Who: Jon Udell, Microsoft
What: Teaching Web Fluency: How we can help web users become web thinkers and web makers?
When: Friday, May 17, Noon to 1:20 p.m. Pizza provided!
Where: Mary Gates Hall (MGH), Room 420, University of Washington, Seattle
Abstract: Students of computer and information sciences aren’t the only ones who need to understand how web resources are represented, named, provided, composed, and exchanged. Everyone can learn a set of basic principles and then apply them to be more effective participants in (and co-creators of) the web. Microsoft’s Jon Udell is teaching communities how to manage their public calendars in a way that enables groups and organization to be authoritative for their own calendar data, and to connect their calendars in syndication networks using the well-established (but underutilized) Internet standard for calendar exchange. In this talk he’ll review the progress he’s made so far helping cities and towns around the country adopt this model, discuss the web concepts required, and explore the challenges involved in conveying those concepts. He’ll also suggest how lessons learned from community calendar syndication can generalize to other domains, including health care, energy conservation, and political discourse.
About Jon Udell
Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer, and new media innovator. His 1999 book, Practical Internet Groupware, helped lay the foundation for what we now call social software. Udell was formerly a software developer at Lotus, BYTE Magazine’s executive editor and Web maven, and an independent consultant. A hands-on thinker, Udell’s analysis of industry trends has always been informed by his own ongoing experiments with software, information architecture, and new media. From 2002 to 2006 he was InfoWorld’s lead analyst, author of the weekly Strategic Developer column, and blogger-in-chief. During his InfoWorld tenure he also pioneered the medium now known as screencasting and produced an audio show, Interviews with Innovators. In 2007 Udell joined Microsoft as a writer, interviewer, speaker, and experimental software developer. Currently he is building and explaining a calendar network that’s based on open standards and runs in the Windows Azure cloud.