I'm Elizabeth Yalkut. I make things. I make food, novels, websites, capital campaigns, mistakes, friendships, and pots of tea. Among others. (The tea and websites are my favorites.)
Project OWL Online
Project OWL online was an online version of an optional mini-course offered to writing fellows at Barnard College, meant to raise their awareness of learning disabilities (LD). The course was originally designed by the Office of Disability Services (ODS) as a seminar course, but students were interested in the course but unable to find a time that would work for all of them to take it in person. So, working with ODS, Educational Technology developed an online version.
The course was created in Wordpress. Different activities were created to take the place of the in-person instruction that had happened in the seminar version of the course — to both motivate the students and to get them to engage with the material — and those activities were put put into the blog along with journal entries for the students to respond to.
Genevieve Calligraphy
Genevieve Goldleaf is a freelance calligrapher, who needed a site to reach out to clients and serve as an online portfolio. Originally built in pure HTML/CSS, the site has come to include a Javascript portfolio and fluid columns, and now embodies the twin qualities of a calligraphy website — elegant function and attention to handcrafted detail.
Carolyn Yalkut
A college professor and playwright, Carolyn needed a site to serve as an online business card as she wrote and workshopped a new play. The site is a single-page portfolio, résumé, and business card, with experimental CSS3 and five possible color schemes.
Decade of Thanks
Do Something collected messages from young people all over the United States thanking emergency service workers for their efforts to keep us safe, as a tribute to their hard work on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Rob Hawkins worked with the Google Maps API to link the messages, sent in through a custom Drupal content type or text message, to a map, and I translated Keri Goff's PSD into CSS.
Barnard College Office of Disability Services
For two years, I maintained the website of the Office of Disability Services, which won the College's Office of the Year Award in 2011. The site originally included iframes and a table-based layout; I oversaw the transition to the content management system Drupal, as part of the College-wide update. Both versions required weekly updates, coordination with University-wide Disability Services offices, and adherence to 508/ADA standards.
Barnard College Portal for English Majors
The Portal for English Majors (POEM) is an unofficial English Department tool to help majors keep track of their progress toward fulfillment of the English major and facilitate communication with their advisor. Megan Myers, Kristine Hizon, and I collaborated closely with the English Department administrator to design the user profiles, which required complex privacy controls and field sets. Built on Wordpress, with a heavily modified installation of Buddypress, the site is in closed beta.
- A Very Uncommon Cook is my blog about cooking, which I have maintained since 2008.
- Barnard College Educational Technology was my employer for three years, including full-time summer employment; while working there, I created podcasts, videocasts, over a dozen websites, and social media updates. I worked with content management systems including Wordpress and Drupal, and helped faculty and staff with support for their class-related technological needs.
- Dreamwidth gets a few hours of my time a week, as I try to contribute to their volunteer, open-source customer support.
- Organization for Transformative Works, where I served on the Board of Directors in 2010, and am currently the chair of the content policy committee, has trained dozens of new programmers and built an astonishing archive for transformative fiction.