Shelley Keith

As part of the WPMU implentation I’ve been working on for a year now, it’s time to start training my content contributors (“content managers”? I haven’t come up with the right title for these departmental “please take this responsibility off my plate” types). Simply giving faculty and staff basic software training and sending them on their way would be catastrophic, hence a (hopefully) well-rounded 4 hour training session that includes some elementary yet essential content tips and an overview of 508 and W3C before giving them the power to change a single character of text. The expectation is to offer this comprehensive training on a twice/year basis and provide one-hour lunchtime sessions on specific topics throughout the semester, as well as make refresher materials available online through my department site.

I’ve coordinated training with both our HR department to be counted as staff development, and through our Continuing Education department who will be issuing CEU credits. As such I feel the need to have some sort of assessment in place to gauge the success of the training, beyond just a session evaluation. If anyone has any ideas about assessing this kind of training, I’d love to hear it.

For this first round of training I have a wingman, Brent Passmore (@bpmore) from University of Central Arkansas. Brent has graciously agreed to dedicate some of his post-baby paternity leave time to my little project. Props.

Overview: Four-hour training session for faculty and staff who will be responsible for managing departmental Web content. Sessions will be presented with the aid of step-by-step video and hands-on examples.

Training Outline

1. Content
   1. Evaluate
   2. Generate – Writing for the Web
   3. Review
2. The WHY
   1. Section 508 and Web accessibility
   2. Browser Compatibility
3. WPMU
   1. Posts vs. Pages: What’s the difference?
   2. The Admin Interface
   3. Managing Posts & Pages
   4. Media for your site
      1. The media library
      2. Adding images and files to your posts and pages
      3. Flickr options
   5. Links, Widgets & Sidebars
   6. Forms
   7. Your campus directory profile

Upcoming blog entries will outline in further detail the issues we’ll be touching on along with comprehensive resource listings for existing training materials and content guides. At the end I’ll post our slides and any supplementary materials we generate. Some of these items (like Flickr options, Forms, and the directory profile) are plugin specific and/or highly customized to our site and may not be relevant for you, but I’ll show how we’ll train for it anyway.

Training is scheduled for February 3, 2010.

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I was at the Pride Parade in Chicago a few weeks ago and took so many pictures Flickr won’t show them all, but you can check em out anyway. See also all photos tagged chicagoprideparade2007.

This T-Shirt @ CultClassicTs.com

Seriously, I ROFLMAO and stuff.

I do not agree with what Don Imus said, I think he’s an idiot for being an insulting jackass on the airwaves. I think the FCC should have stepped up and done something about it. I think the Rutgers ladies bb team had every right to be righteously indignant and furious. I think men like to insult strong successful women at every opportunity. I do not think he should be fired solely for being the same kind of jackass he always is.

If Jesse Jackson and Rev. Sharpton want to get all up in arms about what Imus said they need to step to their own communities and start speaking out about arguably much worse lyrics being spewed forth from the hip-hop community and promoted as “art”. If Diddy had said the exact same thing it would have been very un-newsworthy.

Proof positive that free speech doesn’t apply to all of us anymore.

Fuming over politically (in)correct bullshit wasn’t the way I wanted to mourn Vonnegut today.

“I am too lazy to chase down the exact quotation but the British astronomer Fred Hoyle said something to this effect: That believing in Darwin’s theoretical mechanisms of evolution was like believing that a hurricane could blow through a junkyard and build a Boeing 747. No matter what is doing the creating. I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly: Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!”

-Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)