Warren Wilson College recently underwent a change in leadership with a new President. At the same time, the exciting changes happening all over the internet have finally managed to trickle into higher ed. The many projects underway made Karine Joly, in her University Business article, declare 2006 “the year of the redesign.” All of this coming together means that we’re working furiously here at Whole Wheat College to put together a fresh look. You saw the Photoshop mock-up some time ago, and I’d like to invite you to the test server to have a look at the working draft: http://php5.warren-wilson.edu

There’s still an awful lot to do. As you may have guessed, we’re taking the opportunity to migrate from PHP 4.x over to PHP 5. I’m also completely rewriting our CMS. We’re going to be purchasing and installing a Google Search Appliance. From a marketing perspective, the redesign represents an attempt to subtly tweak our brand image in a couple of ways. It’s both exciting and exhausting.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Design, Personal. It has been viewed 923 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There is an argument made against privacy that says someone who isn’t engaged in criminal behavior has nothing to hide. This method of thinking allowed the US government to slowly sap away our civil liberties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks–many have just accepted that trading privacy for security is acceptable and used the “nothing to hide” argument to rationalize what was, essentially, a decision based on fear. However, limiting the government’s ability to intrude in our private lives is easy compared with attempting to control how personal information spreads on the internet via gossip. Rather than spies or wiretaps, gossip is often gathered by those we trust and spread online by people who don’t understand or appreciate the potential for the damage it can do. In reality, privacy is about much more than concealing wrongdoing.

Internet-based abuse (’cyberbullying’) and privacy / relationship issues are still massively misunderstood. The complexities of online sociality are probably the biggest ‘generational divide’ between modern teens and adults. To help put it in perspective a bit, here are some numbers…

I HAVE A MYSPACE ACCOUNT!!1!

Wired picked up a story yesterday on a lawsuit in Florida dealing with the emerging legal issue of ‘cyberbullying.’ Reading this, I think there is a gap that new law should seek to fill–a law addressing defamatory opinions when wielded against a citizen in an international context when that citizen is not otherwise newsworthy.