February 2008 Archives

A few years ago, the Web Conference made a connection. We brought in a speaker, Dan Frommelt, who was first seen by committee members at the HighEdWebDev Conference. The following year, the connection with this broader conference strengthened when Mark Greenfield brought us his unique view of the Higher Ed Web experience. Both speakers were well received, based on conference evaluations, and we were implored to continue bringing views from other higher education institutions. Dan and Mark have been impressed by the Web developers at Penn State, and enjoy the conference to the point where they have happily returned to Happy Valley each year.

This year at the conference, you will see a noteworthy strengthening of the connection we have with the HighEdWebDev Conference. Not only will Dan and Mark be returning, we will have two new (to us) speakers from other higher education institutions who will present a session and/or a tutorial. Matt Winkel, Communications Officer for Web and New Media at The College of New Jersey will join us along with Steven Lewis, Web Manager and Information Security Coordinator at SUNY, Brockport. This fortunate circumstance brings a unique opportunity for all of the conference attendees to benefit from the diverse perspectives of individuals from other institutions.

To that end, we will be finishing our agenda a bit differently at the Web Conference this year. Instead of a regular closing keynote presentation, we will offer a town meeting with our colleagues from other higher education institutions, led by our own outstanding communicator and CIO, Kevin Morooney. The planning committee is thrilled by the prospect of allowing the conference attendees to drive the topics discussed by this diverse group!

Of course, this format will present some challenges and opportunities. We must trust that the attendees will be interested enough to either ask a question, or "write in" a question for us to pose to our panel. Based on the energy that I've seen at the end of the day in past years, I'm confident that this will not be a problem! We will also need to rearrange the setup of the room to facilitate the town meeting format. It should be very entertaining and has the potential to be incredibly fascinating.

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This has been a difficult two weeks. The Web Conference Program Committee received a record number of superb proposals this year. We honestly wish we could have accepted them all!

The Program Committee met and reviewed each proposal, not only on its own merit, but also as its topic compared with the others proposed. Nothing we have done was more difficult than the necessary step of choosing which ones would not make the cut.

We found that we needed to take into consideration the results of the survey we sent, asking past attendees to let us know what topics were of most interest to them. It helped to give us some direction in differentiating between proposed sessions.

We had such an enthusiastic response to our call for proposals, we could have provided another half day of sessions. Unfortunately, this was not an option.

The option of adding more sessions concurrently was also rejected because we received a tremendous amount of feedback last year that having seven sessions to choose from was just too much. It wasn't fair to either our attendees or presenters.

While having so many proposals to choose from seems like a good problem to have, it is also challenging. We have to hope that our reputation doesn't take a hit because we did have to make so many really tough decisions.

My sincerest thanks to all who submitted a proposal. We need you to make the conference a success!

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