Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Current News
Content in Motion: What iTunes Can Teach Us About Managing Web Content
3/29/2005
What are the characteristics of event information that motivate us to put such effort into managing events content?
* Events have shared properties (name, date, time, location, sponsor, etc.) that can be abstracted from the presentation of each event, and event information is more re-usable when this information is presented in a consistent manner. The content is granular and re-usable.
* To reach their intended audience, events need to leave the organizational unit they originate in and get exposure in more than one place (multiple Web pages, Web sites, and other media). The content needs to be syndicated.
* Events fall into categories--such as event type, topic, and intended audience--and event listings are more useful if they can be filtered, sorted, and grouped by those categories. The content has metadata.
* Events are topical and relevant to other content. On a Web page that discusses a particular topic, we want to be able to show events relevant to that topic to give the page more depth. The content has relationships to other content.
* Being able to aggregate and re-use events from across an institution and show the depth and richness of its activities is an important institutional goal, beyond the goals of each event sponsor in promoting their event. The content is institutional.
Back to the Big Picture
Once we generalize the characteristics of event information, we start to discover lots of other content on our Web sites with similar characteristics. Some examples typical to higher education are suggested below. The characteristics listed above apply to each one--granularity and reusability, syndication, metadata, relationships, and institutional importance.* Faculty profiles, including contact information, biographical information, expertise, publications, research, and connections to courses.
* Courses, including descriptions, requirements, schedule information, syllabi, and connections to faculty.
* Academic programs, their offerings, requirements, and connections to faculty and courses.
* University news, press releases, departmental announcements, and profiles of faculty and students.
* Organizations, their events, activities, announcements, and members.
At many of our institutions, the de facto process for putting this type of content on the Web is to embed it in a new Web page. Doing that is like creating an album of music, to return to our music analogy. We've frozen content in a single arrangement for a single purpose, when what we really want to do is re-use it and let it flow logically through our Web sites and into other media.
Content from a faculty member's profile, for example, should appear in a university faculty directory; on the Web sites of the departments and research centers the faculty member is affiliated with; in a faculty experts guide for the media; in a Web gateway for a particular research topic; and perhaps even in an RSS feed that updates faculty about their colleagues' latest publications, or a Podcast of the faculty member's latest lecture. In each instance, the content should be automatically linked to relevant related content. And each of those areas of content should flow freely and appear where it should as well.
Getting There from Here
Getting from traditional Web publishing to granular, easily syndicated content objects is no small task. Most of our institutions don't have the resources to make major changes across the board, so it's part of our responsibility as Web professionals to develop strategies that move our institutions incrementally in the right direction. Here are some of the areas I think we need to be working on.Recommended Reading
- Web 2.0 :: Wednesday, October 8, 2008
:::::: THE BUZZ
: The Institutional Path For Change in This Age: Andragogy, not Pedagogy
:::::: PRODUCTS AND APPS
: College Students Find WiFi Essential to Education, Survey Reports
: Digital Arts Alliance Adds Fordham U
: Amazon To Host Microsoft Solutions in the Cloud
: Online University Aims To Boost Rural Math and Science Teachers - News Update :: Tuesday, October 7, 2008
:::::: NEWS
: Coming to Terms with Cloud Computing
: IBM Aims To Boost Mainframe Competency with Scholarship Program
: Microsoft's 'Dublin' App Server Tied to .NET 4.0
: Payment Card Security Toughens with DSS 1.2 Release
: 6 Universities Join NASA Astrobiology Institute
: Amazon To Host Microsoft Solutions in the Cloud
: CRM Pushing into New Areas of Higher Ed
: U Washington Aims To Streamline Data Access with Amalga
: Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Available - IT Trends :: Thursday, October 2, 2008
:::::: INTERVIEW
:: CRM Pushing into New Areas of Higher Ed
:::::: IT NEWS
:: Integrated Collaborative Environment Leverages Web 2.0
:: You Say You Want a Runtime Revolution?
:: Visual Studio To Include jQuery Library
:: Browser Makers Seek Clickjacking Fix
:: China's Southeast University Upgrades Wireless LANs Across 6 Campuses
:: Aruba To Increase Wireless Performance with ARM 2.0
:: More Universities Sign with Hothand Wireless To Deliver Mobile Marketing - SmartClassroom :: Wednesday, October 1, 2008
:::::: ELEARNING TIPS
: Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students
:::::: NEWS and PRODUCT UPDATES
: Stanford Testing iPhone Application Suite
: North Seattle CC Adds Plato Online Algebra Course to Math Formula
: Second Life Mashup Helps Boost Distance Ed Retention at Huntington JC
: DePaul Weaves SS&C Tech Finance Material into Hybrid Graduate Course
: Serena Acquisition Takes Aim at Microsoft Project - Web 2.0 :: Wednesday, October 1, 2008
:::::: THE BUZZ
: The Generative Nature of the Digital Economy and Its Challenge to Educators
:::::: ELEARNING TIPS
: Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students
:::::: PRODUCTS AND APPS
: College Crime Gets Google Maps Mashup at UCrime.com
: Second Life Mashup Helps Boost Distance Ed Retention at Huntington JC
: UW-Stout Taps Echo360 Lecture Capture To Connect with Distance Students
: Turnitin Integrates Plagiarism Tool into New Online Writing Service - News Update :: Tuesday, September 30, 2008
:::::: NEWS
: Second Life Mashup Helps Boost Distance Ed Retention at Huntington JC
: Seton Hall Monitors Recruitment Dollars with Coremetrics
: Universities Tackle Mainframes in IT Courses
: Windows 7 Bits To Be Released at PDC'08
: Serena Acquisition Takes Aim at Microsoft Project
: United States Tops List of Sources for Botnet Attacks
: Malicious Code Hidden in Rich Content Files Tough To Detect, According to Finjan Report
: Purdue Team Driving SiCortex Low-power Supercomputer in 2008 Cluster Challenge
: U Arizona To Optimize Wireless Networks on Campus
