When landing on Dartmouth’s departmental websites, it’s easy to just visit, find the information you need, and give no further thought to how that information got there. But there’s actually a lot of teamwork that goes into building a site.

By Susan Lee
Director of Web Services at Dartmouth

We recently checked in with Web Services' information architects, user experience designers, support specialists, and content strategist to see what they've been reading. Here are their answers:

When architects design a building, they should consider everyone who may enter the structure. If it’s a public, commercial, or institutional building they MUST consider all, as this is part of Life and Safety code. Ramps and the width of doorways ensure passage for those in wheel chairs; brail helps the blind locate specific rooms; the heights of switches, water fountains, and handrails accommodate all potential users.

In 1964, mathematics professor and future Dartmouth president John Kemeny and math professor Tom Kurtz, along with a handful of Dartmouth undergraduates, revolutionized computing with the introduction of time-sharing and the BASIC programming language, opening the door to computing for all Dartmouth students and faculty, and soon after, for people across the nation and the world.

Even when Director of Digital Learning Initiatives at DCAL (Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning Initiatives) Josh Kim was a student, he became interested in how he could use technology to become a better teacher.“In grad school I never really learned about how people learn,” Kim says. “I learned about my disciplines.” But he says the experience made him interested in pedagogy.

Guest post by Sarah Horton

ITS Communications Specialist Elizabeth Kelsey goes on a tech diet, and Geisel Associate Professor of Psychiatry Benjamin Nordstrom weighs in.

Read the essay in The Boston Globe.

Dartmouth announced today that it has joined edX, the nonprofit online learning platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Read "Student Body Shifts from Blackboard to Canvas," about Dartmouth's new learning management system (LMS) in today's issue of The Dartmouth. Great interviews with Assistant Director of Educational Technologies Barbara Knauff and Associate Director of ITS Susan Zaslaw.