Sue Zilliox and I recently presented a session on making the most of your faculty/staff Web presence at Winterim. Working with Mark McBride and Marc Bayer from E. H. Butler Library, we focused on using/maintaining faculty/staff template pages and explaining how fac/staff may create self-published pages and sites.
This was my first Winterim presentation and what I enjoyed most about it was the open, back and forth discussion with the attendees.
So many questions! Occasionally I did notice a healthy sense of exasperation (“Where do I begin?” and, alternately, “Where does it all end?”) in some of the queries. This perception immediately reminded me of Michael Corleone’s quote in that ill-conceived conclusion to the Godfather franchise, “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in!”
Indeed, the Web can seem so vast that it’s almost suffocating (another word that makes me think of the Godfather!). It’s natural to be overwhelmed when thinking of ways to generate content for your site. It’s also OK to ask some basic questions like “Where do I begin?”
To that question, I suggest:
-Start small.
-Set some achievable tasks and find out how to do them.
-When in doubt, ask!
One of the initial questions that came up as a side discussion concerned podcasting. Several faculty members were interested in having their students create podcasts as a class exercise. Natural questions followed…”How do I use the equipment?” “How might my students use this for a project?,” etc.
Again, good questions to which I have a few answers:
College Relations loans out podcasting equipment, offers a two-minute tutorials on how to use the equipment, can help you edit the recordings, and will post them on the college Web site for you. Learn more…
An example:
In spring 2007, Ramona Santa Maria’s Computer Information Systems 101 classes created podcasts to go along with Buffalo State’s 2006-2008 academic theme, Great Minds That Shaped Our Intellectual World.
This is a great example of how podcasting can be used for a specific project.
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