By now, you’ve heard the news: a gun man shot 22 people yesterday at Northern Illinois University. Seven Six – including the gunman – died.
All my prayers go to the families and friends of the victims as well as to the whole campus community at Northern Illinois University.
There are some blog posts I would rather not write. This is one of them, but as I did at the time of the Virginia Tech Tragedy, I think it’s important for the higher ed web and communication community to keep a record of the way NIU is handling this tragic event.
Higher Ed blogger, Andy Careaga, reported the news with a first screenshot of the graphic-rich homepage yesterday evening before it was replaced by the emergency web page you can see below.
Previous time stamped updates from this page are available via a link on a secondary web page, clearly following a blog format as VT did last year.
The NIU web team has also used another common feature of blogs: strikethroughs to indicate changes in information previously posted.
Update: screenshot taken on Feb 16 (including memorial masthead)
NIU has also set up a memorial website following the approach Virginia Tech took last year.
Students went back to class on February 25. Here’s a screenshot taken on Feb 26:
I’ll try to update this post with more screenshots if/when major changes are applied to the NIU homepage.