- Internet increasingly utilized as research tool of choice for potential employers, grant committees
- Applications (of all stripes) increasingly asking for personal website
- Great tool for professional development
Why spend time cultivating a professional web portfolio?
! PUT ON 'TO DO' LIST!
Proactively control your web presence
- Clean up social presence
- Pictures, blogs that are overly political, profanity laden
- Emphasize professional presence
- set up google alert
Advantages to developing one's web presence.
- Professional networking
- Dynamic, Customizable CV
- Provide examples of academic work and accomplishments
- Easily highlight your teaching portfolio
- Excellent resource for pedagogical experimentation
- Filter out "less professional" images/comments
Everyone has a web presence - the challenge is controlling it.
of a web portfolio, cont.
Introduction
Benefits
- Web presence allows you more customization and control in developing coursework for students
- Learn@UW? - Great - but . . .
- Advantages of custom website
- Greater customization
- Greater experimentation
- Easily portable across time and institutional boundaries
- Great spot to demonstrate to potential employers your commitment to pedagogical innovations
Fun and Pedagogy
Purpose
- Sample assignments
- Sample presentation slides
- Syllabi
- Student evaluations (formal and informal)
- Faculty evaluations
- A/V clips of teaching
- Teaching statement
Illustrate your Teaching
Employment
and Funding
- Position yourself academically
- BEFORE YOU START
- Google professors in your department and field
- Google fellow grad students
- Google scholars publishing in your field
- Allows others with similar research interests to spot your work
- Prominently indexes you to your work
- Excellent way for others to sample your work
Research and Collaboration
Purpose
Illustrate Your Research
- Pictures of you presenting
- Links to any papers online
- Slides used during presentations
- Handout's from presentations you've done
- If invited to present research, a description as to why you were invited
Illustrating Research
Employment
and Funding
- Use professional portfolio to declare academic awesomeness!
- Highlight achievements, awards, work
- Use as customizable, and
expandable CV
Employment and Funding
Purpose
BEFORE YOU BUILD
- Think on Purpose - a web-portfolio is not an end unto itself
- How does web presence align with your professional goals?
- How much time can you afford to spend creating web portfolio?
- What you want out of your website will really dictate what kind of website or web portfolio you'll create.
- Job hunting
- Academic collaboration
- Teaching
Of a Commanding Web Presence
Purpose
Wrap Up
Where to go now
- Plan
- Don't become fluent in HTML/CSS but do become familiar with them
- Utilize WYSIWYG or website creation tools
- Squarespace
- Wordpress.com
Conclusions
Wrap Up
- Control Web presence
- "Scrub" online material associated with your name - especially Facebook
- Set up "Google Alert"
- Claim you name
- Domain
- Twitter
- Get educated
- doit.wisc.edu/training/student
- Lynda.com
- Mozilla offers free HTML/CSS lessons
Creating a Professional Web Presence
Next Steps
Wrap Up
Examples
Facebook
! FIRST ! Essential to "scrub" clean personal profile, and set limits to public profile - public profile MUST be professional
Potentially great vehicle for professional collaboration with cohort or for staying in contact with a confined collaborative group
- Poor Vehicle for promoting academic work
- Professional Facebook page
- Pros
- Cons
- Options
Three Methods for Using Facebook
- ONE - Integrate Personal side and Professional side using Groups
- TWO - Create seperate professional page
- THREE - Create public persona
Examples
LinkedIN
- Powerful website
- Allows you to establish and develop contacts through existing contacts
- Provides setting to briefly showcase awards and expertize
- Powerful as electronic CV
- Great tool for controlling Web presence
Examples
Academia.edu
Trying to be LinkIN for academics
Could be a good idea - jury's out.
Option 1
- Relatively small userbase
- Academia - 2.5 million users
- LinkedIN - 200 million users
- Facebook - 1000 million+ users
+Social
Examples
Twitter
- Twitter becoming more and more prevalent amongst professionals
- Tweeting going on during conferences
- Tweeting becoming more about ideas and less about "cats"
- Conversational
- Excellent way to introduce self to "rock stars" of academia
- Use existing social networking sites to aid you in developing your professional web portfolio
- BENIFITS
- Quick and Easy
- Tapping in to potentially large community
- CONS
- Relatively little
customization
Option 2
Unified Social +
- Great option if you want a unified web presence, but don't want to actually create a site
- Allows you to link to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN accounts, while providing brief introduction to you and your work in attractive format
- Can easily link a personalized URL to about.me website
Examples
Website creation tools
Hosting:
All except wordpress.org include hosting
- Free
- sites.google.com
- wordpress.com
- wordpress.org
- Paid
- wordpress.com
- squarespace.com
Option 3
Examples
WYSIWYG
Websiting with Friends
Methods
- Adobe Dreamweaver
- $$$
- moderate/steep learning curve
- Still need a host for site
- Adobe Muse
- $$$ - cloud service, monthly fee
($14.99 p/month)
- design websites without code
- includes site hosting
- Microsoft Expression Web (4)
- Free
- No web hosting
- Support costs $$$
Design own web page with little-to-no knowledge of HTML/CSS.
Two main methods
- Online web-creation tools
- WYSIWYG web page Editors
Creating your Vision
Practicalities
Option 4
Design my own web page
From Vision to Website
- PROs
- Fully customizable webpage
- Process will aquaint you with significant knowledge base (HTML/CSS/Java)
- CONs
- Considerable time investment
- Numerous other programs that do the same thing
- Major commitment to keep it operational
- Purpose?
Before you start think about your goals and how much time you can spend creating site
- ONE - +Social
- TWO - +Unified Social
- THREE - Website Creation
using online tools
from scratch
Practicalities
Plan
- Plan
- Create
- Get a domain
- Host
- What is the purpose of your web page?
- Increasing name recognition?
- Fostering collaboration?
- Pedagogy?
- How much time can you commit to this web page?
- What do you want to take away from this website?
- Who is your web page's audience?
Practicalities
Create
Important things to remember as you are creating
- "Usability and utility, not the visiual design, determine the success or failure of a website."
- "Users don't read, they scan."
- "Web users are impatient and insist on instant gratification."
- Do not make users think - Krug's first law of usability - any website must be "obvious and self explanatory."
- Don't worry about being flashing worry about great content.
Practicalities
Web Hosting
If you intend to create webpage - need to host it
- Some creation tools (Wordpress.com) and WYSIWYGs (Squarespace) provide hosting services.
- Generally costs $3-5 per/month ($36-60 p/year) - cheaper than $3? - beware
- Recommended Providers
- Bluehost - includes domain registration
- DreamHost - provides domain registration
- Other Providers
- Hostgater
- Laughing Squid - no domain registration
Get a domain
- Domain = website address (www.yournamehere.com)
- Long and cumbersome URLs are rather unprofessional and make it difficult to tell others about your website
- Easy to get - as long as you do not share your name with Adam Smith, Queen Elizabeth, George Bush, Barak Obama, or Justin Bieber
- Usually around $10.00 p/year
- Many for-fee WYSIWYGs (squarespace) and web hosts (Bluehost) offer Domain registration along with their services