A Little Ludwig Goes a Long Way

A smattering of opinions on technology, books, business, and culture. Now in its 4th technology iteration.

Cool Props

07 November 2002

OK here is a cool idea for creating talking skulls with your own soundtrack – Talking BORIS. Some more boris ideas at Boris Modifications. Waaaaay Cool props – Kind of outrageously priced – Iron Kingdom. Bones bones and more bones – The Bucky-n-Thrifty Boneyard Bargains Page. The fog heads here are nice – Terror Syndicate. Tombstones – HAUNTED HEADSTONES. Stylized Dragons – Garden Shadows. Props and effects of all kinds including cool organ – DC Prop Shop. Various and sundry props – Halloween Haunted House Design and Equipment. Some nice props here tho webpage is a little heavy – Haunted Village. Various props – Kreepers, eviltoadstudiosnew. Now here are some great sites for building animatronics. Controller boards at Scream In The Dark - Animatronics Modules. and servos to match at ServoCity.com. and/or wiper motors – Incredible Stuff at Unbelievable Prices: American Science & Surplus. Ambitious thoughts for an Axworthy Ghost project. Simple and low-tech but nice looking…Dancing Ghost Ring. Nice plans in here for Tesla Coils including the 6’ tall 1 million volt version – Information Unlimited Nice Pepper’s Ghost writeup. Cool! Save this one away for next year – this would be a great part of my pirate scene.

What makes a great school website?

06 November 2002

What makes a great school website? You can look at a lot of the award winners and I think you can start to draw some conclusions. #1 is student involvement. Students have the energy, the breadths of interests, the technical savvy to really contribute. #2 is currency. The great websites have all kinds of current articles and are updated frequently.

Most of these websites are public schools and are oriented towards current students. I think for a private school we need to serve better the prospective student base, the parent base, and the donor base. As many college sites do.

There are probably some good task-based metrics we could come up with. For each user segment, how easy is it for them to get to the 5 most important items/perform the 5 most important tasks.

Schools and Websites

06 November 2002

Best School Websites. Forest Ridge recently posted a new version of their website, which is good, and I want to help them make it even better. I am starting to canvas the web for great school websites. The NSPA denotes these as the best. And some others from the OJR.

School Web Site Principles

06 November 2002

School Web Site Principles. I’ve thought about a little more and am starting to develop some requirements and design principles wrt school websites.

My current take on principles:

  • Student involvement. Students should do the bulk of the work for developing and maintaining the site. They have the energy. They have the knowhow. It is a great learning experience. It doesn’t require a huge budget.
  • Content management. At the base of the school website should be a great content management system. We want every member of the school community to be able to easily post content in the most natural way for them. Standard documents, email – they should all be able to be easily posted to the system, without having to edit the website to take the content in. (A multiuser blog architecture would work nicely).
  • Every publication created at the school should be created with the web as the primary publication target. Syllabi, meeting agendas, newsletters – let’s get it all on the web. We want the website to be lively and constantly updated, let’s get everything up there.
  • Let’s leverage the effort of others and use standard software packages to build the website. No one should be building new website scripts and content management systems – let’s leverage what exists and what is economically viable – blog technology again is a good start as it is very economical.
  • Collaborate with other schools. Every school needs the same technology for their website. It is not a source of competitive advantage. Let’s collaborate with other area schools or schools nationwide on the technology and ideas.
  • Clean separation of content, layout, and code. As articulated above we need to cleanly separate out content – we want every member of the school community regardless of their technology orientation to be able to get their content posted on the web. We don’t need to turn everyone into webmasters or PHP coders. We also want to separate out cleanly layout from code. So that the members of the school community who care about design and have design skills can work on site design, while the members who care about coding and architecture can work on coding and architecture. Pretty obvious web design principles but not something that most schools practice as far as I can see.

MIT OpenCourseWare | Home

06 November 2002

MIT Open Courseware. A great leadership initiative from one of our leading educational institutions – [MIT OpenCourseWare Home](http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html). Certainly inspires me to encourage the schools I am associated with to put more of themselves up on the web.

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