2003.wlu.edu: Freshman home pages scheme

7 May 1999
This one started as part of the Portfolio Scheme, and references to its possibilities are found in 5 May and a database for... pages. A preliminary mockup is available.

10 May
A meeting last Friday confirmed that the overall scheme is practical and feasible, so the next step is to put together the pieces and include other interested parties. The current configuration is as a "personal information portal".

It looks to me like there should be a button that leads to "My Courses" and requires authentication to see the contents, which could include stuff about scheduling, probably a link to the registration process, etc. Other than that, the rest of the page should be accessible to anybody within 137.113 (or anyhow I can't think of what the other exclusions ought to be).

Can we get this operating in time to be truly useful to the Freshman Reading Program? Can the basics be up and running by, say, 1 August? Is there other information that we should be working on? What are the dates of the several freshman mailings? When would facebook pictures be available, if they were available at all and worth using? When will details like room assignments be made, and how do they get into the Augusta database that we'll presumably be piping from? What about lists of advisors? And what's a sensible strategy for updating the things that change often? Just what is stored on Augusta, and what exists in some form that isn't network-accessible?

How can we design things to be most useful to advisors, such that they have easy access to the cluster of their advisees' pages?

What bits and pieces of Freshman Orientation can we materially assist with stuff on pages?


Freshman Reading: Marc Conner is the faculty point person. What could we offer him? IS there anything to be gained from trying an experiment with some kind of threaded discussion forum, perhaps using a couple of the groups (ones where the faculty person agrees to be an early-adopter)? If we DID want to do such a thing, how would we have to go about authenticating and so on? How easy IS it to set up a usable discussion space?

And while we're on the subject, what are the general requirements for authenticating? We look toward sending out the information freshmen need in order to log in to this intranet (perhaps with the Registrar's mid-July mailing, or the room assignment mailing, or the University Computing mailing?)