Shelley Keith

This is the message I just sent my brand new social media student worker. I’ve given him some time to get used to the office, read some great social media resources, watch useful videos and talk theory with me while getting to know the personality style we use here. Now, time for him to get his ass to work.

You are ready young Padawan. Time to get your work on.

Daily Tasks:

1. Be on Facebook SAU page responding/interacting/uploading. Find answers to questions if possible. Refer users to appropriate offices if necessary. Keep upcoming events up to date. Review other Facebook pages and come up with ideas for things we can do with ours.
   1. Goals: greater FB interaction with all audiences; a regular and constant presence.
2. Check Twitter for questions/comments to answer/respond to or retweet appropriate content from those we follow. Review our list of followers for people we should be following, review their lists, etc. Build an interactive community of related Twitter users. Keep the SAU Twitter list up-to-date. Consider new, creative, funny (yet appropriate) Twitter lists.
3. Daily review of We Are SAU. Check for group creation, unanswered questions. Write blog posts explaining new features, welcome and help new users. Propose ideas for ways to boost users and user activity including content and features. Follow users on Twitter when they post their Twitter names. Suggest design improvements.
4. Check MySpace for activity and begin reconnecting with users there.
5. Check H drive daily for new photos to add to Flickr & Facebook with as much descriptive information as possible. Review related press releases for ideas.
6. Begin reviewing Flickr photos and adding titles, descriptions and keyword tags as appropriate/possible. Tweet awesome photos. Establish “friends” whenever Twitter/Facebook/etc users post Flickr photos.
7. Make sure each new YouTube video is posted to Facebook, Twitter, We Are SAU and MySpace. Propose ideas for new videos.
8. Forever uphold the core value: Han shot first.
9. Propose ideas…all ideas.
10. Other duties as assigned.
11. Notice: scoping virtual hotties is not on this list.

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.

HighEdWeb 2009 just wrapped up as a resounding (overall) success. It’s to my increasing satisfaction that this conference gets better and better every year. We’re setting the bar for mix of content and social interaction that, from what I’ve seen and heard from attendees, isn’t really matched anywhere else. The winning mix of great presentations, incredible attendees, and insanely devoted conference organizers make this a must-attend event for me every year…so much so that I actually cornered my University president at an event in his home during budget discussions last spring to pitch why it’s important that I be allowed and funded to attend.

This conference has such a devoted following that even in these unfortunate economic times we had considerable interaction from those who were unable to attend. We always have a bit of non-attendee backchannel traffic, but this year saw the creation of #fakeheweb09 backchannel and Ning site for our fiscally strapped brethren. Their interaction was significant and contributed greatly to the overall success of the conference. Your presence was felt my friends, and you were missed.

hella drop shadow

Just in case there’s anyone out there who has not by now heard of our Tuesday keynote issues, you can read about it on this blog, and this one, and this one…and then this one and this one too. (Just a note, I’ve read the non-heweb community blogs, but am holding off on the ones @fienen, @KarlynM, and @nickdenardis wrote until after I publish. I might have to append notes on those later.)  I’m not going to rehash the train wreck. What I am going to do is speak to those who were not in attendance and chose to publicly assume we’re a bunch of disrespectful assholes.

Let me tell you a thing or two about #heweb09 attendees. They are, almost without exception, overworked, underpaid, understaffed, and under-appreciated public servants. These are some of the most brilliant minds in their specialty areas who give non-stop to the web community in the form of infinite sharing, finding solutions to intricate problems, extensive blog posts, and technical and moral support to each other. They give of themselves to their universities and their peers in a way that is simply unparalleled in my experience. Many of them paid their own way to be at this conference for all the reasons I’ve already covered. When the melt-down started, the community response was stunned silence, incredulity, and not a small amount of snark.

wtf and omfg

Monday at the lunch break mypersonal HP Mini was lifted from one of the session rooms. To my knowledge nothing like this has ever happened before at one of our conferences. Everyone in attendance has their own equipment, whether personal or uni owned, and if any one of us *were* going to steal a machine, it’s highly unlikely that it’d be a frickin MINI when there are prized Macs laying around all over the place. I’ve heard a lot of theories, and I’m just not willing to believe it was an attendee.

The response of this overworked, underpaid, overstressed group of “disrespectful assholes”? In addition to the amazing warmth, sympathy, and offers to do a #heweb09 style beatdown on whoever stole my netbook, they (led by the unstoppable @mherzber) started a Facebook Causes fund and pushed the #shelleyfund agenda on Twitter to help me get a new machine. The community rallied around me in a way unlike anything I’d ever been party to. The hugs, donations, and genuinely lovely sentiment still bring tears to my eyes. The result of the netbook fiasco of ‘09, I got a new machine in time for our final lunch together…blubbering like a baby on stage. You people humble me, and I’ll never forget this conference and your incredible generosity (I’m talking to you @tonydunn).

Catastraposter

In yet another tale of the outpouring of support for one of our own, attendee extraordinaire @Robin2go had her own serious issue when her hard drive corrupted containing the only available copy of her poster presentation. We found her in tears in the conference office upset about being unable to present something she’d obviously been working very hard on for some time.  After a brief discussion as to the nature of her presentation we came up with a plan and kicked it into gear. Her poster, titled “Campfire Tales: Wikis and Wonder for Community Engagement” gave us the inspiration for what turned into a really fantastic (or so I heard, I was unfortunately too busy to actually go see it once it was up) “poster” displayed using a circle of 5 (?) notebooks each running one of the online components of her presentation. There were people running around everywhere hijacking machines and printing signs so she could do what she does best…

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

It is my honor and privilege to be counted as one of you. My paltry contribution to #heweb is, in my mind, the very least I can do to help give back to a community that, even before the #shelleyfund, has given me so much. I intend to append a list of those who donated to the #shelleyfund as well as build a Skinit to go on the mini (engraving was perhaps a little over enthusiastic since I can’t seem to find anyone who can actually do what I want done). I’ve got a comprehensive list, but since I was a little bloody wasted on Tuesday night and people were throwing money at me like I was Pamela Anderson doing a pole dance for PETA, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop a tweet my way if you gave me cash and aren’t @tonydunn, @tsand or @cmk22.

In a related note, I will be writing an extensive post related to my poster “From All Me to MU” as promised. I’m just not sure it’ll be done before Monday.

Also, everyone please tell @thinkgeek thanks for the APS door prizes. They rocked out with the donation.

\m/

So I’ve been struggling with how to manage our varied user groups when it comes to initial site population and long-term registration rules.

In English, all of our current faculty, staff, students and very recent alumni have @saumag email addresses, so using the built-in WPMU registration restriction based on email domain capability is perfect for that…however, our less recent alumni (obviously the vast majority) do not have SAU email addresses since we only just started offering permanent email in the last year. The problem: either we can restrict registration to @saumag domain emails or we can establish an invitation only community using a plugin.

ITS indicated it would be no problem to give alumni the appropriate email account, but there’s a process involved and I would prefer not to force an additional step when we’re trying to really promote community building. Also, our incoming freshmen don’t get their email addresses until they arrive on campus. The addresses are created in batches as they’re admitted, but not activated until right as the semester starts. We really want easy interaction with both of these groups. A better solution is necessary.

Enter Bulk Import Members. This plugin will allow me to take delimited data from any source and turn it into a pre-registered membership. Essentially, I can import name and email address and the plugin will send an email to the user containing a link to the site and their username/password.

Why is this especially valuable to us? It circumvents the @saumag only restriction without my having to turn it off. It means that current students, faculty, staff, and anyone with a University email can still freely join the community, but I don’t have to put my non-University email address having alumni and admitted students through ANY steps to welcome them into the online community. It’ll also mean that my Alumni director and Admissions staff with admin access can go add their own people as they see fit without needing a lot of help from me.

Before I launch full-steam into the BuddyPress socNet project I’m putting together some relevant research to support various features. One thing I’m trying to learn is how many institutions offer faculty and staff a blogging vehicle within the confines of University provided services. To that end, here’s my quick poll on LinkedIn. I appreciate all those who take a moment and respond. I’ll post the results here.