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High Ed Hangout episodes
- HEH 25: Let’s Get Accessible!
Dan and Dave bring an enlightening report back from the CSUN Accessibility Conference in lovely San Diego, CA.
Dan and Dave just got back from CSUN Accessibility Conference
- “Everyone will have a disability at some point in their life”
- Accessibility is just a branch of usability
- The UN has a ratification to make all their technology accessible
- Voice assistance and AI is on the rise making much more controllable via voice
- Target had an inaccessible app and added someone to their team who was blind to work with them on the development of this app.
- ARIA is somewhat of an override (last resort) way to change something that you can’t do in the code or HTML.
- Using HTML5 tags the way they are intended to be used is a huge step in the right direction.
- How do persons with disabilities use mobile devices?
- What’s the future of accessibility policy in higher ed? In the USA?
- The easiest way to get buy-in would be to just have a disabled person show how they work through a site or an app.
- How to test:
- VNDA tool to see how it works
- Turn on voice controls on Mac
- Just try to tab through a website without a mouse
1 hr 2 min - HEH 24: How I Learned to Love the (Ginger Beer) Bomb
People keep uploading HUGE images, so we chat about the best ways to handle automatically optimizing them via the various CMS tools. We also dip into usability and card sorting exercises.
Ken has an issue with people uploading non-optimized LARGE images. What’s the best way to deal with that?
- Img tag can use “srcset” which you can pass a list including the path and width of the image with multiple images so that the browser doesn’t need to download the image to know the width.
- “sizes”
- https://ericportis.com/posts/2014/srcset-sizes/
- How do we make images smaller (file size)?
- Managed Image Content Areas
- File size (compression, img data optimization, stripping meta/exif data)
- Resizing
- Cropping
- Dynamic size use (srcset, sizes)
- File Format conversion/use
- Load/Pre-loading (lazy loading)
- WordPress Tools
- WP Smush
- PicResize
- ShortPixel (also does PDF’s… if you’re into that kind of thing)
- Drupal Cropping Tool
- Focal Point Module
- Outside Services for Compression
- TinyPNG
- PicResize.com
Card Sort for usability
- http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Card_sorting
- Good Article on Card Sorting Process: http://usabilitygeek.com/card-sorting-quick-guide-for-beginners/
- Card Sorting App: https://sites.google.com/a/uxsort.com/uxsort/
(this is better used internally for reporting vs. a tool for a user to participate in the card sort)- What would happen when you played card sort telephone game – taking a sort and giving the results to the next sort and giving those results to the next sort?
1 hr 4 min - HEH 23: Don’t Let Your Dog Eat Poo
Tonight the topics center around outside vendors and products for various tasks at our universities. We cover digital marketing, scholarship searches, chat and events calendars. We also touch on strategic planning.
What outside vendors do you use?
- GVSU: Siteimprove
- GVSU: google and FB ads
- consultant provide a report for digital advertising
- UALR: digital marketing buyer
- Mainly for recruiting
- Iowa Admissions: digital media buyer
- Iowa Admissions: Search student development consultant
- UALR: Consultant recommends a position, but the position is only half implemented
- Iowa Libraries: Use a ton of vended products (search, springshare, libcal, libguides, chat)
Have you ever had a cold call from a consultant work out?
- GVSU: Scholarship search – AcademicWorks
- The issue has been the culture change reviewing scholarships
- Getting data back and forth between school and cloud service is the most difficult part. UALR uses WS02.com (an api to make it easier)
Chat?
- The biggest issue was trying to get people to monitor the chat – if you don’t monitor, it’s just a contact form
- The library is the primary user for chat.
- Iowa Admissions uses PHPLive Chat
Event Management Calendar
- Iowa uses localist – events.uiowa.edu
Strategic Planning Practices
- Iowa Admissions: every summer. What’s working, what’s not…
- GVSU: lost several developers recently and really brought the focus in on what works and what goes where.
- Iowa Library: New communications team sets the web surface of the library
- UALR: IT and Marketing are coming together for a collaborative relationship, and need to have a plan.
52 min - HEH 22: Inject this into your SQL!
Tonight the High Ed Hangout gents talk about security and what they’re doing to make their sites more secure. They also chat about rolling out new features and updating their CMS.
Possible SQL injection attack on GVSU reported by a student
- Security offices in all of our separate universities who look for this.
- UALR has a security area of study
- Information Assurance Minor or Certificate.
GVSU is rolling out new CMS – what’s the best way to roll it out to users? It was prompted by the new website users wanting the new design.
- Stage both at the same time and let users try the new prior to it being pushed to everyone.
- How are new features added to the CMS?
- Web team brainstorms based on comments and groups common features together for roll-out.
- What are the best requested features for the CMS?
- Best: form builder (also complicates things with very complex forms)
- Pick template colors
How do you handle staging on your CMS?
- Is there a temporary area where things can go before they go live since most CMS’s are published live.
- Enterprise CMS have features like this (they need to)
- There are workflow modules to make this work, but the overhead to roll something like that out is almost more trouble than it’s worth.
Dan & Dave going to CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in Feb.
Ken wants to go to UX Lib
56 min - HEH 21: I Just Wish It Was Bulbous at One End
The gents chat about current books they are reading and then talk about what (non-computer) hardware they use for home, media, health and more.
What books are we currently reading?
What hardware do you use?
- Amazon Echo
- Smartthings Home Control
- Ken built an echo with a Raspberry Pi
- Nest Thermostat
- Automatic bluetooth connector for car to feed information to the phone app
- IFTTT
- Search for conferences and email
- Stocks watching
- Nest notification of movement
- Craigslist notifications
- Lumo Lift
- It notifies you when you’re slouching
- Fitbit Aria Weight Scale
- Tracks weight over time and does BMI
- Withings activite-pop
- Step tracking
- Media Devices
- XBox One for media
- Apple TV 4
- Plex
- Windows Media Center
- Chromecast
- Streaming Services
- Sling works, but having to watch on a specific schedule is hard
- What Internet Service do you have?
- Comcast
- Mediacom
- SouthSlope Coop fiber to the home
- AT&T Uverse
- Comcast Xfinity
- New FCC Chairman is anti-net neutrality
- Do we use a tablet of any sort?
- How do you take notes
- Laptop to Google Drive/Docs
- Naming is important and tagging
- You can assign stuff to others in google docs!
1 hr 5 min - HEH 20: 4 + Joe: The Podcast Podcast
This episode is the podcast podcast (how meta!). The gang shares their favorite podcasts that span the gamut on topics. Tune in, and you might just find something new to listen to.
Our Favorite Podcasts
- Serial
- Season was waaaaay better than season 2
- Reply All
- Random topics about the internet
- Startup Podcast
- The startup of Gimlet Media who is the parent company for Reply All
- My Brother, My Brother, and Me
- 3 brothers who give advice in response to Yahoo! Answers questions
- The Adventure Zone
- 3 brothers play D&D with their father
- Judge John Hodgman
- People bring cases and John judges
- Welcome to Night Vale
- Fictional town of Night Vale radio drama
- Criminal
- Mini-serial
- MacBreak Weekly
- Common topics about Apple/Macintosh
- Security Now
- Security/internet with Steve Gibson
- Slate Political Gabfest
- Current political topics of the day with good analysis
- On the Media
- Issues in journalism and the news
- Science Podcast
- Current issues in Science Magazine
- Hidden Brain
- NPR – why our brain does the things it does
- Freakaonomics Radio
- TED Radio Hour
- Interesting topics from really smart people
- Comedy Central Standup
- Just standup comedy
- This American Life
- Hit and miss on episodes (some of us have given up on it)
- Long Form
- Long interviews, in-depth
- Cord Killers
- Cutting the (tv) cable; streaming tv
- In the Dark
- Kindof like Serial; analysis of a child abduction story
- A Life Well Wasted
- Video game life
- Penn’s Sunday School
- Penn Jillette
- More Perfect
- RadioLab spinoff about the Supreme Court
- 99% Invisible
- Design that works is design you don’t notice
Podcasting Apps
- Pocketcast for Android
- Overcast for iOS
Other Apps
- Breathe Meditation
Ira Glass on Taste: https://vimeo.com/24715531
59 min - HEH 19: Present-day Screwups and Misspent Youth
A site gets destroyed (temporarily), and how we all test our sites and prepare for the worst. We also talk about our favorite childhood games.
Ken destroys his Iowa Library site
- Testing with the new google tester
- Used a plugin for compression (w3 total cache plugin)
- Got all 100’s (because an error 500 page loads REALLY quickly)
Iowa Library overwrote a site
- Overwrote /maps with /maps (an actual site)
Arizona launched a new primary website
- The server was not configured correctly for Drupal and failed under normal traffic.
Dave did load testing
- Learned that the internet connection was not good enough and the load balance was failing on that.
Dave created a site for site administrator and not the actual users of the site
- Failed badly and had to rewrite – was a learning experience
UALR set up 250+ WordPress (stand-alone) installations on a single server
- The server still exists and they have been working on migrating into a single wordpress network
What do we want to be when we grow up?
- Scott – Artist, Movie Director
- Daniel – Hacker, Actor, a lot of things
- Dave – Was outside a lot and wanted to be a park ranger (then got a Tandy and never left the house again)
- Ken played games on ancient calculators (http://sm.pcmag.com/pcmag_in/photo/h/hewlett-pa/hewlett-packard-hp-65-1974_js34.jpg)
He LOVED the HP 15C!!!!!!Play: Wizardry on the Apple II
Read: Ready Player One (movie coming out soon)
Favorite Childhood Games:
- Dan: Pokemon (gameboy)
- Dave: Thexter
- Daniel: Myst
- Scott: Lode Runner
1 hr - HEH 18: Is This Good for the COMPANY?
The gang talks about the what new strategies and goals they have for their schools/sites. It covers speed, new applications, and updates to the CMS. They also look into web boot camps for new hires.
What’s 2017 going to be in your area? Strategies? Goals?
- GVSU
- Upgrade to the CMS to reflect the new design of the home page
- Caching, less server load
- Admissions application rewrite – accessibility/usability
- Increase grad enrollment (marketing/web) – giving it a lot of attention for the first time (centrally)
- Iowa Admissions
- Admissions application rewrite – responsive
- It’s hard to drop in those random misc required questions in a way that works with the rest of the application. A possible solution is to visit it regularly and look at the big picture.
- New digital marketing/tracking system
- Iowa Libraries
- Support systems/pages for content developers
- New Style Guide (or pattern library)
- Interface consistency (elements) – “This is how it looks”
- Audit for usability and accessibility
- Survey web users/audience (pop-up on top pages)
- Standardize development workflow
- New library search interface
- UALR
- Integrate CMS with other systems
- API to standardize systems
- Student portal -> content wide
- Grow/nurture a new team
- Workflow? Tell Stories.
Web/Online Boot Camps/Training
- It was a single platform consistent across all browsers that HTML5 does not *yet*?
- Mobile support of HTML5
- Getting very popular
- Don’t watch a tutorial – collaborative development with a mentor on a team. They look very thorough and… actually good.
- Firehose
- Bloc
- General Assembly
- The Iron Yard
- Provide actual work experience
How Adobe Flash, once the face of the web, fell to the brink of obscurity—and why it’s worth saving
Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: Stealth-call
1 hr 8 min - HEH 17: Dang It the Cat Threw up… Hold On
For some reason throw-up is a common thread to kick this one off. Dan’s cat throws up, and Dave and Dan take a trip which involves a (rather humorous) throw-up story as well involving an airplane barf bag. We also chat about web infrastructure in other parts of the world, and how much we hate (HATE!) mobile ads.
Dan and Dave traveled to Africa.
Dave and Andrea get sick. Dave washes his pants.Sister institution travel
- Dave traveled to Africa to visit a web team there 4 years ago.
- Widernet Project
- eGranary digital library (local internet)
- What is infrastructure like in Africa and India?
Intrusive web ads
- There’s a point where ads push you away from the actual content.
- Google has started to hurt pagerank on sites with intrusive ads.
- The scrolly-sucky ad that you need to scroll out of the way.
Urban Dictionary Word of the Day: Trump Stump
55 min - HEH 16: Ken Got Hitched!
Ken goes to an island and gets married. GVSU looks at taking over web representation of grad programs, We talk about staff training opportunities and communities that our individual universities provide.
Leroyyyy Jenkins!
GVSU, after looking at analytics has taken over grad programs centrally because there is very little (or poor) data available.
Does the library provide information mainly to grad students?
- Librarians jobs are coming to a turning point. They come in at the end to narrow down results after the fact where before they helped on the front end.
University of Iowa has a central graduate admissions site that lists all grad and professional programs in one place with a similar format and content type.
What sort of services does your university provide for (staff) training?
- CPR
- Violent Incident Training
- Providing for safety and awareness (safe rides etc.), crisis alert systems
Staff communities
- CMS communities: email groups, in-system help systems, trainings
- Ambassadors for different topics: Safety, Health and Wellness, Technology, Web, etc.
- Issues: identity crises within the community and cross-roles (Content? Developers? Tech/Support?)
- Examples: Nebraska, Penn State
Urban Dictionary Word of the day (NSFW)
1 hr 1 min
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