I’m wearing my good luck shirt. on Flickr.
I’m wearing my good luck shirt. #GoHeels!
HASTAC Features
I’m very proud of some work I’ve been doing on the Drupal site that I manage at work. Here’s a blog post I wrote about some of the newest features:
Today I am excited to officially launch several new features on the HASTAC web site, including Collections, Similar Content, Knowledge Base, and more. I think these additions will do a lot to help people connect with and utilize the rich and deep content of the site.
Collections (beta!)
The culmination of two months of very hard work, HASTAC Collections is a beta feature of our site that brings together content from across the site in a hand-curated list of posts which can be viewed in a large tiled display (at right), or in a multifunction list view (below left). Collections are not limited to highlighting hastac.org content, links to other sites are highlighted with yellow buttons. When viewing as a list, users can sort and filter the collection by type of content, topics and tags, and keywords in the title or body.
I invite you to check out our two inaugural collections, Digital Badges and MOOC HQ, and look for more soon. The staff are using and testing this feature now, and we hope to be able to expand it to more HASTAC members later this year. (It will require additional programming and may even result in a new module that we can contribute back to the Drupal community. As a result it will take considerable time.)
Visitors can browse our Collections by visiting the Topics landng page.
Similar Content
When looking at any content on the site you will now see a list of posts that may be about similar topics. It is generated by an algorithm based on the title, tags, and topics of the post. (See example at right.) If your post doesn’t seem to be generating revelant content, try adding more tags. These are the best way to tell the site what you are talking about and to properly connect related ideas.
Knowledge Base
The Help pages of our site have been in place since 2011, but don’t get much attention. We have now moved them into a proper knowledge page, and added a Frequently Asked Questions section. You can also use the Contact Support link there to create a ticket when you need personal assistance. This is being combined with our existing site feedback tool (see tab in lower right of your browser) which allows users to suggest and vote on improvements for the site.
Other goodies
I have also uncovered or enabled a few other goodies on the site that members might enjoy.
- Get Random is a button you can find on the Recent Content page (linked to from the Recent Content column on the front page) that will let you trip back through 9 years of HASTAC community content, 20 randomly-selected posts at a time.
- Two great ways to see what’s happening on HASTAC right now are the Tracker (a list of content sorted by latest comments and newest publication) and the Heartbeat (a stream of activity including new posts, comments, relationships, and users).
- The site-wide Tag Cloud is exactly what it sounds like!
I hope you enjoy all these new features. If you have more ideas for improving the site (and I know you do) please fill out our Usability Survey (it only takes 5 minutes) and post your suggestions in our Feedback forum. Thanks for your engagement, it’s what makes HASTAC great.
Super Duper Izzy on Flickr.
Super Duper Izzy
“As intelligence goes up, happiness often goes down. In fact, I made a graph. I make a lot of graphs.”
This one’s for you, I Love Charts (submitted by magiagranadina)
Joi Ito rallies the troops to a maker revolution at MozFest
I just finished attending the fantastic 2012 Mozilla Festival. I got inspired and wrote a blog post about it for work at http://hastac.org/blogs/ruby-sinreich/2012/11/12/collaborative-documentation-mozfest-including-joi-itos-call-maker-rev and cross-posted below.
MozFest might be the first physical event that I’ve attended that used Lanyrd.com. (I’ve seen it used for online events in the past.) It looks like about half of the 1,000 registrants (and all of the speakers) also signed up on the MozFest Lanyrd site, which makes it not the most efficent directory in terms of finding people.
But where Lanyard was truly essential was displaying a grid of the conference sessions. The MozFest site itself did list sessions, but simple as a textual list on one page which made it very difficult to understand the unusual “organic” schedule. Given that sessions were different lengths with a verity of starting and ending times and that there was no printed program available, the temporal grid was the only way to understand what was going on.
But now that the event is over, Lanyrd shines even more with a feature I hadn’t seen before. Any participant can contribute “coverage” of a session to the site in the form of notes, links, pictures, slides, videos and more. We were frequently reminded via Twitter to contribute, and the reult is this page chock-full of great reources with which to follow-up: http://lanyrd.com/2012/mozilla-festival/coverage/
In that coverage, especially recommend checking out the brief and inspiring keynote by MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito from Sunday morning, in which he reminded us that we’re all “a bunch of fucking weirdos” for wanting to be makers in any degree, but that makers are changing the world’s culture. He compared his own frustrating experience with formal education to his sister‘s success. Clearly they are both brilliant, but even among siblings great minds don’t always fit into neat academic boxes.
Citing a conversation with the great activist/thinker/lawyer Lawrence Lessig, Ito said “You don’t win by changing the world’s laws. You win by changing the world’s culture.” Whether you think of yourself an activist or not, “Understand that what you are doing is political. It will disrupt the system. Embrace it with your fist in the air” says Ito. Or, to put to put Joi Ito’s 21st century vision in 19th century verse, here’s Arthur O’Shaughnessy (by way of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka, I’ll admit):
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
Photo credit: Paul Clarke
The wrong @Ruby
One of the downsides to having an admittedly awesome Twitter name is that I am involuntarily exposed to fools like this several times a day. I don’t usually say anything but this time I did, and hilarity ensued. Maybe someday the people on Twitter will actually understand how Twitter works.
Debate fun
I don’t think I could sit through the canned B.S. that are American political debates without the deep insight and cutting snark of my friends on Twitter. So I Storified my favorite bits:
Signs
An open letter to the UNC community
I was a doubter when Holden Thorp was first appointed to be the UNC Chancellor, but he has turned out to be the best thing to happen to South Building in decades. I’ve been surprised to see some of my friends blaming Thorp for UNC’s athletics scandal and acting as if staff abuse of med air flights was a capital crime.
Thorp clearly seems guilty of trusting Matt Kupec too much, and allowing him to waste taxpayer dollars. But Thorp is also a tremendously thoughtful and effective leader of this hugely complex academic institution. One stupid screw-up wasting money does not outweigh the great job he has done for many thousands of students, for Orange County, and for the state of North Carolina. In fact, I think he’s due a lot of credit for the badly-needed daylight that’s been shed on UNC athletics.
The Chancellor’s position has become untenable now because of athletic boosters and anti-intellectuals like Art Pope pounding the drums of “scandal.” These people are not concerned with the quality of education available to North Carolinians. Of course the Kupec/Hansbrough thing was a big mistake, but it doesn’t make Thorp unfit to do all the many things required of a good university chancellor. Let’s don’t blame Thorp for having to clean up the mess left by decades of athletic corruption and mismanagement.
And with Pope stacking the BOG with his Republican pals and getting himself appointed to a new panel on the future of the UNC system, I’m afraid the next Chancellor will be someone that doesn’t care about Chapel Hill and does whatever the Ram’s Club wants. This will also not be a person who is able to fight off Pope’s decimation of the state educational system.
I urge the Chancellor to reconsider, and I call on students, alumni, faculty, and staff to continue to show support for Holden Thorp. The reason I love the Tar Heels is that I love the institution they represent. The Carolina Way means academic integrity and fair play. If we give UNC over to Art Pope and the Ram’s Club, I won’t have much to cheer for.
Sincerely,
Ruby Sinreich,
UNC class of 1993