Web 2.0, Social Media, and Academic Advising

This summer I am working as a Student Technology Assistant for the Computer & Informational Services (CIS) department at Brown. I expected to be doing a lot of website design, handout design, or even teaching professors how to use programs for their classes in the Fall. The job has surprised me everyday, basically it encourages me by how much I’ve learned over the past three years and how much I’ve improved over the past month working as an STA, but then also has taught me how little I knew about the process of design and all of the steps involved.

I’m working on two projects so far for the summer, one an animation project for Professor Christine Janis of the Biology Department at Brown. Professor Janis started a project with an STA last summer, but unfortunately due to the complexity of the task it has still not been finished. Over 200 hours have been spent on this project. The goal is to create animations of the evolution of cardiovascular systems from invertebrates to vertebrates–quite a lengthy task! So far a lampfish, shark, lungfish, frog, and intermediary amphibian have been designed, with intricate designs of blood color, flow, veins, arteries, air passageways, etc and transitions between every animal. I can share some pictures of the project:

Lampfish, Stage 1

Shark, Stage 2

Lungfish, Stage 3

Lungfish (air), Stage 4

Frog (kinda?), Stage 5

I know very little about biology, so I have been learning a lot! The eventual goal, once all of the key evolutionary stages are completed, is to create buttons with additional information on each animal’s status, play/rewind/pause timelines, and potentially closeups of certain key changes from step to step. I’ve been told this project is a never-ending one, but my goal is to at least have working evolutionary stages by the Fall for Professor Janis’ next course.

The second project that I’ve been assigned to is designing a new Curricular Advising Tool for the incoming freshman class. All of Brown’s advising, from course recommendations to faculty/advisee meetings, are recorded on paper and unretrievable to the students. The goal of the new Curricular Advising Tool is to create a networking space for Faculty and their incoming class of freshman Advisees so that students can have one place to go to for all of their requirement/ course registration/ advisory needs, and so that faculty will be able to keep in touch with their students better and have a checklist of requirements online and close at hand. The project has been called “Advisory Sidekick”–very descriptive of the interface’s purpose.

My design has been uploaded to the Brown Webpublishing site so that the Deans of the College and the advisor to the project, Sarah Bordac, can study the mock-ups.

Colleen Brogan’s Advisory Sidekick Mockups

I’ve learned a lot in terms of organizing text, designing widgets, and anticipating how faculty and students can easily move throughout a space. Does a checklist need a scroll button? Should widgets be collapsible? Should you create a widget or a link for the Dean of the College Mailbox tool? A delete button? All of these things that otherwise I never think about when visiting websites, now I realize that if one of them were missing it would be a major flaw. I’m sitting here writing this post and even considering how the Wordpress design is set up: updates on the top dashboard, tags large and visible underneath, related tools and shortcuts on the side. What if the “save” button was called “archive” instead? Would that make sense, or be ambiguous? What other tools would have been nice?

What is also interesting is that yesterday, I had a meeting with Dean McSharry, Sarah Bordac, and the programmer for Advisory Sidekick, Chris Klein, to present the mock-ups that my co-worker Karynn and I created. While making this presentation, I was under the impression that Karynn and I were in charge of creating concept pieces as well as implementing the final product…it turns out that we were only doing the front-end, conceptual piece designs, and Chris would be programming the site based on our concept pieces. Of course there were discrepancies, a lot of the facebook and twitter-like interfaces that Karynn and I had built into our concept pieces were too complex for Chris to design for the first launch in August. It made me wonder, however, if this separation of work is typical of web design. It’s nice from my side of the equation, but it seems a bit unfair to Chris who would be the final creator of the beast. We will see how it goes.