ScottBlog v2.0

Here are some of the best quotes from backnoise (we often tried to pick the best quote of the day).  I won’t attribute any so as to protect the innocent.

“you should always have time for a cup of coffee with your friends”

“creepy tree-house effect”

“when people with ties start asking about a Facebook strategy, it is too late”

“we are living in a climate where most undergraduates would trade a DNA sample for an Extra Value Meal”

“there is nothing we do to make education convenient”

“there is no such thing as a reference emergency”

Well, here is the end.  Everyone feels like summer camp has ended.  The group really gelled after just a few days.  Many people thought the backnoise channel played a role in that.  I have to agree.  It was great having a whole second conversation going on.  Imagine if during a presentation you could hear the thoughts of other people in the audience, the questions thay had, their comments, the additional resources they know of — that’s what backnoise provided. The faculty made a wordle of the backnoise text

Everyone is pretty exhausted — especially the ones that stayed up to midnight each night (I wasn’t one of those). But I’m still exhausted.

To sum up, here’s 3 types of things I want to take away

• things to do
  • check on campus crisis plan
  • plan a user support retreat
    • include: Pink exercise, hedgehog concept, Terry Hartle view of higher ed
  • check on the cognitive cost of voice recorders, flip video, other things
  • IT advisory committee
  • get “Good to Great for Social Sector”
• things to think about
  • managers (doing things right) vs leaders (doing the right things)
  • creative leadership model
  • current disruptive currents in IT
• things to think differently about
  • life-work balance
  • looking at things as essential vs. strategic
  • cognitive cost of services
  • tracking projects in the department

Today things are winding down.  We have group project presentations this afternoon and one speaker this morning.  We start the day with Mitzi Montoya, Assistant Dean of Research at North Carolina State.  She talked on “Marketing for Sustainability.”  She too was a great speaker and really hit on some relevant marketing ideas for IT.  For me, the key take-away was the cognitive cost of a service. That is best described as how hard it is to get to your service, or how many steps does it take.  This is a lens that I want to use to look at what we provide.  Two things come to mind — voice recorders and flip video cameras.  We should pick models that are easy to use, reduce the cognitive cost.  Other items included a reminder about “Good to Great for Social Sector.”  I’ve read most of “Good to Great” but would like the tie back to nonprofits.  The hedgehog concept came up which was a good reminder to think of us in terms of that concept.

The afternoon was filled with group presentations.  My group presented on “Innovation.”  We took the definition of “ideas applied successfully” and deconstructed that a bit for higher ed.  Another group tackled “globalization” which made me ponder why we don’t leverage video conferencing, including desktop video conferencing, for remote support including Rochester.  Another group presentation on “collaboration” and did this great exercise for getting to know each other.  This exercise came from Jody as she uses it in her classes.  I have a bunch of ideas for a user support retreat now.  The group on “sustainability/green it” reminded me about the President’s Climate Commitment — I know Paul signed it but is the campus moving forward on it?

The day ended with a group picture, a graduation ceremony and 1 minute speech from each of us about the experience.

Today we delved into e-scholarship again this time with Christine Borgman from UCLA via video skype.  It worked really quite well.  She used her work with CENS as a case study.  Not a lot of takeaways — I’m just not that interested in e-scholarship or see the pressing relevance right now for Augsburg.  The major research institutions in the room were far more engaged in the topic.

The after consisted of a tour of Emory facilities including Cox Hall — I feel like I visited one of the holy sites for learning spaces.  I of course snapped many of my own pictures. One tidbit, they spent 30% of their budget on lighting — something to not forget.  We also visited the tiny room where they are digitizing books in partnership with Amazon.  I snapped a few pictures of their machine.  As we watched it looked like maybe an average of 5 seconds per 2-pages with a yellowback book. They noted for every 1 hour of digitizing they needed 2 hours of post-processing.

We then had a panel discussion with leadership from the library and IT at Emory.  A few quotes include “manage complexity in an organization resistant to change,” “higher ed lacks guts but has a heart,” and “the part that is not in the classroom is a business.”  The various discussions made me think

• we need to track what projects we have going on (something Leif has been interested in).  There has been so much talk about projects driving things.
• how do we keep meeting the changing demands and stay nimble? — our beginning efforts to build a knowledgebase, make videos are all moving towards a campus culture where people can use some self-service.  I want to have the personal contact to be meaningful and advance our goals and the mission.  We have a talented, committed outstanding user support staff.  We can’t keep expanding and changing what we support without streamlining some of the basics — some questions are essential but not strategic.

Day 8 opened with discussion on e-scholarship by Chuck Henry, president of CLIR and JQ Johnson at U of Oregon and Frye alum.  This was  not the most pressing topic for me since it was library-centric and publishing-centric.  But I did get a lot of good references from Chuck on Humanities examples of e-scholarship like

• Parker Library @ Stanford - scanned and indexed manuscripts
• Roman de la Rose - digitizing 150 of 200 versions of the manuscript
• Nines - 19th century studies online scholarship
• TaPoR - environment for text study

Something in the discussion made me take note of Stacey’s blog post on library stats software.  Something to follow-up on with the library.  I think this is the package we have explored.

JQ focused on the Open Access model of e-scholarship.  Again, not a topic close to my heart but a few things jumped out like

• arXiv.org - an open archive of e-scholarship in the sciences
• opendoar.org - directory of Open Access repositories, search them all

The afternoon brought James Hilton, University of Virginia VP and CIO.  He was an energizing speaker and I was writing furiously during his session.  He framed his talk around the fact tht the fabric of inquiry is changing — what questions we can ask and the ways we can answer them.  For example when the Large Hadron Collider is running again it will generate 3 million DVDs of data per year.  The four areas of computation, visualization, simulation, and technology-enabled represent the key areas affecting inquiry.

He then dove into how we navigate these disruptive changes.  He highlighted looking at things as essential vs. strategic.  I think this lens will be very relevant for me.  For example, email is essential but it is not strategic.  And if something is essential and commoditized it lends itself to be outsourced so that you can direct resources towards strategic endeavors.  More on that in a bit.

James also touched on the “Does IT Matter?” book.  He noted that because IT is mature enough now investment in IT alone does not give a strategic advantage.  He framed it as, does oxygen matter?  It doesn’t give us a strategic advantage but it sure is hard to live without it!  He also warned that IT will become irrelevant if it is not aligned with the institutional mission.

He then moved into the need to embrace emergence.  The world is emergent and not planned.  We need to work in an emergence mode: we know where we are (starting point) and we then pick a direction to go.  But we don’t define an endpoint — we don’t know where we’ll end up.  We operate in a “fine tune as you go” mode and need to have a comfort with ambiguity.  We need to develop a discipline of refining based on experience.  Another mantra he uses is “tomorrow is better than today.”

We need to ride the current disruptive currents at play in higher ed IT.

1. Unbundling
   1. taking that which was whole and breaking it up into parts
   2. mass media: 3 networks in the old days to 100s now
   3. content: iTunes unbundled the album into songs
2. Demand Pull
   1. people can get what they want when they want it
   2. mass marketing vs. search
   3. lecture vs. exploration
3. Commoditization
   1. people’s appetites have gone up but so has capacity
   2. the US steel industry failed because they ignored a Japanese process for making cheap steel (because it was cheap), then the Japanese process continued to improve and stayed cheap and it then killed the US steel industry
   3. fashion: cheaper, lasts not as long
   4. U of Phoenix: drives down labor cost and scales up
4. Consumerization
   1. email
   2. networks: airport brought wireless to the masses
   3. software: if google apps can be class and role aware, it can do 90% of what a CMS does
   4. user support: outsourcing helpdesks to PerceptIS or Presidium (people had mixed results with them)
   5. storage: amazon backup $0.02 a week for 1GB backup, why are we providing storage
   6. passing the enterprise altogether and going straight to consumers
   7. computers: this was the big discussion point. he’s set the path to reduce the number of public labs over the next 3 years

The computer lab issue raised a lot of discussion. They found that 99% of the new students had computers and students were using the labs for web browsing and word processing — activities done easily on their own computers.  They started transforming some of the lab spaces into student spaces — a nice way to repurpose the spaces.  They’re also planning to use virtual labs to deliver applications to students.  There will still be a need for specialized labs for software that isn’t common (unbundling).  It makes me think we need to look at our labstats and see how our spaces are being used.  Student learning spaces are more strategic than the commodity computing need in my opinion.

He wrapped up with the advice of identifying your values and steering by them.  He emphasized power (influence) over force.  He likes to think of leading as “enrolling them with a vision.” However, you can’t enroll everyone so you need to get a critical mass of support for changes.

The weekend has come and gone.  I went with a group to the Saturday night Atlanta vs. Milwaukee baseball game.  Atlanta lost.  The high-tech stadium was interesting — the giant display screen was better quality than my TV!  I haven’t been to a baseball game in like 20 years.  It was interesting to see all the norms and traditions that happen.  On Sunday I joined a group that went to the aquarium downtown.  I got a lot of nice pictures of animals.  We had lunch in the CNN food court — a few people went on the CNN tour (I didn’t).  We took a cab downtown and took the MARTA back.

A few of my Frye colleagues got press at their institutions.  Both Mike and Jody are people I really connected with.  Mike’s photo is right-on.

Friday was short day, at least the programmed part.  Today was all about policy issues which on the surface might seem dry but the speakers made it anything but!  First Steven Worona gave us the big picture of privacy and security.  He reminded me a lot of Noel Petit in his general manner.  He drove home that you can’t have privacy without security and that you have to balance things.  His main example was that we want everyone to know who the candidates are getting money from but we don’t want anyone to know who we are giving money to — you can’t have it both ways.  He ended with “privacy is a basic human need.” We also looked at 2 scenarios.  The first made me wonder if we have a policy on talking to law enforcement — that mysterious “general counsel” came up again.  Another example about anonymous online chat counseling (something that we’re pondering) made me wonder what we would do if a student submitted a suicidal chat.

Next up was Tracy Mitrano who dove into questions and outlined the key factors/tensions at play here — law, social norms, technology, and market.  We talked a bit about e-discovery and copyright — especially section 110.  Chris from Stanford shared her q&a about this.  Holly from USC shared a link to The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy which in turn links to Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video which gives some examples that I find useful.  She ended with suggesting that institutions have an institutional policy process to guide creation of policies — at it’s simplest has 3 steps:

1. A bigwig asks for a policy on something
   1. do a cost/benefit analysis
2. Gather mid-level folks who will likely implement such a policy.  Have them refine it, but they cannot veto it.
3. Return to the bigwig for a blessing
4. Distribute and educate people about the policy.  It should be an educational experience, not a “club you over the head” experience.

Ok, it’s a 4-step process.

This all ended just after 12 noon.  That was end of the scheduled day.  Then I met up with Fred from Loyla Chicago and Stacey from U Kentucky and Win from SUNY Albany and we headed to the Georgia Tech Info Commons.  I snapped a few photos here and so did Win.  They had some nice computing spaces, a nice practice space, and a nice cafe.  We had lunch on the way back at the flying biscuit.  Good food.  I think the afternoon was the best time I’ve had with a bunch of librarians (they’re all in libraries).

I didn’t think yesterday could be topped.  I was wrong.

The day started out with our peers sharing about 360 degree leadership — how you can lead from anywhere in the organization.  That got my interest for something to help develop my team members.  Then we heard from CFO Peggy Plympton from Lehigh University.  Wow, she was a riot.  She was so funny and so wise.  After lunch we heard from Carie Windham Page from ELI talk about our students.  Carie wrote the “student perspective” in the 2005 Educating the NetGen book.  She had some activities for us that got us out of our chairs — always good.  Then we heard from Michael Schoenfeld, Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations at Duke, on communications.

Then after diner a group met informally to talk about work/life balance.  It was convened by Jim from UW Madison who is becoming our “guru.”  He took a group to Sanskrit chanting last night and today before lunch we spent 5 minutes listening to the same chanting and clearing our minds.

My key take-aways today are

• 360 degree leadership
• To check into NIH grants for building projects (stimulus package)
• Think about an unconference
• Re-look at the flip cameras we were thinking of buying (heard bad stuff about them)
• Find the ELI keynote on students in gaming environments matching up to NSF skills
• From Michael on communication strategies - “think about what you want them to hear, not what you want to tell them”
• “From Where I Sit” videos for CLASS
• Work/life balance tips

Wow, we had a knockout roster of speakers today. My head is still reeling from all the information and wisdom they brought. They were

• John Hitt, president of the University of Central Florida
• Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College.
• Terry Hartle from the American Council on Education.
• Linda Katehi, outgoing provost at the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and soon to be Chancellor at UC Davis.

They all had either amazing stories or amazing information. Dr Hitt and Dr Tatum presented amazing pictures of what it means to be a president. Dr Hartle was so knowledgeable about higher ed on a national scale and brought the big picture of higher ed. Wow. I didn’t write much down as the ppt slides will bring it all together. There was a recent article on USA Today about graduation rates and explained that the graduation rates do not include transfers or students who took longer than 6 years. So if you did 2 years at one school and then transfer to another school you’re a drop-out, not a graduate. There are a lot of students who aren’t being counted — Obama would be one of those since he transferred schools. Dr Katehi shared her career story (so did Dr Tatum, both wonderful stories) and what it means to be a provost.

Today will be hard to top.

Before dinner I met with my group to talk about our brief Learning Commons sharing Friday morning (groups are sharing a topic of interest every morning). I’ll share some pictures of ours and talk about the project.  I met with Fred from Loyla Chicago and Stacey from U Kentucky.  Stacey is going to Georgia Tech friday to see their Learning Commons and Fred and I are coming along.  I’ll shoot some pictures while we’re there.

The day opened with a great chat with Mike from Whitman. We talked Sakai/moodle and instructional technology and more. And there were waffles at breakfast.

Today in the morning we got the faculty perspective. One thing I want to follow-up on is looking for this article, “No Time to Think” by David Levy. There is a youtube talk version. We also had an exercise looking at some faculty-focused scenarios which all let me to wonder what policies we have in place for intellectual property and if we have a general counsel. I’m sure we do have a general counsel but so many other institutions sound like they consult theirs all the time.

The afternoon kicked off hearing about a new initiative between Columbia and Cornell libraries called 2cool. It’s about creating a separate organization to run the two libraries and pool resources and realize savings. Very interesting. We also hear about the Hathi Trust which aims to become the digital book repository for libraries. We were also fortunate to hear from Deanna Marcum at the Library of Congress (formerly of CLIR). She shared some amazing leadership experiences and gave us much to think about. We finished up with an exercise in a campus crisis. It made me think, “do we have a campus crisis management plan?” We have a plan if the server room burns down but what if a student is shot on campus (one school in my group just experienced that and was able to execute their plan successfully). Something else I’ll have to look into when I’m back.

Breakfast started out fun today. I got to chat with Sandra from Manchester at our breakfast table about Manchester and Ireland. She had met Tony Wilson whom she described as quite a figure in the city. We also talked about Ireland as her husband is Irish and they go there often. I got to remember my travels there. And it makes me want to return and to visit the UK too.

Today we focused what it means to be a leader coming up with various definitions of leaders. We touched on the contrast between managers (doing things right) vs leaders (doing the right things) and how you need to be a good manager before being a good leader. Diana also shared some of her perspectives one of which lead me to think hard about developing a better scrutiny filter. She talked about being relentlessly realistic about projects, people, why we do things, how we do things, how much we do, doing things better, and if we should do things. These all make up a scrutiny filter for me.

We also touched on John Maeda’s recent Nercomp conference. He contrasted the traditional leadership model with a creative leadership model. These slides show it concisely. This really resonated with me. I can see, in contrast to other organizations, that Augsburg is more creative than traditional. But what was more interesting was though I am drawn to the creative behaviors I feel the internal tension questioning “but that’s not what a leader does.” I can hear the traditional, societal, model of a leader ingrained in me. Much to reflect on from today.

I made it to Atlanta, or Hotlanta as it were. I think it was 90 degrees today and humid. The plane ride was mostly uneventful though it took an hour to get the baggage claim. The plane had to be towed to the terminal for some reason so we sat on the tarmac for a while. I made it with barely 30 minutes before the opening session.

I’m encouraged by their focus on reflection. Each day will end with some reflection time. They even provided a little notebook meant to be a journal. Diana Oblinger, yes the Educause president, lead the opening session. She mentioned 4 key ideas to help us frame our time here:

1. lifelong learning — we will always need to be learning, we can’t know everything
2. how to think about things — leaders need to know how to frame (or re-frame) issues, build judgement skills, know what you believe in. We need to make time to think about things as opposed to doing things.
3. interact — with each other and the speakers.
4. reflect — spend time processing and reflecting

We paired off and interviewed someone else and introduced them. Always a good exercise. There are a lot of library folks and some people from far-off places like Australia or Manchester (yay!).

Visited with a nice group at dinner — learned about how different libraries are at big universities — digitization huge. Also got a good tip on reading the Register for a UK perspective on IT (more weary of google). I’ll put it in my Netvibes feed and see how I like it. I recently added the Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog and am enjoying that.