Who You Calling A Jesse?

In August of 2005 I was bored and frustrated. I decided to check out graduate education options even though my undergrad experience pretty much sucked. After looking around I decided to try out the University of Liverpool’s Masters of Information Technology. At the time it was a relatively new program and I was hesitant to take a Msc via distance learning. Plus I couldn’t afford it and work wasn’t going to pay.

Ignoring all that, I went ahead and applied. Since then I have hit highs and lows—distance education is a lot of work and takes a lot more discipline than I thought I had to get things done. But now, 2.5 years later I have just made my final submission for my dissertation. I hated it and I loved it… I certainly had the best education experience I have yet to have in my life and would do it again.

Once the paper is graded I will post more about that. I did it on Microformats ;) Nothing too exciting, just looking at how they could be applied… in 91 pages with appendices!

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

Is there a template out there for evaluating web page content in order to identify content patterns that would stand the test of academics? Surely there must be. So far I haven’t been able to find one as most of the research on semantics focuses on application based on a given content type you are creating or using. What I am trying to do is research a site, identify patterns, apply Microformats to the patterns, then figure out if there is a need for a new format based on the content.

What would need to identify a pattern in web content? Two years ago in WebPatterns and WebSemantics John Allsopp (the guy who wrote the Microformats book ) posted a great summary of what are patterns and how can you identify them. John mentions the area of web patterns is under-researched and references a great collection of patterns in web sites (that is missing the higher education pattern) but unfortunately for me I don’t think I can use that as key reference.

Interestingly enough, identifying web application patterns is exactly what my team and I have been doing with the new JobMine system. What I need to find out is where this has been before and in what capacity. Documenting UI elements is nothing knew but I think the criteria for the documentation is pretty loose and perhaps there is a need for one.

When I have my research criteria defined I will post it, any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated ;)

After a little delay, a couple weeks ago I started a page in the Microformats wiki to start collecting some examples and hopefully draft a format for course catalogue information. I see this as a really useful format to create for a number of different reasons.

Think about having an application that just search all universities course information and compare similarly numbered courses or courses with similar keywords? Think about how easy it would be for Universities when trying to translate transcripts for students that are transferring or heading to a school out of the country? Looking up that information yourself is not fun at the moment. Perhaps a Microformat can make it easy…

This should be a simple task. I am hoping to get some more examples of what currently exists from schools outside of Canada and maybe even some schema information on closed course information systems in the hope that some consistency exists already. I am fairly certain a draft format could be made quickly and easily but some research is required to ensure it works for the most amount of schools. Anyway have a look at the working space and add your 0.02.

Anyone can contribute really… so please do.