Missed the #heweb14 conference? Check this selection of slides, posts & resources

The Big #heweb14 Recap

I didn’t make it to the HighEdWeb Conference this year, but I did follow the #heweb14 backchannel on Twitter & read all the posts about the conference sessions published by the excellent team of bloggers from LINK, the journal of the HighEdWeb Association.

So, here are the slides I was able to find so far along with a quick recap of what I found the most interesting in these posts.

I will update this page as more slides are published, so please if you presented and posted your slides on Slideshare or any other slides web service, leave the link in the comment so I can update this post.

Selection of slides from the 2014 HighEdWeb Conference

Behold the Class of #heweb14 Red Stapler "Best of Track"! Fantastic job — thank you all for sharing your work! pic.twitter.com/4kiyF7HLyq

— HighEdWeb (@HighEdWeb) October 22, 2014

Human At Work – Dave Cameron – BEST OF CONFERENCE & RED STAPLER WINNER

Links & Resources mentioned in Dave Cameron’s presentation
Recap of Dave Cameron’s session on Web Services Tarleton State University Blog

What we learned from 100 Tech Savvy Students – Erin Callihan & Nick Jensen (NYU) (PDF) – RED STAPLER WINNER

Digital Fundraising – Ashley Budd (Cornell University) – RED STAPLER WINNER

Taking the Web Offline – Erik Runyon (The University of Notre Dame) – RED STAPLER WINNER

Homebrew Web Applications with WordPress – Gabriel Nagmay (Portland Community College) (PDF) – RED STAPLER WINNER

User Experience Testing in Your RFP Process – David Rosen

Your Website is the Next Social Medium – Peter Anglea (Bob Jones University)

Website Deathmatch: Choosing my NCAA Bracket based on websites & what I learned – Kelly Anne Pipe (Saint Joseph’s University)

Jude’s Law – Kegan Sims (Oregon State University)

Mix it up! – Conny Liegl (California Polytechnic State University)

Better Living Through Automation: Defeating Time Sucks and Doing Better Work – Jessy Lavery (Allegheny College)

Centralized or Decentralized: The Hybrid Social Media Strategy – Christopher Barrows (NYU)

Confessions of a CMS Generalist – Stephanie Guay (Duke University)

Fix All The (Map) Data – Aaron Knight

Be Yourself: Embrace Authentic Content – Rick Allen

No Better Time Than Now: Telling the Story of How Elizabethtown College is Telling Its Story – Donna Talarico

Flipping the Classroom through Blended Learning – Kelly Elander, PhD (Harding University)

2014 E-expectations of High School Seniors and Their Parents – Stephanie Geyer & Lance Merker

Get with the program – Doug Gapinski

Talk MOOC to Me – Megan Kohler, Lindsey Whissel, Hannah Williams and Audrey Romano (Pennsylvania State University)

Moving to Git-based Version Control with Small Teams – Waylon Baumgardner (California Baptist University)

Just another bughunt – Charles Fulton (Lafayette College)

• Beyond the Buildings: A New Generation of Campus Maps – Mark Lee & Karen To (Higher Ed Experts’ Alums!)
• Creating a Collaborative Campus – Corie Martin (Higher Ed Social Media Conference Presenter)
• Playing Politics: How to get what you want at any given time – Karlyne Borysenko
• Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign – Greg Marshall

Must-read blog posts published on LINK

I know how hard it is to blog a conference while attending it – and this year again, the LINK team has done an amazing job. So, you definitely need to read ALL their posts.
In this selection my goal is to give you a taste of some of the most interesting nuggets I found.

• Human at Work; Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and and Get Better at My Job– BEST OF CONFERENCE & RED STAPLER WINNER
• Let’s face it: We’re not 16 anymore – Mark Heiman’s session blogged by Catherine Donnelly– RED STAPLER WINNER

  “A series of focus groups found that high school students do not fully read content, that they make snap decisions based on photos and that sports engagement resonates with everyone, even non-athletes. Their goal is to find the place where they are going to fit. As such, they are very selfish with how they read websites. They want to have a personal experience that has meaning to them. Many elements on college sites are confusing, such as giving buttons (is this school poor?), close-cropped photos (where is this place?), and top news (not my future major so who cares?).

  Mark pointed out that higher ed sites are selling an experience even if that is not how we want to view our content. We often create sites that require interpretation (which parents get) but that students don’t understand. High school students are still developing intellectually and emotionally. As such we need to make the admissions process easier: no small fonts, less clutter, better photos and easily identifiable tasks.”

• WordPress and Beer: Homebrew Web Applications with WordPress – RED STAPLER WINNER
• Taking the Web Offline – RED STAPLER WINNER
• Words of Wisdom from 100 Tech Savvy Students – RED STAPLER WINNER
• Digital Fundraising on the Social Web – RED STAPLER WINNER
• KaratEmail: Putting a nail in FormMail’s coffin – RED STAPLER WINNER
• Is Tumblr Right for Your School? – Wendy Darling’s session blogged by Catherine Connelly

  “Tumblr is cool. Although some think it’s nothing but a collection of memes, angsty blogs, and cat pictures, there is a lot of high quality content out there. But you have to understand what users there want to see,” Wendy says. “It is not your viewbook or your Facebook content, it’s your cool stuff, your spectacular architecture, your student art. It has to be shareable to do well on Tumblr.“

• Your Website is the Next Social Medium – Peter Anglea’s session blogged by Dave Tyler

  “But the sky is the limit on what kinds of experiences you can provide a user, Anglea said. Users are willingly giving social sites such as Facebook a ton of data about themselves. And APIs connect that data to your school’s site.
  You could create a customized social profile for users on your site. You could show them alumni in their area who graduated from your school, in order to connect them to talk about what your school experience is all about. You could show a user how many of their Facebook friends attend your school or have visited your site.
  “You think you could go along way toward convincing someone to check out your school if they knew that 5 or 10 or 15 of their friends are checking it out?” he said.
  You could even send a visitor a $10 discount on school clothing on their birthday. That coupon could appear on both their Facebook page and your website when they visit.“

• Rescue The Content blogged by Susan Evans

  “As you search for content to rescue, give top priority to imagery. Forward-thinking .edu sites rely on photography that romances and captions that pack a punch. More and more, home and landing pages on websites are visual. Visual content is more successful at making the case; it is an immediate, powerful, and memorable expression of your brand.
  The companion to visual content is less text! Say just enough and say as little as possible. Going green with your content strategy means diving into the pools of content on your campus and coming up with raw bits of wonderfulness. When you rescue content, the easiest next step is to transform it into microcontent.”

• Jude’s Law – Kegan Sims’ session blogged by Catherine Connelly

  “Kegan talked about three key elements: Play, Control and Connect.
  Play focused on finding creative outlets at work (ie, the Seattle Fish Market); control meant owning your happiness and choosing your attitude (find a positive trigger heading into work to make the day start well) and connect in order to help people around you be happy too.”

• Website Deathmatch – What I Learned by Choosing My NCAA Winners Based on Websites – Kelly Pipe’s session blogged by Dave Tyler

  “A key metric, Pipe said, was the size of a site. 75 percent of schools had a mobile site that had the same page weight as their desktop version. That slows the experience down and probably loses users, Pipe said. If a site takes too long to load, your users will flee, especially on a mobile device. She encouraged the use of optimization tools to scale images on mobile devices.”

• Beyond The Screen – Amanda Smith’s session blogged by Catherine Connelly

  “Looking at visitor traffic and other indicators can offer some direction for content development but Amanda strongly suggests getting out into the real world. Take a class (especially if free for staff!), help at campus events, support university issues, help with search committees, attend sports, play with your co-workers etc. If you don’t understand your campus you are stuck with general ideas and stereotypes and both of those fail miserably at helping prospective students connect to your school.”

• Mix it up! The art of remixing content – Connie Leigl’s session blogged by Donna Talarico

  “Leigl is a senior designer for web, graphics and user experience for the Robert E. Kennedy Library at California Polytechnic. And if you were looking for a golden nugget from her session, and if you were judging by the content of live tweets, it would have to be the “library project worksheet” – a landscaped layout of empty boxes; fields that needed to be filled in, things like audience, responsibilities, goals, milestones and the like. But, what’s more, is that Leigl’s team requires people to sign off on these project sheets – and also requires the supervisor of the person requesting a project to also sign. This gets the ultimate buy-in and holds all accountable.”

• Agile in Higher Ed? Yes You Kanban! Jenn & Dan’s session blogged by Jackie Vetrano

  “Step one is the backlog.
  All projects, no matter the origin, go to the backlog list. For each project vision, a story is formed. It’s important to ask: Why do this? Who is this for? What is the elevator pitch? What is the scope? This breakdown should be done before the start of each project so that every team member is on the same page, while also understanding the expectations for the project.

  At the start of the sprint, Jenn takes about an hour to determine the most important projects to tackle, and update next iteration for ongoing projects. It’s important to note that for the sake of sanity, we need to say “no” more than we say “yes.” You’d think this would cause some pushback, but Jenn and Dan report that there was little. To determine what is a “no” or a “yes” Jenn looks at the Eisenhower Matrix, which analyzes projects based on importance and urgency.”

• There Are No Break Points in Your Web Strategy: Going Responsive Without Screwing Everything Up – Rebecca Pugliese and Dave Housley’s session blogged by Lougan Bishop

  “Pugliese and Housley discussed the hamburger, the relatively new menu icon that’s quickly being adopted by many websites.
  They quoted research from Exis Web that showed that people are 20% more likely to click a button that says menu than the hamburger icon, showing that people still aren’t recognizing it as a menu icon right off the bat.
  They also introduced the idea that when planning a responsive website, one should consider the smallest device first, before planning the largest. When one does, one has to consider putting what’s most important up first. They showed Happy Cog and Medicare.gov as examples of this.
  They found that the most important thing users were looking for was Academic Program information, and so they put that front and center. They also reminded the audience that it is important to think about the device people are using. A phone is a phone, so its a good idea to have a Call Us button.”

• What Does the Web Say? Thinking about Sound and the Internet- Aaron Rester’s session blogged by Dave Tyler

  “Sound brings listeners to a different place, Rester noted.
  The University of Notre Dame’s alumni site plays sounds and a movie each time its loaded. One clip is the band playing Notre Dame’s Victory March, accompanied by a movie of the football stadium early in the morning. Another clip plays the sounds and sights of a dining hall.
  “It’s the sound of the band in the stadium or the sounds of food in the dining hall that can evoke nostalgia,” Rester said.”

• Talk MOOC to Me – “The 4 PSU Ladies” session blogged by Jackie Vetrano

  “Important things to keep in mind when creating video include:

  • Audio matters: make the investment of time or money.
  • To estimate recording time, 3-4 x length of content + 15 minutes for breaks
  • Learn when to stop and when to keep going. This comes mostly with experience, understanding when things should be re-recorded or not. Sometimes, re-recording a flustering professor makes the situation worse.
  • Estimate 175 spoken words per minute
  • For scripting, the shorter the better.
  • How will you edit your video?
  • Where will you record?”
• Engaging Prospective College Students and Their Parents Online: E-Expectations 2014 – Stephanie Geyer & Lance Merker’s session blogged by Chris D’Orso

  “Takeaways:

  • No, email isn’t dead. It just looks different; make sure you’re mobile-friendly. (Of course, if you still need to be told that in 2014…)
  • Try text messaging! Might be a great yield idea.
  • What does your .edu say about you? More than you think! Students and parents are very much swayed by the experiences they have on your site.
  • Match web content value propositions with email messages, landing page text, and social media posts.
  • Complete the marketing cycle by measuring the success of each major initiative, and pilot new ideas!
  • Explain to students how you’re going to use their data. Be clear on how you will communicate.”
• The Voyage of the Beagle: Biology, Evolution, and Content Strategy
• That IS your problem! Creating a collaborative campus
• Centralized or Decentralized: The Hybrid Social
• Going GREEN with Content Strategy
• Focusing on Student Success
• The Library Who Came in from the Cold
• Essential Strategies for a Student-Staffed Social Team
• Six Questions with Chris Hardwick
• Six Questions for Dr. Moira Gunn
• Speaking the Students’ Language: Using Smart Phones & Apps to Enhance Learning in the Classroom
• Making Love to the Admissions Staff: Enrollment Management 101 for Web Professionals

Don’t see your slides or your post(s) above?

Post a link to your presentation slides or your conference posts so I can add them to this post.

Into Social Media & looking for another conference to attend with your team?

Check out the speaker line up and the program of the 2014 Higher Ed Social Media Conference (Dec 3, 2014) – no travel required for this one :-)