MinneWebCon 2008 Sessions
Morning Keynote:
The Emerging Profession
Eric Meyer
Ask ten web professionals to define their positions and you will hear ten different answers (and probably ten different job titles). As a field that grew out of the collective efforts of millions, a formal description of the “web professional” has never solidified. However, there are certain characteristics that professionals in the field share.
What are the hallmarks of a true web professional? How can we (as individuals and as a community) develop these important, shared strengths? How do we work to influence the use of best practices amongst our colleagues, administrators, and people just entering the field?
Drawing on nearly a decade and a half of experience in the field, Eric will sketch the emerging outlines of the web professional, and how the underlying principles of the web standards movement, as well as the technical design of the web itself, provide a frame for that outline.
Afternoon Keynote:
Internet Law & Liability
Amy Kristin Sanders
Like new communications technologies in the past, the Internet and World Wide Web have resulted in new ways of creating and interpreting laws. And just like print technology resulted in the creation of copyright law, Internet technology is now challenging these traditional notions of copyright....and may very well result in a new paradigm of what defines intellectual property and its protection.
Toss in issues about First Amendment freedom of speech and press protections, privacy issues, and thorny technical issues like accessibility, and there is now a broad landscape of Internet law that is being reshaped and reinterpreted by our nation's courts.
How do Internet law issues shape the way that Web Professionals do their work? Are there issues of liability that should concern us? What are the top Internet law issues that affect our emerging profession, and how should we be paying attention and reacting to them?
Sessions in Memorial Hall: Usability and Content Management
Semantic, Accessible HTML is Good for Business
Zach Johnson, University of Minnesota
With wide support for CSS by today's browsers, you can make your visual design a reality and use semantic, accessible HTML. This session explores what semantic HTML is, describes the business returns you can get from designing with standards, and demonstrates how CSS enables you to honor your visual web designs with even strict semantic markup and advanced accessibility considerations in place.
View Semantic, Accessible HTML is Good for Business
User Experience Strategy and Touchpoints
Jason Sack, space150
Usability ideally instructs every point of the design process. This session will describe methods and principles to help keep a project faithful to it's intended audience and purpose. Using case studies/examples of the relationship between establishing a UX approach, and tangible examples of how using this as a sounding board results in more usable interactive environments, we will look at the user experience from the site structure level to the aesthetic level and on down to the smallest interaction.
Blogs, RSS, and Podcasting
Shane Nackerud, Dan Kunitz, Sara Hurley; University of Minnesota
This session will be a crash course in using the Movable Type (or UThink, at the U) blogging platform, and ways you can use the ease with which blogging software generates and automates content delivery. Get insight into how the College of Liberal Arts uses the blogs to manage content for their websites and how the School of Public Health uses the blogs to deliver three different podcast channels geared towards various audiences.
Best Practices for Accessible Forms & Data Tables
Phil Kragnes, University of Minnesota
Promoting universal access to Web-based information, services, and technology has emerged as a major design consideration. Individuals are increasingly dependent on technology access to enhance their productivity. Given that Web pages and services are central to the way in which business, learning, and other life activities are conducted, they must be designed as not to exclude individuals with disabilities.
This presentation will examine coding techniques for increasing the accessibility of HTML forms and tables. The audience will get a first-hand look at the difficulties encountered by a screen reader user when form and table coding is inaccurate or missing. Accessibility issues for users with other types of impairments will be discussed. Finally, it will be demonstrated that coding for accessibility has little, if any, impact on visual aesthetics or design.
Johnson Great Room: Usability and Social Experience
Social Networking: Meeting the Expectations of the MySpace Generation
Mark Heiman, Carleton College
Social networking offers intriguing opportunities for facilitating connections between and among our prospects, alumni, and on-campus populations. Many vendors will happily sell you their version of Facebook. We'll explore the issues, glance at the current market, and begin to construct some principles around which to integrate social networking with higher education.
Microformats: A More Personable Online Experience
Laurie McGinley, University of Minnesota
The premise: design simple, open data formats built on already existing standards to identify and label classes of commonly used data to make it easier for people and computers to locate or distribute information on websites. Microformats allow us to share and reuse our data—to populate address books and calendars, share reviews, tag content, publish or discover events, and browse and define our social relationships. In short, microformats leverage your existing content by defining it for your browser.
What can you do with microformats? Be found. Tell the internet a particular link is your work. Share who your contacts are and how you know them. Provide instant mapping to your organization. This session will include demonstrations on using hCard, hCalendar, and XFN. To get started with microformats, personalize your browser with the Operator plugin for Firefox and visit microformats.org to learn more.
Enhancing Your Sites with JavaScript
Sam Buchanan, Minnesota State Colleges & Universities (MnSCU)
An introduction to using modern JavaScript libraries and techniques. With an eye toward web standards and accessibility, we'll explore ways to add behavior to web pages and enhance user experience, including using JavaScript and CSS to control the behavior of elements on web pages and learning some basic Ajax techniques. The session is aimed primarily at people who have little to no JavaScript experience, but is still useful to those who have more background.
Google Tools: Using Analytics To Understand Your User base
Michael Cizmar, MC+A (Google Enterprise Partner)
Metrics are a qualification of success or failure. Using Google Analytics helps you understand your visitors, know where they are going on your site, and eliminate much of the guess work on overall site performance. In this presentation, we will review the process of defining metrics, measuring them, and then revisiting site design.
Ski-U-Mah Sessions: Software and Web Tools
Google Tools: Mash Ups Mania
Michael Cizmar, MC+A (Google Enterprise Partner)
As consumers demand more transparent access to information, mash ups are becoming popular platforms to deliver unified presentations of desperate systems. The increased availability of services, combined with AJAX technologies, allow for composite web applications that have become a dominant practice for delivering content and functionality on the web. This presentation will present available Google Services and APIs that you can utilize to develop web sites. The audience will be presented with the history, key Google services, and fnally a demonstration of mash ups using Google APIs.
Online Video Tools: MediaMill and VideoAnt
Brad Hosack, Pete McCauley; College of Education + Human Development
Film and video are effective educational tools; but, until recently, sharing and delivering video has been clunky and cumbersome, prohibiting user interaction. With increases in bandwidth and with new media tools being developed for sharing and augmenting video, academia can more effectively utilize video as a teaching tool. Brad Hosack and Pete McCauley will present two web-based video tools which allow students and faculty the ability to archive, derive, and annotate video for the purpose of teaching and learning.
Adobe Dreamweaver
James Lockman, Adobe Systems, Inc.
In this session, you will learn how to apply Cascading Style Sheets to your sites so that you can create a more portable, accessible web site for your audience. We will demonstrate how to create style sheets, lift them from the page you create them within, and apply them to new pages. Plus, you will learn how to use this for updating your sites and changing the appearance of your content for specific users.
Adobe Contribute
James Lockman, Adobe Systems, Inc.
Adobe Contribute is a great tool for distributing content management responsibility. Adobe Dreamweaver is a robust application for creating the overall site and building the templates to hold the content; however, the nature of the web is that most content is dynamic and ever-changing. This session will demonstrate how Contribute integrates content writers and editors more effectively into the content management process.
