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High Ed Hangout episodes
- HEH 35: Don’t Wear Earmuffs Over AirPods
Ken tells us all about his trip to WordCamp Minneapolis. We dig into cloud hosting (mainly for CMS), and get a bit into using Docker.
Ken has Apple AirPods (and likes them)
Wordcamp Minneapolis (~200 people)
- Keynote was about technology industry and mental health
- The community behind WP is very involved
- Rest API
- PODS (for adding fields to WP) vs. Advanced Custom Fields
- PODS is very connected to WP Core
- ACF is further outside of WP Core
- Drush (for Drupal) = WordPress CLI
- Pantheon was there for cloud WP hosting
Cloud Hosting
- Iowa uses Acquia for Drupal hosting starting discussions for WP cloud hosting
- Helpful for automatically updates, but also scary (more for Drupal).
- GVSU hosts locally (no cloud)
- UALR is invested in virtualization
Iowa Admissions uses AWS for a custom video to render thousands of videos for students. It builds itself, runs and then destroys itself.
Anybody used Docker?
56 min - HEH 34: He Touched my Fanny!
It’s a random conversation this time, folks. We chat Zime (it’s back!), Dan getting stopped by the TSA, some future conferences, new podcasts we enjoy and Dave’s classes starting this fall.
ZIMA IS BACK, BABY!
The US asking for passwords to your phone at the border.
TSA always asks to touch Dan’s belly.
Dan accidently took the wrong bag once (that was filled with bibles and whitey tighties)
Ken is going to Wordcamp in Minneapolis, MN regional tomorrow (tune in next week for a report)
UALR is starting a new funding model based on completion.
Any new podcasts?
- Paula Poundstone Institute
- RadioLab: the Future of Fake News
- Reply All: Long Distance
- Reply All: What kind of Idiot gets Phished
- Relevant because Chrome Web Developer extension got hacked today
How do you protect university business from hackers and phishers (hr forms etc)?
Dave talks about his master’s classes starting this fall.
1 hr 2 min - HEH 33: Let’s All Take a Moment to Floss
Russian hacking (they’re after Daniel), Admissions Apps, Google Search Appliance, Analytics, Icon Libraries, and more… brought to you today by the letter H (as in HEH, as in High Ed Hangout). Enjoy!
Daniel gets hacked (likely Russians) and keeps dropping out of the podcast. He changed all his passwords. They will be listed in the show notes.
Admissions App Redesigns
- GVSU is mainly working on question wording. Some people were still coming at the project as an extension of the old paper app.
- GVSU still has a paper app that gets handed out in high schools.
What do you do that’s still paper?
- UALR, anything that requires a signature (access requests)
- GVSU determined that a logged in user is sufficient as a signature (LDAP etc.). There are issues with external users still needing to actually sign.
Digital Asset Management
- GVSU Widen Collective stores every photo taken and tagged
- UI Library uses ContentDM but moving towards Islandora (and open source library archiving product based on Drupal 8)
- Iowa also uses PhotoShelter for marketing photos
Google Search Appliance is being sunsetted
- Moving to a new cloud solution CSE?
Ken is building an icon framework that’s flexible and responsive (using font awesome).
- Font Awesome Pro 5 had a kickstarter and trying to get the university to purchase a site license.
- CSS Tricks
- CodePen
What browsers do you support?
- UI Libraries IE10+
- #2 browser on library site and Admissions is IE7!!!
- Turns out it’s campus terminal traffic (internal traffic)
- GVSU IE9+ (last 2 versions)
Analytics
- Tell us something interesting in from your Google Analytics
- Dave is Google Certified in Google Analytics
What online training do you use?
- GVSU: Lynda.com & Code Academy
- UI: Lynda.com & Pluralsight
- UALR: Lynda.com & Friday workshops to try new things with coworkers using codingame.com
1 hr 3 min - HEH 32: Back to the Boob: The Quilt Situation
Scott had a son, and is adjusting to life as a new parent (and the time he took off work). The GVSU guys jump back into accessibility training with a new consultant…. and then somehow the conversation transitions to quilts.
Scott had a son, and talks about paternity leave and FMLA and paternity/maternity leave at universities. Additional, he is very very very very sleep-deprived.
GVSU engaged Deque Systems for accessibility training.
- They gave the GVSU site an A… NOT an A+ (because the bottom of the drop-down menus did not go to the next menu)
…shame on Daniel!!!- If someone is deaf from birth, they initially learn ASL before learning english.
- Working accessibility into the dev process – get involved early. Checklists were provided to different roles on the team (content, dev, design, front-end).
- How do you keep content creators following accessibility standards? GVSU is thinking about requiring training before handing over the keys to the CMS.
How is accessibility handled centrally at universities?
How much time does your dev team spend trying to fix your site for older versions of browsers that make up 2% of your audience? Accessibility is a much larger percentage and we don’t focus on that.
QUILTS!!!!!!
46 min - They gave the GVSU site an A… NOT an A+ (because the bottom of the drop-down menus did not go to the next menu)
- HEH 31: Dude! Get away from my Chicken!!
Daniel kicks things off by trying to enjoy some fried chicken, but is foiled by his cats. From there we chat about our design process and making sure it fits the larger university brand. Then we try to figure out the definition of a landing page.
- Design process
- paper sketch
- Photoshop
- Omnigraffle for wireframing
- How do you design within a university brand?
- Slight customization in the GVSU CMS (fairly locked in templates)
- Everyone (at all levels) use the same templates in the CMS at GVSU
- University of Iowa is very decentralized and web varies department to department.
- MSU does a nice job with branding/web with a more open policy
- Nebraska does a single web template created by the web community on campus
- Libraries use some lower level pages to do some of the design experimentation.
- What is a landing page?
- One thing to do on a page (conversion button or form)
- Keep navigation in place to allow for exploration if a user wants to do that.
57 min - HEH 30: Happy One Year Anniversary!!
It starts with the weather, moves on to politics, and then to religion (or at least a TV show slightly about religion) before the conversation moves on to discussions about college applications and how to improve their usability.
- It’s storming in Iowa and Daniel lives in tornado alley.
(small talk about the weather)- Presidential Politics with a question for the future.
(small talk about politics)- Religion? American Gods on Starz
(small talk about religion)- GVSU and Iowa are working on updating their admissions applications
- Iowa needs to be responsive and is just working on removing friction points for users.
- GVSU is doing a similar thing.
- Currently we all have different app logins than our student single-sign-on login. It’s many systems talking to each other and transitioning from one to another.
- How do you show the large list of majors available at a university? College > Major? How does a student narrow that list?
- Setup instructions ahead of time and let student know what materials they need, how much it costs, how long it takes before even throwing them to the app.
- How do we narrow down the app from the 9+ app we have for different student types? We need to be asking the correct questions to get a student where they need to be automatically and not have them use higher ed terminology (which they don’t know) to get to the correct place.
- How do you enter phone numbers to make it easier for the user
1 hr - It’s storming in Iowa and Daniel lives in tornado alley.
- HEH 29: Puppets! Puppets! Puppets!
The conversation tonight includes things learned via penetration testing at GVSU, what we know about retention policies at our schools (Internet Archive?) and content update policies. We also learn that GVSU Library has puppets you can check out… like a lot of puppets!
Penetration testing at GVSU
- Very fixable things were found (one thing was found 35k times)
- SQL injection
- Clickjacking
- Embedding an iframe from an outside site. Fix by adding headers to prevent outside domains to be embedded or to embed your site.
- Cross-site scripting
- Allows a hacker to send a link that looks like it’s from the site you’re going to but does nefarious things.
- Does your school have a web retention policy? When is it ok to get rid of a site?
- Conference sites have a definite end date.
- GVSU puts a “last update” date in the footer. This can be problematic for evergreen content (directions to the university).
- Internet Archive
- Iowa and GVSU libraries use it for retired sites.
- Content updates policy – how do you make sure someone is looking at content on a regular basis?
- Best Puppet Ever
Pheasant Puppet (with inappropriate finger placement)- All About Twickety
Puppets for everyone!52 min - HEH 28: We’re doin’ it live!!!! (3 of us anyway)
Daniel is in Iowa City visiting Ken and Scott, so they are podcasting from the same location at the University of Iowa Libraries. Dan and Dave join remotely to discuss personal sites and hosting on campus and focus groups and how the kids use the internets these days.
Ken, Daniel and Scott are in the same room recording at the University of Iowa Libraries. Dan and Dave are still in Grand Rapids.
Dan is participating in a Magic the Gathering tournament tomorrow. (He will not be dressing like a wizard)
Do you host personal sites and/or blogs?
- GVSU has personal web space (via FTP)
- http://www2.gvsu.edu/slaughtd/ (built with MS Word!!)
- UALR has a historic server (Web1) where everything went (and still lives, including personal sites).
- UIowa has MyWeb for academic purposes (hosting space)
- Admissions has a student blog site (http://blog.admissions.uiowa.edu/) to provide an authentic student voice for recruiting.
Focus Groups
- Uiowa admissions focus groups for high schools: where are students on social, what are they using?
- High School students are not on facebook anymore; first time it has shifted
- New incoming students setting up a facebook to participate with the university
- Where do the find you first? Google. High School Counselors (https://www.naviance.com/).
- Populations tend to be highly heterogeneous, students have varied goals and intentions. After those, “do you have the program I’m interested in? What do I have to do to join?”
30 min - HEH 27: Puddting?
The lost episode.
Scott lost his internet connection, so the episode got called off. No internet = no podcast.
13 min - HEH 26: Daniel’s Wallet got Poop on it!
How do we handle user tracking and privacy policies for our university? What do we do for retargeting and advertising? What do we all use personally to keep our internet usage private?
He got a new one https://www.crabbygear.com/
Privacy policies on our sites
- User tracking is somewhat new in higher edu, but commercial sites have been tracking you for a long time.
- When is it ok for a company to track you?
- Amazon showing other things you’d be interested in based on purchases
- Google Now showing cards or news based on actions
- Facebook “hide this story” and “don’t show as much from this person”
- Retargeting in general with products seems to be the most obviously bad.
- Retargeting
- Brand awareness – just showing full university brand to visitors
- Specific program retargeting for visitors to specific program pages
- How do you associate content and ads with the correct users?
- How do you personally keep things private?
- VPN
- Private Internet Access
- TorGuard
- Tiger VPN
- TorrentFreak does a good yearly review of VPN’s
- VPN Mentor provides a list of VPN reviews
- Adblock Plus
- Ghostery
- uBlock Origin
1 hr 2 min
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