Who You Calling A Jesse?

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the regional Higher Ed Web Conference that was held at Cornell University over the past two days. What a great conference put together by Jason Woodward and his team at Cornell. The speakers started off yesterday with a heavy focus on how to get the user involved in your web project from user testing to engaging folks through social media story telling.

Today we moved into an actual project aimed at a particular set of users at Cornell, into project management (my presentation), and off into the high level thinking about the future of higher ed with Mark Greenfield. My head is swimming with ideas and issues but even more focused on the purpose of the web in higher ed.

My presentation slides are here, thanks everyone for the great feedback and I look forward to continuing many of the conversations online and maybe even at the big Higher Ed Web conference in Milwaukee in the Fall:

Almost a year ago now I started exploring the idea of a research paper on Microformats with regards to Higher Education. After doing some research I settled on assessing ten Higher Education web sites, their mark-up and their content, identify some common patterns and explore the viability of Microformats for the typical Higher Education home page.

• You can grab a version of my paper in acrobat.com but if you want a PDF version please leave a comment.

In my paper you will find a literature review, the method I used, all the data, and my results. I did write this over the winter so things might have changed a bit and it certainly isn’t a perfectly written paper… but I think it offers a way to approach semantic mark-up that I hope some people find useful.

From my research, I developed a process to identify a design pattern for Higher Education web sites in both the mark-up code and the content. It may not be the most efficient but it seemed to do the trick.

I used those design patterns to come up with a mock-up of what the University of Waterloo home page could be (not graphically, just semantically) and tried out how that could be useful. My mock-up has:

• hAtom for news
• hCal for event listings
• hCard for the University address with geo information

There is also some other semantic richness in there. I thought that maybe someone would find it useful as there really isn’t a lot of research with regards to applying Microformats and why.

update: I have another post that looks at how Microformats can help higher education

Ever had a bit of technology your use dictated to you by an IT department? Does it not even come close to meeting your expectations or requirements? Is it usually web based technology that is letting you down? This type of problem stems from what I call a ‘square peg, round hole’ philosophy in IT – when decisions of what technology to deploy is based solely on the ability to provide support, not the requirements of the project and/or an analysis of features required by the user. It seems to happen far more often with web based technology.

In a conversation with a colleague over a beer I tried to understand why this happens. Sadly I still don’t understand why, but I do better appreciate the position of people that decide to hammer that square peg in. But I think it because they don’t understand or have an actual use for the web themselves (that is a totally different post).

I believe this happens in every IT department and it stems from the environment. IT finds itself in a situation with limited resources to hire new staff even though they are tracking time on/and tasks and there is an expectation that IT needs to support everyone regardless of expertise. There is a project or group or department that has decided to use a particular technology. Reality kicks in and the service end has to learn to support the technology so a decision is made to apply that same technology to others that have similar but not the same requirements as that project group.

What happens next is ugly. The clients expect something that usually different because they may want the same features but they would apply a different priority to the features they use/need. This influences their expectations on the total experience. Take a content management system (CMS) for example. One group might put a high priority on workflow management, another on user management, another wants a templating scheme, another wants a forum, and another group really wants a wiki. A CMS can do all these things but I can’t think of a CMS that can do them all as well or anywhere near as good as specialized software.

However, CMS vendors will promise support and the ability to meet the demands of the user. This pulls on the support strings of IT. Rarely, if ever, will you find a CMS that delivers to a diverse groups expectations. What happens is that any number of groups become disenfranchised with the software and the overall project of deploying that technology is doomed to failure or mediocre success at best. The CMS vendor comes off either not being paid and/or looking really bad. The IT department comes off looking unprofessional at best which puts pressure on them to produce, and the cycle continues.

What should happen is that the IT department assesses the features as well as the priorities. They evaluate the technology providers based on that clear idea of what are ‘deal killer’ features for people. If it reaches a thresh hold that makes it impossible to please even 70-80% of the clients then IT needs to break down the technologies and groups not force them all onto one.

The web offers the opportunity for this to be easy. Web services, web sites as your API, universal log ins, etc. all make it possible to integrate different solutions on the data level. Sadly I think IT still approaches web apps as black boxes that work in silos.

The moral of the story for anyone building a web based service is that to really be a hit with medium to larger organizations you need to offer integration and openness in your apps. If you can be the folks that develop the integration tools as well as offer your product you can likely charge more based on a successful track record. At least from where I am sitting ;)

In what I think is a good example for large institution web teams, the BBC has gone and offered an update to their home page. It is very Web two point oh with some widgets and gradients, big images, and larger text so its easier to read in this web world of increasingly high resolutions. They have some cool design elements like a classic looking clock, customization, and all the other bits you would expect on a site… except advertisements. The rationale for the design is offered in a blog post.

Issues to note about the BBC in my mind are:

• It is publicly funded and the public can take an ownership view on its web presence
• They have a large team but an even larger web presence
• Their primary audience is hugely diverse and crosses generations, from pre-teens to WWII vets

What I like:

• Their blog post explains what they thinking with regards to the big changes and invites conversation
• They point out there will be continuous changes (the web is not a static medium)
• It is a big change on look not content so they try to undersell it a little as a ‘lick of paint’ not a ‘redo’

Love it or hate it, its a pretty cool public process given all things.

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…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

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 ;)