I am sure you all remember these terms from calculus in high school or early years at College. I love calculus and can go on talking about these terms and how I continue to use them even today. But that is not what I want to talk about…
I think it is natural to want to excel in what we do and this in part requires you to differentiate yourself from your peers. I know, I know, our students don’t come to Wellesley College because we provide a high quality library and technology services. However, this is something our students, faculty and staff expect and failing to provide such services will result in dissatisfaction that will begin to show. (more…)
I am asked by a few staff members to explain what is the “vision” I have for my organization so that they can help me achieve it. My answer is “Unfortunately, I don’t have much more than what we have already talked about…” which happens to be an unsatisfactory answer to those who ask this vision question. And what we talk about are broad principles that should govern us as described in our strategic plan. In fact, what many want me to answer are specifics in their area rather than a broad organizational vision.
On the other hand, those staff members who are willing to look at what has made us successful and learn from them and help contribute to our success are doing tremendous things. And one of them is creative uses and reuses of technologies. I want to mention a few here.
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It almost looks like all of the recent advances in technologies were created with good intent as well as to reward the inventors with boat loads of money. I cannot think of any of the major technologies that have been invented by responsible companies to assist the bad guys. However, almost all of these great new technologies have and continue to be used in ways that they were not intended and for the detriment of everyone. Here are a few: world wide web – this has been a game changer and has helped bridge the technology gap around the world in meaningful ways, but has been exploited by the criminals in numerous ways; Mobile technology – again, this has revolutionized communication all around the world while introducing another path for the bad guys; Streaming media – this now helps us listen and watch what we want, when we want and where we want, but this also has resulted in intellectual property violations of all kinds; finally Social Media – well, do I need to say anything about this?
My gripe is with the technology companies, especially the startups, who do not pay enough attention to the implications of what they are putting out. They rush to get their products to go viral and this seems to be the focus rather than use current examples as a guide to structuring the products in a way that they are solid in terms of security and privacy and are sustainable for a reasonable time into the future. Of course, unintended consequences are part of the game because no technologist can ever see before hand how a criminal is likely to think and take advantage of the technology being rushed out. But…
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We hear a lot about mentorship in the context of middle managers who aspire to be leaders. You can read more about Mentoring as an EDUCAUSE Special Topic. I thought this is a great time to talk about someone that I consider as my mentor – John Meerts, who was the Vice President for Finance and Administration at Wesleyan University until he retired on June 30th this year. John was the Vice President for Information Technology Services at Wesleyan from 1996 till 2006, when he became the VP for Finance and Administration. I reported to him from 1996-2009 before moving on.
No matter at what stage of your professional career you are, you always should aspire to be better and an important aspect of that is to have someone that you look up to for advice or from who you learn a few things. To me this loosely defines mentorship.
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Wintonbury Hills Golf Course, Bloomfield, CT
I decided to take a week off, but it is turning out to be more like “work from home”. This is life, I guess. No complaints. I did get a few rounds of golf in.
As we are going through the Workday implementation, it is very clear that Workday has a very clear and strict process for a reason. We all have opinions on the process itself, but what I see is that it imposes a level of discipline that we are all not used to. Especially, they have a concept of “In Scope” and “Out of Scope”. This therefore requires us to think very deeply about what we want in scope early on. There are slight variations on the theme that are always supported, it is just that the typical large variations that we are all used to that is not possible.
Why? Because, those of us who have been in this business already have experienced the pain of scope creep. In tech related projects, it goes like this – techies first want as complete a project plan as possible; it doesn’t happen, so they complain; then they deliver some initial prototypes; functional offices are thrilled to see it; their creative juices flow and they now want this and that; a lot of times some techies feed this by saying, “yeah this can be done but you should really see this cool stuff”; such back and forth then becomes the way the project is handled; the project crawls; the ex-enthusiastic techies are now disgruntled and say “I can’t wait to get off this project” because this has become a drag and they want to move to the next exciting project; finally, both the techies and the functional owners complain that the other party is not delivering.
Instead, how about saying “folks, we have a common set of goals. This requires discipline. Let us define what is important for day 1. You should really let the creative juices flow, because this is very important for us to construct a solid foundation, but remember, not everything you ask for will be possible on day 1. Just park the less important ones for later. And please don’t say that everything you come up with is equally important”. In other words, creativity is to be accommodated, but within bounds. If only we can all get to this point, our projects will be better and move faster.
I always feel that Higher Ed administrative projects are treated like research projects. They tend to be explorations. However, researchers set broad and general goals for a research project. This won’t work for administrative projects. We need to be more precise about the end game. The outcomes are not always predictable in a research project, and they typically tend to branch off in other areas. This is the nature of the research game. Unfortunately, the same exact method may not be suitable for administrative projects.
I am here at the Richmond International Airport waiting to get back to Boston after a fabulous conference. This year the CLAC (Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges) annual conference was held at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA. The campus is beautiful and the hosts were gracious and extremely helpful and the overall experience was just fabulous.
There is nothing better than a gathering of committed higher ed professionals who work in institutions that are very similar. All the member institutions are small liberal arts colleges and there is a lot of similarities in terms of what we are trying to accomplish and the challenges we face. And we are very open and are not afraid to share. So, it was a lot of fun.
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Diploma Names in Alternate Alphabets
In case you have not read this, I strongly encourage you to do so. We were asked by the students about the possibility of having their names printed in a language other than English, we agreed to explore and got it done. As is the case with everything, it is not trivial. We quickly developed an app where the students could copy and paste their name composed using a tool like Google Input Tools . We had them reviewed by faculty members and in a few cases volunteers from outside and then found a very cooperative printer in Scrip Safe who was willing to print them for us. We needed to purchase the fonts we needed. 32 students participated in the pilot and the names were in 9 languages, with Mandarin Chinese topping the list at 20. The diplomas will have their name in English as well as the alternate alphabet. We will be handing them over tomorrow after the commencement!
We collaborate with the Registrar’s Office, Student Life and the Provost’s Office on various things leading up to the commencement. The last couple of weeks leading to the commencement are pretty intense, mainly because of the compression of schedules and other complications. But everyone at the College put in enormous efforts to make sure that everything goes well.
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I am enrolled in a course being offered by Worldview in Stanford called “Behind and Beyond Big Data“. As a part of this I am learning a lot about how the big data is being used in various interesting ways. In addition, a couple of other things that I saw on TV or heard in the social media also has captured my interest.
Tweets predicting rates of heart attacks. https://goo.gl/2iInWM%5B/caption%5D
Predictive Modeling based on Facebook Likes
Michal Kosinskia, David Stillwella, and Thore Graepelb from the University of Cambridge and Microsoft designed an experiment to see if the Facebook Likes of a person is a predictor of “private traits and attributes” of a person such as age, intelligence and sexual orientation. They describe their research here. A very large sample of facebook users contributed voluntarily to the research by participating in myPersonality initiative. They also manually inspected the volunteers’ facebook profiles in some cases to infer additional information such as the ethnic origin. It is a fascinating experiment. If you are interested in checking how well the system predicts your traits and attributes, try it out at Apply Magic Sauce.
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With the easy access to data, metrics of all sorts have become common place. Similarly, valuation is something we hear constantly about and we ourselves live and breathe. I am writing about both of these now because, I am looking at staffing data for the members of Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges and also having to deal with annoying pricing issues with Adobe and SPSS software licensing.
Benchmarking is a very useful exercise in that it provides a first level comparison with those that we would consider peers. For example, we can use staffing metrics to justify additional positions (which has become a rare event in Higher Ed recently) or more importantly, we can use this to justify reallocation of existing staff. Of course, during difficult budget discussions, this can be used to reduce positions. The issue with data is that, even if it is done scientifically, the results tend to be in the eyes of the beholder. However, it is very important to treat these data for first level comparisons and not read too much into them for reasons I explain below.
Valuation is another problem. We hear that the cost of higher education is too high or that we argue that the cost of a software is ridiculously high. In most of these cases, the argument is based on how fast it is growing relative to CPI. As painful a question as it is, is this the right comparison to go by?
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As always, we are engaged in a lot of exciting things and I thought I would touch on a few items here.
MOOCs – Two of our self study courses that opened in January are drawing to a close. Italian Language and Culture: Beginner and Personal Finance, Part 1: Investing in Yourself have been very well received. They have had much higher engagement percentages going into last couple of weeks (between 9 and 12%) than the typical MOOCs. And the learners are loving the courses. Please see here for several additional courses that are opening up in the next few weeks. A couple of them have been run before, but are redone to be shorter ones which seem to be more appropriate for this medium. Enroll yourself and enjoy!
Blended Learning – We are doing really great in this Mellon funded project. We continue to receive requests for support and experimentation. I strongly suggest that you view this website, especially the embedded video. Talking about blended learning, a second jointly taught course between Davidson College and Wellesley is going great by the reviews we have received so far. Van Hillard from Davidson and Justin Armstrong from Wellesley have been co-teaching a first year writing course. These are truly collaborative projects involving faculty members, students, staff members from Research and Instructional Support and Library Collections. For example, Helene Bilis is planning to jointly teach a course with a faculty member from Smith for which they are working on a project on making a digital clickable edition of an 18th-century almanac that once belonged to Marie-Antoinette. This book was acquired by special collections and a member of RIS team is assisting with digitization and the creation of clickable online version of this book!
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