I missed a couple of weeks
I think it’s going to take a little while to get into the habit of writing weeknotes. Friday is a good day to do it, but last week I was off for Good Friday, and the week before I went to my colleague Arthur Wilson’s retirement do at St Cecilia’s Hall.
It was cool hearing Arthur’s speech. He started working at the University in the 1970s and talked us through what it was like seeing computers evolve over that time. I loved hearing about the colleague who came back from an American university with news of a new network of connected computers. Imagine that.
We’re piloting two new monthly meet-ups for web publishers
There are content people all across the University and we all have things we can learn from each other. One thing I’ve enjoyed in our training sessions has been seeing publishers help each other with common problems. So later in April, we’re piloting a new meet-up for publishers called Content Improvement Monthly. This is partly about improving websites, and partly about keeping the content community in touch with each other.
Another experiment we’re working on is called Mini Wins: Bitesize Content Improvement. This is an online meet-up where a small group of publishers focus on a topic in content design and choose a small thing to fix on their sites. Then 2 weeks later we all report back.
We haven’t been publicising these too widely, but if you count yourself as a content person at the University, you can look them up in the Training and Event booking section in MyEd.
Four new content design assistants joined our team
With the ongoing work to migrate sites into EdWeb 2, we’re happy to have Katie, Ellen, John and Mel join us as Web Content Design Assistants. The migration project is large and complex, and it’s been an interesting challenge to explain how it all works without too much jargon, acronyms and information overload.
I’ve been thinking about how we can help publishers develop their site’s information architecture
One last thing I’ve been thinking through is how we can best help publishers who want to reorganise their information architecture. There are some UX techniques that can help, and a bit of best practice. But there’s also a huge amount of variation between different sites at the University. What works for one site might not work for another. Somehow we want to balance up bespoke advice (which takes more resource) with generalisable advice (which takes less resource but doesn’t always apply to specific cases).
