education building

The bright folks up in the SFU library, have been busy working away behind the scenes on an interesting new web application for searching academic journals. They call it “e-Journals“.  The thing that caught my attention (Thanks Sandra W.) was their implementation of tagging as a means to organize the content.  Oh sure, they use a traditional classification scheme as well, but have added the ability to use tags for those ‘hard to classify journals’ .  I still dont know much about this yet but I am very eager to learn more!

I led a brown bag discussion on the topic of tagging today with some of my illustrious colleagues from the university, which is how I even came to discover this site. Hopefully we will see more sites around here that will be able to leverage this powerful Web 2.0 feature.  If you know of any, let me know or leave a note on the wiki.

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!

OK, so its true this blog never even really got off the ground to begin with, but I sure am glad its here now to adopt and show off the brand spanking new S.F.U. look and feel for Wordpress. This template was built by yet another in a string of brilliant Co-op students we seem to recruit here at S.F.U. Thanks David! (do you got a myspace or something i can link too?) I’d say each one is better than the last although that would just be rude.

There is no official blogging infrastructure here at our university, although when there is (there will be), I imagine (hope) it will look something like this. The idea here is to demonstrate that a blog can in fact be used as part of a universities ‘official’ public communications in a way that both integrates with the presentation strategy, but also adds fresh and diverse content to the flood of google results that may result with any random query. If I would just use the thing once in awhile it might help.

We are getting ready to launch a new blog for Student Services using this very template, which I hope will be a welcomed addition to the communications tools they are currently using. I hope the students will like it too. This would \lmost be a first for S.F.U. except for the fact that Career Services (a division of Student Services) has been blogging their little hearts out for the last two semesters. yay Career Services!

It seems this blogging thing may be actually be beginning to take a foothold here in on our beloved mountain.

Dave from the Faculty of Science has emailed us about a new calendaring solution they have implemented for booking public rooms, using google calendar. He explains some of the rational…

in part because it is easy to for several people to manage calendars and bookings. It also uses common standards so if SFU adopts a new calendaring system we should be ablebe able to integrate quickly.

I think this is one of the most innovative solutions of information managment I have seen come emerege from the the SFU webscape for some time. It will be interesting to see if there are any benefits to other groups (like our own).

One of the great features of google calendar, is the ability to subscribe to multiple ones, allowing for easy customixzing and ‘remixing’ of calendar information. If every department, faculty, school and service unit WERE to adopt a similar solution, the learners would be able to customize their own calendars by subscribing to each relevant source. I realize google may not be the way to go here but open standards definatley are. Dave continues…

This uses php icalendar http://phpicalendar.net/documentation/ on fraser to grab/parse 3 ics files from google- everything is live- and sometimes slow). People did not like the look of the default google embedded calendar http://www.sfu.ca/science/calendar/ssb7109.html (it only shows start times and only one calendar at a time). People can also subscribe to view events via ical or Sunbird.

Nice. This allows users to subscribe using the tools and technology that THEY prefer. I look forward to discussing this and finding about more as user feedback comes in. Kudos Sciences!