What do you do?

[Scott Watkins]

Please let everyone know what it is that you do. Are you a designer? a developer? a user-interface specialist? project manager... server administrator... or a 'I do it all' person?

[Scott Watkins]

I personally feel I'm a hybrid web professional. I'd say my strength is in server-side code, but also feel I have competent design skills as well as client-side coding. I'm solely in charge of our website in the College of Education, so I get to put on many hats while at work.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Scott! I started out as a traditional academic (in the Classics dept. at OU), then resigned that job to do a stint in OU IT (I was part of the faculty liaison program way back when)... so I have ended up being a bit of a hybrid also. My current job is teaching online courses for the College of Arts & Sciences, which is the perfect way to combine those two worlds. I am still pursuing my interests in Classics (for Latin fables, proverbs and sundry amusements, see my Bestiaria Latina blog), but I also spend a lot of time exploring web technologies, especially anything that promotes sharing of online resources (this summer I started keeping a How-To Technology Tips blog). I love teaching courses online and I'm looking forward to sharing ideas and learning about different approaches from other folks interested in the web world at OU. :-)

[Donna Lewis]

I am the OU Office of Compliance Outreach Coordinator. I've recently been working on a redesign of the Compliance websites toward a more user-focused layout. However, my job is not just associated with the web. I do a lot of other project management, database management, and, well, outreach type tasks as well.

One of my primary interests is user-interface development.

[Scott Watkins]

I've become increasingly interested in UI testing. Have you conducted any UI testing, and if so, what methods do you use? While our site was just in conception, I think they did some focus groups, but I'm not sure how in-depth the testing was.

[Kerry Magruder]

Hi everyone,

Scott, thanks for setting up this ning network for OU web developers. I suspect we are a disparate bunch of people, and so it's been difficult to network physically through campus meetings or on-site collaborations. This community promises to be just the thing we need to communicate and coordinate our efforts effectively.

I'm the rare book librarian for the History of Science Collections and a faculty member in the History of Science Department. Both of these involve web development; the first in digitization and the second in that I'm just now beginning a new website for the Dept to bring us through to the transition to the new CMS. The Collections' digitization approach is somewhat unique for special collections, in that we offer high resolution images of our rare books for download without charge, attracting about 10 GB of traffic from our little server each week. This provides us with much needed visibility and tons of good PR from scholars, teachers, publishers and the media. We are looking for more collaborative endeavors with other institutions, such as the Darwin Online project at Cambridge and the Archimedes Project at Max Planck. Our website, architected by Eric Bruning, reads the image directories on the fly to present thumbnail galleries for browsing. Here's the site, still in infancy, but David Corbly and the University Libraries are hiring someone to help us take it to the next level: http://hsci.ou.edu/galleries.

[Alicia Zahrai Keys]

Thank you, Scott! I'm excited to have everyone getting together. I am the Web Systems Manager for the College of Atmospheric & Geographic Sciences and the National Weather Center. I'm not really sure what I do anymore! I am a developer, designer, project manager, systems administrator, and technical support supervisor. I manage a team of student developers and we have at least 8 websites running right now. This is my departmental site: http://rcs.ou.edu/. We run everything on RedHat servers in PHP/mySQL.

[Eric Blazek]

Hey All,

I'm the website coordinator for the College of Liberal Studies. In addition to the college website, we've got about 1500 students taking ~150 online courses. Each class has it's own website, anywhere from 10 to 50 pages. Lotsa maintenance, but new development as courses are added to the curriculum.

I spend most of my development time in Dreamweaver, but I am also proud to call myself a 'software toolsmith' - in that I have had to build the tools necessary to manage all these pages. CLS didn't have a spellchecker or a bad-link checker, so I wrote one (PHP/MySQL) that checks all 3000+ links across all the courses nightly and displays the results to me in a color coded control panel.

I have also written a number of tools to manage all those D2L sections, such as adding discussion boards to 100+ sections all in one fell swoop :-) Or a notification system that emails instructors when an independent study student leaves a paper in the dropbox - also works for those students working off incompletes. D2L mid-level management tools are sadly lacking.

[Scott Watkins]

I'd be VERY interested to learn how you've integrated with the D2L software. I too support my College on D2L happenings and would like to see what you've been able to accomplish with custom coding.

[Laura Gibbs]

Scott, I am VERY interested in D2L issues as well, although not from an administrative standpoint - just as someone who is 100% dependent on D2L for getting my own job done. I'll set up a discussion area for D2L and send a note to Anita Tom to see if we can lure her in here, too! :-)

[Mark Walvoord]

I'm the web guy for University College now...but since we switched to the CMS in late Feb '08...that means I don't do too much! :) (I take that back...I make lots of critiques about the system, much to the chagrin of the Web Communications folks. But its all done in the attitude of improvement before other departments/colleges switch over). My "real job" though is maintaining the new Action Program, where we are currently exploring how to do in-house online tutoring. (Oh, and I also will be teaching Intro Biology online this fall and spring.) Phew...should be a fun year!

[Son Le]

Hello. I am responsible for the OU Human Resources website. I do a bit of everything related to the website, but most of my time at work entails developing new applications to automate HR processes. I'm currently working on creating a pure CSS template to make the HR website more accessible. I wouldn't mind getting some pointers if anyone on campus is a CSS guru.

[Scott Watkins]

Hi Son, I really like the new HR website. It has a light graphic feel that I think is great, and it doesn't overwhelm the visitor with too much content. Also, I really like the icon notifications on your external links. I've even accessed the site with my phone and it linearizes very well. I'd be happy to field any questions you have regarding a CSS template. What did you have in mind?