I had to attend a conference today. I was to exhibit a website to people who might benefit from it, and that is always a good thing. The conference was at another large state university, a couple of hours away. The registration materials were clear: I was to register at 8, and prepare for a full day. I drove up last night, and finally found myself in the hotel (no mean feet, as its street address was an alley out back, not either of the major roads which intersect in front of the place. They had free (slow) internet, so I was able to be online, but the room was wet. I mean the carpet. And the drapes. And the bedspread. I tried to get a change, but they were fully booked. It smelled wet, too. Bleah. I cranked up the heat, and didn't use the bedspread. I clipped the drapes shut with my car keys, because the hangers were broken, and they didn't close tightly. If the neighbors were closer friends, I might let it pass, but I don't need to be on display for strangers. Oh, and the hot water came out of the cold spigot, which I figured out after "letting the water warm up" for 10 minutes to no avail.
This morning I wake, shower, drove to the event parking site, loaded up all my stuff, dragged it four blocks to the convention hall, and checked in. "You're in room 302," said the registration lady.
I found an elevator, rode up to floors, found room 302, only to discover that it was a banquet hall - and there was a banquet planned. No room for exhibitors. So I poked around, and came across a right-looking room. I went in, set my stuff up, and waited. And waited. Luckily, I had both power and internet access, as I was able to entertain myself here (in My Opera). Finally, some kids showed up with displays, and started setting up. They looked at me oddly, but I thought it was just because I am an old man. Another hour goes by, and no participants. Finally, a woman comes in and says "Oh! You're in the wrong place! This room is for student exhibitors." So I got directions to the correct space, load up and trundle it on down to the foyer in front of the main library, where I set everything back up, turn on the laptop for demonstration purposes, and wait for business. Lots of traffic, but not my target audience.
Finally, participants start milling around, and I get into a conversation with a counselor. Perfect. Until a little finger taps me on the shoulder. I turn around, and an even littler voice says "Is that your computer?"
Uh oh.
"Why yes it is, says I.
"My friend spilled her water on it," says she.
Uh oh. Uh oh1. I dash for the power, unplug, and as I'm picking it up to remove the battery, everything goes black. Uh oh. I pull out the battery, and set it on its side, hoping water will drain out. I think ‘I can fix this’ – here’s a tip for you (just in case you ever drop your cell phone in the toilet): remove the battery, place it in a ziplock bag, and fill the bag with rice. Zip it shut and leave it until tomorrow. Remove the phone, replace the battery, and presto! The rice draws the water from the phone.
20 minutes later, I pick it up to survey the damage. Not water. Sprite. My laptop is a sticky electronic soup.
On the plus side, I was able to leave two hours early.
1. I love me some George Clinton. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find “Double Uh Oh,” which was appropriate. Enjoy George Clinton and Parliament – “We Want the Funk”:
I have no idea who put the billboards to this music, but the imagery is fun, and the music is great.
I'm sitting at a conference as an exhibitor in a hall full of other exhibitors. We were told to register at 8 AM, and to set up prior to 8:30. It's now almost 11, and we have not yet seen any of the conference participants. Apparently, they will be visiting with us at 11:30, just before lunch. Three perfectly good hours wasted (not completely wasted - I've been able to respond to people in My Opera, and that is always fun - thank heavens for wireless access!).
I hope you all have more productive Satudays (Sundays, for those of you on the other side of the International Date Line) than I am having. Or, if you cannot or need not be productive, may your Saturday be restful.
I need to administer my server, and I'm making things worse not better.
When I put on my pants in the dark this morning, things felt a little off. I was in a hurry, so I didn't deal with it at the time. A trip to the bathroom reveals a solid reason for my disdain for both pants and underwear: my underwear is on backwards, which is a functional nightmare when one stands at the urinal. Google reveals that I am not alone, and that other gentlemen with the same problem are funnier than I am.
I’ve been asked a number of times lately what I do when I’m at work. The simple answer is that I manage a career information system. I do other things too (help develop tools for my colleagues for use in our CRM/intranet), but career information services is the biggie.
I enjoy what I do for a number of reasons. First, what I do makes an impact in the lives of people all over my state. Secondly, I work with great people. Thirdly, I get to spend a lot of time with technology, and that is great fun for me.
What I do is aimed mainly at middle school and high school students. We pay particular attention to schools with low graduation rates, high poverty rates, and high rates of minority attendance. The fact that I focus on a particular demographic is a product of limited funding. If I had the money to hire a half dozen people, we would train everyone aggressively. As it is, we have to determine where to invest our time, and because of the way the benefits of career information interventions accrue, we have chosen address populations who can most benefit from our services. You might wonder what those benefits are.
Career information interventions, and particularly career education, provides improved educational outcomes, improved social outcomes, and improved economic outcomes. Forgive me three lengthy lists, but if people understood what career education means to the future of the family, the community, the local region, the state, regionally and nationally (heck, even internationally), they would wonder why it goes largely unfunded.
Improved educational outcomes:
Improved educational achievement
Improved preparation and participation in postsecondary education
Better articulation among levels of education and between education and work
Higher levels of worker satisfaction and career retention
Greater ease of transition from school to community for persons with developmental disabilities
Shorter path to primary labor market for young workers
Lower incidence of work-related stress and depression [Note]
Reduced likelihood of work-related violence
In addition to community/workplace social outcomes, we see dramatic positive outcomes among family/peers, too:
Better access to health care
Less dependency on government assistance
Lower poverty rates
Longer life spans
Better dietary and health practices
Healthier children
Greater use of seatbelts
More continuing education
Greater internet access
More book purchases
Higher voting rates
Higher academic performance of children
Greater community service
Less criminal activity and incarceration
Improved economic outcomes (of all the outcomes listed, these are the most tenuously related to career education. Most of them are actually tied directly to higher levels of education. Since we know that the primary result of career interventions is improved educational attainment, it is not a stretch to suggest that these outcomes follow career interventions):
Higher incomes and increased tax revenues
Lower rates and shorter periods of unemployment, along with lower costs of worker turnover
Lower health care costs and generally better health
Note: consider the fact that employee depression costs US employers an estimated $44 billion annually in lost productivity. A one percent reduction in depression rates could save business/industry $440 million per year, with corresponding savings to individuals and families. Return to list.
One of the things I do at work is implement collabroation tools for groups of people who are not proximal to one another. Look at the cool (free) whiteboard tool I found today: Thinkature. I don't know if I'll ever have cause to either use it or recommend it at work, but I'm loving it!
Karen noted the coolness of StumbleUpon - and it is cool. It pays attention to what you look at online, and suggests similar pages of which you might not be aware. Easy on the porn, if you use it at work.
If you use an RSS feed reader to keep track of news or changes to blogs, or whatever you may use them for, you will love tiinker - a feed aggregator that suggests feeds based on your preferences. As long as you create preferences that reflect your interests, you can cut the time you use to find new articles by letting tiinker do it for you. How sweet is that? It saves me easily 30 minutes a day.
One of my coworkers is spending her holiday in Africa with an International Youth Worker Exchange. She was to have spent the past three days at a youth center in Eldoret, where horrible brutality has been unfolding. At work, of course, we are on pins and needles. We do, though, have a grapevine report that the party has been relocated and are and outside the areas of violence.
The coworker in Kenya is one of several wonderful, caring, giving women whom I am blessed to work with - people who genuinely believe that the world can be a better place and actively work hard to make it that way.
I am hopeful that my friend will return soon, and hopeful too that she will not have witnessed firsthand the horrors that are being reported in the news.
One of the things I have to do at work is take notes. I'm not entirely sure how this duty was foisted upon me, although sometimes it's obvious (like when I am the only one from the office attending a conference). There are glaring reasons why it makes no sense to leave me in charge of preserving institutional history: I don't type quickly, I don't write quickly, I don't know shorthand... In short, I need help.
I've been investigating both note taking systems and tools. The one I currently use (with pen and pencil) is the Cornell Note Taking System.
It forces one to be concise (good when you don't write fast), to pick up on the important themes, and perhaps most importantly, to revisit your notes immediately to recast them in an overview.
Lately, I've found some tools that approximate this method in small programs that have the features of a simple txt editor, but yield notes that look like the Cornell Method. I haven't used any of them extensively, but I've had a look at them:
Evernote: The trial version does not expire, but it does not have some of the bells and whistles of the pay-to-play version. It seems quite usable as is - perhaps more program than I need. In adition to taking notes, it lets you create to do lists, itineraries, track expenses and more.
Notalon: this one is written in python, which makes it possible to run it on your PC. Unless you have a Mac or Unix/Linux box, in which case you can run it, too! It displays only one note at a time, which I find difficult, as my mind needs context.
Keynote: unsupported since 2005, this is my favorite. Cues appear in a treeview on the left, while noted go in the text pane on the right. It's intuitive and easy.
On top of all these, I've discovered (thanks to my Brother-in-Law) Tidliwiki. It's a wiki-like program that is entirely selfcontained in an html file. It can be carried on a flash drive, and can live in multiple instances. Rather than new pages, it creates a "chunk," which appears below the current open chunk (of information). I'm just starting to learn how to use it, but it looks very appealing - and because it's html, I can make it look just the way I want it to look. I've got an instance of MediaWiki running on my PC, and I use it for writing articles and keeping track of all sorts of repetitive but evolving information. I'm really excited to see what I can do with TidliWiki.
Another tool I use is Compact Calendar. It's a quick project management tool - a vertical calendar down the side of a note page. I can make notes and create timelines - and leave a copy with whomever I'm speaking.
I've been online on and off since the early 90s. In those days we had one choice for chat: IRC, which was a good bit clunkier than it is now. We also had just one choice for IM (IRC wasn't doing IM yet): bitnet. The beauty of bitnet (and it's drawback) was that you could sent a message to anyone on a UNIX or VMS server anywhere in the world. All you had to do was finger them, and presto! Send them a message, and it popped up in the middle of what they were doing. Remember, there were no graphical interfaces then, and the monitors were either amber or green. Color? You had your choice of of two (but not both). Nowadays, of course, we can use Yahoo ir IRC or MSN or a host of other chat and IM clients. We can include voice or video. We have blogs and boards and wikis. These are tools I use or have used in my personal life, and which I employ in my work life, as well. I studied them in the abstract during graduate school, too. You'd think life would be a bed of roses - we can talk about anything with almost any one at anytime - but recent events at work in in my personal board life have led me to think anew about how we deal with each other online.
In my personal life, I've been part of a series of message boards for about five years or so. They've varied in pace and number of members, in the range of subject matter discussed, and in the investment of the members in the day to day operation of the board. Currently, there are maybe ten active members (daily posters). Some of them talk about themselves, some talk about the weather. All of them have been with us for two years, some for the entire five plus years, traveling from board to board together.
Well, it's time for us to find a new home. Our current board has been active for several years, which is a pretty good run, considering some of the boards we've shared. The service we pay for is changing, and frankly support has never been stellar. They are going to move over a million people to a beta service that is broken as often as it is working, and we don't have the stomach for it. So we're looking for a new home. The nature of the board has changed. What were once vital conversations are now check-ins. High post frequencies are no longer the rule, but the exception. Still, we've come to care about each other, and need a place to check in and share. We are looking at options, and I think we may settle on Opera. Here people who want to share can do so - photos, blogging, etc. We can build a group, create a message board, and continue to check in. It looks good from here - but we haven't invited our friends yet. Don't know how they'll take to this new environment, but we'll see soon, I think.
Meanwhile, at work, I've spent two years fighting with the technology group about the need for an academic networking platform. No one is biting - in fact the oposition is astounding. We went to SharePoint - an amazingly complex bundle of tools that can do amazing things, yet cannot do some of the very simplest. It permits savvy users to do many, many things that we once needed a goup of programmers to do for us, yet doesn't let us do things that we've never needed a programmer to accomplish in the past. The technology group is scared, I think, that we will be able to do without them (wrong, of course, though our needs are changing dramatically). Once they touted this product as the new world order, and when we decided we'd better emrace it, they've abandoned us - and in some instances actually undermined us. I'd be interested in whether this is standard, or we're experiencing something novel. I'd bet on the former.
At any rate, the tool has permitted us to create a great public-facing website with some sophisticated content (changing current events, changing spotlights on important information, etc.) and multi-language tools, and to create a pretty good internal collaboration site - wikis, document libraries, blogs, contact logs, calendaring that meshes with Outlook, a knowledge base, and team/subteam sites that allow us to do a pretty good job of project management, along with some other things. It should allow us to import information about the 13,000 faculty members in this university state-wide, and permit those who wish to blog, share publications - it's really primed for scholarly writing/publishing - and the like. The tech group has created every roadblock possible to importing data, and the faculty themselves aren't that interested in exloring new technologies. I could suffer through the latter, but not being permitted to make use of a tool that I know will solve a number of problems really frosts my pumpkin. The people I work for could, with a simple search, find university resources statewide that could be brought to bear in local schools and communities.
As one of my now departed coworkers is so fond of saying, you can't make uncollaborative people collaborate, no matter how cool the tools. I work with some collaborative people (in person), but they are partial technophobes in many cases. Interesting that someone would embrace the iPhone and eschew the linking of calendars - that email is a challenge while tivo is the greatest thing going.
I'm starting to bore myself. The point of all this is that there convergent forces in my personal and work lives that have me thinking about the same things. Hopefully, the transition in online gathering spaces for my personal relationships will flourish here. Another social experiment unfolding in text and images - right before our eyes!
WIDGETIZE