education building

Im sitting in a NV session right now being put on by John Maxwell from SFU publishing. His workshop on ‘Designing Smarter Wikis‘ is showing some of his work on the Thinkubator site. He is using Zwiki on Zope/Plone engine, but you wouldnt be able to tell that from looking at it. SWEET! He is working WITH his grad students on the development of the site itself, not merely using it as a learning tool which is the first thing that strikes me as unique. Kind of a ‘media is the message approach. John is doing some interesting work in customizing his wiki, and making some simple options for authors to quickly and easily make different kind of wiki pages. For example, some pages can automatically list all their child pages in a sidebar, which could be very handy.

The discussion is lively, and it is apparent there is a LOT of interest in this topic, but we are at a nerd conference after all. It seems like they are beginning to broach the topic of RSS feeds in and from wikis which I am very interested in. At this poin,t the only use of RSS I see in conventional wikis is a ‘recent updates feed’ that simply lets you know WHEN a page has been updated. Well is kinda novel, but not really useful. In the wiki we have set up for our work (a wakka wiki) , my nemesis has hacked in some functionality to display RSS feeds right onto the wiki page. Now THAT is a handy feature! On my home page for instance, I can aggregate several of my feeds that are directly related to my work, such as this blog of my google starred items.

well off to another session, so quick.  but im looking forward to following up with John on this later.  great talk!

Who knew how fast and furious the internet would offer up a glimpse of peoples first impressions of the new SFU brand ?

First up is a somewhat critical story on Digg, which over the weekend received a surprising amount of follow up “Diggs” by other Diggers. (For those whom I just lost, Digg is a site that allows people to post stories, or links of interest, and as more users read the article, they can promote it (digg it?), or bury it into obscurity.) The SFU story has received 230 ‘Diggs’ at this point which is pretty good, in terms of attention. “Theres no such thing as bad publicity“, so the saying goes… Even though the title is a little critical, (nay cheeky even), by reading some of the more thoughtful comments, a more balanced story is conveyed.

Next (and I think the same people(s) may be responsible for starting both of these stories) was an amazing turn out on facebook as two different groups were introduced. One was in the ‘constructive criticism’ category, the other… downright rude! Nevertheless, over 700 ‘adds’ have been recorded, and a large number of student contributed artwork has been added to the picture galleries. Oh my! Although much of it is rather derogatory (think bathroom wall kinda stuff), I thought this one was kinda clever and cute, albeit a tad obscure.

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So while all this may not at first seem to be the most positive spin on what the university has been trying to do in terms of re branding, I think there is a very important and incredible thing going on here. And that is, discussion! Sharing, feedback, the exchange of opinions and ideas in an open forum. A place where students, staff and anyone can go to contribute their thoughts has got to be worth something. Just the fact that others can easily stop by and see what people are saying is valuable in my opinion, worth more than 10x the money spent in usability studies.

One question, what in the heck are all these students doing on facebook all the time when they should be in WebCT doing their homework?!
(I actually have a pretty good guess, but it may be something for others to ponder.)

Whether you like the new logo or not, many people have put a lot of hard work and time into it. I find there is a definite bias that just because something looks ’simple’, that it must have been quick and easy to produce. Not to mention cheap. That is rarely the case and in fact quite the opposite in most examples. From a designers perspective, I would not use the term ’simple’ at all for this logo, instead perhaps the terms ‘clean’ and elegant’ would be more appropriate.

Lastly I will add one big shout out to my colleague Eryn, who was on the ball enough to see to it that the new logo did not go long before being integrated into the site as a favicon. That is, the little icon that appears in the address bar of the browser or besides items that you bookmark. The old one was in dire need of a revision, and I’d wager this small change alone will improve peoples perception of our site significantly. Way to go girl!