Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
I am in Indianapolis attending the EDUCAUSE Annual conference. You can see my tweets from the conference. We had an early start at 8 AM to listen to the first keynote by Daniel Pink titled “The Cascade Effect: How Small Wins Can Transform Your Organization”. It was interesting and there were a few good take home lessons. The talk was mostly about motivating the staff in your organization. He referred to a collection of social science research in his talk the conclusions from which can be summarized as “If the work involves even rudimentary cognitive tasks, then better rewards by themselves don’t improve performance”.
Some of the recipes provided were useful, such as constant feedback, providing autonomy etc. One thing he mentioned was to give the staff an hour a week for them to explore new things. As you see in one of my tweets, I am very happy to say that we already have this in place in LTS at Wellesley where we encourage the staff to take 2 hours a week to explore new areas. He stressed the importance of weekly meetings where feedback is provided, but change every fourth such meeting to talk about something totally different, such as career ambitions etc.
I also attended a couple of other talks, one on digital scholarship and another abut “what’s next in higher education”, both were a bit disappointing. However, during a dinner last night I was talking to a few colleagues from other institutions and what caught my attention was how many times the “What if?” question came up.
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“Data governance (DG) refers to the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data employed in an enterprise. A sound data governance program includes a governing body or council, a defined set of procedures, and a plan to execute those procedures.” This operational definition, by Margaret Rouse, captures what data governance is all about. I think it is fair to say that in most of Higher Ed, access to data is far less than optimal. The reasons for this are varied.
In “Choosing Governance Models” , Gwen Thomas outlines some of the important things to consider when it comes to data governance.
- Top-down
- Bottom-up
- Center-out, or
- Silo-in
This will provide a window into why access to reliable data in a secure way is a huge issue in higher ed. First and foremost, until recently we have not had any formal governance structures. In many cases, it has been bottom up, decisions were taken in data silos and no one was willing to disturb the status quo. These have resulted in incoherent policies, over control of data and in some cases misinterpretation of the laws governing data. In general there are a lot of users in the institution complaining about problems and not many who are interested in participating in finding a solution.
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Earlier this year, EDUCAUSE published Top 10 issues facing technology organizations. In an opinion piece, Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian at Temple University, posted a similar list for the Libraries “Top 10 Academic Library Issues for 2015 | From the Bell Tower“. These lists provide us a way to look at what we do and gauge how we are doing. Sometimes, it is pretty heartening to see that we are not the only ones facing these issues and other times you are glad that these are no longer “issues” for you.
It is not my intent to go over them one at a time, rather just highlight some of them.
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Data integration is a fact of life for those of us who are in the information technology business. Since we are yet to invent a single system that does everything for everyone in an enterprise, it is inevitable that we have to support and deal with multiple systems. It is equally true that unless the data from these diverse systems are integrated, we will not be able to understand the data in a coherent fashion. With the proliferation of “best of breed” solutions we have a complicated mess in hand.
Most institutions have a large administrative system like Banner or PeopleSoft that is considered to hold the authoritative data. In addition, for the purpose of reporting, we all have a data warehouse or a data mart into which data from the central systems is inserted typically on a nightly basis. The general premise of this is that the administrative systems were originally designed to take in the transactional data and therefore optimized for that purpose. They were not designed for complex reporting. Combining both of these in one system means a drain in resources and everyone suffers. Modern systems like Workday claims to have designed their system in ways that you can do all activities in one system. When you have multiple systems, generally, the data is integrated with the administrative systems, though in some cases, directly into the data warehouse.
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It turns out that “Name” is complicated business. For all the official purposes, we use the legal name. When someone begins at Wellesley, this name is recorded in Banner, our ERP and is used to generate a username and email aliases. This then propagates through integration to several other systems, some internal and some external. In other words, the fist instantiation of this official name becomes pervasive.
There are many reasons why the legal name is not enough. Many use their middle name instead of their first name and would prefer that this is properly noted and used in some fashion. There are several others who would prefer to use a nickname. For example, several of us from Southeast Asian countries prefer this approach as a way to spare the rest of the world from the agonies of learning to pronounce our complicated names. There are many cases where our given names, when not correctly pronounced, may mean something totally inappropriate either in English or in our own languages! I strongly recommend that you read this article titled “Personal names around the world“.
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I really liked the piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “The Administration Vacation“. I think the paragraph “In short, we as faculty members and administrators have to stop viewing one another as monolithic and antagonistic entities, and instead begin seeing ourselves as dedicated individuals and shared stakeholders working toward a common good.” captures the current situation in Higher Ed accurately.
Each of us is on the “inside” in several aspects of our work and life and “outside” in others. And our view points differ so drastically depending on the view that we have. The article suggests that we should have the faculty shadow an administrator for a few weeks and vice versa as a way to get a better understanding and appreciation of the other side. This is the same as moving someone from the “outside” to go “inside” to get a better understanding of the situation.
The practicality of this is a serious issue, but we all can benefit from trying to find some common ground, whatever the path is. (more…)
I have touched on this topic several times in my postings, but it is always a good reminder as we begin another academic year.
We often see the tension around which technologies will enhance teaching and learning as perceived by the various players. The predominant public discourse on this comes from those connected to education in some fashion or the other, but not from the faculty and the students, . In many higher ed institutions, instructional technologists play the role of both being the resource for the use of existing technologies (such as classroom technologies, learning management systems etc. etc.) but also researching emerging technologies and finding appropriate venues to talk about them to see if the faculty are interested.
There are also institutions where the adoption of technologies seem to be more a top down mandate. I was talking to a friend of mine who is an excellent teacher in a very prestigious institution who was complaining about the pressure to flip classrooms. He flipped and it was a big flopped classroom! (more…)
A Disclaimer: The fact that we have a very large organization means I am highly likely to miss some of the things we are proud of… I have chosen a few for the sake of brevity.
Response to the Glycol Spill: As I wrote in my last blog post “A leak, a move & a redo”, we had a pretty nasty leak. The way our staff came to the rescue is something we can all be very proud of. It was amazing to hear how well everyone responded, minimizing the damage.
Wide use of data analytics: I am extremely proud of the collaboration between the Provost’s Office, the office of Institutional Research and LTS on the data analytics/business intelligence project. It has taken us a bit longer than we would have liked, but every faculty member who has been introduced to the Blackboard Analytics based dashboards and reports are thrilled to be able to have access to data this way. Everyone who worked hard to get us here should be very proud of the road we took and for hanging in there patiently.
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A Leak
The archives in Clapp Library after the leak
We had a major issue in Clapp library this past Monday. I was not here and this is based on what I have gathered since then. A pipe in the cooling system broke and glycol began leaking from the ceiling in the fourth floor near the archives. A staff member noticed it and several others came together and through their extraordinary collaborative effort, many of the affected boxes in the archival storage area were saved and moved to a makeshift area. The 4th, 3rd and the 2nd floor were all affected and the recovery is in full swing. Apparently in some locations, the amount of Glycol was ankle deep! The damage was pretty severe based on what I can tell. It is the amazing dedication of our staff and their ability to rise up to the occasion that served us well and I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped out!
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As we celebrate Fourth of July, I am reminded of how lucky some of us have been to be living in countries that are independent and how so many others all around the world do not have that luxury. I was born in Sri Lanka which received its independence in 1948 from the British; lived in India which received its independence from the British in 1947; and have spent the longest period of my life in the US which declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776. We all value independence so much and it is part and parcel of our DNA and we don’t even consciously think about it.
This spirit extends so much into technology too. We make independent decisions all the time – about choosing operating systems, smartphones, how we each configure our desktops, the choice we make about apps that do the same thing etc. However, just as individual independence has limits and constraints that are imposed by many other factors (cultural, political, and financial amongst many other things), so are technology choices.
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