DCMOC
Department of Content Management and Online Collaboration
A resolution and a reminisence
2008 Jan 4
So we’ve just flipped our calendars to a new year. If I make any resolutions, they’re generally the same as those I made the year — or even the day — before: read more, eat better, be more patient, spend more time with my kids, break 80 on the golf course. But even if it isn’t a genuine resolution, this seems like an appropriate time to start a new commitment: to more frequently post content here at dcmoc.com for friends of CM&OC to read and comment upon. I’ll try to do this at least weekly, probably on Fridays.
I thought I’d start this year off with a reminisence. I was thinking recently about an article I read back in the 1990s, when I was first working on Web stuff. I hadn’t looked at this article in years, but the Google faeries found it for me in seconds. The article is called “The flesh & soul of information,” by Dmitry Kirsanov, from April of 1998. (Warning: it’s pretty heady at times, and it’s not really brief.)
This was one in a series of articles that Kirsanov wrote for Webreference.com back in the 1990s. It’s a great article because, 10 years later, nothing about it is untrue. The principles Kirsanov speaks about — separating content from its presentation, emphasizing on the fundamental structure of web content — were true in 1998, are true in 2008 and will be true in 2018. Take a look and judge for yourselves. Is this still as relevant as I think it is? And, if it is, how should we use these principles when thinking about the online experiences we’re building at Capella? What technology has arisen since then (XML, XSLT, RSS, content management tools) that puts in practice some of the theories he is discussing? Maybe this is just a sentimental piece for me, since it’s an article that really spurred my own way of thinking about Web content and thus helped influence my own career. Seriously: I can remember a 28-year old me reading this (I believe I actually printed out a hard copy and brought it with me on an airplane) and thinking “this guy has nailed it. This is how information actually works.”
And I’d love to hear about other sites, books, articles, or even conversations that others out there found seminal in your careers or in your thinking about this stuff.
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RSS in Plain English
Andrew Gruhn 2007 Sep 19
One of the projects we’ve been casually evaluating is how to better leverage RSS feeds across the University. So far we’ve had a lot of great ideas, but the most difficult element we’re running into is simply communicating what RSS is and how it works, in a simple way and without delving into code. Jason came across this video at commoncraft.com and the two of us liked it so much we thought it’d be worth re-posting:
Video: RSS in Plain English
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Nothing like the sun
2007 Aug 23
I’ve been talking a little about this “solar system” diagram. Here’s the purpose of it: in conversations about our web properties, I’ve discovered a need for a visual aid of sorts to describe how these things all fit together. If faculty say they want a faculty blog “off of iGuide,” or if a workgroup wants a toolbox that’s part of Stella — but not really delivered through Stella — how can we visualize the request? Hence was born the solar system diagram. This is still ugly and unfocused (and could benefit from some better production values, to be sure) — but it’s a start. Check it out. I welcome comments.
A Creed
2007 Jul 13
I’ve been working on defining some of the core practices and beliefs of the CM&OC team. These are all part of a larger CM&OC manifesto, excerpts of which I’ll be posting here regularly. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on these items.
Anyway, here are some elements of the CM&OC creed:
• We believe humans excel at creative, collaborative, thoughtful work. Humans struggle with tasks they are ill-suited for – like repetitive, rote maintenance. Fortunately, we have designed machines (like computer hardware and software) to do these rote tasks much more quickly and accurately than we can. CM&OC believes in using them. In short, we understand that web pages should be designed by people, and written by people, but assembled by computers. Bluntly: we want to free the monkeys and harness the machines.
• We make smart decisions.
• We are advocates for those who use our sites. When making decisions about navigation, information architecture, organization, prioritization, we’ll generally favor options that enhance the user experience. We believe Web sites should be organized according to the needs of the users, not according to the org charts of the host organization.
• We understand that Web content changes over time, in a way other media content does not. Unlike a book, a brochure, a clay pot, or a piece of film, users expect web content to be easily and regularly revised. (Side note: this is why “under construction” pages, so popular in the 90s, with their cute icons of little construction workers, were basically pointless. Almost all web sites are, in some way, “under construction.”) Therefore, a truly well designed web experience includes – by definition — a maintenance / content management plan. Otherwise, it is just posing as a well-designed web experience for the sake of oohs and ahhs at launch. Time will reveal it to be a fraud.
Some might say that our insistence on a maintenance plan conflicts with our advocacy for the user experience. If a user experienced is improved by something, and we “favor options that enhance the user experience” why should we balk simply because of maintenance? However, we believe these two tenets are not in conflict. We believe that efficient maintenance actually translates to improved user experience, for many reasons, not the least of which is because it reduces staleness and inaccuracy of content.
• We aren’t afraid to ask questions.
• We are transparent. We believe in sharing what we are doing.
• We take a systemic view of our world and our work.
• We believe in unity. That is, what we publish can vary widely in tone, in scope, in audience, but everything should be aware of its place and its role in our family of web publications.
• We support the broader organization. While we may ask tough questions to make sure the directives we are given truly fulfill the need of the organization, we are here to make others’ lives and jobs easier.
• We produce results. The work we do directly results in happier, more productive staff, faculty, learners – and we can explain exactly how.
• While we are experts, we aren’t territorial. We apply our expertise in order to support others’ expertise. More: we believe expertise should dictate territory, rather than the other way around. If our constituents are territorial, we demonstrate how our expertise can augment their expertise to accomplish a project, improve an experience, etc.
• We like elegance; we dislike bloat.
CETA, Research, and collaboration
2007 Jun 21
At this week’s CETA (Capella Educational Technology Advisory) committee meeting, we discussed the relationship of several similar projects that are on the horizon:
- a larger collection of faculty collaboration tools (code name: “facultyland”)
- a faculty-only research site (which is sort of an offshoot of facultyland)
- a separate (but parallel) faculty/learner research site.
Some good thoughts were shared on the prioritization of these projects. I suggested to the committee that we combine these into a single project. Paul H. suggested that a faculty-only research site won’t have the traffic volume of something supporting learners. Scott H. counseled that we could execute several of these simultaneously. The upshot of it all was that the CM&OC team will scope out these projects in more detail, and then our leadership (including CETA) will help us decide how to execute these projects (sequentially, concurrently, etc.)
Someone on the phone (Bill Burkett?) said during the conversation that he’d send me more thoughts on collaboration and research sites for faculty. Actually, rather than get more emails on the subject, I’d like to invite CETA members to use this blog posting to provide any further input on these initiatives. It’ll be more conversational, and I think a better way for you to share all your thoughts.
So: if you have more to say, leave a comment here.
What’s Portal?
. 2007 Jun 15
I attended my first colloquia a couple of weeks ago, with the sole purpose of delivering a couple of presentations to faculty members about the new Portal. What’s Portal you ask? Well, simply put, it’s the new iGuide. It’s a powerful system, with streamlined content and role based materials that should indeed improve your experience and access to information. This will become the new way to interact with us, although there’s so much more work to do and new features to add.
I was hoping that more faculty would participate at colloquia, afterall, it was a chance to meet you and let you know we took your suggestions for enhancements to heart. Several faculty generously provided us with input on the design of the new system in the past year and I was hoping to get more feedback and ideas from the rest of you. It will be released this summer, stay tuned as more communication is coming about that. Once you gain access and are able to interact with it, we’d love to hear what you have to say.
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Feeling optimistic
2007 Jun 7
I recently joined Chris Cassirer and Paula Stechschulte (dean and associate dean from the school of human services) at the 2007 AUPHA conference in Orlando.(AUPHA = Association of University Programs in Health Administration. Insiders pronounce it “ay-YOO-puh,” apparently.) We gave a presentation on Capella and the role of multimedia in health care education. The audience primarily comprised faculty members from “traditional” higher ed institutions, as well as some other health administration industry leaders. Our presentation and the comments of those who attended reinforced, for me, much of what is exciting about Capella. I’ll try to put this excitement in a nutshell.
<nutshell>OK, start with the fact that there’s a huge population of people who want additional formal education for whatever reason, and who prefer (or even need) the convenience of an online experience. This population isn’t going away; in fact, it’ll get bigger. Therefore, an organization that can deliver quality educational content AND a quality online experience is best positioned to meet the needs of this big, growing market. Many traditional universities simply aren’t structured to provide this combination of quality content plus quality online experience. But Capella is.</nutshell>Think about it. Every course we build and offer includes, off the top of my head:
- curricular rigor
- subject matter expertise
- professional instructional design
- engaging, relevant, attractive multimedia
- content editing
- a robust technical delivery system
- a process for ongoing content maintenance
Faculty at other universities (who are Subject Matter Experts, of course) who want to create online programs and courses usually are well equipped to do maybe the first and second things on this list, but they don’t have the infrastructure for all the other items. They simply cannot do it all, so they have to cut corners that Capella doesn’t have to cut. You could tell that some of our audience at AUPHA was downright envious of what we’re able to do.
Anyway, our AUPHA talk focused on courseroom content, but with the Content Management & Online Collaboration team, I’m eager to continue to develop that same sort of quality content PLUS quality experience for online experiences outside the courseroom. I’m talking about these kinds of experiences:
- collaboration between faculty members
- learner networks
- learner-alumni networks
- collaboration between co-workers
- interactions between faculty SMEs and curriculum and course development
- interactions of learners/faculty/staff with administrative resources
- interactions of learners/faculty/staff with corporate “knowledge” (support resources, training) — both creating it and consuming that knowledge.
- etc., etc., etc.
The existence of our CM&OC team and the collection of skills we bring together means that it’s darn likely we’re going to do this well. I’m feeling downright cheery.
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Reducing the “labor” in “collaboration”
2007 May 30
Thanks to all for the insightful comments you’ve posted recently.
Here’s are some more direct questions for faculty out there: what does “collaboration as a university faculty member” mean to you? And what collaborative parts of being a university faculty member do you find challenging when you are working for an online institution like Capella? What sorts of things do you wish you shared or did with your Capella colleagues, but don’t? What’s just plain hard to do when you are working with each other from afar?
I’m looking for things like:
- Bouncing research off one another
- Sharing teaching strategies
- Discussing trends and happenings in your discipline
- Understanding university/school policies and practices
- Merely attending online meetings
- etc.
One of my team’s goals is to figure out ways to make the spatial and temporal circumstances that separate Capellians as insignificant as we can, through elegant, effective tools and processes. First, though, we need a really good understanding of what it is you want to be able to do. So please: tell us.
Let’s Collaborate
. 2007 May 23
This is the official groundbreaking post for our blog. We are a newly organized team in the Next Generation Learning area at Capella. What we really want to is to connect with you, our constituents, fellow colleagues and users. This is your chance to get to know us, do a DITL (day-in-the-life) and tells us what you want! Maybe you’ve been working with new technologies on your own, or as a part of research, or just want to see what’s going on in the neighborhood.
Let’s kick-off this blog with some discussion on the topic of collaboration and specifically what it means for faculty to be able to collaborate with one another, albeit, from a distance. Tell us in your own words how you currently collaborate with other Capella faculty. What tools are you using (phone, email, blogs, wikis, etc.)? How much time per week is spent collaborating? What are the problems you’re facing?
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Maintenance, Man
2007 May 18
Been a while since I’ve posted…
At our CM&OC team meeting yesterday, we had a great conversation about what this department should be and about our areas of responsibility. The conversation took several interesting turns, including a discussion about how challenging it is for web production staff when a site is built without a content management plan other than “once it is launched, we’ll throw people at it for maintenance.”
We need to remember that Web content changes over time, in a way other media content does not. Unlike a book, a brochure, a clay pot, or a piece of film, users expect web content to be easily and regularly revised to meet their need for new and accurate information. (Side note: this is why “under construction” pages, so popular in the 90s, with their cute icons of little construction workers, were basically pointless. Almost all web sites are, in some way, “under construction.”) Therefore, a truly well designed web experience includes – by its very definition — a maintenance / content management plan. Otherwise, it is just posing as a well-designed web experience for the sake of oohs and ahhs at the moment of launch. Time will reveal it to be a fraud.
Here’s a true (and extreme) example of what I’m talking about: a decade ago, I worked for a company whose first Web site’s home page (at least until I got ahold of it!) was nothing but a big .jpg. This graphic (which the corporate communications team was so proud of) was a sort of collage containing navigational captions, images, even a few announcements of product releases. Maintaining it was basically impossible — you actually had to edit the graphic (there wasn’t even a source .psd file with layers — to update the page, they edited this flat, lossy .jpg directly in an image editor). It may have looked nice when it first launched (in this case, even that’s debateable), but it was outdated within days. The fact that the content could not be maintained made this a poorly designed experience.
Obviously, we’ll never make a mistake that extreme — but it is useful for us to remember that content management is an intrinsic component of the process we use to design web experiences.
The DCMOC Blog is a team effort among members of the Content Management and Online Collaboration department within Next Generation Learning. It's our aim to take you behind the scenes, give you a sense of who we are and even introduce you to some of the new technologies we're working with. more
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