemen.  Time for a mixer and then off to sushi on Boardwalk (where rent is $50 without hotels on it).  I follow up tomorrow with details of the evening and pictures.