IT 6710 Seminar Lecture/Demonstrations

As a result of my participation in the Internet Task Force and my success at developing my own home page, Brent Wilson invited me to conduct two one-hour inservice training sessions for his IT 6710 doctoral seminar in March 1996. Both training sessions were lecture/demonstrations followed by guided work by individual students who were attempting to create their own home pages.

I created a 4-page handout for the class, "Guidelines for Home Pages", for students to use as a job aid as they worked on their home pages.

The first session was a follow-up to Martin Ryder's introduction to WWW home page development, an invited demonstration which had taken place the previous week. I covered the following material, using some files from my own home page as examples:

1. different ways to structure home pages, using either a hierarchical directory structure or a set of anchors within a single document
2. the creation of ordered and unordered lists of links
3. the use of links to telnet, ftp, newsgroups, and gopher sites
4. the use of graphics
5. some guidelines for message design and document layout

The second session covered the Yale Style Manual's guidelines for hypertext document design. I went through the style manual online with the class, and discussed key issues that they needed to address. Some salient points were:

1. don't reinvent hieroglyphics-graphical navigation icons should be intuitive to the user
2. don't create laundry lists or gopher servers-directory structure should be neither too shallow nor too deep
3. don't write ransom notes-use color, typefaces, and layout consistently and conservatively
4. the 20-second rule of Ben Shneiderman-avoid any graphic that takes longer than 20 seconds to download

As a result of these two lecture/demonstrations, Brent selected me to be one of the two advisors for the design and development of the ILT Web page. Eventually, this led to the creation of the School of Education home page, and the online AERA paper and presentations at professional conferences that described these activities.

Presentation to Dean Bellamy

Following the success of the lecture/demonstrations in the IT 6710 seminars, and the excellent home pages produced by some of Brent Wilson's students, Brent decided to have a team of five students (myself, Karen Myers, Craig Cutts, Steve Sanford, and Curt Farrell) create a School of Education home page, with major components to consist of an ILT program home page and a Ph.D. program home page. From March to August 1995, our team worked collaboratively on this project. Our results are documented in an online paper titled Developmental research on collaborative design", which became part of AERA's VIRTCON III online conference.

Once we had all the pieces of the home page in place, Dean Bellamy asked Brent Wilson to have our team give him a demonstration of it, so that we could revise it according to official School of Education guidelines. The presentation took place on August 10, 1995, and was attended by Dean Bellamy, Elizabeth Kozleski, Karen Myers, Steve Sanford, and myself. I gave the presentation; other team members commented as necessary.

Our objectives were to brief the Dean on our goals, history, accomplishments, and future plans, to elicit any revisions he would like, to gain top-level support for our work, to get a permanent home for the Web page, to deal with future problems of maintenance, and to get the School as a whole more involved in a networked, Internet-based learning community. We used a PowerPoint demonstration to make our major points. I demonstrated the School of Education home page online, using Netscape. I also gave Dean Bellamy and Dr. Kozleski screen prints of the PowerPoint demonstration and the top level of the home page.

Agenda:

1. Introduction of team members
2. Distribution of handouts
3. PowerPoint briefing
4. Questions and comments
5. Live demonstration of the School of Education home page
6. Questions and comments
7. Action items and responsibilities

The Dean and Dr. Kozleski wanted to see faculty home pages with photos, technically accurate descriptions of the academic programs, and hot links with an automatic "mailto" feature when a user clicked on a professor's name. During the ensuing six months, we did implement all of these features when we totally redesigned the home page.

The Dean commented that he had seen many home pages on the WWW, but none of them had the depth that ours had. We considered that to be a great compliment! As for evaluation, we see that we are getting an increasing number of "hits" on the School of Education home page, we finally have a permanent location for our files, and we are getting input from interested faculty members who wish to use the home page to advertise their programs and share pertinent information. As interest continued to increase, Brent followed up with a faculty inservice in February 1996.

There were no formal UCD presentations. Instead, I gave presentations in the doctoral laboratory and taught some web authoring techniques to a few IT classes. Formal presentations took place at Colorado School of Mines and the UCD School of Business. Together with Brent Wilson and Karen Myers, I also gave a poster presentation of "Developmental research on collaborative design" to attendees of UCD's first Oscar research competition on Nov. 8th. I re-used our our STC slides and paper, and gave demonstrations of the School of Education Home Page.

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