Disclaimer: Yes, I am not in a good mood because of the poor performance by the Patriots yesterday and their loss to the Broncos!!! I cannot guarantee that the tone of what you read below is not necessarily the result of this.
Once upon a time, like in the 80s, the Higher Ed institutions were ahead of corporate America in terms of innovations in technology and uses of technology. Now I feel like we are far behind, especially in administrative systems. I am proud to say that at Wellesley, we have found interesting ways to help our administrative offices overcome some of the hurdles, but now that I am responsible for the Registrar’s office and we need to deal with other institutions, it is so frustrating.
I will not name the other institutions with whom we have reciprocal arrangements through which students can take classes in each others’ institution. The whole experience from the student perspective is nothing than a nightmare.
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I have an Google Nexus 6P, an android phone. I love it. The apps that I really use on it are only a handful, though, in some weak moments, I end up installing a few which I would use off and on. I am pretty disciplined about getting rid of stuff that I don’t use. First and foremost, I love the fingerprint support on my Nexus. it is not perfect, but it works beautifully and I pray every day that no one cuts my finger off when they want to steal my phone!
I will not go into too much details about the usual suspects – all of the Google Apps that I simply cannot do without. The ability to edit docs & spreadsheets, or share them easily with others from my phone has made my life much simpler! I use these apps all the time. I love Google Hangout and have forwarded all my SMS to it and you already know about my use of Google Voice, so I don’t have to tell you about that either. I do not have a GPS in my car, so I will be totally lost without Google Maps and Waze!
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I look at such beautiful things around us on campus to get out of frustrations!
We hear the frustration about technologies on a regular basis in our business. It is our job to comfort our users and make sure that in the end they are able to get through and accomplish what they need to.
I was at the receiving end of this during the past couple of weeks and let me tell you, what I had to go through was “so frustrating” and I felt the pain first hand. I tell my staff that unless we really experience what our users experience, we are highly unlikely to know the pain that they are experiencing. So, my frustrations provided me a view into this pain. Thankfully, the frustrations I felt were all outside Wellesley 🙂
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