Programming Czar » Conferences

At HighEdWeb 2008

Richard Orelup — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:00:20 +0000

I’m hear, sitting in the first session. Pretty good talk about looking at accessibility for people with disabilities. Lots of stuff we are doing wrong

I’m up next after this, added examples from the last talk. Freaking out as always but it’s only 45 minutes long so should be in like flint.

Talk over with at eduWEB

Richard Orelup — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:04:55 +0000

Well the talk went. The whole time in my head I’m telling myself to talk slower but it didn’t really work. Turned a 50 minute presentation into 30 minute one. And unfortunately not enough questions to fill more time. I have some things I will add to the presentation for when I give it in October at HighEdWeb 2008 that came about from questions. Actually showing off the graceful degradation concept will be the big thing. Other then being too fast I think the talk went okay. Hopefully it will get easier over time. It’s hard giving a talk though to such a diverse group of people (position wise.) I would guess it was 1/3rd developers and 2/3rd manager/pr types and it’s hard to really hit both because you don’t want to get to technical but at the same time you aren’t getting technical enough. HighEdWeb seems like it will have the more technical side of the coin which I’ll try to adjust the presentation more to next time around. And maybe I’ll get more laughs from some of the geek humor I threw in.

eduWEB 2008 slides

Richard Orelup — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:33:18 +0000

Here are the slides for my presentation today. Hope you enjoyed it if you saw it.

Slides

At eduWEB 2008

Richard Orelup — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 06:05:01 +0000

Well just made it through the first day of eduWEB 2008. Just putting the finishing touches on my slides for tomorrow. I’ll be talking about AJAX and how we used it on our athletics site. Will be interesting, being it’s my first time talking at a conference.

When I first walked into the keynote today it really freaked me out because I was like wow this is a huge room. I figure if people divide evenly even with a 1/3 full room it would be scary just cause it’s a really long room. Though after the keynote I went into the room I would be presenting in and it actually made me feel better because it had significantly less tables and didn’t seem as massive.

The keynote speaker, Mark Greenfield, was pretty good. He’s got a firm understanding of what’s going on out there. The talk was pretty much a waste for me though because he was really going through stuff that you “should” know if you keep up with what’s going on out in the tech world. I mean really if you just listened to TWiT every week you would know most of what was said. The talk was more about what is possible now more then the future, with only brief mentions of where things might go. Though for those people unlike myself (which I’d put in the high 90’s), this talk probably filled them in on a lot of things that are going on out there.

A couple things he missed, which I really thought he wouldn’t with his Minority Report reference, was the big things going on with multi-touch inputs. This is directly web related but actually is something was are definitely going to have to watch out for on a usability side once more of these things are in the wild. With the iPhone, Microsoft Surface, and cool homebrew tricks we will need to try to make sure we can take full advantage of these things.

Another thing I feel he missed was that along with mobile, consoles are something you have to pay attention to. With the Wii and party now having browsers (you can even get Opera on your DS) and consoles having such a huge install base, these are going to be more devices that potential students will get to your website.

The second talk was nothing to write home about so I won’t

Well time to hit the sack and hope everything goes good tomorrow.