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2014 Conference Management & Professional Development

Better Living Through Automation: Defeating Time Sucks and Doing Better Work

(Author’s note: It’s poetic that I completed this Link post when I did. I hadn’t anticipated that it’d be a few weeks late, but this also is the very reason I was hyped up about Jesse’s session: I needed his session to help work smarter.) Jesse Lavery, director of web communications at Allegheny College, closed […]

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2014 Conference

Human at Work; Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and and Get Better at My Job

We’re going to move fast, but don’t worry. Everything’s online at bit.ly/HumanAtWork. It has a great number of resources in book form and app form to help with productivity, and ways to be 100% Human. [field name=code] Dave did what many presenters do. Talk about a case study. But, this study is of himself. Disclaimer. This […]

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2014 Conference

Taking the Web Offline

Session Details Erik Runyon, Director of Web Communications, University of Notre Dame led this session on storing data in the client browser and how you could leverage it to speed up your websites. He used this to power the #heweb14 website — which is how most of us were able to still access the conference website, even when the […]

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2014 Conference

KaratEmail: Putting a nail in FormMail’s coffin

A catalyst for change: Hundreds of forms were attacked, tens of thousands of emails were sent, email accounts were overwhelmed and shut down, and business processes ground to a halt. On one cold February morning our Web team discovered that the our good friend FormMail was neither good nor a friend. After more than a […]

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2014 Conference

Your Website is the Next Social Medium

Personalization is becoming pervasive in our society. It’s time for higher ed to start thinking about their websites that way too, says Bob Jones University’s Peter Anglea. Anglea told his audience during his presentation “Your Website is the Next Social Medium,” Tuesday at HighEdWeb 14 that, quoting author Gary Vaynerchuck that every platform now needs to […]

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2014 Conference Management & Professional Development

Mix it up! The art of remixing content – #mpd2

It was a full house in Skyline II for Conny Leigl’s session, “Mix it up! The art of remixing content,” so much so that this Link blogger had to take notes by hand – you can’t laptop it up without a lap. Leigl is a senior designer for web, graphics and user experience for the […]

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2014 Conference

The Voyage of the Beagle: Biology, Evolution, and Content Strategy

The World Wide Web is governed by similar principles those laid out by Charles Darwin in his Theory of Evolution. And mastering certain evolutionary tricks and strategies can lead to great results for your website. That’s the message Jeff Stevens, of University of Florida Health (UF Health), gave to a packed room at HighEdWeb 14 […]

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2014 Conference Management & Professional Development

Agile in Higher Ed? Yes You Kanban!

Session Details They’re a small team of five, but the Web and Development team at University of Arkansas at Little Rock were ready to take on projects using agile methodology, because yes, it is possible for agile in Higher Ed. Let’s back up. What is agile? Dan and Jenn outline what agile is, and isn’t: Individuals […]

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2014 Conference

Going GREEN with Content Strategy

· The highest number of LEED certified buildings in the county (175). · Two-hundred fifty miles of bike paths and lanes. · The first major U.S. city to ban plastic bags. With its 92,000 acres of green spaces, Portland, Oregon, is not just shades of olive, emerald and lime on the outside; the Pacific Northwest […]

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2014 Conference

Rescue the Content

Content is everywhere. Sometimes you just need to rescue it from its original state. On every campus there are content pools— places where content lives and is waiting to be found. Diamond-in-the-rough content can be rescued from: Admission blogs. Semi-annual newsletters published by academic departments. Last year’s Twitter posts. This month’s student newspapers. Recurring email […]

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2014 Conference

Six Questions with Chris Hardwick

How much “funny” should colleges and universities be trying to deliver to their audiences? On a scale of Ned Flanders to Krusty I’d say Barney Gumble. You’re so many people’s favorite nerd. Who is yours? Neil deGrasse Tyson. Or John Hodgman. In your self help book “The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level […]

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2014 Conference

Six Questions for Dr. Moira Gunn

How are schools treating women in technology disciplines today, versus when you were at Purdue to earn your doctorate? This is an interesting question. And there are several ways to answer it. First of all, we can all count the numbers. There weren’t many women in the MS Computer Science program, and then I went […]

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2014 Conference

Focusing on Student Success

When a former governor and presidential candidate becomes president of your university, it tends to shake things up a bit. Such was the case at Purdue last year when Mitch Daniels became president and announced a four-year tuition freeze for current students. That brought a sharpened focus and a increased need to demonstrate value. Groups […]

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2014 Conference

Jude’s Law

  Jude’s Law says that in order to sustain day to day creativity you have to be happy — and happy comes from having fun. Kegan Sims from Oregon State University just wants to have fun. His talk focused on the reality that highered folks need to be creative on a regular basis  and that […]

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2014 Conference

WordPress and Beer: Homebrew Web Applications with WordPress

Gabriel walked us through the similarities between brewing beer (home brew style) and WordPress, how they both have base ingredients, but when you tweak those ingredients, you can get a million different variations of a great product. Beer = barley (grain), hops, yeast and water WordPress = posts, pages, media, tags Cool comparison. Working from […]

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2014 Conference

The Library Who Came in from the Cold

Librarians are some of the most helpful people on our campuses. But library websites often are not. Libraries are all over the place when it comes to the technology they use: they run WordPress, Joomla, ContentDM for special collections, LibGuides for reference services, etc., etc., etc. When Brian Rogers took over the job as Web […]

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2014 Conference

There Are No Break Points in Your Web Strategy: Going Responsive Without Screwing Everything Up

PennState recently went responsive with their world campus website. Rebecca Pugliese and Dave Housley were recruited to help make that happen.  Their presentation, “There Are No Break Points in Your Web Strategy: Going Responsive Without Screwing Everything Up,” was a conversation about strategy. For the website redesign, lead generation and conversion where their primary goals.  As […]

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2014 Conference

Let’s face it: We’re not 16 anymore

  Let’s face it: We’re not 16 anymore, and Mark Heiman, Senior Web Application Developer at Carleton College (better known as @wyrdebeard) doesn’t want to be that age, but he knows that we need to think that way to do our jobs better. Carleton College reworked their homepage after a series of focus groups that […]

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2014 Conference

What Does the Web Say? Thinking about Sound and the Internet

Aaron Rester  wants us to believe in sound on the Web again. Rester, of Roosevelt University, used his presentation at HighEdWeb 14 to remind his audience of the bad name sound on websites got in the late 1990s. But he says its time to think about how sound can enhance, and not harm, our web […]

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2014 Conference

Essential Strategies for a Student-Staffed Social Team

How does New York University, the largest private university in the world, keep itself relevant to its students and prospective students? By using student workers to build their brand on social media. Caroline Osse and Nick Jensen of NYU’s Office of Interactive Media talked about their “Essential Strategies for a Student-Staffed Social Team” during a […]

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2014 Conference

Talk MOOC to Me

Session Details Four ladies, 45 minutes. Can it be done? We’ll find out. The Penn State Design team looked at MOOCs, specifically the Epidemics MOOC at Penn State. What’s a MOOC? It’s a Massive Open Online Course. But, what is massive? The average enrollment for a MOOC is 43,000, but it can greatly change based […]

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2014 Conference Social Media

Engaging Prospective College Students and Their Parents Online: E-Expectations 2014

In recent years, social media and use of mobile devices by students have changed how prospective college students and parents research and interact with campuses. How can campuses adapt their content and e-recruitment strategies to effectively engage with these very different audiences? Stephanie Geyer, VP for Web Strategy and Interactive Marketing Services at Noel-Levitz, and […]

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2014 Conference

Website Deathmatch – What I Learned by Choosing My NCAA Winners Based on Websites

Did you say Website Death Match? And picking the best college websites based on the NCAA DI college basketball tournament bracket? Well, heck, what’s not to love about this idea? That was the premise of Kelly Anne Pipe’s presentation (#MCS1) at HighEdWeb 14. Pipe, of St. Joseph’s University, decided it would make for an interesting […]

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2014 Conference

CrowdSource Summit will connect students with the people who make the Web

When you ask people who work on the Web what they like about their jobs, you get a lot of answers. “The way the Internet brings us together.” “Looking through data, coming up with hypotheses on how to make improvements and analyzing data again to check for changes.” “The collective power of the people who […]