Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
There are always new things to learn. Some lessons are so powerful and stick in your mind and you put them to work. Others such as Total Quality Management come and go. They don’t tend to be useful unless the context in which you go through this is clearly explained. You can then prepare yourself to learn from them and relate to that context. For example, in the early 90’s TQM was pretty hot in higher ed circles. The institution where I worked at that time asked the staff members from our technology support organization to devote 4 full days to TQM training. Except, no one bothered to tell us ahead of time why we are doing this.
During the introductory remarks by the guy who was going to train us it became clear that the senior administration is making us go through this because our organization was in trouble and the staff had no idea how bad things were. Long story short, I was pretty upset that the context was not explained and was not shy about expressing it (in a cvivil way, of course!). Frankly, many saw me in a completely different light during the TQM training and recommended to the next administration that I will be good in a leadership position! So, I owe TQM for paving the way for me to take on leadership positions.
Wellesley’s HR has a strong leadership development program which I participate in. Its goal is to help senior managers develop leadership skills through exchange of ideas amongst ourselves as well as by listening to experts. We learned about Open Space Technology (OST) last week, which was very interesting on several counts. According to the website “Open Space (Technology) is a simple way to run productive meetings, for five to 2000+ people, and a powerful approach to leadership in any kind of organization, in everyday practice and turbulent change.”
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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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Image from http://google.com
Dear Google
If it is not already apparent to you, I live and breathe your tools. I own a beautiful Google Nexus 6P phone, whose battery life continues to amaze me. I use GMail, Inbox, Drive, Calendar, Keep, Google+, YouTube, Photos, Maps, you name them, and I use them. It is moot to point out that I use Google search, because, how else does one live anymore? I marvel at all the things you have done and you continue to do, manage to give so much of it away for free, yet manage to make boat loads of money. But, please, can you take care of a few very simple, but very important things first?
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Taken from:
http://goo.gl/XXmJGc%5B/caption%5D
I was at a meeting in Washington DC organized by CLIR. CIOs from liberal arts colleges with merged Library/IT organizations are members of CLIR and meet twice a year. This time around, we included senior managers from each of our institutions also. One of the topics we discussed was “Sharing and Collaboration”.
As I have written before, collaboration is very hard and the types of collaborations we take pride in and celebrate are the so-called “low hanging fruits”. The real ones we have been discussing for long time, such as sharing services and staff simply remains unattainable. So, I thought I will share with you my analysis of factors that contribute to a successful collaboration.
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It is no secret that the use of the libraries has undergone drastic changes and numerous articles have been written on this subject. There are several valuable resources available for understanding the trends and the future of the libraries. I would like to link to a few here that are directly relevant to what I would like to discuss.
Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013 executive summary (the last available survey from them) summarizes some of the key findings on collections:
- A minority of respondents, even at doctoral institutions, believes that purchasing
print books to build research collections is important, while the large
majority believes that building local print collections has declined in importance.
By comparison, the vast majority of respondents see resource sharing
as an important library function and there is ample evidence across institutional
types of the importance of collaborative approaches to serving users’
information needs.
- For journals, the shift from print to electronic collecting has been, from a
budget allocation perspective, nearly completed. Library directors tend to
be more comfortable than are faculty members with the print to electronic
transition for scholarly journals.
- A possible format shift from print books to ebooks appears to be occurring
at a more measured pace, with relatively small projected increases in ebook
spending. Views about the importance of ebooks in their libraries have not
measurably changed over the past three years. With respect to books, library
directors may if anything be less aggressive in moving towards electronic
formats than are faculty members.
Drafting a viable plan for managing the library collections as well as the efficient use of library spaces to meet the emerging needs of the students and faculty are activities that we are engaged in. These are extremely difficult topics on which there are differing views, but this statement generally applies to anything we do in library and technology services! What is important is to have broad, and informed conversations, take into consideration multiple dimensions of the issues and come to a sensible conclusion. Yup, easier said than done, but we are making progress…
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If you follow me on twitter you must have seen my tweets from the edX global forum in Washington DC from 8th Nov till the 10th. As an early adopter of MOOC, we have been extremely happy with our decision to get into MOOCs as well as with the success of our MOOCs. Measure of success is clearly in the eyes of the beholder. Those who are non-believers will point to the very poor completion rates (compared to the initial registration). Those of us who believe that MOOCs have a place in Higher Education will point to a whole list of other things – those who complete our MOOCs are still several multiples of face to face class size, our faculty are engaging with the global audience to help them learn the “liberal arts” way, they are learning from teaching in a new platform to a global audience for the benefit of the students in face to face classes, our students say that the MOOCs help them as a valuable additional resource to their face to face class etc. We are not going to settle this debate any time soon, so let us move on.
I thoroughly enjoyed the meeting. The presentations and panels were impressive. The networking was excellent. I got to meet a lot of people from Europe, some from Jordan, a few from Japan. I was fascinated to meet a young man from Sri Lanka who supports MOOCs from Kyoto University. Of course, he does not speak Japanese and I found out that he is a vegetarian. Talk about an outlier! It is also fair to say that he would be one of the rare Sinhalese Vegetarian.
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We just finished & submitted the EDUCAUSE Core Data Survey and I thought this is a better forum to discuss than the narrow discussion in EDUCAUSE CIO Listserve. Today is the deadline and we finished it.
First off, what I say below hopefully will help improve the survey and bring more clarity to us as those providing input as well as benefiting from such an important dataset. As a CIO I totally get it that the users are not shy when things don’t work and are deeply silent when things do work. In this case, I am a user! And a dedicated one in that we have submitted the surveys every year that I can remember though to be honest, its value is diminishing for reasons that I will touch on below. Dedication also comes from a deep rooted fear that not filling out the survey will result in us being kicked out of Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) (Filling out Module 1 is a membership requirement). CLAC membership is one that I treasure tremendously!
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I was in Indianapolis attending EDUCAUSE Annual Conference last week. It was a reasonably good conference. Every year I come back and say to myself that I am going to seriously look into whether to go next year or not. I say the same this year. The conference has grown tremendously and the leadership was proud about 7000 attendees. Reminded me about admissions officers being proud of the number of applications. As always, the best part of the conference was meeting some of the colleagues. Some of the presentations I attended were interesting and so were the general sessions. This time, I also enjoyed meeting a couple of senior folks from companies with whom we either have a relationship or plan to.
I would have expected the programming to be a bit more interesting and diverse given the number of attendees. When I heard at least a couple were presenting twice, I was a bit surprised. Panels are great, but when most of the events are panels, where each presenter gets between 5 and 7 minutes to present and everyone is trying to be nice to the other presenters and therefore trying to keep to their time, it gets a bit restrictive. Now, on to the subject of my blog.
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