Tag Archives: Web Conference at Penn State 2013

Web Conference at Penn State Day 2

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The second day of the conference was very good. Definitely a shout out to the planning committee who did a fabulous job of bringing in great speakers. Both days were great!

The keynote was a good reminder of how easily, we may be left behind if we don’t understand how important disruptive technologies can be. Karen McGrane spoke about a company called DEC that went from being at or near the top of selling computer systems to being taken over by Compaq. This after several decades of being at or near the top. How did this happen? They miscalculated the impact of a less sophisticated technology (personal computing). I thought an important point is that quality usually means little when this type of disruptive market takes over. Usually, the technology brings users into the market that haven’t been around before. After time, the technology improves and replaces the original. I couldn’t help but think of higher ed as Karen made her points. Hopefully, we can make the necessary adjustment. I think that accessibility (disabilities, mobile) will play an important role.

There were several other sessions that I really enjoyed. One was by Eric Kim on Mobile Context. I really loved his analogy of food with mobile computing. He talked about power bars as an example of how mobile is to the desktop. Important point made by Eric based upon research is that mobile is morphing into the preferred method to do computing (not just when you’re on the go). I find that myself. I always have my phone with me. Laptops/desktops are becoming less and less my preferred method.

The rest of the day revolved around social media. Matt Hames talked about how facebook needs to be used carefully. Personally, I don’t understand how facebook is still so ubiquitous. I think that it has alot to do with the difficulty of leaving the environment.

Donna Talarico from my alma mater Elizabethtown College did an awesome session on the use of social media to improve engagement. I was so impressed that I like the fb page and followed on twitter. Definitely good to see Elizabethtown making the move.

Web Conference at Penn State 2013 Day 1

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Great first day of the Web Conference at Penn State 2013.

After b-fast at the Penn Stater, we moved to the day 1 keynote by Cindy Li from Flickr on Inclusive Design. Cindy started by mentioning that her mother has macular degeneration. This brought a personal element to her talk. She went on to talk about sites that needed work and how they could be improved. During this part of the talk she highlighted tools that helped in testing sites, like Xscope, Nocturne, Braille Institute, and Color Contrast Analyzer to name a few. 
One of the most memorable parts of her talk were a few exercises where she asked us to close our eyes and hear how a screen reader worked on a few sites. Then we were asked to watch the experience. It was amazing how poorly the sites had been set for accessibility. Just a reminder of how so many individuals are affected by items that many take for granted. 
She also highlighted a few sights that were well done. She mentioned that we should make our designs welcoming. Users remember when it makes them uncomfortable.

Went to several sessions in the AM and PM that I really enjoyed. 
My favorite of the day was by Kris Rockwell from Impact Games on Play the Election. Kris talked about how there were three parts to the experience of Play the Election. 
  1. Electoral map that allowed students to go back to 1960
  2. Election games – 11 games & a way for teachers to create their own games. Impact Games made the interface while the 11 games were created by those at Rand McNally
  3. Community – which needed special consideration because of the audience, high school students. Classes had the opportunity to wall of their classes from the public. 
Kris made some important points about game creation and gamification and differentiating between the two. He also mentioned how competition increases engagement at least in the short term. 
Kris went on to talk about things that went wrong:
  1. Short development time (only 3 months)
  2. Abbreviated marketing research
On the positive side:
  1. The game was a solid platform on several devices that included the transition from flash to html5
  2. Tools in the game were easy to use with little need for support
  3. 2400 classrooms created – 20,000 to 25,000 Individual users, a lot of positive feedback
Another session that I liked was about our users. The speakers highlighted Millennials. I felt like much of what they highlighted could be good for all users. We spend so much time thinking about making everything so useful for a large group when we need to think about personalizing the experience. We really need to do little with our systems. We need to think about how our systems are accessed and integrate with one another.
The last session that I’ll comment on was about leveraging social media for maximizing student engagement by Andrew Smyk. Andrew handled technical difficulties very well. He made some solid points about being strategic with the use of mobile. He also mentioned that accessibility of content via mobile is much more important than the attractiveness of materials and content. 
Nice conversation at lunch with people from outside and inside Penn State. Great day and looking forward to more tomorrow.