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I arrived in Rochester, New York earlier today for my second HighEdWebDev conference. This year the conference has moved to downtown Rochester and should offer more to do each evening. Earlier today, three colleagues from Penn State and I did a second run of our Paper Prototyping workshop, the first being earlier this year at the Penn State Web Conference. Twelve people attended today’s workshop. We had a few problems with the facility, but we were able to juggle the order of our presentation to keep things running smoothly. Everyone in attendance semed to enjoy the workshop and if that is any indication, then it was a success.

Things are now winding down after an orientation session and a mixer that closed a few minutes ago. Conference sessions start tomorrow morning and have yet to decide which sessions I am attending. A second day of sessions are planned for Tuesday with a poster sesssion at the end of the day. I’ll be presenting at the poster session. My poster covers my participation with the Web Standards Project Education Task Force. If you are attending the conference and have an interest in Web standards, stop by and introduce yourself.

I recently attended the HighEdWebDev conference in Rochester, New York. As part of my work with the Web Standards Project Education Task Force (WaSP EduTF), I wrote a report on my experiences and observations at the conference.

The conference report was recently posted on the Web Standards Project site.

Overall, it was an excellent conference. Excellent facilities, food, speakers, and free wi-fi. I learned a great deal at the conference and would urge anyone working in web development in higher education to attend this conference in the future.

HighEdWebDev 2005 has now ended and I’ve made my way home to Central Pennsylvania. The opportunity for me to attend many conferences has never been available, so this has been one of the few conferences that I have attended. That being said, I have only one word to describe this conference; superb.

I’ve been to sessions at other conferences where the quality of the content did not meet my expectations. This was not the case at HighEdWebDev. Every session that I attended was simply great. The presenters new their subject and presented in a manner that was very accessible. I was sick for entire conference but I couldn’t pull my self away from the next session.

Jonathan Linczak, formerly of Hiram College, presented on Lenya, a very technical subject. His two hour session was outstanding and because of that, walked away with “Best of” for the Technical Track. At the conference closing Jonathan was also awarded “Best Conference Presentation”. Congratualations Jon.

The presentations were great, but the people were better. I think I can safely say, as a group, web geeks are the nicest people I have ever met. I met a lot of very bright people with a lot of very interesting ideas and thoughts. I really would have liked to have spent more time socializing with these great people. As fellow Penn State web developer Rose Pruyne and I were preparing to leave Rochester seventy-four hours after we arrived, I mentioned that I was depressed. I wanted more. So, I’ll be back for more in 2006. See you at HighEdWebDev 2006.

Day 3 at HighEdWebDev and more excellent presentations. Jon Linczak gave an excellent two hour presentation on Lenya and it’s deployment at Hiram College. Jon covered a lot of ground and mentioned more than once that everyone should be using web standards in their work.

After lunch, Rose Pruyne’s presentation on “Roll Your Own Content Management System” was given to an almost capacity crowd. Rose talked of building your own CMS incrementally and how you can customize the CMS for yourself and the users.

Unfortunately, that pretty much wrapped up my day. I started to come down with a cold/sinus infection and have mainly been running on caffiene and sinus medication. My energy level is draining faster than my old Powerbook battery and I’m pretty much wiped out at this point.

I did recover somewhat at the end of the day and had a chance to attend the poster session. Charlynda Winkley from the University of Buffalo (and another EduTF-PP list member) was presenting a poster and briefly spoke with her about web standards in higher education. Following the poster session I caught up with Tim Hannigan from Queens University as he was heading out the door to last evenings dinner excursion. I hope to meet up with Tim again today before the end of the conference.

Day 2 of the HighEdWebDev 2005 conference is well underway. I’ve had the pleasure to meet Jonathan Linczak and Justin Thorp, both participants on the WaSP Education Task Force Participation Project list. Justin presented on Accessibility Tools and gave a quick review of the tools that he uses to improve the accessibility of web sites.

Steve Krug, this years keynote speaker started off the day with an excellent presentation of site usability. Next up was Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel and Daniel Frommelt. They gave a look into the future with a presentation on Aural Style Sheets. Aural style sheets can improve accessibility, but at this point are not ready for production use due to the low level of support at the present time.

Richard Els’ presentation on building accessibility into your workflow gave a nod to the importance of structuring your documents semantically, but also stressed that one should build accessibility into their daily work.