There is a live stream available (if the hotel wireless holds) so you watch the action as it happens:

http://ustream.tv/channel/eduweb-2008

The start of the 1st Annual EduStyle Awards!!!

The details of the conference have got me really excited! It looks like the best conference yet.

• 340 Attendees from around the world New Zealand, Egypt, Ireland, England, Canada,  and the United States.

• Trump Marina Hotel recommended the Tropiano Airport Shuttle Service; other options on EduWeb Conference Ground Transportation page.

Stewart is already there and will be announcing the winners tomorrow during the luncheon so if your attending please show your support for the biggest online higher-ed design gallery on the internet! 

Update from Stewart: It’s all getting started here. Look forward to meeting many of you at the BlogHighEd Social

You’d like the world to learn about, and listen to, the brilliant speakers who present to your university/college/faculty/department/unit. Read my recipe for a quick ’n easy Speaker Series podcast.

Ingredients

1 Speaker series with a dozen or more speakers per year
1 Web page/blog
1 RSS feed
1 Publishing schedule
Release forms
1 Audio recorder
1 Audio editor

Directions

Having speakers who present talks on a regular basis is the easiest way to start a podcast. Mix this speaker series with audio recordings of the talks and your podcast will be ready to serve in no time.

Cook up a web page or blog that:

• describes the purpose of the podcast
• delivers the RSS feed
• lists each talk with a link to its associated recording
• takes comments from your audience

Combine with a publishing schedule so your audience knows how often to expect a new recording. Stick to your schedule. A haphazardly published podcast is nobody’s friend.

Toss in release forms to cover the legal angle. You can get a release form from your university privacy office.

Contact your speakers (either directly or through their representatives) to ask if they agree to be recorded for your podcast. Let them know why you want to record and link them to your podcasting web page.

For each speaker, show up 5 – 10 minutes before talk time with your audio recorder and release form.

Start recording now. You’ll get several minutes of useless chatter but you can cut that out during the editing process. Never rely on your speaker to turn on or off the audio recorder. They have other things to worry about.

Ensure your audience knows you’re recording. Announce it before the speaker starts or write it on the whiteboard.

Stay for the talk or return right at the end to stop recording and pick up your audio recorder.

Next, record an introduction stating the:

• title of your podcast
• date the podcast will be published
• speaker’s name
• speaker’s topic
• speaker’s affiliation or credentials
• date the podcast was recorded

Record an outro directing your audience to your website, podcasting web page and any other information.

Mix your intro, recording and outro in your audio editing software. Ensure you cut out the empty bits before and after the talk. If you have time, listen to the whole talk and cut out the long pauses. Cut out audience questions at the end since you don’t have release forms for your audience and often the quality is poor. Keep the audience applause at the end since it’s a great segue into your outro.

Save and export your file. Make sure your file size is reasonable, say around 20 MB for a half hour and 30 MB for an hour.

Upload the file to your web server. Your RSS feed maker adds the new podcast to your feed. Test the feed and recording. Tell your speaker the recording is online (and ask for the presentation slides if you want to add them to the web page).

Enjoy!

Details, Details

In my department we have speakers giving talks on various topics all the time, sometimes several in a week. Our speakers include graduate students who are required to give a talk on their studies once a semester, visiting professors and our faculty. So if you have a similar set up, getting speakers will be a breeze.

I’m in a science department and our goal is to entice junior and school students to be interested in science. We started with recording graduate students and professors but quickly found that the topics they present to their peers are quite technical and not for a younger audience. So we invented a new speaker series, a popular science speaker series.

We united with our undergraduate student group for this new speaker series. The undergraduate student group chooses topics they are interested in (topics that are more accessible for the average citizen) and we acquire the speakers.

Now we publish two podcasts per month, one technical podcast from our pool of graduate students and professors, and one from our popular science series.

Don’t get discouraged if your podcast doesn’t get an audience right away. These things take time. Remember to advertise whenever you can, such as at your university open house or on your facebook group. And stick to your podcasting schedule. You lose audiences by not delivering.

What We Use

To record, we use an iPod Classic with a Belkin TuneTalk omnidirectional microphone. I just leave the iPod on a table near the speaker. The microphone is good enough to pick up sound if the speaker wanders around a bit.

However, the microphone picks up the whine of the iPod’s hard drive. I’d suggest getting a microphone that sits away from the iPod. We don’t use a wireless clip-on microphone because it’s more effort to get the speaker set up.

I use Audacity to edit and save the file as MP3. We built our own RSS feed maker, but it’s fairly easy to find one you can install… or just use a blog to create the feed.

I use Feedburner to deliver the RSS feed and get statistics. And finally, I added our podcast to iTunes.

To be honest I have a love hate relationship with social sites. There have been some great finds like www.thesixtyone.com, and www.digg.com but I also tend to find some that keep my attention for a couple of weeks and then become so annoying that I never come back. That probably leads you to ask, so what? Well I find that a lot of universities are trying to take advantage of the facebook phenomenon. Quickly changing assignments or schedules could be easily accessed by students if they could follow it with Twitter. Having a process where alumni could follow old professors or news from the university would allow continued contact with potential philanthropists for fundraising projects.

While the social sites increase, how and why these types of features can be used becomes more apparent. I guess the better question is where should these features be used? or how could universities use these types of features? Please let us know where you think they have the greatest potential, or if they shouldn’t be used at all. Remember comments build your user ranking so be active.

Congrats to the two sites selected as Noteworthy for July 2008 and Happy Canada Day!

Vassar College - History Department

Skidmore College - Campus Map

Each month the users on this site select two sites as Noteworthy by voting them as “my style.” In the nearly year and a half since eduStyle launched they have put 36 sites into the exclusive Noteworthy club. In that time there have been many sites that were just edged out of winning the monthly award by a few votes. Here are 15 sites that were almost capital ‘N’ Noteworthy:

Skidmore College

Appalachian State University

Vassar College - The Learning and Teaching Center

University of Dayton - MyLife at UD

Our Lady of Holy Cross College

Dallas Theological Seminary - Watch & Learn

University of Notre Dame - Prospective Students

Calvin College - No Greater Task: Hearts and Minds Renewing God’s World

Ball State University

Loyola Marymount University - iLMU - Point.Click.Experience LMU

Virginia Tech - The Campaign For Virginia Tech - Invent the Future

Clarita Career College

Tabor College

Robert Morris University - Master of Business Administration

Virginia Tech - April 16 Remembrance

Over the last year and a half we attracted some of the cream of the crop when it comes users. We have some of the best bloggers in the HigherEd, people who present at conferences and have a lot to offer when it comes to finding the next thing in the industry. Here are just a few to start with…

•  jameskm03-Writer of .eduGuru a blog about Internet Marketing, Web Development and Social Media in Higher Education. He is a presenter at the upcoming EduWeb Conference  July 21-23 in Atlantic City (we are presenting the Edustyle Awards right before his presentation…plug).
• ericstoller-Self described accessibility guru and blogger. He is everywhere on the internet and part of just about every social website. He is our most acitvely involved user and has voted on 527 of our 1234submitted sites!!! 
• designologist- This user has made everyone who has viewed his profile page to turn their laptop upside down. He has voted on 112 sites. For the mystery alone this one is a keeper…
• jillgee-She is ranked numer three in total users for activity. She specializes in online communications and management of complex technology projects for higher education.  She tends to pick sites/pages that focus on usability and are engaging.
• chasgrundy-He has the one of the highest percentages of picking noteworthy site…15%. He is a project manager in the Notre Dame Web Group with expertise is in usability, process, and implementation.

These are just a few of our great users to follow. I will be posting other edustyle movers and shaker over the next few months. Remember you make this site great so make your voices heard and you could be the next profile we highlight.

Believe it or not, we occasionally get emails from folks asking for us to make their sites Noteworthy. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Those of you who’ve been around here for awhile understand it’s based on the number of ‘My Style’ and ‘Not My Style’ votes a site gets in a month. That being said, here are some tips that may help get your site in the running (and possibly push it over the top).

1. Submit it. It definitely won’t become a Noteworthy if it’s not in the gallery
2. Have a Quality Site. This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyways. It’s the community that determines whether you get a Noteworthy or not so if nobody has a reason to vote, you won’t have a chance (sorry).
3. Keep the Discussion Going. Post comments on the site page. If someone responds, reply back (remember flames wars don’t accomplish anything). This will create a link to your Site Page off the eduStyle homepage (which can drive lots of traffic your way). We also recently added an rss feed for the comments for each site to make it a little easier to follow what’s going on.
4. Build Out the Site Page. Submit news items and articles about the site, team, or process. This encourages people to stay on the page. Also add keywords as this increases the number of ways people can get to your page.
5. Promote It Elsewhere. Link to the Site Page on your team and personal blogs if you have them. Encourage your visitors to register on eduStyle and vote it up. Lately it takes about 20 votes to make it as a Noteworthy, so we’re not too worried about people trying to game the system, although if things get out of hand we’re not afraid to act

On a related point, if you’d like to promote your site by doing a ‘Q & A’ type article, please send us a note. Feel free to post any more ideas you have in the comments.

Mike Richwalsky of HighEdWebTech’s post on “What the new iPhone means to higher ed web folks” got me thinking about the mobile browsing revolution and it’s impact on web designers. Since the launch of the original iPhone it’s users have been collectively driving a revolution in the mobile web (I know there at least 12 of you who came here last month). The best part of the revolution is that it is being led by a browser with the same rendering abilities as its big brother on the desktop. This is break from the thinking of the other mobile browsers that seem to think that you need a dumbed down web on your mobile device (I’m looking at you Mobile IE). With iPhone 3G coming to many more countries (including mine, Canada … want to buy me a present?) in the next few weeks and at a price that is much less daunting I expect the climb in mobile browsing will not slow anytime soon. So where does that leave us higher-ed web designers and what can we do to prepare … or catch up?

Although many websites have opted to design custom versions of their sites for use with the iPhone (Facebook, Google Reader, Gmail) this makes much more sense, in my opinion, for web apps than it does for content delivering websites. So what can you do to get your website iPhone ready?

1. Start testing your pages in Safari. You can test for iPhone without the the need to have the hardware (although it is always fun to justify the school paying for cool hardware for testing purposes ;). If you are on a Mac Safari comes pre-installed (although you may want to download iPhoney just to get the real iPhone feel) and on Windows it will be installed without you even knowing by the Apple Updater … ok that is a joke. But seriously, it is an easy install for Windows users. You should definitely Build Safari into your testing run if you haven’t already.
2. Use proper structure on your site. Mobile Safari uses the structural elements of your page (<div>, <p>, etc.) to do it’s intelligent zooming.

And if you want you want to do some custom iPhone development here are a few tips:

3. Have a look at iUI for some help in making that iPhone looking app. iUI was developed by the Joe Hewitt, the genius behind Facebook’s iPhone UI.
4. Make an iPhone icon for your school so that anyone who opts to add your site to their home screen will get your nicely designed icon.

With the trail blazed by Apple you can expect the other hardware makers will be looking for ways to bring the full, real, web to your new cell phones. I saw this video the other day and it looks like Firefox mobile is coming along nicely and actually doing some really innovative stuff to maximize your screen space.
Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.ps. If you are concerned about mobile browsing you should take some time to check out Opera as well. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 Million devices running Opera. The Desktop version of Opera has nice tools in it for testing for mobile devices.

We have added a few things this week at the request of a few users:

Comments

We have a new RSS feed for the latest comments and a new page with the 100 newest comments on the sites in the gallery. As a bonus we have added an RSS feed for the comments on each site. So for example if you submitted Virginia Commonwealth University - Undergraduate Admissions site and wanted to keep tabs on what the community was saying about your submission you can now subscribe to the RSS feed for the comments on the Virginia Commonwealth University - Undergraduate Admissions. Just look for the RSS link below the last comment on the page.

Thanks for the suggestion ericstoller.

Links in a new Window

For all those who prefer to have the links off-site open in a new window, you can now control this from your profile. Login and visit your account page and click on the “Edit profile/password” link and look near the bottom in the “Email Notifications and Other Settings” section.

Thanks for the suggestion Compie.