Exhibit A: Time spent reading An Event Apart blogs - this was really interesting stuff. People who hit my blog from higher ed networks spent SIGNIFICANTLY less time reading the AEA posts than people coming from non-higher ed networks. You could almost sort the thing by time spent on site and have it be completely segmented between non-higher ed and higher ed. To me, this said that people just don't care what goes on at this conference and that baffles me! This was an event with some of the biggest names in the game and my higher ed readers basically said "ehhhh....not important". WHAT?! And watch - in a few weeks when EduWeb happens, they'll be a plethora of blogs about the event and how great it was, though I'll bet money the reality is that it'll be no different than it has been for the last two bloody years (except in a different location) and that few or no original ideas will come out of it.
Exhibit B: "That what we have edustyle for!" - I was talking to another blogger about my theory and of web design inspiration, he commented that that was what we had edustyle for! My jaw literally dropped, as my point had been missed entirely. Edustyle is fine for what it is - it's not a site I visit at all but if you're looking for examples of what other colleges are doing, I guess it gets the job done. But it is ironic that any honest higher ed web person will tell you that the industry is YEARS behind the corporate world and then in the same breathe say they look to only higher ed websites for inspiration.
I feel like I outgrew higher ed web stuff circa late 2005, which is when I first started attending professional development events outside of the industry to draw inspiration from. To me, it seemed natural - higher ed was just giving me the same thing over and over again where as things like SXSW gave me new ideas and perspectives. I still went to the higher ed stuff because my job required me to, but it wasn't out of any sense of excitement for what I would learn. Is it the lack of formal education in web design that leads to problems like this? I find that especially with the younger crowd, people have never bothered to learn the basics of design and standards so they have little regard for their importance. I never thought I would become so parent-like..."those young whipper snappers just don't know what they're doing"....yet here I am.
Mark Greenfield likes to argue that higher ed websites are becoming irrelevant and I would agree in the sense that I think higher ed websites aren't taken seriously because most of them are just bad. Your users aren't comparing you to every other college website they visit. They are comparing you to EVERY website they visit and when you don't have a respect for basic design standards, you're going to have a hard time competing with sites designed by big time experts, like those who spoke at AEA.
But clearly they are irrelevant because they didn't speak at EduWeb. Pity.
3 comments:
Karlyn - I agree that the majority of higher ed websites leave a lot to be desired. Benchmarking only against .edu sites will provide only marginal improvement
The question that keeps me up at night is how do we move forward? How do we get higher ed administrators to fully understand the strategic importance of the web ( and provide the appropriate resources and training)? How do we help higher ed web folks improve their skills? How do we get everyone to understand what really goes into creating a great site? (and not just a great higher ed site).
Hi Mark,
I think the thing that has been solidified for me is that this is NOT an administrator problem. It's easy to blame everything that goes wrong in our areas on the administration "just not getting it", but at the end of the day, the people actually doing the work need to take some bloody initiative to look outside of higher education, which most just aren't inclined to do.
I also think that far too many people are rewarded for ignoring the basics - the basics won't get you conference slots or accolades. Doing things that require little to no expertise (ie social networking...) will. We've kind of screwed ourselves in that respect - I was talking to a very well-known blogger the other day (who shall remain nameless) and he is miserable with his job right now. I told him that he was smarter than what he was focusing his time on, which is mostly social networking stuff. His reply? Yeah, I know...you're totally right....but this is what I'm known for. He's afraid to move onto more challenging/rewarding types of web work because he doesn't want to lose the limelight.
The first step is to stop rewarding practitioners for being "experts" in something a bloody pre-teen with no training is an expert in. The next step is to start listening to acknowledge that there are people out there who are a lot smarter than us and drain all of the information out of them that we can.
Here here (holding up my gas station soda cup since I can't have beer at work).
I think we forget how much time and money has been spent by other people in other markets to perfect things like navigation, form completion processes, and other usability and design concerns. Or we just ignore them as inapplicable.
I get really frustrated too that the outside community is better at all of this stuff. We (higher ed) are supposed to be teaching cutting edge professionals of tomorrow. But all everything we seem to produce is at least 3 years behind. I just don't get it.
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