Tech Note: The Current and Future Web

[The Higher Ed Assessment blog will be "off" during the winter holidays. Back on January 6, 2009.]

Accessibility standards are updated per the December 2008 announcement by the World Wide Web Consortium (known by the acronym W3C). The strategies for making and keeping web technologies accessible by all users are labeled Success Criteria and written as testable rules. The new standards, expected to be widely adopted, provide for future developments in what some describe as a technology-neutral manner.

Recommended quick read for the new standards: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are detailed on the web page How to Meet WCAG 2.0. Non-technical readers can gain a sense of the scope of WCAG simply by scanning the Table of Contents. (Scroll down just a little from the top of the web page for this section.)

Another December release from W3C is much more limited but has import in light of a December report from Pew. The "minor update" from W3C is the CSS Mobile Profile 2.0, concerned with how cascading style sheets (CSS) are implemented on mobile devices such as cell phones. The W3C profile is of interest to technical readers; the related Pew report is more digestible to non-technical readers.

The Future of the Internet III is the product of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Internet experts were surveyed on what we might expect about web computing in the year 2020. Strong agreement was registered for two assertions made in the survey: that the Internet will be improved (not replaced) and that mobile devices such as cell phones will provide the primary connection to it.

[The Higher Ed Assessment blog will be "off" during the winter holidays. Back on January 6, 2009.]

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

Final FERPA on Emergencies

The U. S. Department of Education web page for "Federal Register: Final Regulations, Priorities, and Other Rules" posted the Final regulations for FERPA on December 9. The regulations take effect January 8.

HTML version

PDF version

These regulations for the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act are published by the Department of Education's Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development. Prompted by the shootings at Virginia Tech, proposals were developed to increase flexibility in handling student information when health or safety of students and other individuals is threatened. The resulting changes and clarifications to FERPA include increased ability to share information with students' parents in some situations.

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.

SACS Follow-up: Ordering Conference MP3 Recordings

Just yesterday the SACS web site posted a copy of the order form (PDF file) for MP3 files of conference sessions. The annual meeting held a couple of weeks ago in San Antonio is represented by more than 120 recorded sessions available on CD.

Cost ranges from $49 + shipping (a pre-ordered set of 12 to 16 sessions or a self-selected set of 5 sessions) to $379 for all sessions (no shipping charge on this order for 8 disks).

Recommended: CHEA's Dr. Judith Eaton's gritty (but not necessarily all doom and gloom) address, GS-2 - Accreditation After the 2008 Reauthorization Act.

To help make selections, use the search function of the draft program posted in September. Few changes were made in the program since that time, so the file can be put to good use to locate abstracts of presentations.

© 2008 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. Email contact: bold[AT]marybold.com. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as legal or professional advice. Bold is the co-author of Reflections: Preparing for your Practicum or Internship, geared to college interns in the child, education, and family fields. She is a consultant and speaker on assessment, distance learning, and technology.