A Good Reminder from Allegheny’s President

With the coming of my daughter, a new school year, kindergarten, and the host of other changes that come with August, September and October, I have been struggling with finding time to blog.  Today, I took the following excerpt as a sign to take a few minutes away from the grind…

On another topic related to wellness, this time of the semester, when the press of work can be particularly heavy, it can be tempting to hunker down and focus on the next deadline. Deadlines are important, but I want to remind us all that it’s important to find balance in our lives and also to take advantage of the opportunities we have here to interact with other members of our campus community and to see the work that’s being done not only by visitors to campus but by our colleagues and peers. November will see public lectures and panel discussions on a variety of topics, Playshop Theatre productions, concerts by our student musicians, dance performances, athletic contests, and a host of other events — and, yes, it will bring a chance to catch our breath over Thanksgiving vacation, too. Taking a break from work to go to a play, a concert, a public lecture, or a game can recharge us and reconnect us to our community — and that’s time well spent.

Now, I know blogging is not mentioned here but I will do the other things as well. (If I can find the time )

Emails and Event Inviations

We are rolling people into Google Apps this summer and have had a few growing pains with scheduling meetings as people switch from MeetingMaker to Google Apps Calendar.

The link in the compose message window that allows you to add an event invitation that will go in to your calendar and send an invitation that can easily be brought into a calendar has helped to ease the growing pains.  That being said I just made the connect that when you make an event invitation in this way it also brings the email conversations into the event’s description -

This is fantastic!  But also a reminder to be cautious with your email conversations.   They might be available to those who weren’t meant to see it…

Zimbra vs Google Apps for Education

I have been trying to assess the feature strengths of Google Apps for Education and Zimbra (most likely a yahoo hosted version).

The basic premise of both are the same online access to email and integrated with productivity applications such as shared calendaring, instant messaging, contact list, rss reader, document sharing (and creation) but how the products approach both are different as is their business model.

Google Apps is based on the google business model – give away services to get people’s eyes (and information) to generate advertising dollars. This model associates a no annual fee for colleges that choose to sign on.

The strong points to google apps for education is it universal mobility and it’s ala cart nature where if all you want is email then you can have it.  Or if you want email and a calendar you can have it, or if you want ..

Secondary to this ala cart get at it from anywhere nature, but not far off is its design that easily allows for collaborative generation of documents, spreadsheets and presentations. To easily collaborate on a document without worry of versioning is a great leap forward in the academic arena compared to the options currently available to most learning environments.

The problem with getting excited about the Google Apps for education is drinking the kool aid of Google and all the paradigm changing ways that go with moving to the clouds with Google.

On the other hand there is Zimbra (hosted at Yahoo).  Zimbra has all of the integrated features of Google (minus the labs stuff) but it attacks them from a different tack.  Zimbra has designed its interface to include email, calendar, rss, chat, notebook, and briefcase into one Java based interface that is very comfortable to use. I think the comfort in zimbra comes from how it marries web2.0 features with the the desktop computing as most in this world are still do most of their computing from a desktop computer dedicated to his/her personal use.

Beyond the design of the interface, the briefcase which allows you to share any type of file with others internal to the system (or in read only format to the world).  A question that I have not been able to answer is does the briefcase have some sort of version control where if the file is being used by  someone another cannot open it for editing.

Multiple mobile phone/device support is another strength of the platform.  I am not sure why but I seem to care more about this point than others but I think there is something there.  Perhaps it is related to the zimbra’s tack on design and layout that marries the access to information with the realization that the device used will be personalized to the individual.  (Gmail and all of google works much nicer in the access from any generic web enabled device).

There is more but I am tired.  There will be more posts to come.

Looking Forward –

It is the start of a new year and with that comes a conditioned desire to look forward and attempt to make the coming year better (what ever better means) than the previous year. Most of us do this and I am no exception.

As the days away from work diminished and thoughts of work started to creep back into my consciousness I have found myself mulling the following thoughts regarding work.

1. I have a better understanding of my role and spending more time forming the work instead of implementing the tasks (to varying degrees of success I must admit).  There are a few bits of organizational dynamics to address to make us work more smoothly but those are tweaks that are only apparent because things are working well and generally moving in the same direction.
2. Now that we (user services) has our niche carved and day to day tasks becoming second nature, how do we connect with the community beyond requests for help? If we are better connected with the community it will help us be more intune with their perspective allowing us to make better decisions when implementing what needs to be done.  The question I face is how to accomplish this?  I am going to propose that each of us take a few buildings and commit to walking through them a couple times a month with the sole purpose being trying to connect with users and helping them know that we are people who want to help.  It will be interesting to learn how the group will respond and improve the idea.  (This is one thing I really appreciate about my colleagues – they field my half-baked ideas and make them into plausible practices they feel comfortable implementing.)
3. I will also be doing my own part to reach out to the community.  I would like to meet with a majority of directors on campus to start the conversations of working better together.
4. The last “resolution” is for me to gain a better understanding of how a college’s budget, particularly the portion of which I am responsible is most appropriately used over the course of the year.  Starting to attend the FFC meetings and the Finances portion of the IT Manager’s Series  has given me a good framework of how to use and talk about budgets by connecting to the mission of the institution.

We will see how these play out.  I will be blogging more on these topics and we will see how it goes.  Your input is welcome.

Team2 builds the tallest tower!

Team2 builds the tallest tower!

Originally uploaded by mediacloisters

We were the best tower builders of the NERCOMP IT managers workshop.

New Technology Jargon – Swag

SWAG

S – Silly

W – Willed-

A – Assed

G – Guesses

These are rough ballpark estimates of costs and time used at the beginning of a project to avoid the sink hole that eats up time before it starts.

Gator Placed on Rock

img006

Originally uploaded by Allegheny College.

Nope it’s not the University of Florida it is Allegheny College’s newest Gator.

Next Steps for the NITLE Sakai Community Sessions

These are the ideas generated during the session -

Next steps for the Sakai community -

- General Support Possibilities
* Mentoring/Sherpaing
* Sakai Listserv
* hosting field trips
* Panel Discussions at face to face meeting on the developments of Sakai in the past year
** blog of the same content – this is could be tied to the central
* Finding champions to support our community of liberal arts colleges

- Pedagogy Support Possiblities
* Collecting Exemplary courses
* Inclusion of course demonstrations in every face to face meeting
* Find ways to share the courses and tools asynchronous and ageographical manner
* incorporate MIV sessions in ongoing support
* attempt to connect faculty to other faculty in similar and diverse disciplines

A few notes from Web 2.0 and LMS

Topics of web 2.0

- Push content to the world â?? Many are using web 2.0 to do this.

- Remix Pedagogies â?? (accomplishing the synthesis tasks of bloomâ??s taxonomy)

- Folksonomy â?? Social Research, Communal Reading List, Topic Keywords,

Where do web 2.0 and lms meet? - Do they?

- LMS = web 1.0

- How does LMS play out in a Web 2.0 of microcontent â??

- Syllabus, assignments, etc.. are examples of microcontent for a course

- Social â?? LMS community is limited

- Web 2.0 has many elements that are closed which brings it closer to LMS

- Web 2.0 tools are being incorporated into LMS

- Blackboard has announced that they are moving toward hooks for web 2.0

- Mashups â?? LMS and Facebookâ?¦

- At one end of the spectrum people are using Web 2.0 as an LMS. Netvibes is an example.

Webs 1.0 and 3.0

- Webs 1.0 is static webpages

- Google Sites â?? easiest web authoring tool for static authoring page

- Google Knol â?? new expert content in non wiki form

Semantic Web = Web 3.0 = Not one idea = Social Graph

- Content is marked up with tags

- Content become more easily leveraged with advanced searching

- ClearForest Gnosis, FF plugin â??

- 3d web browsers

- The mobile web â?? Kindle, Google Phone, iPhone, Microtops.

Perhaps web 3.0 is not as game changing as Web 2.0 was perhaps it is only web 2.1 as web 2.0 is

Some Good Thinking Thanks To a Late Night Visitor

This morning about 2:30 Jay woke – he is teething again – fortunately he went back to sleep quickly and by 3:00 he was sleeping peacefully.  Unfortunately, the same can not be said for me.  Apparently, my mind decided my body had rested enough and started to think about some of the things on my todo list that are not pressing but will be in the near future.  I tried to fight it for a while but in the end the mind one and I snuck down stairs turned on the Adult Alternative station and started hammering away at Web Help Desk.

I spent my time focusing on the problem types that we will want to help organize our work.  While I hoped that this would be a quick exercise, it turned out to be the task I knew it would be one of many revisions.  I have come up with a list that has a few holes in it and a few types that are overkill but it is good enough to serve as a starting point.  I will start talking about this with others in Murray tomorrow.

From there I started looking at quick tickets and the user tables.  Not as many concrete actions here but some good thinking nonetheless.