Topics for roundtable?

[Erin Yarbrough]

Hey guys - we discussed some possible topics for a roundtable campus group and wanted to throw out what we came up with to you guys and get some feedback on which of these topics (or others) you'd be interested in attending / presenting:
- CMS update and development case study
- Higher Ed best practices and cool finds
- Featured developers
- Usability testing how-to
- Video demo and how-to
- RSS creation

Let us know which topics you'd be really interested in. Thanks!

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Erin, I'm not in North Carolina this summer or for Fall semester (thank goodness for the virtual world online that lets me keep teaching my classes as usual!), so I won't be able to attend a roundtable, but I am absolutely fascinated by RSS, so if some kind of RSS working group emerges from the meeting, or if you need to assign tasks to someone - i.e., why doesn't somebody find out if we can (fill in the blank) with RSS...? - feel free to assign a task to me in absentia! :-)

I just posted some notes about how to include RSS feeds as javascripts in Desire2Learn widgets since one of the OU faculty in Tulsa wrote me this week to ask specifically about that. Yeah!

[Scott Watkins]

Hi Laura,

Erin, please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that when someone makes a presentation to the roundtable, we'll digitize the information in some way; either by posting the presentation document, support documents, video or audio of the presentation, etc. We'll post this on the network, so it will be available to you remote members as well. Of course, we'll all have further questions regarding the presentation even after it is presented, so we'll hold an online discussion also.

I definitely feel that finding creative ways to create, integrate, and use RSS feeds will be a large part of our jobs in the future. With that said, any information we can learn regarding RSS will be welcome. Also, if you would like to present regarding RSS (or anything for that matter), we can always post an audio or video recording of your presentation. Or if you'd prefer to write up a document, we can add that as well. Though it wouldn't be as nice and beneficial as having you here in Norman, maybe that would be the next best thing.

We definitely have a group with much expertise represented in the network, so we're hoping others will be willing to share with the group. With this post, we're hoping to get input from the group as to what topics would be most beneficial to our members. Yes, we want to get together and meet each other personally, but we also want to have something to tie the whole thing together.

Another topic that I'd like to see presented is:

SEO Practices: Link Building

We all know that getting quality links to your site is a big push in achieving better search engine results. So, how do you initiate communication with other high profile sites to discuss them adding a link to your site? What should be said/offered, etc?

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Scott, I will create a quickie GooglePresentation about RSS prior to the Roundtable - that would be a good way for me to organize some materials myself, regardless of whether it fits into how the Roundtable comes together. I played with YahooPipes this weekend because I had a combined RSS feed I needed to truncate, and it worked! I also learned about using Feedburner's BuzzBoost to create a nice quick headline summary (I wish they had not given it such a dopey name - I hadn't realized what it was until I clicked on it by accident, ha ha).

As someone without a dedicated server and or any special IT support on campus, I'm always exploring these free tools online - that's probably not the direction network administrators on campus would want to go, but it does mean that I end up with some good solutions that can be disseminated among faculty, students, student groups, research groups, etc., who might be trying to cobble together a web presence without a dedicated server or much IT support. :-)

[Erin Yarbrough]

I would be happy to talk about my experiences w/ SEO link building. I was at a startup ecommerce company for a couple years and spent a lot of time on this for the company. Not all of our techniques would translate, but i think many would.