Author Archives: Jason Mittell

Designs for Academic Departments and Faculty Profiles

Per Mike’s last post on the “glass wall” phase of feedback, we are offering links to design mock-ups for three academic departments and a faculty profile. A few notes on these:

These designs are not supposed to mirror actual content or the specific links and menu items that a department might use. White Whale did model it using real content, but making the specific content and menu decisions will be up to each department. Instead, the designs represent a range of options that a department/program might choose from, including different color palettes and navigational tools. Even the three departments used as samples might choose completely different options. And these are just flat images, not actively linking sites.

The three departments represent a range of possible design set-ups. The Chemistry site is the most bare-bones in terms of interactive tools – see the bottom of the page for an area called “the carousel,” a horizontally-scrolling content area that can be updated regularly with upcoming events, announcements, stories or links. The Economics page adds a top navigation nicknamed “the juice bar,” with tabs for updating content. The Film & Media Culture page uses both the top and bottom interactive navigation, and highlights how you might embed video into the pages. There are also various other boxes that can be used in all the designs for highlighting announcements, events, deadlines, or any other updates.

The faculty profile page (thanks to Nick Muller for being the prototype!) shows how faculty might display information. We’ll be adding areas for Recent Accomplishments (publications, awards, grants, etc.) and the ability to embed a feed from another site (like a faculty blog). We will also be basing a staff profile based on this template.

Please look these over and leave comments below – again, we’re not looking for “I love/hate it!” style comments, as much as hoping you might pose useful questions about what might be left out, what functionality you might want that’s not clearly here, etc. Every department and faculty/staff member will have some control on how their sites appear, but it will be based on the options here, so hopefully this will be useful as you work forward in adding content into Drupal and helping to build the site in the coming months!

Customizing and Personalizing the New Site

One aspect of the web makeover that we’ve heard is quite desired – and that we’ve always included in our plan – is the creation of personalized and customized pages. Over the last few months, it’s become clear that these terms, along with others like portals, homepages, profiles, and the like, can mean differing things depending on context. So in the interest of sharing a common vocabulary, we’ve developed a brief glossary of four different ways that the new site will support personal and custom information:

Portal: a personalized & customized user page for interacting with Middlebury.edu. This will not be published for others to see, but rather an interface you can make to choose the links, feeds, updates, and other information from Middlebury and other sites that you want to easily access. It will be comparable to iGoogle, MyYahoo, etc., but we will not be able to have it structured around widget in first iteration launching in January – implementing a widget-based system will be part of the next phase of development.

Directory Listing: the public presentation of data coming from Banner (department, address, email, phone, office hours, photo, etc.). You cannot edit this material on the web directly, but can update your information within Banner, including adding a link to your profile or personal website. This information will be accessed through the online directory search, and departmental sites can pull staff/faculty info from the directory.

Profile: the public presentation of your information, fully customized and editable by you. You can include feeds, images, video, links (internal & external), and other assorted content. There will be templates for defaults by classification (faculty, staff, student, etc.), with limited design flexibility. Your profile can feed from other dynamic systems – faculty pulling current course offerings, links to recent publications or documents, calendar of relevant events, etc. For most members of the Middlebury community, your profile will be the place to present yourself to the world.

Personal Website: anyone can build and maintain their own website independent of the core Middlebury.edu design and information architecture. Many people already do this, using tools like Segue, WordPress, HTML, or other platforms. LIS Web Services will support building such sites on WordPress and other currently supported platforms (including Segue in the short-term). Anyone can choose to link to their personal website via their directory and/or profile.

Hopefully this clarifies what options will be available for individuals. Please post any questions and comments as we work to implement these features.

Help make Middlebury’s website tell your story

I write with an update on Middlebury’s website makeover project, and a request for how you can participate to make our site more vibrant and effective.

In late April, our design firm White Whale visited campus and met with many of us to understand the culture of Middlebury. Through this process, we all feel confident that the new website will address the core concerns that many have voiced throughout the process: effective search, easier navigation, more design flexibility, easier to edit and update, and more multimedia possibilities.

However, White Whale discovered a problem that we had not previously diagnosed: they saw Middlebury as an incredibly vibrant place full of exciting research, activities, projects, and people – but the current site does not effectively share those stories. We realized that as a community, we are much better at doing interesting things in the classroom, labs, publishing world, and community, than sharing knowledge about what we do – and often, peers outside of Middlebury know more about what faculty, staff, and students are working on than here on campus.

The solution to this problem requires simple but widespread participation from faculty, staff, students, and alumni to help share Middlebury stories. White Whale is working on a web design that highlights the vibrancy of the Middlebury community, but we need to discover more specific stories to highlight. To help “seed” this process, we have created a simple web form designed to allow you to let the web makeover committee know what stories you have to share or type go/webstories in your browser.

White Whale has challenged us to gather 400 compelling Middlebury stories by the beginning of June – we can easily top that threshhold if each member of our community shared only 1-2 stories of your accomplishments. It will take only a few minutes to share what you already know, and it will help make our site much more reflective of who we are and what we do. All you’ll need to do is type 2-3 sentences about a project have been working on or know about – if the story seems like something that the Communications Office would like to feature in other media, they might contact you to help develop the story.

Thanks in advance for helping our website tell our stories!

Ideas for faculty & departmental pages

One of the specific areas that I’ve been working on is how our new website can better present information & inspire engagement within departmental and individual faculty webpages. I’ve sent the following questions to all department chairs, but invite anyone with a stake in academic pages – whether you’re a faculty member, coordinator, student, alum, or interested party – to weigh in about specific features you could imagine would strengthen the academic side of our website:

1. What would you like your department/program site to do that it doesn’t do now? Think about organization, graphic design, type/amount of information, interactivity, images/sound/video, and functions like blogs, wikis, and commenting.

2. What would you like your personal faculty page (and those in your department) to do that it doesn’t do now? Are there specific needs for your discipline that should be accounted for in designing the possibilities for faculty pages?

3. Who currently manages, edits and updates your department’s and faculty’s pages? Are there other people in your department who should be able to make edits and updates (assuming that the new system will be easier to use and accessible across system and browser, which it will be!)? What role do you envision your coordinator should have in this process? What about student workers?

4. What is your desired workflow for managing your department and faculty pages (e.g. how are updates requested, who makes updates, what information is automated, how frequently would updates be made)?

5. Do you currently have a way of featuring student or alumni work or updates on your site? If so, how do you manage it? If not, would you like such a function and how would you use it?

6. Do you currently publish a departmental newsletter? If so, how frequently, and in what formats (print, email, web-based)? Would you like to shift newsletters to web-based publishing and/or integrated into your departmental homepage as a blog, downloadable PDF, or other digital platform (think of the cost and environmental savings!)? And if you don’t have a newsletter, would you like to have one (and if so, in what format)?

7. Are there ways you could imagine the web being used to help promote and support department-specific events and tasks? To what degree might your website work better to send information to majors, or promote the program to non-majors/prospectives? What functionality and workflow would be necessary to add those elements to your departmental site?

8. Are there examples of departmental or faculty pages at other institutions that you find particularly effective that you would like to emulate? If so, please provide the URLs and highlight what specifically appeals to you about that site.

9. What other comments, feedback, and guidance might you offer to the web makeover team, especially as it concerns the site(s) in your academic area?

Examples of other sites

We’ve tried to assemble a range of examples from college websites that exemplify some options that Middlebury might emulate. Please provide additional examples in the comments if you see any that speak to you, or have comments on these sites that we used to present to staff on Dec. 16:

– Oberlin has recently redesigned its site into a highly dynamic & multimedia system. Particularly noteworthy is their group blogging site, encouraging students, staff and faculty to participate in a multifaceted conversation.

– Gettysburg has a good example of how a personalized bookmarking system might work – you can create a profile (if you don’t have a Gettysburg email, you can register as a prospective student), and then bookmark any page you might find to save in your profile. Also check out their strong use of embedded video.

– Bates has an embedded audio site that is simple and effective.

– Amherst‘s site (which is built on Drupal, an open source system we’re actively considering) effectively integrates information from its registration system (comparable to Banner) into a range of sites. For instance, a faculty page automatically feeds what courses they are teaching from their schedule, and links to individual courses (which, if registered in the course, includes access to course rosters, eReserves, announcements, etc.). Such an integrated system of sharing data from various platforms is a definite goal of Middlebury’s makeover.

– Colby has an extensive list of wikis, which range from administrative functions to student initiatives to course projects. While Middlebury does have a wiki platform, it could be much more active and integrated into the core web functions.

Please share your thoughts on these sites as well as links to others in the comments.

Some thoughts on editing

This idea emerged out of a conversation that Renée Brown and I had last week, and I thought it worth sharing with the group.

Renée & I agreed that one of the problems with our current web system is that the editing functions for CMS are ineffectively distributed around institutional staffing. Focusing only on academic departments (our mutual site of expertise), departmental coordinators are the people who hold the keys to the CMS and edit/update the material on departmental sites. However, most of the content revision requests come from faculty & chairs, not the coordinators, and coordinators update sites so infrequently that most lack confidence and comfort in the tasks, and thus seek out help from LIS. The net result is that department sites are typically out-of-date, stagnant, and clunky in their design.

The interesting aspect of the conversation was our different solutions for fixing this problem. Renée suggested that web updating and editing should be more centralized, with staff who are expert at the website fielding requests from departments & other units for changes, revisions, design overhauls, etc. She felt that coordinators lack both the time and skills to dedicate themselves to this task, and will never have enough to do on the website to justify developing the necessary skills. She approaches this issue as someone well-versed in the current CMS system, and sees how the learning curve and historical problems with the system has made it difficult for coordinators to carry out their roles as active editors.

My idea for solving the problem is to create more editors, rather than fewer. With our new platform, we might imagine a more organically integrated editing system, where any user with a login could “make edits” to any page on our website – click a button that says “Edit this page” and have at it via a simple user interface. Any submitted edits would be sent to a moderator who would approve & tweak submissions to fit stylistic norms, proper formatting, and vet questionable content. Since it would be tied to a Middlebury login, vandalism shouldn’t be an issue (and can be easily disciplined if it becomes one). The moderators, probably at Communications or LIS, wouldn’t need to know the content area, just the form, with contact people for each page if there are content-related questions – since the process of moderation would be fairly simple, approvals could be done quickly rather than taking time for much editing, redesign, etc.. All users would be empowered to collectively improve content and quality, make suggestions and recommend clarifications. It wouldn’t be a wiki free-for-all due to the moderation, but it would marshal the energies of more than just designated web editors. (Renée’s main skepticism about this model is that too many people would simply choose not to participate, still asking coordinators to make changes – I’m more optimistic that there are a few energetic editors out there!)

I thought that our different visions on the potential solutions highlights the different assumptions of, to use a jargony phrase, Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0. Personally, I think that our makeover should try to come up with a wide range of ways to build upon the efforts of many input sources and invite participation broadly under the banner of User-Generate Content, without turning the site into a decentered playground. I’m curious how others might view this or similar problems and possibilities…

-Jason