templatedata

On Friday afternoon we went live with the new-look University homepage, an altered IA that separates the material for local and international future students and new site-wide styles.

The front page has been radically altered. The aim was to expose more second and third level navigation, giving access to highly used material from the front page. The inclusion of news also reflects the success the Media and Publications Offices have had with the News and Events website. Interesting content is being produced every day there and it seemed only right to feature it on the front page. This also gives the front page a more engaging feel for those not already associated with the University.

Other systems we have promoted to the front page are the blogs and podcasts.

We had codenamed the project 'Panda', a nod to Apple's big cat codenames for OS X. Of course, being a university we felt a big cat was not really inappropriate, we went for something a little slower...

And after the launch the team partook of some of these fine beverages, courtesy of the jokers at Marketing. Hic.

Yum. Berkeley have a web pattern resource for user interface design. I have wanted to develop one of these for us here at Sydney for ages but, alas, you know how these things work sometimes.

If you're interested, there's another pattern resource here,

Not strictly about building websites but, BBC Radio 4 is running a series called 'The idea of a university' which can be listened to via the web. It is based on UK unis but still might be of interest to some.

Martha Kearney looks at how our universities have been transformed by six decades of expansion. Has our idea of what a university is for changed?

Jobseekers will think twice about employers who lock down work internet access, a senior Microsoft executive said today.

“These kids are saying: forget it! I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to work at a place where I can’t be freely online during the day,” said Anne Kirah, Microsoft Senior Design Anthropologist.

(Yes, I want to know what a 'Senior Design Anthropologist' is too...and I thought my title was stretching the boundaries.)

I have often wondered what it would be like to work somewhere where internet access was restricted. I always imagined it would give employees the message that they were not to be trusted.

I am not sure exactly what this proves, except that the page layout of some very large sites looks relatively basic but here is a gallery of some very large sites with all text removed, leaving only graphics.

As we are currently in redesign mode (it's coming, settle down), I thought I would direct you to this piece by Maishi NIchani: The changing face of University websites.

A lot of the points raised will not be new for anyone working on uni sites but it's still worth a read.

Well, not really. There was a pretty amazing hailstorm though. Stegasaurus and Deepwarren have some wonderful photos if you want to take a look.

UPDATE: More at the Uni news site.

A typical back-up post for a blogger lacking inspiration is to blog about the search terms people have used to get to their site. Sometimes they can be amusing, sometimes just plain weird. In a similar vein, AOL recently published the search histories of some its users and the results were jaw dropping. Of course, there are a whole heap of privacy issues around this as AOL users can be identified. This identification enables you to string together a picture of the person's life, as this journo has done over at CNet. Highly questionable but compelling reading.

The program for the Oz-IA Conference/Retreat has been announced. Get over there and check it out. There's no registration facility or info as yet but perhaps you might like to subscribe to the news feed so you won't miss a thing.

if:book has a great round up of a series of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the career risks of blogging and the role of blogs in the life of the 'public intellectual'.

Particularly pertinent with the proliferation of blogs here at Sydney.

Elsewhere, the Pen asks some questions about university-sanctioned blogging, particularly Sydney Life.

It's hard to imagine life without the web isn't it? (Well, my career-path so far would certainly have been VERY different it hadn't been around). I have been pondering this today as it seems it is the 15th birthday of the WWW. To celebrate the occasion you may wish to read a copy of Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of the birth.

Often web teams have obsessive arguments about whether a scrolling page is ok and if so, how much scrolling is too much? Like a lot of things in web design, the answer is: it depends. (Except with sideways scrolling to which I say: avoid at all costs). You have to consider things like the type of page (homepage, article page etc) and the nature of the page layout itself and whether it leads a user to believe the page should scroll.

Jared Spool has written a short but descriptive and useful discussion on the issue. Go and read it.

Via Column Two.

A few recent highlights from around blogs dot usyd:

Black Knight writes on Life of a labrat:
Synchronicity

I told her why I had taken the machine apart (to find out how it worked so that I could mend it) and from there went on to say actually, that's what I do at work. No, not mend washing machines — I take things apart to see how they work. I did not use the phrase 'the very fabric of Life' (I was tempted; that kind of thing does not faze nine year olds as much as you might think) but we did have an interesting discussion about dissection and atom bombs and all sorts of groovy stuff.

Jane Simpson writes on Transient Languages and cultures:
Wiradjuri language revival

Last Wednesday (26 July) I went along to a ceremonial ribbon cutting on a bunch of books on Wiradjuri in the Parkes Shire Library (central west NSW). This prompted some thoughts on language revival, Wiradjuri, the German Saturday school I went to, and teaching language.

Max Lane writes on Southeast Asia and International Affairs:
Letter from Jakarta, August 1

I am still in Jakarta finishing off university work. Unfortunately an old illness, adhesive capulitis (frozen shoulder) has returned to hit me in the right arm. This is preventing me from doing any extended typing, as well as being generally a pain – in all senses. So I have had a bit less time to get out and meet contacts but I did speak at a discussion organized by PRAXIS, another organized by the Workers Accuse Alliance and attended the public launch of a new party PAPPERNAS.

William Renner writes on eLearning Dispatch:
Is asynchronous learning really social?

A great question was put to me which is difficult to answer, but I will try.

Asynchronous communications force us to question what is it to be social. The telephone is a synchronous communications tool, where the participants are separated by space. With asynchronous communications they are also separated by time. For me the social aspect is not one of space or time, but the quality of the conversation.

Julian Murphet writes on Postmodernism now:
Mel Gibson: in vino veritas?

Is it even worth going there? Is anything to be gained by observing that, lo and behold, the boys from South Park had got it right, and pretty precisely, years ago now?

Davina writes on Sydney Life
'Coz I'm leaving on a jet plane

I must admit here in my first ever blog entry that I have, until now, been completely uninterested with the very notion of a ‘blog’. This goes beyond any reservations about the sheer unattractiveness of the word ‘blog’ (who came up with that anyway?) to the arrogance of assuming that if you write down some ponderings and post them in cyberspace, that someone will actually want to read them.

Karine over at collegewebeditor has managed to cajole some of her readers to actually write for her. They're 'live blogging' from the eduWeb Conference currently underway in Baltimore.