Above the Fold

Above the Fold
by Joshua Anglero, from the other SHU – Seton Hall University, anglerjo at shu.edu

At Mary's request I attended this session, which was all about custom channel building blocks for the community system portal. Seton Hall has programmed a couple of them so far, trying to save space and give a consistent look and feel to the information that is provided to students.

Challenges
Low screen resolution average for users – 768 pixels, all students get laptops from the university, so those are normally used
Had 450 pixels of height to work with in the community system, before students had to scroll.
Takes awhile to make building blocks
Wanted to standardize their building blocks some
Didn't want to have to reinstall the building blocks unnecessarily when text changes in them.

Used jQuery and MooTools to try to accomplish the goals

Want to get the module height around 300 pixels, and make the modules more interactive. So created module/channels that are that size and are easy for staff to edit through content management system or RSS - meaning building blocks don't have to be reloaded when content changes. Have the ability to disable or enable tabs inside their modules on the fly, so channel stays there but what is in it changes. I didn't get a screenshot picture, but it is basically a small box with a few tabs at the top with information inside them, and some optional links and pictures.

Module administrators often people inside the faculties/schools – content owners without technical skills

Can drag and drop links, easily edit the information inside the areas.

Also created a second module/channel thing which is a photo gallery – had student advisor photos inside it. Does a random order of what pictures are there. Can be integrated with Flickr instead of just uploaded to the server (or external server hosting the images).

Had to prepare for a channel not loading properly or slowly, causing problems where the portal tab page does not load right. They put a loading/unavailable message that is the same size as the channel on the portal in the case that it is loading or the server is down, so page loads ok and items are put in right places.

Benefits:
Consistent look and feel of university information
Content updates easily
Low amount of development time

MooTools and jQuery are great, but do require javascript

May make it available for others to use

The presenter was really friendly and knowledgeable. He's offered to send us some screenshots or other access (including code) if we want. The only downside of the session was that the web 2.0 features advertised were mostly RSS and a simpler user interface, not tapping into the social learning aspects (yet).

I queried the number of top tabs students have and he said 5-6, which seemed pretty reasonable. He said students responded well to the idea of more tabs inside the page, which I was worried about. Since it is consistent, it is made less difference how it actually worked - all of them worked like that.

Note that the fold referred to in the title is the point on the screen where the student would have to scroll to another page.