Ron’s Slip n’ Slide Extravaganza

Student Tunnel Prank

Dorm Chair Jumping

Professor takes care of annoying cell phone

I’m doing a little housecleaning on the right sidebar, adding new links and taking down the not-so-great links and the why – don’t – they – ever – post – anything – and – when – they – do – it’s – not – worth – reading, …links.

A new site worth mentioning is Interface: The Official Blog of Web Communications at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Their most recent post, Teach a man to fish, is worth sharing:

“Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.”

This is the philosophy in Web Communications.

We try to regularly step back and take a good hard look at what we do and how we do it. For the first several years of our existence, we spent most of our time building Web sites for other departments and then handing the client the keys. This was a complete failure for many reasons. First of all, we broke our own cardinal rule which is “do not build what you cannot sustain.” Second of all, we were destined to disappointment because the site soon bore no resemblance to what we’d created because the owner didn’t have the skills needed to manage the site. We had the best of intentions, but, the result wasn’t what we’d hoped to see.

There are other great posts on Interface, authored by various members of the University of Missouri-Columbia web team.

Speaking strictly in terms of graphic design for web, I’m in a very good spot at this University where I’m able to effect change without a great deal of interference. In fact, I’d say the biggest obstacle to doing great work would would most often be myself. I have alot of people coming at me, (FOCUS being my akilies heel) and I find it hard to set aside quality time for the big design projects. That aside, we’ve all worked on jobs or specific websites that have been stunted or scarred by groupthink, politics, or an occasional well-meaning yet misguided client.

Communication or lack thereof can hurt any design project regardless of the talent involved, but often, web designers at universities square off against firmly entrenched institutional norms that often serve as roadblocks to doing great work.

Garret Dimon says:

This year, I was putting on a workshop about Improving Interface Design where I wanted to discuss and draw attention to some of the less tangible challenges we face when designing interfaces. Ultimately, I’d say the theme was about the unfortunate fact that the red tape, politics, and other institutional hurdles are the most significant impediments to good interface design. As a result, creating good interfaces is as much a matter of changing institutional assumptions and challenging bad ideas as it is about understanding the principles and improving our skillsets. More importantly, we have to view this responsibility as an ongoing process of educating and sharing.

His presentation, entitled Improving Interface Design can be found on Slideshare.

In 2006 at the Webmaster’s Jam Session in Dallas, a certain Cameron Moll, who has had his fair share of design work for Universities gave a presentation titled “Essential Web Skills“. I wish I could have been there. Dallas is close.

Not to worry though, you can still download a pdf of his awesome slide presentation.
(11 MB pdf)

I wouldn’t have bothered reading about this event, much less posting anything about it, but because it’s going on in the same state I spent some time investigating what it was all about.

The SimU Conference

On September 7, the University of Arkansas will host a significant conference at the Reynolds Center of Enterprise Development, addressing the challenges and opportunities for higher education that are provided by increasing numbers of so-called “millennial students”. These students come to the university with extensive experience in digital gaming, including video games, computer-based role playing games, and massive multiplayer on-line games.

Let me say that I’m a passive online gamer. In the past I’ve had my fair share of addictions to multiplayer games like Age of Empires and Counter Strike, but I’m not a fan World of Warcraft, and personally I think Second Life is an absolute joke. I downloaded Second Life a few weeks ago and spent two evenings walking around lost and alone. “Surely this will get better” I kept telling myself, but alas, it didn’t. That’s my personal opinion, and I think many colleges are wasting valuable resources trying to build a presence there. Mark me down as a Second Life naysayer. The hype will soon be over.

Nonetheless, there are many other worthwhile forms of online gaming, and it’s hard to ignore the facts:

…One study reports that the average entering student in the next decade will have spent many thousands of hours playing video/computer games. While gaming is seen by some as frivolous or even a destructive activity, recent research and scholarship, indicates, instead, that students are, in fact, learning valuable skills. These include such skills as contextual bridging, high time-on-task, motivation and goal orientation, and collaborative and teaming skills.

Speakers will be asked to address one or more of the following topics:

• What skill sets have extensive gaming developed in individuals now entering higher education?
• How should higher education pedagogy respond to these new capabilities and expectations (new courses, new techniques, new approaches)?
• How will the combination of gaming experience and new educational responses better prepare the students for the workplace of the 21st century?

So I’m actually kind of curious about this conference and might be attending. It’s only one day, and a few hours up the road.