Sunday, December 1, 2002
Content Management in Education
Last week, I completed the teaching of a course called "advanced coding for Manila"... or something like that. We spent the last day going over news items (blogging) and manila's discussion features. Since becoming interested in blogging I have seen potential for secondary instructors, but have strayed from advertising it to elementary educators. One of my elementary school webmasters that was taking the class became very interested in the idea, and after discussing it with him, I became excited as well.
As we have tried to make websites more and more manageable all of the time, we are really past the point of making it simpler, technically. It is now so easy to type your content and hit the submit button, that I'm convinced through experience that if someone isn't doing it, they would not do it regardless of the situation. You could give them a pen and a simple form to fill out and they would be the ones that never would get around to completing it. Once a simple solution for updating web pages has been delivered, it becomes pretty hard to convince me that the reason web pages aren't being updated is because of the solution. So what questions DO you start asking? How about, "was there ever content to go here in the first place, or are we creating houses with no buyers and then getting mad when we can't find anybody to move in?"
Whenever you begin talking development of web sites, the first thing that gets asked is "who is your audience?". I think that same question has to be asked when a content management solution is being provided. Sadly, this is not a question that can be asked of the people to whom the solution will be provided. School administrators nearly always have grand ideas of the content that thier educators will place on the web and want web sites built that are big enough to accomodate it. Teachers also have big ideas and dream of creating their "classroom on the web". In the end however, very few teachers find the time or passion to work faithfully on thier site and even fewer administrators give their time to it.
The simpler we can build a web site, while still providing a place to which teachers can post information, the more successful we can be. The elementary teacher to which I referred earlier, proposed building a front page that was a log format to which all teachers, administration would have access to post announcments, etc. We could then, off of that page, build a couple of static pages that contained school and contact information, as well as a link to their calendar.
I really feel that this model could have great success because it focuses all of the changing content of the site, except for the calendar data, on to one page. This model does not require or encourage visitors to hunt and search the website for some teachers page buried 8 levels deep, but rather constantly provides up-to-date information right on the front page. A page that provided such easy access to news about everything going on would only encourage people to visit the site knowing that they were not going to have to browse around for things.
I hope that we can get a school website following this model off the ground in the next semester and I look forward to seeing how it works, both for the content providers and the content readers.
8:38:26 AM 
I'm back... again
I'm back again. I've had a hard time this past month finding time or content to put up here. Also, I reorganized my application launching on my computer and moved the Radio icon to a place that made more "sense", but now I don't see it in my dock all of the time. I think that I need to move it, along with some other applications back to my dock just so it's always there staring at me.
I hope everyone had a decent Thanksgiving. Ours was one of much food and travelling. It's now Sunday, and I'm happy to be facing a day of hanging around the house. Now I need to start the annual rearranging of the living room to make room for the tree which will be decorated today.
8:17:04 AM
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