Shall Make You Odd

Apparently, tech conferences are all I can blog about anymore.

I spent my own money this year on An Event Apart Seattle, which won out over Webvisions on the “can I sleep in my own bed?” tiebreaker.

If you’re reading this because you got my Moo card at AEA, howdy.

This trip to SXSW was much different from my first trip in 2007. For one, I knew people there this time, not only from the last trip and from Seattle but from my Twitter followers. For another, I was a panelist for the first time.

The core conversation I hosted ended up being very polarizing for attendees. Some were very happy about the experience. Some left some quite brutal assessments on Twitter. I learned that if you’re going to talk about faculty struggles with the web to ask if there are faculty in the room first.

I was generally happy with the experience, and happy to have one of the best higher ed social media experts in Brad Ward to help me through it. But the room was dimly lit, the lack of amplification and dearth of chairs made the experience dissatisfying for many attendees, and the fact I had such a generalist topic meant we were trying to whip through multiple concepts — social media, politics, accessibility — in 60 minutes. Any of the topics we discussed could have taken up an hour unto themselves.

And doing the talk threw me for a bit of a loop. I didn’t hit a lot of other sessions while I was there, and hit even fewer after the talk.

I think, unless a project I’m working on earns a return speaking engagement, I’m not going to propose anything for SXSW 2010. Don’t get me wrong — I loved hosting the core conversation and thoroughly enjoyed it, even with the bumps and mistakes. But I think what I missed this time around was the serendipity of meeting people and hearing great ideas. I did do that, but I felt bound up by the demands of my talk. I think I also want to feel more secure about being up in front of the crowd. I really felt my self-esteem issues the whole week, but the immediate aftermath of the talk was very bad.

And I did meet a lot of great people this time around. Too many to list, in fact. But it was good to hang with Elaine and Andrea and Ralph again, and being able to catch up with Vijay (through pure serendipity) was great as well.

I’m planning on being back in 2010. I really hope I can be.

Oh, SXSW, I wish I could quit you. Despite your massive crowds, drunk geeks, and 2.75 million “social media experts” around every corner, I still love the conversations on the margins, the introverts trying to break out of their shells, and the BBQ and Tex-Mex.

Tomorrow my core conversation on higher ed and the web rolls — 3:30 in Room 19B. Let’s all be there.

Also, we’re having a higher ed meetup at Buffalo Billiards tomorrow night from 6-10pm. Come on down and drink  your higher ed budget woes away.

About a week ago, another school at this university invited my colleague in advancement to a meeting. The meeting, as it turned out, was less of a meeting than it was a sales pitch.

The other school, and the campus media office that works with this school, wanted my school to help share the cost on something called Meltwater. What Meltwater was providing these units, basically, was a clipping service — they’d monitor media sites around the globe looking for references to their school and compiling them all into their user interface. It’s pretty slick; there’s even a button for translating foreign language press into English (by means of a Babelfish-type “translator,” which, of course, isn’t “translating” as much as “looking up word meanings and subsituting the English words that mean the same without reference to cultural context clues or idioms”).

Meltwater costs this other school and the media office $10,000. I’m not sure if it’s a month, year, or multi-year subscription, but the number that stuck in my coworker’s mind was $10,000.

As everyone who’s acquianted with the University of Washington knows, we’re going though a horrific budget crisis and looking at a 13% cut to the state’s higher education funding. Discretionary spending, already low in good times, has shrunk to almost non-existent now. Asking us to share in a $10,000 bill for a clipping service is something we can’t do.

But here’s the thing: we already have a clipping service running here in the school. A few years ago, I set up some Google Alerts using variations of the school’s name. About once a day I get an e-mail with an article or press release featuring some combination of the search term. I get a lot of false positives, yes, but the gems are easy to spot amongst the muck, and more often I’ve been able to scoop our assistant to the dean on stories — and our dean’s assistant is incredibly diligent at monitoring local news sources.

My colleague, luckily, had the Meltwater username and password, so I went in and compared a search of our school’s name with the Google Alerts responses I received. Meltwater was a little better at limiting the cruft, but not much, and they did not turn up a single article in their search that Google Alerts had not already notified me of.

No, Google Alerts doesn’t have a slick user interface. It’s just e-mails. It doesn’t have a “translation” service built in. You have to go run the article through Babelfish to fake-translate it yourself. And there’s a bit of a learning curve. You must punch in the searches yourself and tinker and tune them until they’re right.

But Google Alerts is free.

I’m hard-pressed to find anything about Meltwater that’s so superior to Google Alerts that it’s worth $10,000. In a time of financial hardship, would you rather pay $10,000 for the all-in-one solution that is Meltwater, or pay nothing for a product that has 90% of the features and has a slightly higher learning curve? The decision, for us, was easy — we’re not paying in to this $10,000 service.

There’s one thing gnawing at me, though. This can’t be the only service at this university people are overpaying for. Somewhere out there we’re leaking cash this university desperately needs to some company providing a service that could be done elsewhere for free or for a much lower cost.

Ten thousand dollars. That’s tuition for three quarters of graduate work here on campus.

My grandmother, my mom’s mom, was a 10 year old when FDR was elected. She grew up in a small town in southeastern Oklahoma; during the worst of the Dust Bowl her mother would spend the morning sweeping off the red dirt that had accumluated on the front step from the dust storms 300 miles west. Unemployment in Oklahoma at one point reached 33% -1 in every 3 adults who wanted a job didn’t have one.

And while times were lean for my grandmother’s family, my great-grandfather never lost his job, and they never suffered the indignities of unemployment and foreclosure that other Okies did.

Why? My grandfather owned a tire store. You can’t run a car without tires.

As we look down the barrel of what will be the worst economic crisis since at least the 1981-82 recession, I think we’re at a critical juncture in higher education. The budget cuts will be deep, and they will cripple American higher education for a generation. In a time when countries like China and India are rapidly building out their higher ed research and teaching institutions, these cuts will almost guarantee an end to the US domination of graduate education and scientific research that has existed since the 1940s.

At the same time, we’re starting to see the web batter at higher ed the way we have seen it overwhelm media companies. Teaching is moving online. The desire for extended learning grows greater as people work more hours to keep food on the table. Some are starting to see tuition as a costly barrier to entry and are turning to DIY learning and open courseware. People are starting to ask the question we all don’t want to hear: Is the college experience really worth the expense when you can get most of what you need online?

The present budgetary nightmare is going to lead university presidents and chancellors and deans to consider whether it’s worth keeping their web geeks around and whether it’s worth investing in the web. But this isn’t a world where paring back on web expertise will win you anything, and the coming changes in higher ed will only exacerbate the impact of paring back on the web now.

Just as tires are essential to a car, the web is now essential to any institution of higher learning. Any institution that thinks they don’t need to invest in the web will be stranded on the side of the road waiting for someone to sell them tires — at a price much higher than they would have paid if they hadn’t neglected them.

For the web in higher education, this is a time of incredible opportunity. A paucity of resources will mean relying on free web applications, open source software, duct tape, and bailing wire. Paucity will breed innovation. The low cost and the reliance on open source will mean lower overhead and the ability to be on the bleeding edge of the coming revolution in higher education. The lessons learned in the next couple of lean years will form the backbone for how post-secondary education evolves in this country for the next generation.

I’ve been worried of late that I’d be fighting to keep my job amid the economic calamity here on campus. I’m not as worried now. I realize that, like my great-grandfather, I sell tires. The web is not only vital to running a higher education program now, it’s critical and essential to keeping that program relevant in the future.

We in higher education can no longer pretend that the web is just some toy for geeks and nerds. If we do, it will be our undoing, just as it has been for the newspaper industry. I think most people in higher ed get this fact now. But there are still those who don’t. And I expect we’ll be driving past a lot of them in the coming years, sitting on the road shoulder, staring blankly at their latest blowout.

During the last round of redesign, I removed the tuition information from the prospective students section of the website. The way the University of Washington handles graduate tuition had become so hard to grok that I didn’t feel like it was worth the risk of confusing them. As well, the individual program websites had tuition info specifically for that program. (Unlike many schools, you don’t apply to the school itself but to the program; we don’t do admissions at the top level, only assist in recruiting and financial aid.)

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: We have three tiers of graduate school tuition, and we have four kinds of graduate degrees. PhDs pay Tier I tuition, the lowest level. MHA (Master of Health Administration) students pay Tier II tuition, the mid-grade cost. MS and MPH (Master of Public Health) students pay Tier III, the highest tier. And no, it’s not silver-gold-platinum (though, honestly, if you’re paying 20% more for a degree, shouldn’t you get bonus miles or something?)

Earlier this month, I got some scuttlebutt from other schools of public health that their one chief criticism of the school site was, yup, no tuition information. So I set about trying to figure out how to add that information back into our prospective student package without confusing the heck out of prospectives.

I went to the UW tuition website and clicked on Tuition Rates.

Which sent me here, a page on the Office of Planning and Budgeting site.

The tuition tables are all PDFs. Untagged PDFs that fail the basic accessibility check in Acrobat (whatever that means).

In the tuition table in the “Annual Tuition and Fees” PDF, the tiers are listed with no explanation or hint as to what they are:

An image of the PDF for UW tuition info.

You want to know what these tuition tiers signify? Well, you need ANOTHER PDF for that. And that PDF doesn’t list our MHA program as being in Tier II; in fact, it’s not even listed at all.

So, what can I do with this mess? I’m not even sure. Create my own tuition page for the school — one I’ll have to update every single year with new tuition data, meaning I’ve created yet another data island in the university’s infamous web archipelago of data? Yuck. Alternatively, I could attempt a long exposition of how the university’s tuition system works, which means I’m doing their work for them, and that doesn’t make me happy.

I think the third solution may be the best — yell at the Tuition Office. A lot. Until they fix this mess.

But this is inexcusable for a major public university. Sequestering this data in inaccessible PDFs is dumb enough, but then separating the crucial expository data into another PDF, one with too little actual expository information to explain which tier governs which degree?

Compare with Penn State’s tuition site. They have a much more complicated branch campus system, but you’re still two clicks from getting correct tuition information.

There are three fundamental questions every prospective student needs answers to before they apply — Does this university offer the program I desire, is this the right university/program for me, and how much will it cost. The first and second questions are ones I can answer on my level. The third, though, in a huge school like this, is one I can’t answer — those answers are owned by people higher up. So, we depend on these higher-ups to provide those answers in the most usable, accessible way possible for every prospective student looking to come to our university. When they don’t, we all suffer.

The solution is simple: Move the tables out of PDFs into HTML. We’re talking about a 1-2 hour job once a year that would greatly benefit everyone, especially disabled students, and would provide greater clarity for prospective students. This isn’t “create a web application from scratch” territory, this is “build a table in Dreamweaver/Composer/BBEdit/whatever.” And this isn’t “hire a super-expensive webgeek” work, this is “hand a secretary an HTML book or send him/her to an HTML class” work.

This is frustrating.

One of the things that annoys me to no end on the iPhone was the micro-mini sized button on the wireless network authorization page. I did some research and discovered a relatively easy fix. Since iPhone uses Safari and Webkit, you can use the Webkit-only CSS property -webkit-text-size-adjust to make the button larger — while leaving the button size unaffected in all other browsers.

Here’s the test case. Obviously, it’s best if you look at it with an iPhone.  But if you do have an iPhone, compare it with the current wireless login screen.

The solution was applying an inline style to the <input> tag that creates the button:

-webkit-text-size-adjust: 250%;

Why 250%? It felt right to my chunky fingers. The primary purpose of this page is to get wireless users to the UWNetID login screen, so the button should be big, legible, and easy for my big honkin’ finger to push.

And as I was thinking through the usability of this page, though, I started wondering if this page was even set up for maximum usability. As is, it’s still using a table for layout, appears to be referencing a blank stylesheet, and it has those three links next to the logo that probably aren’t as important as the login button.

I took a wild stab at redesigning the page and ended up with this mess. Not my best work, but I hope that the C&C guys will take a look and glean some ideas from it.

I’m really liking the iPhone as a design/development platform, simply because it’s browser-based. You don’t need to know some flavor of C to develop for the iPhone, only AJAX, web standards, and an understanding of the phone’s limitations.