Join beTech next Wednesday, December 19, at 3:00PM to map out the future of beTech. This last beTech session of 2007 also marks the end of my run at the helm of this fine organization. In January my family and I will be moving West.
Three years ago Anna Tubbs and I assembled an open group of enthusiastic Web designers and developers and coined the name beTech—Bleeding Edge TECHnology. The name was a little poke at, among other things, many of the University’s inaccessible table-based layouts and dry, brochure-ware sites in an age of CSS, Ajax, and social software. Our goal, then and now, was to subtly coax the UVa Web experience into the 21st Century—to evolve already. We engaged designers, developers, administrators, and anyone that saw the Web as a fascinating realm of possibilities with powers to change the social fabric of this institution and the World. We merely asked that everyone share whatever knowledge, skills, and inspiration they had and to start building the Web they wanted to work in. We’ve come a long way since then.
Today beTech is a strong and vibrant community with almost 200 members on the mailing list and a blog that is followed on every continent that Google tracks. Our inaugural beCamp brought in over 75 campers from across Grounds, across the region, and across the country. The spinoff WeeCamp series is also proving to be quite popular (a WordPress WeeCamp is in the planning stages). beTech Labs, our virtual Web development environment, is really starting to pick up steam with 8 Labs rolling as we speak. It’s truly been an amazing ride and one that I hope will continue to provide opportunities to others for a long, long time. Thank you all!
So let’s get together next Wednesday, dream up the next chapters of the beTech story, and then figure out how to divvy up the organizational duties. Unfortunately, in leaving I won’t have any ceremonial tarball of Mosaic or disc of FrontPage to lay at the base of the beTech Tim Berners-Lee alter but I will pass along any insider knowledge and username/passwords that I can conjure up. I hope to see you all next Wednesday.
The NYTimes recently had a short article about “The Google Way” in their Jobs section of the online magazine. Related by a Google employee (”A Googler”), the article starts: “GOOGLE engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally.” Is this something that could work here at UVa?
If you’re interested in the evolution of the modern student, this video is worth five minutes of your time. Michael Wesch and his cultural anthropology students at Kansas State University just set the educational blogosphere on fire with their production of “A Vision of Students Today”. The video is the culmination of a classroom brainstorming excercise to consider the nature of today’s students. The discussion itself took place in the new thinking space (Google Docs) and started like this:
… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.
The result is stunning. The video effectively communicates their findings while evoking quite a bit of emotion. It’s “must-see-TV” for anyone addressing the future of learning at the University.
Shameless Blogroll
How I came upon the video is a study itself on how we gather our thoughts these days. It started for me with a piece by Jon Udell on “The once and future university” that, among other things, reflects on how the Internet has essentially supplanted college as the great introducer of new worlds and ideas. For those unfamiliar with Jon’s work, this article is a great introduction to a great thinker and champion of higher learning and libraries.
From there, I followed the links to Andy Rush’s site over at the University of Mary Washington. Andy and his colleagues at UMW Teaching and Learning Technologies are doing amazing things with far fewer resources than UVa. We really need to bring them over here for a show-and-tell and discussion in the not-to-distant-future.
From Andy’s site, I followed a trackback to the Scobleizer. There I found that another regional blogger picked up on the video. That Jim Duncan, a local real estate blogger, found parallels in the video to his work just goes to show how much we’ve evolved into a decentralized information mashup culture.
Are We There Yet?
It’s obviously to our advantage to look beyond our disciplines for ideas and answers. The students are already there and they’re operating at Twitter speed. When most of us were in school, we could only have dreamed of this much informational power at our finger tips. For some of us it’s overwhelming. So then, are we capable of understanding this new paradigm, much less capable of creating the new learning models to leverage it? Watch the video and let us know what you think.
The announcement is a welcome—if not jarring—departure from the staid, old ways of doing things at UVa. And, though I am loathed to admit it, I was one of those initially jarred by the offering of, not one, but two new email choices. How could we introduce another student option and additional support complexity when the University already had two somewhat disparate choices (Central Mail System and MS Exchange)? I was particularly concerned about the potential incompatibilities of the document applications (i.e., will Google’s spreadsheet work with Microsoft’s spreadsheet?). Yeah, I was thinking with my lizard brain.
In beTech-land, we already recognize that the world is shifting from a centrally-managed, closed-source working/learning environment to a distributed, open-source, API environment. Information is the application and the tool we use to access it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. A recent Scoble post reinforces the obvious…
These new services let you work with people in a whole new way. No more emailing around Word Docs or Spreadsheets or PowerPoints. Instead you pass around a URL, and work there.
Duh. This is what Work 2.0 looks like. The students, if they haven’t already, will quickly master these new applications as readily as Facebook and MySpace. Rather than coddle students with archaic, committee-conceived, and centrally-managed dinosaurs, the University’s primary task is to provide competitive tools to open worlds of information and insight. All the rest can and will be worked out in due time. For now, UVa students have an unprecedented opportunity to show the rest of us how it’s done.
John Backus, father of the Fortran computer language, passed away earlier this week at age 82. Though he earns a solid place in the beTech Hall of Fame as much for his hacker spirit as well as for pioneering one of the earliest (and most enduring) programming languages, he probably won’t catch a headline in UVa news because, well, John didn’t fare so well here:
After flunking out of the University of Virginia, Mr. Backus was drafted in 1943. But his scores on Army aptitude tests were so high that he was dispatched on government-financed programs to three universities, with his studies ranging from engineering to medicine.
He would later get his masters in math at Columbia University and join IBM as a programmer. Computer programming in the 1950’s still required “hand-to-hand combat with the machine”—banging out assembly code. Backus envisioned a better way and, with his superior’s approval, assembled a young, diverse team to create a FORmula TRANslation System, Fortran.
Still in use today, Fortran changed the landscape of computing and earned Backus a National Medal of Science, a Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, and a Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.
Thanks to all who came out this past Tuesday to the presentation and usability lab tour hosted by Dr. Stephanie Guerlain and Dave Bauer of the Engineering School HCI program.
Cindy Walters, of the ITC Advanced Technology Group, and Brevy Cannon, of UVa Media Relations, were kind enough to send me their notes from the event. These are available for download at the end of this post. Also available below is Dr. Guerlain’s Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Course Notes document. This expands on the topics covered during her presentation and introduces some fundamental concepts applied in the study of HCI—usability and user testing included.
The large turnout on Tuesday indicates there’s a strong interest in usability testing at UVa. I hope everyone who attended was able to come away with something useful. I also hope this was just the beginning of something enduring, and that we’ll all soon find ourselves regularly conducting usability testing.
Though user experience (UX) design isn’t necessarily bleeding edge technology, its a crucial factor of any technology’s success, particularly large complex information systems like the web. Considerations like information architecture, usability, accessibility, and aesthetics, applied in the right way, make a user interface really sing. So, it’s only natural that beTech should toss UX into its mix while trying to stir up tech enthusiasm at UVa. Right?
Let me know you think so by joining me (and hopefully many others) in the Byrd room of the Harrison/Small building at noon Thursday January 18th for the first beTech User Experience Group meeting.
The beTech UX Group aims to bring together UVa website and software producers to pursue knowledge of UX design best-practices through special beTech events and initiatives. UVa webmasters, web designers, software designers, programmers, media producers of all types, and communicators will all hopefully find something useful in the focused community and opportunities this group has to offer.
Some of the pursuits and issues we’ll address include:
User Interface Design
Information Architecture
Usability Engineering
Interaction Design
Web Accessibility
Human Computer Interaction
Information Visualization
Graphic Design
Multimedia Production (A/V, Flash, Animation, Games)
Writing and Editing
A few timely initiatives ripe for the beTech UX Group to start, if we’re so inclined, include:
Creating a first-class central web/software usability testing lab available to the entire UVa community
Creating and stewarding a website that showcases the best of user interface design at UVa
Recruiting and regularly engaging representatives of UVa website user groups (students, faculty, staff, alums, etc.) to provide them a persistent voice in our website design processes
Needless to say, a lot of what we’ll chew on will be in regards to user testing and ways of gaining insight into user needs. But fear not starvation of your creative soul; we’ll seek plenty of juicy design and communication nourishment as well. Ugliness and miscommunication, after all, are user experiences we want to avoid creating.
So come on out on the 18th, and bring a lunch (á la beHungry.) Currently, we don’t have a presenter lined up. But in the interest of getting this group rolling, our first meeting can simply be a time for casual camaraderie. And it might be set against a backdrop slideshow featuring user interface design patterns, just to inspire a little focused conversation. Of course, if we can snag a presenter, the format is certainly open to change. If you are interested in presenting or have a good presentation/workshop idea, please email me at jml4n@virginia.edu, IM me at (AIM) runamonk7, or give me a call at 924-7099.
