Think Thunk

Useit.com has weighed in: this blog sucks!

2005-10-18T20:25:00.000-04:00

Jakob Nielsen weighed in two weeks ago with his annual Top Ten Web Design Mistakes. Since we continue to work on the large-scale overhaul of our organization sight, I was feeling pretty high about that we'd managed to avoid 9 out of 10 of his mistakes, and the one we did violate, we did for good enough reason.

Then today he published the Top Ten Design Mistakes for Weblog Usability, and I failed on nearly every score.

This sight has been semi-moribund for months as I try to determine if blogging about my professional life is actually compatible with my profession. When I think of the necessary improvements, it's a little daunting.

Blogger Van Winkle meets CMS

2005-04-05T18:00:00.000-04:00

Where the heck did March go?

So, yes, I've been insanely busy. But that's not the full story for why I've been on a month-long hiatus. Work has recently been taking me into areas that probably would be interesting to write about in play-by-play mode, but given my position, it clearly wasn't appropriate to discuss. That sounds much worse than it is.

Consider, for instance, product selection and vendor negotiations. Not much that I could safely say on the topic of products and vendors whom we were researching and negotiating with. It's not just that I had responsibility to stay silent on issues that impacted the negotiating position of the organization—which I did. I also found myself routinely realizing that there were just too many aspects of the project that other stakeholders hadn't had a chance to hear about or weigh in on yet. I felt an obligation on sensitive issues not to let colleagues first hear about things on my blog. While getting dooced is the popularly explored hazard of mixing work with blogging, it’s hardly the only one.

I've been working with a number of colleagues on researching Content Management Systems (CMS) this year. At long last, I can publicly state that we've signed an agreement with Ingeniux as the platform for redesigned website.
So far, they've been a good outfit to work with. I'm interested to see how this process works out from here…I'm especially interested on how things go when you get to the end users of a new technology product. Most computing widgets meet up with adoption barriers when they reach the end users. It seems to me that the linchpin of adoption is ease of use.

This is specifically NOT a critique of our clientele. In fact, adoption of new things is expensive and time consuming. The resistance to change can be viewed as not only human nature, but a necessary step in the feedback loop that helps to force new tools and methods to be more efficient and useful.

Our web maintainers already have a perfectly good, but often confusing set of tools for updating their content. For years, people have been looking for the thing to make this whole business easier. Easier content updates will hopefully spell more content updates, which will hopefully result in more usable content for our important audiences.

I'm usually suspicious that deus ex machina will arrive in the form of a software box. Every once in a while, though, we have seen examples of products that make the daily transactions of networked communication far easier. When we introduced the Blackboard learning management system at the Trico, the number of courses using the web to supplement course activities soared from single digits to triple digits almost overnight. At the time we made that decision, Blackboard was not universally perceived as the most powerful tool available, but it did appear to be the easiest.

I’ve often heard resource developers ask a paraphrased form of the famous quote from the movie Field of Dreams (based on the Kinsella novel, Shoeless Joe): If we build it, will they come? And of course, there’s no guarantee. For starters, how and where you build it matters tremendously. They don’t ask ‘Is this heaven?’ just because you showed up.

If you are with a college or university and you're currently considering content management solutions on your campus, I'm happy to discuss our issues and discoveries with you. (And, of course, I'm interested in your experiences!) In addition to ease of use, I can generally say that full Mac support, standards compliance, and backoffice administration were also factors that played into our final decision.

Michael Gormon vs. The Blog People

2005-02-26T15:00:00.000-05:00

Back in December, Michael Gormon griped about Google and its ambitions. More recently, he tore into blogs and the people who keep them. Since the Prexy-elect of the A.L.A. is weighing in with comments that fall somewhere between professional criticism and open mockery, and since they've in turn been picked up on the ultimate tech-salon, Slashdot, this debate has turned into a Whole Big Thing. (875 Slashdot comments and counting!)

For those of us who have been in the information services arena for any length of time, I think we can hear overtones of the classic (and pointless) I.T. vs. Library culture wars of a previous era. Before I comment directly on Gormon's incendiary remarks in the Library Journal, I'm putting on the record that I fervently love and admire librarians. (Let's give a shout out to all my friends at the reference desk.) I've spent many years promoting (successful) (they tell me) partnerships between I.T. workers, librarians, and other academic tribes; I'll continue to do so until they pry my meeting schedule from my cold, dead fingers.

Gormon's remarks in both pieces, are, of course, generally true. And yet, they're embarrassingly unsophisticated, in ways that my hipster librarian friends who can fluidly navigate traditional librarianship and the roster of expanding digital forms of expression could immediately spot. Is Google's PageRank algorithm the ideal way to store and retrieve information? Does the ideal exist? Do libraries have the market cornered on optimal finding and access to information? Are most blogs good? Are all blogs bad? Are the "Blog People" uniformly illiterate Neanderthals? (Answer key: no, no, no, no, no, and no.) Gormon confesses to not knowing much about the blogosphere until December. This statement suggests to me that, for a person involved in the information services field, he'd been living under a rock. Not that he's a raging Luddite or "antidigitalist." Just moldy as all get-out. As I was reading his piece in the LJ, I had the vague impression that he was speaking about blogs the way my pappy would have spoken about the newfangled rock music in the 1950's. For better and for worse, rock-and-roll is here to stay.

I believe that we will be well-served to be critical of what Google does (up-to-date ready reference) and doesn't (in-depth, scholarly inquiry) do well. Likewise, the best blogs are enormously useful in aggregating news, providing well-written opinion, and building learning/interest communities. In fact, the best "Blog People" (we call them "bloggers") read. A lot. Whole books, even. Without even hesitating, I could name two dozen blogs that are more interesting, informed, and informative in an average post than Gormon's piece in the LJ.

Here are some other takes on the Gormon piece, not all of which I agree with:
Steven Cohen
David Winer
Mark VandeWettering
David Rothman
Andre

Speed Bumps (on the Road of Application Migration)

2005-02-17T00:30:00.000-05:00

From the category of little things making a big difference...

Enthused by my successful transition to Firefox on all my machines over the last few months, I thought I'd give email client Thunderbird a try. I've been using Eudora since the dawn of time, but have been increasingly noticing its creakiness. (I'll still gladly take the power of full-fledged client like Eudora over any web mail interface, though. I don't get how so many people tolerate using web mail as a primary mail interface.) As for Thunderbird, I was enticed to see how well its professed anti-spam functionality performed. If it could do for my email what SpamAssassin has not been able to do thus far, it would be a lifesaver.

In the last twenty-four hours I ran the installer on both Windows XP and Mac OS X. For now, I'm using it quite happily on the XP machine, but quickly aborted on the Mac. The XP installation was drool-proof. It converted all my Eudora settings, filters, and address book entries without a hitch as far as I can tell. Within a few minutes I was up and running. There were only a few minor settings changes that I needed to make, and figuring out how to configure the preferences was easy to interpret.

When I tried the installation on the Mac, though, I was not offered an option to convert my Eudora stuff. The only migration I was offered was from Netscape. (Somebody actually used Netscape as a mail client? Poor schmuck.) That was that. I don't have the time to recreate my address book and complex filtering rules. I'm sure somebody's already built the Eudora migration tool, but it wasn't part of the basic install. Let's face it, I'm too governed by inertia to play the hunt and peck game to replace something that was generally working fine anyway. When it comes to bread-n-butter apps like browsers and mail clients, auto-pilot migrations are essential. Maybe I'll try again at the dot-one release.

The verdict is still out on the spam filtering, by the way. It requires training, which takes a little bit of time at the outset. I've had a number of false positives on messages from mailing lists, but otherwise, it seems to be getting better.

Tipping Point Existentialism

2005-02-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

Partially inspired by my participation in a study circle of Tricollege IT and library staff that I helped to start, I've been doing a lot of reading of books like the Malcolm Gladwell's most recent stuff and Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice. It has been fascinating reading, but so much thinking about spreading ideas and making decisions is starting to give me a case of the existential manager heebie jeebies.

So maybe we can learn to spread ideas by manipulating the environment and exploiting special talents of people in our organizations, just as Gladwell suggests in The Tipping Point.

Million dollar questions: what ideas are worth trying to tip? Are there any big ideas that I.T. in higher education is (or should be) trying to tip right now? Or is our job just to make the trains run on time and keep everybody more or less out of harm's way?

Million dollar questions, continued: how much mindspace should we legitimately occupy for the people we serve? Do we add complexity to people's lives by constantly trying to spread new ideas, features, services, practices, versions, tips, etc.?

Million dollar questions, also: how much behavior can we reasonably hope to shape? Given the effort involved in just trying to modify very basic behaviors (like practicing good password security or backing up files regularly), is there enough mindspace that an I.T. organization (or library) can occupy to spark more interesting epidemics? See also: opportunity costs.

Million dollar questions, they just keep on coming: are I.T. organizations populated by innovators and early adopters, or are they agents of the conservative mainstream culture, seeking to minimize risk and protect the status quo?

I keep coming back to the thought that these issues are really about organizational leadership. Connecting workers' daily to-do lists to broader organizational goals. I wonder if collegiate information services organizations generally have our eyes on the ball, or if we're mostly just getting through semesters putting out fires and trying to stay on the good side of a demanding clientele. Are we a "maven" culture that truly helps to translate good ideas into something that broader constituencies can use?

I think I need some less thought-provoking reading for a few weeks! Congratulations to you on your interpretive powers if any of this puzzled rambling made sense.

Firefox conversion survival kit, tip #1

2005-02-07T17:01:00.000-05:00

Back from a week of flu. Hackity-hackity, cough-cough-cough!

A faculty friend just got the rundown on why he should switch his browser from I.E. to Firefox. Then he asked how he sets up Firefox to be his default browser. I had to do this myself only weeks ago, but I'd already forgotten.

If you're running Panther, you set the default browser for your whole system by configuring the default browser setting in Safari's preferences. Brilliant! (Blech.)

If you have a Mac, you already knew this, but I've recorded it here as both an example of horrible, counter-intuitive U.I. design and a reminder to myself of how to do this the next time I'm asked. (It's so non-intuitive, that I'll have to go looking it up. I find it really hard to remember things that defy logic.)

We're not bad. We're just drawn that way.

2005-01-27T21:49:00.000-05:00

Our current student ce-web-rity, Nelson Pavlosky, one half of the digital-manifesto-wielding, free-culture-seeking, freedom-fighting duo who jousted with (and defeated) Diebold in last year's famous case, says that my organization ain't so bad. In fact, we're an "ally in a quest for a freer society." Heavy. I think it was sometime in the Clinton administration that we last got a little credit in a public student forum.

It may surprise Nelson and some other students that our ITS department is more than just benignly tolerant of freedom of expression. We are a living, breathing, group of humans with similar core values to the community we are a part of. As such, we are quite partial to all kinds of personal and academic freedoms, just like our faculty and students. We value your safety just as much as the Dean's Office. We also need to protect other organizational interests, as would the P.R. office, the H.R. department, and our legal counsel—not to mention the Board of Managers. Some of these interests are in tension at times, but we all do our best to balance them in appropriate ways, while leaving the smallest possible dent when sacrifices must be made.

As a small, residential place, we're fond of calling ourselves a community. I think one of the first steps in having a true community is to stop making different parts of it into "the other," and start forging a shared identity. Our shared cultural values includes traits like rigorous intellectual inquiry, respect for diverse opinions, and commitment to broadly-defined personal liberties.

While I appreciate the recognition Nelson gives my colleagues, I'd like to point out that it's not so much that ITS has stood up to external pressures. The reality is that the whole College has stood up together against those pressures, and the people I work with have played their part thoughtfully and with great care.

We are you. (I feel like breaking out into a chorus of "We are the people in your neighborhood.") There are times when we must address our differences of opinion, but I'd hope that one outcome of spending four (or more) years at an undergraduate institution like Swarthmore is to appreciate the sense of shared mission that typifies such places.

Welcome to Swarthmore visitors

2005-01-26T13:00:00.000-05:00

If you weren't in attendance at the talk that Tim Burke and I gave at the faculty luncheon today, please forgive me for cluttering your RSS feed.

If you were at the talk today, welcome. If you have any questions or comments about what you heard, I'll be glad to field them here. (I'm sure Tim will chime in if he feels he has anything to add.)

***update***
Our supercool librarians have rolled today's bib-blog-ography into a public feed page that you can use to check out a variety of aggregated resources you may be interested in. (Thanks, M.)

When all-campus communications go bad

2005-01-24T17:00:00.000-05:00

The Phoenix, 01.20.2005. Republished with permission from the artist.

For the longest time, the campus had a printed publication called the Weekly News, which was mostly announcements and classifieds. To cut back on expenses, the publication went online-only, which pretty much killed it. Everybody I talked to says that they no longer read the Weekly News ever since they stopped delivering the physical copy to our mailboxes. Me included.

This change put even more pressure on all-campus email, which now was the only way to slackvertise to the whole campus. Anybody drawing a paycheck at the College had the ability to spam the campus about their events or their sofas for sale. Some people really resented the volume of stuff, especially students, and much clamor arose for an email revolution.

Personally, I can't get worked up about a few excess, perhaps frivolous emails from colleagues when the global email infrastructure is collapsing under the weight of drugs-n-porn spam. But, it strikes me as really indicative of how unruly campus communications can be, and how hard it can be to change information consumption habits once they're formed.

Of course, a 15 minute investment in setting up an email filter in a proper client would solve this problem, but that hasn't gained anywhere near the traction that griping about junk mail has. Some students even want ITS or some other administrative entity to police for content on the mailing lists. (There's a bad idea whose time must never come.) Instead, we're sending out digests twice a day, which I consider patently worse than what we originally had. I suppose it's only better if you're measuring good and bad by how many emails you won't read are sitting in your inbox. It's really bad if you only read 10% of the traffic on the list, but if you use subject headings to alert yourself to things you care about.

Unless and until we're able to put forward a real campus announcements system on the web, preferably something that's delivered prominently on a campus portal and with an awesome GUI, I think we were better off just letting chaos reign on the lists and telling the people who have time to complain about junk mail to get over themselves.

I think I'm out of the mainstream on this one.

Ed-Tech Toolbox Essential:Database Solutions with FileMaker Pro 7

2005-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

A recurring theme in my support of Humanities faculty over more than a decade is that few have a workable definition of what a database is. A database is something that one accesses in the library perhaps, but it certainly isn't something that you make. (This probably also stems from the fact that unlike most other disciplines, Humanists do not often perceive of the fruits of their research as data.) As a result, I've seen a number of cases over the years where somebody has spent countless hours generating reams of notes or drawers of slides before they ever realize that they have barely-usable pile of "stuff."

On the one hand, it's a little bit worrisome that there are generations of scholars floating around who continue to be trained, from what I can tell, to approach their research with rather medieval methods for information storage, processing, and retrieval. On the other hand, it makes my job both fun and rewarding.

This week I had a professor land at my door with a problem. She's doing close analysis of patterns of language in a classic work of literature. (Trust me, you've heard of it.) She'd gone through this tome and literally pulled out every instance of a particular part of speech. She then dutifully (and handsomely, I might add) recorded more than a dozen descriptive data elements about each instance on papers in a manila folder.

Alas, to search and sort? She'd figured that she'd try entering it all into Excel. It's good that she realized that she had structured information that belonged in tables, but thank goodness she found her way to me before she started entering her multi-lingual data into a giant spreadsheet.

The best part of my job is that in order for me to help instructors, they have to give me a crash course on their research. Our faculty are world-class scholars, so even if the technology use is early on the evolutionary scale, the questions are always fascinating. I consider it a fair barter to ask for my help in exchange for some intellectually stimulating conversation.

The professor in this case knew her data very intimately, so after an hour at the whiteboard, she had visual understanding of her data's structure, and I had a working specification for the database she needed. It took under four hours to crank out a database that met her needs. This afternoon she took it for a test spin, with only two minor change orders, requiring only a few minutes each.

The light has turned on for her, and I've already been informed that this consultation has helped her think about her larger book project. To me, that's great beyond my ability to express it.

So a word about tools here. We've always used FileMaker Pro in our shop for this type of work. It was never a perfect tool, but it was quick and simple, and with enough kludges, you could make it do what you wanted. At least it was cross-platform, which is essential for us.

Version 7 has come a long way, and it's now quite an elegant development package, especially if you get the Developer edition. There were so many powerful new features, but I especially appreciated being able to store all the tables and a (portable) script library in a single file. This not only makes relationships a snap to set up, but it's also really nice for the solutions developer. If you're using Developer edition to produce a stand-alone/runtime version of your application, there's just one file to give to the client.

Special thanks to colleague J.J., whom I know wishes not to be named on web sites, but who gave me the crash course on all the new features in FM Pro. It was impressive to watch a virtuoso fly through the application.

Not trying to pick a fight!

2005-01-18T22:59:00.000-05:00

It seems I touched a minor nerve with James Farmer when I expressed (and Rick West seconded) my concern last week that blog-centered focus had been dominating my experience of educational technology sites.

Now it does happen that there are a number of people quite focused in the study and use of ‘blogging’, a fascinating new area of communication and community that’s only really developed in a big way over the last few years, many people say it’s changing the world, or has the potential too, haven’t you heard?

Yes, yes I have heard. A little too often, I'm afraid.

Blogs and other social software are an important phenomenon, and they deserve the attention of educational technologists. They fit into the ever-growing toolbox of communication and media solutions available to faculty and students. Will some courses use them to great effect? Absolutely, and Farmer is one of the people I expect to help bring good models to light for the rest of us.

Nevertheless, they're a niche application in the academy, at least for now. And rather than assuming that they're going to only grow and grow, I think it's actually quite likely that the explosive growth in blogging will soon see a contraction. We won't know for some months, but we might already be in it.

The big problem is that blogs have a voracious appetitte for one of an academic's most precious commodities--time. Writing and editing content, researching, and cultivating an audience takes a great deal of effort. Many well-written blogs will wither for lack of time, or the ability to reach a sustaining level of participation or readership.

Project-based blogging has been used to good effect by many educators. While these techniques may transform particular class experiences, they do not, nor are they likely to transform the academy or the teaching/learning process in general.

The media has hyped up the blogosphere in 2004, so getting out the word is no longer really needed from us. In fact, I think it's partly the responsibility of we who know the subject intimately to push back somewhat against the hype.

So, just to be clear about this, I'm pro-blog. How could I not be? I just don't think the topic should dominate so many column inches. All I suggest is that we strive for a greater sense of proportionality. I'm not dogging other writers for writing about whatever makes them happy; I'm only trying to inject my professional assessment into the discussion.

And with that, on to other things. There are so many.

The Dark Prince of Apple

2005-01-13T07:33:00.000-05:00

It's stuff like this that sometimes makes me feel dirty when I use my Mac.

Steve Jobs knows how to make Apple innovate, and he knows how to market products to consumers. To a certain extent, that's like noting that Mussolini made the trains run on time. I am rather thankful that he's never been endowed with a monopoly, or his obsessive control issues would probably make Microsoft seem sweet and benevolent.

At least it's not called iMini

2005-01-13T01:01:00.000-05:00

After all the mayhem yesterday, I didn't have a chance to watch Steve Jobs' traditional dog-n-pony-show keynote at MacWorld S.F.

Aside from the preview of OS X/Tiger and iLife apps, the highlight of the show is new hardware. This time, the toys were (theoretically) pitched downstream of the typical Apple/Mac devotee. The Shuffle lives below the iPod on the food chain, and the Mac Mini sets a new lowest common denominator for Mac hardware.

Or does it? We're told that this cheapie is pitched at winning converts, appealing to 4.5 million new iPodders who are now predisposed to reconsider the Apple brand on their desktops. These users presumably need the low price point, so that the barrier to considering a switch is reduced. They usually also have cheap I/O devices and monitors, so that'll work. Or it won't, and it still might not matter.

If you need more memory, a display, a superdrive and keyboard/mouse, you'll probably be better off buying an iMac. This isn't so much a cheaper Mac as it is a bare bones Mac.

Lo, this is a machine that calls out just as well to long-time Apple geeks, because it just begs to be bought in multiples. Want a dedicated iTunes/Airport Express server or media server for your home? Slap VNC on this little buddy and you have a customizable, headless server appliance. (My brother is already on this.)

How about uses in education? With the monitor de-coupled, this might play to the parallel processing crowd for small clusters. (Big ones still want the rack-mountable Xserves.) Swarthmore colleague Doug Willen suggested that this might be useful for deployment on (or in)teaching podia, where space is at a premium. Just on form factor alone, this is worth considering anywhere you want to hide your hardware. I can also see this as a great standby/loaner machine to fill in for us to have for faculty who need to get work done immediately despite a system in crisis. At this price it might even make sense for lab deployment. For $1500 round-trip, you should be able to buy a Mini with a new monitor and keyboard/mouse, then upgrade the CPU in two years, keeping the other parts for four.

Me, I still hope my sweetheart someday blesses a laptop purchase, but given the right alignment of events, like already having a lot of the extras laying around, I could imagine one of these would do the trick.

For now, my buying advice is to wait to buy one if you're interested. In a few months, Tiger will be shipping, and the upgrade probably will not be free.

Gizmodo has a great rundown of the reactions to Mac Mini collected from a variety of press sources.

As for the Shuffle, this is going to cause a price-war with the other low-end players. Without an LCD display, that's going to keep the pressure on Apple to keep on comparing well with some established players. I'm not sure whether that's sustainable, but the whole iPod phenomenon isn't about price alone. My brother wants to get the meme started to nickname the Shuffle the gumPod. I think toyPod or blindPod might draw attention to the more salient features of the device. No, wait, I've got it...iPiddle?

One way to lose a day heading into the semester

2005-01-12T01:15:00.000-05:00

Around 10:00, colleague E. steps in to ask if anybody already knows about the water that's pouring out of the housekeeping closet in the hallway just outside our office suite.

Hmm...no!

After poking my head out the door, wow, that really was a lot of water. Not overflowing sink kind of water. A-geyser-is-spouting-off-behind-this-door kind of water.

"We need to get Facilities up here fast," say I. E. disappears to find something. Colleague J. runs to call for help; can't find number.

I open said closet door to investigate.

It turns out that the door was the only thing holding back the sea. Knee high water gushes out, and I quickly slam door shut again. Now the water has really spread, and is headed for J.'s office. E. shows up with a roll of paper towels. I think I'm the first one to realize that we were well past that point.

Frantically, we run to J.'s office to get all computers and other possessions up off the floor. By the time we complete that, the water is taking over my office. We just get the surge protectors and the Dell up off the floor in my office, and it's seeping into E.'s office, and the (gasp!) video editing lab. In each room, we're just staying a few inches ahead of the advancing water line. Out in the hall I know the water is advancing down the hallway into other offices and the public computing lab. And also...

THE CAMPUS DATA CENTER. See also: machine room, server room, nerve center, life-giving source of our electronic lives.

In the few minutes that it took for the rescue team to arrive, most of the first floor of Beardsley Hall was covered by an inch or three of water. Rusty water.

A surprisingly young water heater in the closet suffered "catastrophic failure." How does a water heater do that when it's only a few years old?

Bigger question: what is a water heater doing in the closet adjacent to THE CAMPUS DATA CENTER? The newly remodeled data center.

Well amazingly, they had the water out in about 90 minutes, but the offices are being cooled and blown dry overnight. We moved our staff meeting to the coffee bar. The sub-60 temperature and noise in my office gave me a good excuse to make some rounds to faculty and library offices. Then hopped onto the wireless network to get some work done until another faculty member could find me for a late-afternoon meeting.

I know I have an interrupt-driven workplace, but this is really something on a different level.

As a humorous sidenote, the architect who designed our space remodel last year was in just the day before with a photographer to take shots for the portfolio. Could her timing have been any luckier?

***UPDATE***
My Dell needed a new power supply, which is the only computer casualty that we know of. Luckily, there's an authorized repair shop down the hall. (So spoiled!)

It has also been reported that my internal censors may have slipped for a few seconds at one point, so I apologize to anybody who was within earshot.

Meta-blogging squared

2005-01-07T01:10:00.000-05:00

Kudos to the people who kept up on their blogs over the holiday season. I needed the break.

Something's been on my mind about the whole academic technology blog thang. As a relative newcomer to the small community of educational technologists who blog, I have been discouraged by one recurring observation. It is this:

There's too much blogging about blogging.

I'm interested in social software, and I use it. I'm interested in others' use of these tools. If an instructor is interested in applications of wikis for teaching and learning, I'll be thrilled to have a cozy chat about the various models for doing so.

I've also been in this field for over a decade, and social software is still a tiny fraction of what educational technology is. It represents an overwhelmingly disproportionate share of the word count on the blogs that define themselves as being of the field. Some of that's to be expected. The surgeon suggests surgery, and the blogger qua blogger believes in the power of blogs. To a lesser extent, I think blogging is also a safe and easy topic to write about. ("You're reading my blog. Among other things, you may be interested in blogging.")

Bloggity bloggity blog blog blog.

Maybe this corner of the blogosphere is self-selecting for authors who are enthusiastic about the growth of the medium. Nevertheless, I've followed some of the blogs on the library side of the information services fence. Lo and behold, they're talking about the full range of professional topics. I have to imagine that there are some other pros out there who'd like to use the medium to discuss the vast sweep of technologies, applications, resources, and models in the field of academic computing.

As it is the new year, be it here resolved that this blog shall not be about blogging. Unless it's really important to the story. Even then, only in moderation.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony of the post. You don't need to point it out in the comments. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go work with Tim Burke on a faculty luncheon talk we're giving. You know...about blogging.

IE 86'ed at PSU

2004-12-20T17:10:00.000-05:00

You've already seen the story about the I.T. department at Penn State, a massive public university, urging its community to stop using Internet Explorer. You read it at the Chronicle, Slashdot, Information Week, etc.

I'm really pleased about this decision and impressed with the administrators at Penn State for making a public stand. My satisfaction isn't derived from the normal urge to badmouth Microsoft. When they make good software, I'm happy to give them my business. Heck, yeah, I'd like more competition in the marketplace, but I have no problems firing up my copy of Excel.

I'm just sick of enduring the immense resource drain that the Swiss-cheese security of Explorer and Outlook have caused. Billions of dollars have been wasted globally trying to counteract the negative impacts of viruses, worms, spyware, and all other manner of exploits that their software has been vulnerable to. Oh, sure, MS aren't the bad guys. What would we think of a bodyguard whose every client was shot, while defending himself by saying "there are too many people who want to hurt my clients."

The main problem for customers of a ubiquitous monopoly like Microsoft is clout. How do you build up sufficient market power to make them be responsive to your needs?

I've been quietly advocating for a public education campaign on campus for years to urge folks off of Microsoft's internet apps. It'll be interesting to see if any other schools follow suit in public fashion over the coming months. With the stir over Firefox going on, this is probably as good an opportunity as we're going to get.

Webcast-in-a-box

2004-12-10T08:07:00.000-05:00

We saw a demo of Sonic Foundry's Mediasite yesterday. Mediasite is a conferencing appliance. It allows you to capture a presentation with multiple video sources, most typically a camera trained on the speaker synchronized with screenshots of his Powerpoint slides or document camera. Without any post-processing (a.k.a. "Editing"), you can immediately send that canned presentation to the web for streaming or to a CD.

I'm not going to do a review of product features here. If you're in the market for a conferencing appliance, you'll find reviews at PC Magazine, Network Computing, and ProAV Magazine. My overall impression is that this is a very elegant, easy-to-use system if you have a need to record classes and presentations in this way. It does seem to really ease much of the technical and support complexity of creating webcasted content.

There are some drawbacks and limitations, though.For starters, your output is totally locked into Windows Media. The meta-data scheme that synchronizes video cues to images from the laptop is internal to the Windows Media architecture. (Don't expect to run your stuff through Cleaner to make a QuickTime version, for instance.) Furthermore, you're reliant on use of a specialized player/viewer, so you have that obstacle to clear every time you try to get new users to make use of your webcasts (live or on-demand). Finally, while the output doesn't require post-processing, it also doesn't really allow it either. If you recorded an hour of video but only want to use fifteen minutes of it, you have a problem. On top of all the other possible objections, the device doesn't come cheaply.

Of course, I only really care about the device's utility in higher education. There are a couple scenarios where I can envision that a Mediasite or one of its competitors would be highly useful. One is obviously distance education, but if you're at a distance education shop, your institution already has systems for collecting and delivering course content. There are many other situations where professors have large lecture courses where they wish to deliver the lecture and supporting materials for on-demand use outside of class. Another is to create supplemental presentations on topics that will not be covered in class, such as remedial or preparatory material, lab instructions, etc. If this last scenario is your primary need, I can imagine Mediasite being quite useful. You have to decide whether the use of the appliance will be sufficient to justify its price. We small, residential schools might have a difficult time drumming up enough use to make the case for purchase, but my assumption is based only on our current lack of demand locally. We have a growing demand for streaming video, but it generally hasn't come from the curricular realm.

I haven't even gotten into the whole issue of whether it is educationally appropriate for instructional technologists to endorse the use of a technology tool that largely serves to preserve and deliver Powerpoint content. That's an argument for (actually from) another day.

Voting open for first edublog awards

2004-12-04T16:38:00.000-05:00

The first edublog award voting has opened with Think Thunk nominated in the category "Best technology meets pedagogy blog." Hey, proof that somebody is reading this thing. I'm flattered and humbled.

Although Scott Leslie thinks this sort of thing is not helpful, I think this criticism takes the exercise way too seriously.

I consider the edublog awards more of a community building exercise than anything else. Looking over the nominations has made me aware of a much broader blogging community, and I've discovered some great new writers as a result. I can also tell from the limited statistical tracking I do on this site that I've received many hits here that were referred as a direct result of the nomination. This can't be anything but a good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

Taking some time to give a little recognition to our favorite writers is not a waste of time. Building a sense of community in our mildly obscure neck of the woods isn't going to hurt anybody.

Vote for Think Thunk if you like. That's great, and I'm certainly grateful for your support. More importantly, use the opportunity to explore the many other fine blogs that were nominated. You won't be sorry.

Garage Band: making music without paying your dues

2004-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

I was curious to find out what I could do with Garage Band. It had been years since I'd spent hundreds of hours fooling around with my 4-track cassette recorder that my high school band buddies (and later college friends) and I were using to lay down tracks. It has been longer than I care to admit since I'd taken music theory courses, been able to score up a basic arrangement of a pop tune, or taken lessons in voice, percussion, or keyboard.

I am a lapsed musician. (To be brutally honest, a severely lapsed artist in many forms.) I still have a good ear, but I've lost whatever chops I may have once had. While I'd fiddled around with many digital audio editing/sequencing applications over the years, I'd never really managed to do much with them besides cleaning up spoken word recordings.

If Garage Band was supposed to be so easy, though, I wondered what I could do with it in a very limited time. So I gave myself two hours to create the best song I could make. I came up with this little ditty, "Wednesday Funk Kebob." (It was a Wednesday, and I was making music-on-a-stick. Get it? I'm so clever.) I recorded no original material. Working only with canned loops, I collaged together a fairly rich multi-track piece within my time limit.

Trust me, I'm fully aware that I didn't just set the musical world on its edge. But you'll have to admit, it's fairly listenable. Go on now, check it out. It won't bite.

It's a little scary to me just HOW easy it was to pull this off. Garage Band drool-proofs so much of the business of sampling and mixing tracks. For instance, the loops provided will automatically adjust to the tempo and key signature that you've set for the piece. You really don't need to know a lick of music theory. Drag-n-drop. I just had a flashback to the heyday of Kai's Power Tools for Photoshop, when we were all treated to a couple years of excessively cheesy digital art.

While I'm really impressed with how much the tool empowers somebody like me to do, I'm struggling with the notion of how useful it is to empower somebody like me. While there's a small, intense market (a.k.a. my son's grandparents) for the images in my iPhoto and the home movies I can churn out in iMovie, I'm not so sure that there's anybody who wants to listen to my cut-and-paste compositions.

Still, it's an elegant program. It's definitely a winner for a singer/songwriter type who is looking to easily sketch out a new idea when other musicians aren't available. (From what I've heard and read, it's quite a breeze for live recording.) It's also a cheaper and easier alternative for actual garage bands to work up a simple demo. Certainly, for whatever simple (amateur) audio for multimedia I might have to create, it would be simple, cheap, and natural to edit and sequence it in Garage Band.

Interestingly, Garage Band seems poised to become a suite of products for Apple and third parties of many types. A cottage industry has cropped up around producing Garage band loop files. (Anybody can make them with a simple developers kit.) In January, Apple is expected to release a highly-integrated breakout box (a device with multiple inputs for audio sources) at a competitive price.

As usual with all the iLife apps, the point is not so much to create the best tool, it's to create the tool that the basic consumer is excited to use. I'm sure that there's quite a nice, steady revenue stream for Apple to tap for add-ons like the breakout box, the loop packages, etc. A dedicated niche market of rock star and DJ wannabes may be all it takes to make the application live on for a long time, and in the meantime, it's a very fun toy for lapsed musicians like me to fool around with.

Blackboard Survival Tip #1a

2004-11-30T17:30:00.000-05:00

Since I mentioned it yesterday, Liz Evans passed along a handy little utility for Mac OS X users who want to package zip archive content for use on Blackboard with the Document Unpackager building block. If you use the built-in zip facility in OS X, you'll get lots of invisible files (made visible) in your Blackboard course. To avoid a lot of manual cleanup, you should use a handy scripted droplet to make an archive file that has this invisible content stripped out. (You can do this other ways, but this is really easy for the Mac users.) Please see yesterday's post about the Document Unpackager building block if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Download the droplet for Mac OS X.
You can also retrieve a page of documentation prepared by Liz.

In short:
1) Name and organize your folder tree to match your desired hierarchy for content on Blackboard.
2) Drag-n-drop the folder onto the Packager script to make the "clean" zip file.
3) Load the content into a content area in Blackboard using the "Document Package" content type from the "Select" pull-down menu.

Blackboard Survival Tip #1

2004-11-29T17:03:00.000-05:00

If you're an instructor who uses Blackboard to deliver large amounts of course material each term, ask your local Blackboard administrators if they have looked into the "Document Unpackager" Building Block (or something like it). If you are a Blackboard administrator, you'd better go look it up before you get asked about it. Thanks to the distance education group at Joliet Junior College for creating the "duh" tool that seems like it should have been there from the start.

From the catalog description:
The Document Unpackager allows you to upload a zip file containing folders and files to Blackboard. It is then unpackaged and course content items are created with the files attached. The directory structure within the zipfile is translated into folders within Blackboard. All content created by the Building Block is usable even if the Building Block is removed at a later time.

Blackboard can really turn off some power-users. One of the big complaints is its insistence on form-driven content creation processes. They're helpful for the less tech-savvy teachers, but a real drag once you're a seasoned pro. This is handy little tool, and a real winner to show to your faculty when you're doing that little "What's new in Blackboard" session.

For your Black Friday amusement

2004-11-26T01:32:00.000-05:00

My brother and I are geeking out at the family homestead in the late late hours after Thanksgiving. Both of us have laptops out, sharing the wireless connection on the Airport hub, chatting about internet and computer junk while we surf. I just asked, "What makes the U2 iPod so special?" The answer, according to him, is that it comes with a $50 "gift certificate" toward the purchase of "The Complete U2" collection. Also, "It's black."

I already have my iPod, so this doesn't really concern me. With the holiday season upon us, and knowing that some of my faculty friends have asked me about iPods for their kids, let me tell you what I discovered on a quick trip to the Apple Store for Education.

The 20 GB iPod is about $269, and ships in 2-4 business days.
The 20 GB iPod U2 sells for $329, and ships in 1-3 weeks. Oh look, it also comes with a poster.

There's a mild irony here. After all, this is the Apple Store for education, so we presume that the audience is somewhat intelligent, or at least aspires to be.

To recap: for the extra $60, you get a $50 "gift certificate" that can only be redeemed toward the purchase of a $150 music anthology. Otherwise, you're out the $60, unless you consider the black and red design worth the premium. Oh, let's not forget that poster.

As my brother says: "We really need to talk to the people who go for this stuff. If we could figure out why they'd buy this, we could sell them pretty much anything we wanted to."

But Steve Jobs has already beaten us to that punch, hasn't he?

Refining the iceberg model of I.T.

2004-11-23T17:30:00.000-05:00

I gave a presentation to Tri-College (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore) library and I.T. staff two weeks ago titled "Puzzles within Puzzles: Managing Complexity in Information Technology." For that talk, I used a diagram that has appeared here before to launch into a couple of related topics. I've revised it to make it easier to read and to visually introduce the concept of the iceberg and the water line. Since I've been notified by a few people that they've used this diagram for other purposes, I'm posting the revised version here. I think the new one has more layers of information, but old and new are both available, depending on your preferences.

As with most models, this is an oversimplification of the real world environments it attempts to describe. Nevertheless, I think this can be useful to show some of the relationships between technology and higher education institutions that impact how I.T. organizations should weigh investments in web information systems.Keep in mind my assertion that the information age is still squarely in its industrial revolution. (We are just now figuring out the processes by which we will be able to mass-produce and distribute online data to meet a consumer demand for web content.) The diagram attempts to reveal observations about this change in the technology environment.

Much of the growth in information technology for the last few years has been within the broad category of information management systems. These systems allow people with only minimal technical effort to generate and use massive databases of information over the web. (The product examples in bold are the ones used at Swarthmore.)
These information management systems occupy a project space that is different from what higher education I.T. shops were engaged in for most of the web's first decade.
Most technology systems beg for integration with other elements of the overall technology infrastructure. The pink arrows remind us that information must move horizontally and vertically across the layers shown. LDAP data about people not only populate scheduling and commerce systems, but they are also useful for defining permissions to alter content in a course management system or customize one's personal views on the campus portal. Images and documents in digital asset management systems are needed in course management systems. And portals? They need to integrate with everything. That's what they do.
Interoperability is rarely provided by product vendors, which has made product integration a key aspect of project management. Home-grown enhancements not only require attention as they are being developed, but also every time upgrades are made in related systems.
Interoperability generally yields a better user experience but adds significant resource demands on technology organizations. The question arises: "When it comes to elegance of the user experience, how good is good enough?"
Enter the water line: The interest in technology projects has a lot to do with how aware various people and constituencies within your organization are of the technologies in question. Do they use them? Do they like them? How directly can they feel savings in time, ease of use, etc. that your solution delivers? Many senior leaders have a very high water line. How do you talk to them about investments that they may never use themselves and may not fully understand?

These are not the only questions one can come up with about the areas I've suggested. If this is, in fact, a useful model for thinking strategically about technology investments, it should hold up to all sorts of challenges and inquiries.

If you would like an hi-res version of the diagram, you can download a copy of the TIFF file.

ARTstor developments and debate continue

2004-11-19T13:36:00.000-05:00

I'm not blessed with sufficient time (or factual certainty) to give a full-scale update on ARTstor news at the moment. After I've had a chance to do some fact-finding, I'll be sure to post more. In the meantime, I wanted to make sure this blog had links to the current information available relating to ARTstor.

In my previous ARTstor post, I mentioned plans under development at ARTstor for some increased interoperability, at least with respect to searching other collections from the ARTstor interface(s). I encourage anybody who is interested to review the slides from ARTstor CTO Bill Ying's October 26th presentation at the Digital Library Federation's (DLF) Fall meeting. The slides raise a lot of questions about details, but they serve well to outline the direction ARTstor is heading in.

Also, there's a vigorous discussion running on the Visual Resources Association's VRA-L listserv. I learned some things by participating in it. First, there are a lot of different perspectives that shape how people view ARTstor right now: size of institution, existing image collection resources, past experiences in communication with ARTstor, etc. Second, despite what I'd previously thought, I am hardly the most vocal or intense critic of ARTstor's strategy and interactions with the visual resources community.

Both technical and community relations responses are required to achieve greater success. I'm on the outskirts of this particular community, so I tend to focus on the technical side. But I think all the parties involved need better, more productive ways to build a constructive relationship for the future.

If only I'd known this about...

2004-11-17T19:03:00.000-05:00

THE INTERNET, so many of my worst days of the last ten years might have been avoided. Or at least been easier to explain.

New ARTstor plans are sounding better

2004-11-10T15:33:00.000-05:00

In a presentation to the attendees at the National Institute for Technology & Liberal Education (NITLE) conference yesterday, ARTstor Executive Director James Schulman alluded to some new directions for the project that have me cautiously optimistic that we're going to get to a workable place.

My ARTstor critiques (rants?) about interoperability have been—by far— the most requested pages on this blog, so I assume that there's a critical mass out there who will want to know more information as it comes along.

There were two big news items for the visual resources community that I picked up from Schulman's presentation. First, ARTstor is working on a broader interoperability plan that involves expanded federated searching of other collections from the ARTstor interface. We'd already known from previous announcements that ARTstor was planning on exposing its meta-data to searching tools in other applications, which is good for researchers, but not a significant aide for the teaching and student study problems I've been focused on. The new indication is that they're working on API's that might allow other collection databases to expose their collections to a federated searching capability in ARTstor.

This is less than ideal: it will enforce the primacy of the ARTstor viewing tools and restrict choice for teachers about what tools they can use. I suspect that if the viewer stays good enough, we might have to grant ARTstor this point. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here. As Schulman suggested in his presentation, we can't let the great be the enemy of the good. It could be worse, after all. Without ARTstor we might soon all lose our choice anyway, but have Microsoft in the driver's seat instead.

The other big piece of news, though, was the Schulman described the inclusion of collection management tools into ARTstor as essentially "inevitible." If they're now developing a long-term strategy of building a soup-to-nuts (collection-buiding-to-classroom-display) application, the need for interoperability decreases for a good many institutions. Then your interoperability becomes a bigger strategy for re-using your public archives and legacy image systems.

The devil is in the details, of course, and we're still in the conceptual stages. Nevertheless, I came away from the meeting more optimistic that an acceptable course is being navigated. As I get more information, I'll pass it along here (and other places). If anybody else out there learns an interesting tidbit, please don't assume I already know it.

Related information

My first comments on ARTstor interoperability issues
My reaction to ARTstor's published interoperability plan
James Schulman's explanation of interoperability limitations
Eileen Fry's critical response to Schulman's remarks from the perspective of a large institution.

Calgon...manage my content!

2004-10-26T14:31:00.000-04:00

The need for a sustainable content management strategy is finally coming to light within our small College community. As we're looking to overhaul our institutional site, we're seriously grappling with the importance of academic departmental web sites for prospective and current students. These sites are mostly self-supported efforts of the individual departments. Quality of design and freshness of content are all over the map, as they are determined by the level of success of various ad hoc efforts.

These web sites have a lot of data elements to manage. We recently performed a quick review of the types of data that each department was attempting to publish on its site. (You may download a copy of the overview table.) You can see at a glance that there's a lot of structured and repeatable information that most of these sites use. Unfortunately, the College's administrative database systems are not used in any way to develop this web content.

Unless you count some cutting and pasting.

My colleagues and I will be taking a hard look at what our options are in the next few weeks. We may find our answer in one of the commercial or open source enterprise-level CMS applications. There's a part of me that's really resistant to that idea of a full-fledged CMS. (As successful a product as it has been for us, this may be a byproduct of Blackboard fatigue.) While I know such environments have a lot to offer, I'm very cautious about potentially building an XXL-sized infrastructure to solve an L-sized issue. Some within our ranks would prefer we stick with a smaller, cheaper strategy built around Macromedia Contribute and its new multi-user server product. The "aesthetics of cheap" are in play here, for sure, but I'm most committed to getting the tool that fits-just-right. Does it exist?

(I just had an image flash though my mind of "Goldilocks and the Three CMS's." "This CMS is too big. And this CMS is too small. But this CMS is JUST RIGHT." I, humble reader, am playing the role of Goldilocks. A big, thirty-something, geeky Goldilocks.)

I've been investigating for a while, but I've not yet heard the argument that convinces me of the right way to go. We'll be talking to some fancy schmancy consultants about this issue in a few days, and we'll see how they shape my perception of what we need for a project of our scope.

An insanely great resource for we who use Macs to do serious things

2004-10-19T17:30:00.000-04:00

This is just a quick plug for something I consider to be a great step forward for the Macintosh platform. The erstwhile Mac OS X Labs Deployment Project has widened its scope to become MacEnterprise.org. (Doug Willen, from our academic computing team, has been heavily involved in the activities of the group.)

The past history of the relationship between Apple and enterprise customers has been cyclical, if not downright spotty. It's always been clear which channels were "hot" in Apple's eyes. All too frequently, the organizational uses of Macs felt neglected for consumer-oriented marketing and development. Now, that might sound like a criticism of Apple, Inc., but in reality the problem was also that the enterprise-oriented user segment wasn't organized to help Apple serve them well. From what I've seen by floating around the outskirts of the present effort, the MacEnterprise.org folks have made a serious commitment of their time and energy, and Apple has responded by nurturing their effort and being highly responsive to them. Kudos and godspeed to all involved.

It looks like the next big step is getting new participants from business, government, and NPO's outside of higher education. If you know of anybody who might be interested, spread the word.

A week from today, it looks like they'll be webcasting a session on the subject of Wireless Security with participation from people inside and outside of Apple. If that's your thing, check it out.

Half-full or half-empty?

2004-10-14T08:45:00.000-04:00

Reed College CTO (and all-around good guy) Marty Ringle is leading a current issues roundtable session at Educause a week from today. The abstract for the session titled "The Rising Cost of Distractions" reads:

Already stressed IT budgets face the rising costs of virus and worm defenses, increased network security, spam control, copyright infringement, privacy regulations, and other requirements. A survey of liberal arts colleges indicates that such items may be consuming 10-15% of central IT budgets. This roundtable shares ways colleges are dealing with these "overhead" costs along with financial, administrative, and user relations strategies.

I can't make my mind up about this...Given what we've been through in the last year and a half, should I be discouraged or relieved that our organizations are spending 10-15% of our budgets on security, legal regulations, and other nuissances? On the one hand, these expenditures contribute absolutely nothing to the core mission of a college other than letting it get back to do what it was trying to do. On the other hand, would we be deceiving ourselves to think that we didn't have to make such expenditures.

In otherwords, are we just paying the piper now for not having made better investments in preparation and prevention?

Swatties serve humble pie to Diebold

2004-10-02T00:20:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to Nelson, Luke, the E.F.F., and copyleftists everywhere for their legal victory against Diebold this week.

Despite what E.F.F. staff attorney Wendy Seltzer hopes, it's not yet perfectly clear to me whether this decision will embolden universities and ISP's to stand up to DMCA takedown notices. It certainly raises the bar in some narrow ways, but the DMCA safe harbor provisions still is based on the idea that copyright disputes are between the holders of I.P. and those people they claim have misappropriated their works.

(Alert! Alert! I am not a lawyer.)

Let's hope that the decision discourages corporate lawyers from abusing copyright law like this in the first place. I recall Ken Crews saying that most copyright disputes were resolved at the "angry letter" phase; that copyright holders were reluctant to go as far as litigation. One reason for this was the fear that they just might lose. Now that somebody finally has lost, hopefully the message in the States is that you can't use copyright law to silence free speech and free press. (We have other ways of doing that.) (Sigh.)

If they haven't learned that lesson, then let's hope that they've learned not to challenge Swarthmore students to a battle of wits (or Chicken) when their principles are on the line. To quote a traditional Swarthmore sports cheer: "Fight, fight for the inner light! Kill little Quakers, kill!"

The Internet Telethon?

2004-09-25T22:56:00.000-04:00

On the same day that I noted Wikipedia's fund drive campaign, which seems like a novel but inevitable path for popular non-commercial sites to go down, I noticed that one of our local public television stations, WHYY, was having one of its pledge drives.

A sidetrack here for my international readers: most commercial American TV stations interrupt their programs several times an hour for a few minutes of advertisements. Most metro areas are served by one or two public television stations which allow no traditional advertising other than acknowledgements of underwriters. The programming on public TV (and radio) is usually more educational or cultural in nature. For many Americans, public television is their only venue for receiving international programming, especially BBC broadcasts. (It's also where we get our muppet fix through Sesame Street.) The system is funded through a combination of government subsidy (ever-declining since the Reagan era) and donations from foundations and individuals. The tradeoff for months of commercial-free TV is the occasional "pledge drive." During a typical week-plus telethon, all of the station's most popular oldies-but-goodies and major events are shown, interrupted at regular intervals by LOOONG and TEEEEEDIOUS pitches from the local station's notables. "Call now with your donation of $120...that's just $10 a month...and we'll also send you this WHYY tote bag. Here's Jeff to tell us how much he loves using his tote bag when he goes to the local library." Sprinkle in a few reminders that we're freeloaders if our kids watch Teletubbies on public TV and we don't make a donation.... You get the idea.

American Public TV basically uses the shareware model of distribution. It's an honor system enforced by scheduled annoyance.

That brings me back to my slow-moving train of thought. I started to wonder if we'll ever see the next logical step in fundraising for "free" content on the Internet. I can imagine it would go a little something like this...

I've just found a great audio clip of an interview I want to listen to. I click on the link. My media player fires up, and—

"We'll get to the recording you've just selected in a moment, but first we wanted to let you know that this site can only continue to exist through your generous support. You know how important it is to be able to find the kind of engaging, interesting, and educational materials that you've come to expect from us. Won't you please take a moment now to become a member of this site by making a donation? If you make your donation right now, we'll be thrilled to send you this lovely mouse pad with the clever "Catch the .wav!" logo. Here's a message from our webmaster, Jeff, to tell you more about how he uses his mouse pad."

Additional reading:
The Wikipedia entry on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). (How perfect is that confluence?)

An older article from Current.org, discussing the problems that even those within the public broadcasting community have pledge drives.

Open the pod bay doors, HAL

2004-09-20T23:26:00.000-04:00

The Phoenix, 09.09.2004. Republished with permission from the artist.

I love this cartoon from last week's Swarthmore student newspaper. (In case it's not obvious to the reader, "ITS" is "Information Technology Services.") At the risk of ruining a perfectly enjoyable joke, I'll make just a couple brief comments.

This cartoon perfectly captures the dilemma support organizations often encounter when dealing with students. We strive to offer good client services, but the institution also expects us to take the lead on various issues involving enforcement. There are other organizations (e.g. the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S.) which have the dual role of advocacy and enforcement; inevitably, these two strains find a way to come into conflict with each other.

Also to be gleaned from the cartoon is the problem of becoming a faceless bureaucracy. The perception of I.T.S. here is that it's an anonymous other, a big brother figure. Faceless organizations are easy targets for the poisoned pen. I don't think that students' sense of shared community generally extends to include I.T.S. staff, whom they mostly don't know.

Hey! How did we get to be the bad guys here? When did the animosity over P2P restrictions get transferred from the RIAA to the home team?

ARTstor follow-up

2004-09-13T19:05:00.000-04:00

According to the site statistics, many of the readers who make it here are searching for my earlier posts on ARTstor. With those pages now about to drift off the top page, I thought it would be good to post an update about where things stand.

After my initial posts, I received contact from ARTstor Executive Director James Schulman. Based on that conversation, and a subsequent message from him, I am led to believe that some additional clarification or perspective will be offered to the academic community on the issue of ARTstor's interoperability strategy. To date, I have not seen anything, but I am hopeful. If more information becomes available, I'll respond to it here.

In the meantime, if you care about ARTstor's future role in supporting academic study of images, I humbly suggest that we collectively express how critical it will be to for ARTstor images to be usable side-by-side with our other image collections.

Additional reading:
The Luna Insight Users Group mailing list had some related discussions on the issue of interoperability.

Image Stuff, the newsletter of the Visual Resources Association, published ARTstor's most recent statement on interoperability plans. They will, I assume, also cover any major new developments.

If CMS ≠ eLearning, what does?

2004-09-11T13:49:00.000-04:00

This post is an extension of a dialog that's started with Tama Leaver at Ponderance about my post on course management systems. Tama said:

I must say though, I'm not even sure if I know what online learning is: at best it's an ever-mutating practice that never seems at all prepared to let you pin it down (not to suggest that as a concept it has its own agency, only that as it's enacted, it takes on different forms every day!)

As well it should, say I!

Maybe online learning is a confusing phrase because it implies that the learning is somehow done online. Learning takes place in a brain. Our sloppy use of the word "online" is meant to distinguish learning that happens while the learner is engaged in a computer-mediated activity, particularly one that involves networked information or communication. The range of activities that could fall under this heading is enormous. Is looking up a word in an online dictionary online learning? What about completing a drill-and-kill exercise in Blackboard's assessment engine?

On the flip-side, is writing a blog necessarily a learning activity? While there's always some minimal value in getting some students to do almost any kind of writing or reading, I've seen plenty of blogs where a secondary student writes entry after entry that read like this:

September 10
I'm so bored.

September 9
I don't know why I'm writin this thing. Teach says I has to. So here it is.

Unless the curriculum seeks to teach students how to be miserable while navel-gazing, I'm not sure I get the point. Even if students need to practice writing about anything, it seems to me that they ought to be engaging deeply with something other than their personal ennui.

Learning is learning. We don't need to pin down what online learning is, because the "online" part is merely a description of the context, which changes minute by minute.

If we focus too much on the novelty of technology, we can lose track of the underlying learning objectives. Sometimes we get into the habit of saying, "Here is a cool technology; how could I use this with students?" Instead, we should be thinking, "My students seem to have trouble doing something." (The something could be "expressing original analysis in their writing," which might argue for a blog or discussion list; or the something might be "understanding this microeconomic theory," which might argue for a game or animation.) The medium for the resulting activity is secondary to the decision of what type of activity will help students meet a learning objective.

Given unlimited resources (ha!), including time (ha!), there's virtually no online learning activity that couldn't take place in some analog form. For instance, a classroom could keep a group journal on a bulletin board or by passing around papers and notes to classmates. Those of us who blog understand the advantages of the blog in reducing overhead and extending the community of learners, which is why some of us are telling our peers, "You might want to think about using this." Our explanation of our rationale needs to be a part of the recommendation, though. Otherwise the skeptical will just think we're offering a solution in search of a problem.

Using a hammer is not always carpentry.
Carpentry is often easier with a hammer.
(How's that for pithy reductionism?)

I see! (Eyetrack III)

2004-09-10T01:01:00.000-04:00

I think pretty much everybody who designs web pages in earnest will be (or should be) reading the results from the Eyetrack III studies for the next few weeks. The summary is quite rich, but the full site goes into even more specifics. I wish a had a print edition that I could carry around with me and spread out on my desk as I work. The low resolution of the online display prevents us from really being able to study examples comparatively. Despite the limitations of the browser window for publishing this kind of material, its subject is how to publish web material, so we have to cut it some slack. There's a lot of great information throughout the site.For starters, it appears that I'd better start writing shorter paragraphs! Maybe once I've digested it all, I'll figure out a list of proposed modifications to this standard Blogger template. Putting something into practice is the best way to cement it in memory.

Course Management ≠ eLearning

2004-09-09T01:05:00.000-04:00

When I was out promoting our new course management system (CMS) to faculty a few years ago, I was careful not to oversell it. I (properly) described Blackboard to faculty as nothing more than a Swiss army knife of useful administrative tools packaged into a simple web interface. I never used goofy terms like "eLearning platform."

Recycling a recent comment I made on Scott Leslie's EdTech Post:

The current CMS is not really a teaching and learning tool, even though some kinds of teaching and learning activities can take place on one. A CMS is fundamentally an administrative communication tool. I give you documents; you give me documents. I post announcements; you send mail to your study group to schedule a review session. I post your grade; you check it. It's easy to take pot shots at a product that doesn't deliver lofty learning outcomes. The only learning outcome that I hope we might be getting is a moderate overall improvement in student preparation for class by making reserve materials available in convenient form.

I have no gripes with Blackboard's administrative focus. If it had been "only" a tool for online learning, it would have drawn interest from about a dozen adventurous professors. Instead, Blackboard is a tool that justifies its expense by being generally useful, easy, and ubiquitous. The demand in higher education really was for an administrative tool that made the business of organizing a class simpler. Nevertheless, I had always envisioned the CMS as a possible scaffold for future web development. I hoped that Blackboard might become a place where we could conveniently slip in the stuff of real pedagogical value—the tools that truly facilitate and enhance the activities of a community of learners. It was a romantic notion, and one with a critical flaw. Did you spot it yet?

The problem is right there in front of our noses. There just isn't much room for the learner in a CMS. So long as the paradigm for a CMS is pedagogy, it suits the needs of the instructor in defining and controlling the class experience. Aside from posting a message to a discussion forum or dropping a document into a group directory, there isn't much else a student can do. There is no virtual space within the typical "course shell" that truly belongs to the student. The systems don't support the presentation of research and writing, open commentary, and the connection of one's own work to that of one's peers. In short, the CMS is instructor-centric, constantly seeking to keep all communication on a vector from faculty to students. Its nature is its greatest strength and its most glaring weakness.

I don't promote a trouncing of the CMS for what it doesn't do. The only rationale for doing so would be an idealistic and false notion that if you had learner-centered tools that learning would break out like the proverbial thousand flowers blooming. We can live with the CMS shortcomings and focus our energies on the traditional settings for learning activities—classrooms, labs, clinics, libraries, and study groups. On the other hand, I can easily imagine a web course application that would combine the best aspect of course administration with the best aspects of both personal web portfolios and group blogging. I can imagine it, but I have no idea if such a thing will ever exist.

Perhaps it will be an interesting blogging project for another day to speculate on what a true hybrid of the course management system and online learning platform would look like.

Associated reading:
Stephen Downes has an article in this month's Educause Review on educational blogging, which is mostly about blogging, but touches on the convergence with course management systems. It's also a good overview of blogging in education from elementary education on up, for those who are newly exposed to such possibilities.

About a year ago,John Kruper had some interesting thoughts on the potential for bloggish course management or course administration tools within blogs.

Kruper's comments followed April Gibbs' critique of "Blackboard,Students and Publishing on the Web".

Is Your School Paying Protection Money?

2004-09-07T21:30:00.000-04:00

College and university administrators have been approached by the commercial digital music services seeking campus-wide contracts. Hey, you can’t blame a corporation for trying to make a buck. The part that makes me uneasy is the subsequent contact from the RIAA (soon to be mimicked, no doubt, by the MPAA), politely suggesting that we should consider buying into one of these services. They have some suggestions.

The RIAA would claim that they’re just promoting their interests, but we all get the subtext. "Pay up, and we’ll stop harassing you. Pay up, and we promise not to sue you. Pay up, and nothing happens to your students." As far as I’m concerned, the DMCA, adhered to in good faith, should provide our institutions with the liability shield we need. (Caveat emptor: I am not a lawyer!) Beyond that, both intellectual property owners and colleges should have their own methods for dealing with those who are caught breaking the law.

Let's be clear—I obtain my music legally. (Several commercial services could back me up on this claim.) I’m basically your average, law-abiding square. Now I like open source and free software as much as the next copyleftist. This article is governed by a Digital Commons license. I feel, as many do, that copyright law has been progressively tilting toward commercial interests at the expense of public ones; I’d rather not expand those rights any further. But I honor lawful intellectual property rights. I don’t get to choose who owns the assets that are not mine. When recording artists figure out how to cut the venture capital provided by the record companies out of the equation, which some are doing, I’ll be thrilled to pay artists directly. Until such a day, I don’t have respect for those who cry, "Stick it to the man! Steal this record." I’m personally disappointed by the rationalizations for theft that I have heard from so many of the college-aged people I’ve known in the last few years. (I remember it like yesterday, when all we had to worry about was underage drinking and vandalism.)

That doesn’t mean that I personally care to collaborate with corporate meanies either. If a digital music service is a good value proposition to the customer, if the service is marketed well, and is backed with good service, it will sell itself. Apple didn’t need exclusive college and university deals to sell 125 million iTunes tracks.

If you’re a commercial digital music or video vendor, and you want a college or university to broker or endorse your service, these should be the ground rules:

Subscription to the service shouldn’t cost the college or university anything. In fact, if you want us to market your product for you, you should be paying us in cash or kind. The commodities in this transaction are not music files. They are students.

At the very least, your software should work on Windows and Macs. Students can’t buy your music or sync with their MP3 players from a Mac? You haven’t fully addressed the problem.

Students need to clearly get something out of the deal that isn’t available to them as normal retail consumers. I think it safe to assume that every computer-owning, English-speaking, warm-blooded American college student is vaguely aware that she can get a digital song on demand for $.99. This is a good enough price point that it has already turned a lot of former peer-to-peer shoplifters into paying customers. To bring the rest into the fold, you’re just going to have to go one better. (This is where Napster and the rest of the gang do have an advantage. They’re fortunate, though, that Apple hasn’t stepped up to deal a deathblow. Apple’s university program so far is strictly marketing, with no extra bonuses to students who use their services.)

Offer these things, and the gates of the mighty ivory tower will be lowered to receive you willingly.

Of course, if you don’t want to offer students a carrot, you can just keep on banging away at them with your big stick. To a certain extent, vigorous enforcement through legal intimidation may be a deterrent for some would-be pirates. A certain capability to threaten major rights violators is necessary, because some people are going to steal no matter how good a deal they’re offered. Of course, there’s another school of thought that says if you’ve criminalized the behavior of the majority, you’re probably going about solving the problem in the wrong way.

Unfortunately, by publicly rubbing in the 800 settlements reached and the 4000 lawsuits they've brought forward, the RIAA has presented itself like a modern Sheriff of Nottingham, allowing the Peer-to-Peer bandits to play at being Robin Hood. The under-30 demographic doesn't feel sorry for the big bad corporate interests. (They don't have corporate jobs yet.) The recording industry has made it clear that it isn’t pro-consumer, striving aggressively to meet the demands of music fans. They've been recalcitrant luddites, dragged kicking and screaming through every minor change in the marketplace. Using the long 2x4 of the law is their prerogative, but each battle won against young consumers is a pyrrhic victory. They think they’re fighting theft, but all they’re doing is driving the self-perceived Merry Men to hide deeper in Sherwood Forest, where they gleefully dance to looted copies of Modest Mouse.

For the pro-RIAA view of the Napster & higher education story, see "Colleges Rally Against Music Piracy" in the eCommerce Times.

For the vehement opposition, see "More universities agree to RIAA/Napster 'protection'" at The Register.

If you were interested enough to read this article, I assume you're already familiar with Lawrence Lessig. But just in case you aren't, see lessig.org

The Pedagogy Paradox: why we talk about everything but teaching

2004-09-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

It's a great feeling to be a part of an institution that values intense interaction between faculty and students. Now that I've made my loyalty clear, I'm about to break ranks. Please forgive me, my professorial friends.

Even at the finest undergraduate institutions, there are instructors with poor classroom skills. There! Somebody has finally said it in public.

Even instructors with pretty good instructional technique could benefit from the ability to understand more about how instructional methods affect student learning.

Even fantastic instructors have sometimes come by their prowess intuitively, so they don't necessarily have the vocabulary for explaining their practices to others. These instructors are trained to be expert psychologists, mathematicians, or religious scholars, but their methods may be a talent. Perhaps they rely on their ability to replicate the practices that their own favorite teachers used.

If we accept the premise that educational method is a domain of applied social science, I've always found it curious how conspiratorial those in higher education can be about placing practitioners in a field that so few have actually studied. I've always suspected that the root of academia's unwritten code of silence is the fear that smart people have of being exposed for not knowing. Why do our high-powered students underutilize reference librarians as they research? Why are so many students afraid to ask questions in class when they're confused? Is it that admitting that you lack mastery, that you simply don't know something, is a taboo within a subculture that one can only enter by proving that you are a member of the knowledge elite? One has to muster a great deal of courage to say, "I need help." Scratch the surface a little and you expose a great paradox for a community that's supposed to be about learning. Even among our intellectual elite, we've still managed to create cultural barriers that stifle the vitality of inquisitiveness. Shame is a great enemy of curiosity.

That's the dark side. On the brighter side, many students appreciate their interpersonal interactions with faculty and peers more than any other aspect of their college educations. One often hears comments from students about how much they value what they've learned from other students--everything from vigorous dining hall discussions to sudden revelations in a match clinic or lab group. There is also something to be said for being at an institution that strives to focus on undergraduate learners, even if it doesn't always live up to its full promise.

The difference-maker between the two sides of the pedagogy paradox is trust. We do not make ourselves vulnerable unless we feel safe to do so. When trust exists between the members of a learning community, when people feel free to take social risks, when the room doesn't contain a potential for ridicule, both students and faculty will engage more openly. Surely, there are other factors that have an impact on educational effectiveness. Nevertheless, sparking inquiry and investigation is the critical first step for any educational process that has hopes of going beyond mere informational transfer into original analysis and synthesis. This is the very heart of the liberal arts education. I have seen first hand how well it can work, but I also know that sometimes it doesn't.

An effective system for students to evaluate courses is an important tool that faculty need, even if they fear it. Such evaluations have to be designed to induce appropriate responses at the right time. After a course has been completed, it's fine to know how it went. It would be even better to do an evaluation mid-course, when there is still time to address problems that students are having. Evaluation, like any form of job performance, is only worthwhile if it allows you to change the future.

Some schools have more formalized ways of addressing the quality of instruction. At some, centers for teaching and learning conduct programs to expose faculty to relevant educational theory and help them work on their pedagogical methods. Duke has even dividing the faculty into those who teach and those who research. (See the article on the Chronicle of Higher Education on Professors of the Practice.) Of course, that model probably wouldn't work at small, undergraduate-only institutions. There's also something potentially lost when teaching no longer informs research and vice versa.

I sincerely believe that all academics who teach would benefit from having a basic conversance in educational theory. Having taken the core Education course sequence at Swarthmore a few years ago, I believe from my own experience that you don't have to go to work on an Ed.D. to grapple productively with multiple intelligence theory or understand learning styles. Dabbling in constructivist learning principles can be both fun and useful. Understanding the notion of creating a community of learners within the classroom might help instructors to foment the kind of trust within the classroom that encourages honest group learning. After all, if college is supposed to be more advanced than being at high school, good college instructors might be helped by knowing at least what good secondary teachers know.

It's ultimately not about reading the right articles. It's about access to support. Every institution should have a program of training, support for professional development, avenues to get mentorship, or at least a standing forum for discussing classroom practices. In rare moments of candor, faculty friends have told me that they are left to their own devices when it comes to their pedagogical practices. You do a disservice to any professional when you put them in a circumstance that's not designed for their success.

Why should I care, and what place am I in to raise these questions? I don't teach undergraduates, so I hardly consider myself the most appropriate person to broach the topic. But I do have a reason.

We academic technologists are supposed to be helping faculty with technologies that aid pedagogy. But how we can we talk about pedagogical uses for technology if we can't talk about pedagogy? A lot of the tools that we have to offer right now are really not effective educational tools unless the instructor has a committed strategy for employing them within a framework to exploit their possibilities. Course management systems, blogs, and wikis can be used in rather shallow ways, or they can be essential collaboration tools. Everything comes back to whether the professor has given thought to building the community of learners within a class or seminar. If a blog, discussion board, team GIS project or video production supports group inquiry, they can be exciting capstone activities.

The problem is discussing the difficult pedagogical topics, which I think I know a little about, but with a lot of limitations. People who teach need to learn from people who teach. My niche is but a small aspect of the bigger picture. Nevertheless, I'd love to be a part of building a community of learners who were studying about building communities of learners.

How do we make that happen?

Thinking too much about the Apple iMac G5 design

2004-09-01T23:14:00.000-04:00

We purchase a lot of Macs around here. There was a time when Swarthmore was an all-Mac shop. Even though we've been a dual-platform shop for a long time now, and our tech shop is happily agnostic about platform choice, about three quarters of our faculty stuck with the Mac. Since I'm heavily involved in the business of selecting and purchasing the equipment for labs, classrooms, and faculty/staff desktops, I tend to pay attention to the big changes in Apple's product lines.

The new iMac G5 was just introduced with barely a murmur; Jobs is in cancer recovery and couldn't do one of his "insanely great" pitch jobs to introduce the new model. Furthermore, a production snafu resulted in a product delay right as we entered the back-to-school buying season. It's obvious that the iMac doesn't fill the central role in the product line that it once did. I think the Wall Street Journal reporters had it right: the iMac is now serving as a chic crossover product for the millions of happy iPod users. Trendy industrial design is part of the Apple mystique, so they always have to up the stakes with each new version of the product, even if the change isn't really an improvement. The iMac has become the concept car of the Macintosh family. "Look, it comes in yummy colors." "Look, it's a desk lamp." "Look, it's a laptop on a stick!"

On the plus side, the new iMac is a G5, so we'll benefit from the performance increase. The small footprint and flat casing will also make this iMac a nice solution for labs and classrooms where table space is at a premium. Still, from a pure design standpoint, I don't think there's any way I'll consider the new form factor an improvement. I use the current 17" iMac every day at work. On the basis of ergonomic design alone, it's the best computer I've ever used. It's a simple thing, but the monitor on a swing arm makes a huge difference to me. As I adjust my seating throughout the day, the monitor moves with me to remain at perfect eye level. If I want to stand for a minute, no problem. As I roll along the work surface of my desk, I can aim the iMac display so that I can continue to reference my open windows.

If it ain't broke, you don't fix it. Unfortunately, that's not an option for Apple. Apple markets its design and engineering superiority, so it has to constantly eat its young to demonstrate its ability to revolutionize the product line. Usually we ooh and aah at what they dream up. Every once in a while we laugh at it. (The Cube, anyone?) But in this case I wish we could just say "Stop. You already had it right." When it's time for my swing-arm iMac to retire, I think I'm really going to miss it. Maybe that's just me.

Another year, another cravat

2004-08-30T22:58:00.000-04:00

It's the start of the academic year. Aside from the annual confusions with student network registrations, this can only mean one thing. I put on one of these things as part of my annual tradition. I don't think I've ever been required to wear a tie or jacket while working at the college. So I've gotten in the habit of wearing one on the first day of classes as a way of marking the passage of time. It's the little things that show we care, after all.

As this is an anniversary of a sort, it is a fine time for reflection and anticipation. Academic years are well-defined units of time, punctuated by long breaks. When a year ends, we sweep a lot of unfinished business under the rug. As the new year begins, we launch into new initiatives. The big interruptions that happen along the way only really hurt if we're in session. When you add all of this up, years tend to take on themes in my memory.

Last year, the theme was network security and stability. We started the year with Blaster32, and ended it with Sasser. In between, we suffered through connection-hungry P2P applications and an angry, exhausted student reaction to the steps taken to counteract the various infiltrations. Caught trying to fight on two fronts—the technical battle with worms and buffer overruns, and a campaign of ideas to convince students to adopt better practices with their personal computers (or else!)—the I.T. staff struggled to keep its spirits up. Why, your humble servant had to set aside a lot of forward-directed work to churn out an endless stream of announcements and presentations on such uplifting topics as data backups. I got off easy compared to the trench fighters in networking, systems administration, and the help desk.

After a summer spent primping and priming the network, the faculty and administration looked to us expectantly for reassurance that the problems of last year wouldn't resurface. We know things should be much better. But nobody is foolish enough to promise a trouble-free network, just as you'll not hear any member of the national security community promise that there will never be another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. That sort of thing just isn't done. It invites trouble.

Nevertheless, let's raise a cup of cheer, hoping that 2004-05 will be more productive. On Friday, I picked up an assignment to head up the College's ad hoc committee on content management strategies for our web site. With increased interest in our portal environment and murmurs of faculty wanting to get involved in blogging and other forms of online communication, maybe this will be the Year of Vastly Successful Web Publishing Initiatives.

It doesn't hurt to dream.

Confessions of a former PowerPoint user

2004-08-29T09:00:00.000-04:00

As I seem to get some hits to this site through a mention I got from Tim Burke in one of his posts, I thought I'd offer a quick response to something he said about PowerPoint. (Tim doesn't have comment capability on his site yet, but we're working on it.)

The main argument against PowerPoint, best made by Edward Tufte in "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," and best illustrated by Peter Norvig's parody, is that its low resolution restricts presenters to an unacceptably low rate of information transfer. There are tons of other problems with PowerPoint, but nothing is so damning as restricting a presenter to showing minimal evidence and boiled-down ideas.

Since Tim so graciously said that I'd enlightened him, I figure I'd better finish the job. He said in his post:

"The PowerPoint thing is never going to work for humanities scholars. We don't have highly concretized knowledge that we can deliver in bullet points to an audience where the novelty or contribution of our work is going to be retained at all in that compressed form. Scientists and maybe some hard social scientists really can say, 'Ok, we found out something that we didn't know before, and here's the facts, in the most efficient form we can deliver them to you'. Humanists almost never can do the same."

I think he misestimates scientists and social scientists, because their work especially cannot be delivered well in bullet points, as Tufte has shown in his analysis of both shuttle disasters. Scientific evidence is hard to cram into the tiny screen real estate of a PowerPoint slide. All disciplines need to be able to express narrative, and PowerPoint is terrible at all but the simplest forms of narrative. If you really want to show an audience the most interesting, beautiful, and persuasive fruits of research, the most efficient form for doing so is probably paper.

For all my future presentations, my basic plan is to put important data and notes on handouts. My speech will be focused on conveying narrative. (I was a theater major in college. I can tell stories.) I have a hunch that I won't ever need to use PowerPoint again. There's an uplifting thought.

Complexity of scope and integration

2004-08-21T18:07:00.000-04:00

A presentation I gave on integration of web services in Pasadena a few months ago caused me to reflect on the ways in which academic computing has changed in the ten years that I've been involved in the field. The superficial answer isn't wrong in this case: web, web, and more web. When I first got in the game, academic computing was mostly about two things: computer labs and specialized desktop applications to address niche academic needs. Our focus on relationships with individual members of the faculty far outweighed our focus on our relationship with THE faculty. Those traditional roles still exist, but they account for a much smaller portion of our work. The world wide web changed the technology ecology in a way that forced rapid evolutionary adaptation in technologists. One year, let's call it 1993, we were just trying to facilitate specialized activities to address specialized needs. Within the span of time it takes for an undergraduate to get a degree, we were expected to enable everybody, everywhere, to access and use just about everything.

The never ending demand for web services has forced the world of academic computing to undergo a form of industrial revolution in the last few years. Where we once could work on a series of small projects to help faculty get their personal documents or learning objects on the web—not that we called them learning objects until a few years ago—we now are focused, even obsessed, with scalability issues that can only be addressed with mass production. Thus, we have seen the explosion in "XYZ Management Systems." We're in the age of automated course site construction, digital asset management, and syndicated content. Although they're separate products, these web management systems are really just variations on a theme: automagic web content creation from backend databases.

One of the side effects the industrial revolution of information was the mainstreaming of academic computing. The old academic computing was often inhabited by odd ducks in the I.T. world. Our new focus on enterprise systems has turned us into closer colleagues with the traditional administrative computing types--database administrators, sysadmins, and programmers. Likewise, our colleagues are being drawn into the academic computing world because their skills are being leveraged for projects outside their traditional realms of finance, fundraising, and human resources.

It's all simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. I drew up the diagram below for my Pasadena presentation. It shows the various layers of web management systems that I.T. and I.S. organizations in higher education are currently involved in managing and—more importantly—integrating.The intersecting vertical and horizontal lines are merely my suggestion that these systems and services (along with many others not shown) usually realize their maximum value when they are integrated with each other across and between the levels I've identified. LDAP data about people not only populate scheduling and commerce systems, but they are also useful for defining permissions to alter content in a course management system or customize one's personal views on the campus portal. Images and documents in digital asset management systems are needed in course management systems. And portals? They need to integrate with everything. That's their raison d'être.

Of course, few of these products interoperate out-of-the-box. Even in cases where an extensible architecture exists, it falls to consumers to build the connections between most of the web products they use. There are notable exceptions, of course. Blackboard, Inc. has a modular product line that allows their customers to buy integrated one-card, portal, and course management products. (Their products can also use an LDAP directory for authentication.) If Blackboard's offerings in those product classes fit your institution's needs, your implementation of each may be vastly simplified. Of course, if you subscribe to the full suite of Blackboard products, you have a frightening case of vendor-lock on your hands. There's a risk management scenario that somebody had better be thinking about strenuously before signing the contracts.

Each college and university meets its clients' demands for web services differently. We haven't yet seen the emergence of a software vendor for the academic community with designs or means to achieve total world domination. (Phew!) We are buying, building, leasing and integrating highly customized online environments for our communities. The investment of resources to realize our ambitions is huge, so the scope, mission and priorities for the institution's online existence deserves serious attention at all levels of institutional leadership. Each institution needs wise decision makers who know their communities as well as they know their technologies to help steer their organizations to the best expenditures of resources.

Enterprise computing in academia is a fascinatingly complex puzzle to work on. At long last, technology is as essential to our academic programs as it was fifteen years ago to our administrative offices. As a result, academic computing is finally as deeply woven into the central mission of higher education institutions as teaching and research are. That's a pretty interesting place to be.

Lessons learned about consortial collaboration

2004-08-11T18:00:00.000-04:00

Intercollegiate collaborations are a way of life at Swarthmore College. The Tri-college Consortium (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges) shares a unified library catalog and a single Blackboard server. The three schools also allow complete cross-registration for courses. Over the past decade, I have been highly involved in three grants funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, including two with the Trico and another with the bi-coastal Web Integration and Sustainability Project. I’ve supported other consortium grants, projects, and committees in support of the Tri-college libraries.

Today I’m going to summarize my observations about long-term collaborative processes between institutions. Before I profess, let me first disclaim. What follows is based on my experiences working within the niche of information technology and library organizations at small, U.S. colleges and universities. While I strongly suspect that many of my conclusions can be extrapolated to inter-organizational collaborations in other contexts, I cannot claim to know this from first-hand experience. I also need to reinforce that my conclusions about the collaborations I've mentioned are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the conclusions of anybody else involved.

The small college context sets the stage.
Technology workers at small colleges have a long tradition of sharing tools, strategies, and information with each other in a spirit of openness. Competitiveness at the level of the technology organization would be anathema to the membership of the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC), for instance. The sense of shared purpose and the investment in mutual success in this environment is a superb foundation for enabling intercollegiate collaboration.

Despite the receptiveness to collaboration, geographic dispersion and small size are ever-present obstacles in the way of successful collaborations. Unlike how such projects might be handled at larger institutions, small college collaborations rarely have participants whose sole job duties relate to the project at hand. There can be a tendency for consortium work to be seen as “extra work” beyond one’s “real job.” It’s inevitable that accountability and urgency will always be felt more directly for tasks at a worker’s home institution. Since most I.T. workers in higher education work with a degree of autonomy and self-direction, inter-institutional projects will always be a kind of optional work. Even if an individual may be recognized for exceptional contributions to an intercollegiate partnership, the consequences for failure to address local demand are more immediate and painful. There is a large “when push comes to shove” factor for partners outside a participants home institution. These challenges are greatly compounded when the colleagues competing for a worker’s time are thousands of miles away in a different time zone.

Institutional rationale matters most in the planning phase
Organizational leadership must value the participation of its employees in collaborative efforts for the levels of collaboration to be sustained. Staff will typically bias their efforts to achieve success in areas that they perceive to be valued by others. Senior managers are also vulnerable to the same “when push comes to shove” scenarios as the people who report to them. Consequently, collaboration depends on organizations willing to structure themselves for success. Senior managers need to realistically consider their ability to commit sufficient staff resources to the project. They must be sure that staff time can be freed up to enable their participation in the project; that there is appropriate accountability for the completion of project tasks; that other priorities are not likely to overwhelm the team.

The best collaborative projects are those that are difficult to accomplish but that strongly align with institutional priorities. Because of the difficulties inherent in collaborative efforts, shared projects should be scrutinized from a cost-benefit perspective. The investment of resources to get multi-institutional projects off the ground is vastly greater, and the timelines to completion are longer. Planning and consensus-building are more complex. Travel and the reliance on asynchronous modes of communication (email, discussion groups) tend to slow the pace of work. Given the overhead of coordination and administration, participant organizations should focus on collaborative efforts that meet these two criteria:

The outcome of the project should be of vital strategic importance to the institution;

The need for project deliverables is sufficiently far into the future that the project can be completed by realistic deadlines.

To be more succinct, collaborative projects should be terribly important, but not urgent.

Who collaborates matters most in the execution phase.
Institutions in a consortium may set the course for a planned project, but collaboration takes place between people. From this simple statement, a slew of implications follow. Here are just a few examples:

Teamwork is enhanced by social bonds, which are harder to establish between people who don't share a common coffee urn. At the outset, collaborative projects that cross organizational boundaries need to allow for the creation of interpersonal connections. A sense of commonality, or even friendship, encourages accountability and responsiveness between team members. When organizing meetings of peers from different places, coordinators should build social time into the agenda.

Turnover has a profound effect on collaborative efforts, and is even harder to overcome than its effect within the local environment alone. When an employee leaves a position, work on any project will be delayed while a new person is recruited and brought up to speed. Because of the complexities I’ve already mentioned, a new employee may take even longer to build up to full participation in a process with outside collaborators.

Personal style plays a role in whether a particular contributor is inclined to approach a task in ways that reflect and reinforce collaboration. While we can strive to expand any repertoire, a project leader must acknowledge that we often have highly effective employees in our midst whose jobs do not require frequent collaboration on large-scale projects. If advanced communication skills and an orientation toward working collaboratively are needed for important projects, those "soft" skills should be explicitly sought when contemplating assignments or hiring decisions. If an existing employee with a back-office orientation to their work needs to contribute to a collaborative process, he or she may need explicit guidance, support, or encouragement from a project manager.

The institutions invited to collaborate should be sought out for the skill compatibility of the most-likely staff contributors. These personnel factors turn out to be more important than bureaucratic similiarity between institutions. Five schools of similar size and selectivity with very different technical environments will not get as far on a programming project as would five schools with different College guide profiles who had all made strategic commitments to PHP/MySQL and XML development.

Process lessons learned
Make somebody responsible for nurturing the collaboration. Projects inevitably reach roadblocks or stalling points. At these times, it’s important to have people whose built-in role is to reinvigorate the process. Although there are certain things we might do differently, I think one of the most successful strategies of the WISP project was the naming of a so-called “Ops-manager” at each institution. These people were charged with checking on the progress of various working groups and encouraging contributions to group activities.

There is no substitute for being in the same place at the same time. Forget videoconferencing. It’s a technology that has its place, but for the kind of long-term work discussed here, it’s a terribly stale mode of communication. The WISP group settled on a three-tiered approach that seemed to work as well as we could make it. We used a Blackboard site to manage day-to-day questions and document sharing, and to coordinate simple administrative tasks. Regular telephone conference calls helped to keep momentum going in small stages. Most importantly, two to three times a year, we punctuated our efforts with meetings or workshops. The greatest leaps forward always surrounded our gatherings, which reinforces the importance of both building community and creating time to focus on the project.

Design the process to account for unequal participation. The WISP project spent a lot of time struggling to agree on the selection of tools and priorities. This difficulty was exacerbated by our early reliance on task forces that had representation of all four schools. Since flexibility and speed are already at a premium in a group process, it would have been more productive to envision our collaboration as a series of smaller projects, some of which might have formed organically where any two or more participants shared a common interest that they wished to pursue. For a long-standing collaboration, I strongly encourage a more dynamic, modular structure over a more lumbering, bureaucratic one. The Tri-college was faced with an interesting situation recently, which demonstrates how success does not require everybody to be on the same wagon. All three schools share a common Blackboard server hosted at Swarthmore College. Two of the schools wanted to also license the Blackboard Portal. Rather than exert effort trying to persuade the participation of the third school, the first two went about licensing Portal on their own. The third school is welcome to join the party at any time, but in the meantime, the schools that were ready to move forward have not been slowed down by a need for absolute consensus.

Here concludes the brain dump on issues of intercollegiate collaboration. Please add your own ideas in the comments section for this post.

More on ARTstor interoperability

2004-08-05T17:30:00.000-04:00

Joan Beaudoin at Bryn Mawr College directed me to a piece about ARTstor that was published in the most recent edition of the VRA Newsletter. Here you will find ARTstor's plan for interoperability, as outlined by Barbara Rockenbach, Assistant Director of Library Relations at ARTstor.

This is a very discouraging statement to read.

The first problem is that a full two-thirds of ARTstor's interoperability strategy doesn't involve any interoperability. Exporting a low-resolution image isn't interoperability. Stable URL's are a good thing, but they’re not interoperability either. When a professor has to take her personal images and manually add them to an off-line ARTstor viewer, she's not reaping the benefits of interoperability. In fact, anything that doesn't mention or imply an Application Programmer's Interface (API) isn't interoperability. Applications have to speak to each other, which requires that their programmers write the code that enables transactions between them.

The second problem is that the interoperability ARTstor is planning to build doesn't actually help our primary candidates for ARTstor use. The possibility of seeing ARTstor metadata and thumbnails in the Luna Insight client is useful for occasional research activities, but is insufficient for the core activities of professors and students.

The final problem with ARTstor's approach is its self-centeredness. You may be able to search your local images from the ARTstor someday. Maybe next year they'll even offer image hosting, which dodges interoperability by offering the monolithic solution. In both cases, you can use ARTstor images, but only in ARTstor. (By the way, the pilot projects they are hosting this year are static collections. They won't be modifiable by collections managers, which is an essential level of control for visual resources departments.) Neither of these solutions is even available today.

I have been working under the assumption that the Mellon Foundation sponsored this project with neither of these expected outcomes:

create a dud product that receives a lukewarm response from the higher education community; nor
create a monopolistic software vendor that squeezes commercial and educational/not-for-profit alternatives out of the marketplace.

The former outcome is possible, as I obviously think this interoperability issue is a bigger elephant in the room than ARTstor is currently acknowledging. As frightened as I am that ARTstor might fail, at the moment I'm almost as worried that it will succeed with its current strategy. If most schools eventually capitulate their freedom to select their preferred asset management tools in the name of having a complete teaching collection, the other offerings will eventually wither on the vine. This is especially sad, since ARTstor's image display tools are bested by the capabilities of a slew of other products.

In short, ARTstor is a perfect example of bureaucratic product design where the purveyors failed to understand how the end user would use their product. If they had put the needs of the teacher ahead of the needs of the collector, the ARTstor product would have been built upon an entirely different foundation—ARTstor would be unswervingly focused on getting their images into our slide shows and study sets.

An example of the right way to build a service comes to us from our friends at Apple. The genius of Apple's iTunes Music store wasn't the software interface or the integration with the iPod player. Jobs' masterstroke was that he convinced the conservative rights holders (record labels) that they needed to sign off on terms of agreement that were liberally in favor of the consumers who would pay for the music. Apple understood its customer and built a business plan around it.

If anybody reading this is from the visual resources or library communities or is an instructor who teaches with images, I encourage you to lend your support to the effort to bring about a change in ARTstor’s interoperability directions. Post comments here at Think Thunk. Better yet, put the word out in any appropriate venues you frequent.

ARTstor: the fine line between transformative resource and expensive doodad

2004-08-03T18:15:00.000-04:00

This is the incomplete tale of good people whose hard work could fail to accomplish much. (Anybody who has served on a committee will recognize some elements of THAT archetype.) This version of the retelling is particularly sad, because the work that's being done is terribly important. Like a farmer with a bumper crop of wheat who cannot deliver his surplus to starving regions to the south because he only knows how to ship his grain via a westbound train, so now are the well-intentioned people at ARTstor managing to miss their mark within the academic community.

Background
ARTstor is a non-profit organization funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its core activity since it was created in 2001 has been the creation of the Digital Library Collection. In the intervening span, they've managed to collect several hundred thousand digital images of art objects with their corresponding meta-data. That's an amazing accomplishment by itself.

Why would they bother to do such a thing? The advent of viable digital formats for all sorts of media is a boon for educational institutions. The analog/physical world of traditional libraries has a lot of attendant problems; most notable among these are access and preservation challenges. The Mellon Foundation had come to the rescue of libraries before with the wildly successful JSTOR project. By digitizing the back issues of hordes of scholarly journals (431 as of July, 2004), academic libraries were suddenly able to subscribe to a gigantic reservoir of full-text articles. Their patrons gained greater access, while the libraries were now able to make selective decisions about which journals to preserve in bound form on their shelves.

A similar problem exists in the area of images. Most schools that teach art history have assembled enormous collections of images to support the teaching needs of their faculty. These images are usually in the form of 35mm slides. While slides are a high-resolution medium, they have problems. The most common problem relates to preservation—they slowly turn magenta after a number of years. They also have the inherent problem that their physical form curtails access by multiple simultaneous users. (You know, like students.) Furthermore, the slides are kept separately from their meta-data, which hampers browsing, finding, and research.

Even a small College like Swarthmore has 200,000 slide images, with an annual accession rate that averages around 10,000 images per year. Building the digital collection of our future is not a small problem, even if it is one that mostly affects a small department. Consider also that many of our other programs would benefit from a greater ability to build or access image collections that connect to their own teaching and research.

The academic community has largely acknowledged that our future with respect to collecting images will be done predominantly in digital form. The hardware and software tools necessary to scan, photograph, manipulate, catalogue, and display digital images have collectively reached a level of quality that is appropriate for the academy. The bottleneck is the re-creation and re-description of the images themselves. If Swarthmore only has the resources to manage the accession of 10,000 new images a year, how will it ever keep up with new demand while converting its previous twenty years of collected images?

This is the gap that we all hoped ARTstor would fill. By offering colleges and universities a collection of several hundred thousand images of canonical (and semi-canonical) works, we could be given the head start we so desperately need. Then, rather than collect everything from scratch, we could focus locally on converting and acquiring those images that were needed to address the curricular specialties of our programs. The alternative is a dreadfully inefficient process in which every institution scans or buys the same image of Renoir's bathers and Michelangelo's David, piece-by-piece.

This is the information age, so we shouldn't have to resort to medieval methods for collecting.

The Hitch
The education community needs an ARTstor collection that can serve as the core of our collection development strategy, whether or not that is what ARTstor intended to create. Of course, ARTstor can't be a replacement for institution-specific collections. No matter how broad the ARTstor collection, it cannot provide adequate depth to support all courses. If you're teaching an upper level course on Buddhist temple architecture or Islamic painting, you're not going to find sufficient materials in ARTstor for your lectures and student study sets. ARTstor also has a conspicuous absence of 20th century artworks due to intellectual property constraints.

For this single reason, we must insist that ARTstor offer interoperability with other digital asset management systems designed for image collections, such as Luna Insight and MDID. These are the kinds of applications that visual resource organizations use to construct their own teaching collections.

Teachers who teach with images have a variety of requirements for the asset management systems they use to organize and display images. (If you're interested, you can download a checklist of requirements we drew up for our product search at the Tri-College Consortium.) Among these, there's one overriding deal breaker: all the images for a lecture have to be sequenced and displayed seamlessly from a single source. Unusual exceptions can always be made, but no professor wants to toggle back and forth between multiple sources during a lecture. Teachers of art history move through slides on a slide carousel with practiced fluidity; their digital substitutes won't be used if they create frequent distractions for the instructor and students. The focus must be on the art, not on distractive technology used to show it.

At long last, this is the tragic flaw in our hero, ARTstor. ARTstor's database is not interoperable with other digital image management systems. They have created a database on our behalf, but have inexplicably locked it up in an information silo that makes it almost useless for its most important consumers. You can do everything with ARTstor images that you need to do for most teaching purposes, with the single, depressing exception that you can't include images from other image collections. Nor can you use your MDID or Insight client to perform a federated search across your local collections and ARTstor images. (The latter of these approaches is greatly preferable. Decisions about tools and content should be kept as separate as possible.) Consequently, it is still impossible for an instructor to sequence a simple slideshow of images from these multiple sources.

The situation calls for an open API that would allow any ARTstor subscriber to use its digital asset management system of choice to query the ARTstor image set and display resulting images side-by-side with locally collected images. Unfortunately, that is not the strategy that ARTstor appears to be pursuing.

The shame of the situation is not that ARTstor can't deliver their images through third party systems. Luna Imaging had a small pool of testers who were accessing the ARTstor collections through Insight, but I have been advised that this access was suspended recently. Other developers are willing and able to build the necessary enhancements into their software. The explanation I've been given is that ARTstor is concerned about legal issues that could arise by allowing this type of remote access. To this I can only respond that if they've just trying to figure out that problem now, they've waited years too long to start. It is a total failure to understand higher education's needs not to have built interoperable access into the specifications for the product at the outset. It's as if the organization has spent years trying to figure out how to deliver a gazillion images to its consumers without giving any thought to how the consumers actually use images. If that's really the case, ARTstor is a (non-profit) business with a bad business model.

Conclusion
Colleges like ours have been in a holding pattern for years because we were waiting for ARTstor, waiting for ARTstor, and still waiting for ARTstor. (Apologies to Samuel Beckett.) We can't afford to wait another year or two for this problem to be solved. Everybody I've talked to in the visual resources and academic computing communities has expressed a similar perception that ARTstor has a lot of promise, but is painfully slow to deliver on it.

This interoperability issue is the whole ballgame. Sadly, ARTstor must resolve it or be irrelevant. Other application and business model developments are wasted efforts in the meantime until this barrier is removed. I sincerely hope that ARTstor can be persuaded to make this the first priority of the organization. Although I have been critical of their pace and direction here, I especially want to emphasize that the entire visual resources community is rooting for the success of their effort. How could we not? They're our reluctant champions in waiting.

The iTunes "Heavy Rotation" list for August

2004-08-02T17:21:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm one of those iTunes junkies.

One of my smart playlists tracks the playcounts of the songs I've added to my iTunes collection in the last 100 days. It gives a nice little peek into the music that I've recently discovered (or rediscovered). For the last 100 days, here are the Top 10 tracks on the Heavy Rotation list:

"Unsatisfied" The Replacements
"The Other Side of This Life" David Byrne
"Take the Skinheads Bowling" Camper Van Beethoven
"Don't Say Nuthin'" The Roots
"Gay Messiah" Rufus Wainwright
"Hound Dog" Big Mama Thornton
"Our Lips Are Sealed" Bikeride
"Free" The Donavon Frankenreiter Band
"Walk Idiot Walk" The Hives
"What's Happenin'" Method Man & Busta Rhymes

I love swapping tips with fellow music lovers, so feel free to drop a line with any scoops you have on the next new great thing.

Academic Rock Stars

2004-07-31T20:18:00.000-04:00

Having recently finished his Visual Explanations and The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, I was thrilled to have the opportunity on Thursday to attend Edward Tufte's one-day course: Presenting Data and Information.

For those of you unfamiliar with Tufte, you owe it to yourselves to explore one (or more) of his texts. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information has been a definitive text since, well, I was in kindergarten. His self-published volumes are works of art in their own right, packed densely with rich examples of how evidence can be made perfectly self-evident (or mangled beyond hope of salvage) through design choices. Personally charismatic, his courses draw hundreds of enthusiastic attendees. If the field of analytical design could be said to have a rock star, Tufte is that figure.

With a mild embarrassment, I joked to colleagues that I was going to "bask in the warm glow of a guru." In truth, I was really enthusiastic. I'm not a data jock, but my job has a lot to do with publishing on-line information and presenting data and information to faculty, administrators, and I.T. colleagues. I admire Tufte's ideas, and probably have sounded a little gushy to those who've heard me talking about his most recent works. Hence, my embarrassment. In the world of high-powered academia, you're violating a cultural norm if you sound too impressed with anybody. You're supposed to be able to muster a clever-yet-mild criticism of nearly anybody's work.

Tufte is quite decent to spend all of his break times and periods before and after the class to answer individual questions from lines of attendees in what he cutely calls his "office hours." In truth, it's a line for book signing; while we're there, I think everybody feels the need to ask or say something smart. I know I did. When I arrived at the front of the line, I asked something like this: "Your work is so focused on the visual presentation of information. What accommodations do you think are reasonable to make for people with visual impairments?" I wasn't really driving at his take on the Americans with Disabilities Act or Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (although I got one). I just wanted to know what practices he thought were reasonable.

The professor spoke disparagingly of standards-making processes that result from legal mandates. I can relate to this. Standards-making in the computing and engineering fields are essential, even if the number of things that must be regulated is staggering. Unfortunately, standards bodies and their processes are prone to every bureaucratic and commercial mangling you can think of. Relatively speaking, it's a strange duck who actually gets enthusiastic about participating in an ISO or IEEE standards body.

Tufte is an aesthete of the highest order, and that's what appeals to most of us about him. He encourages his audiences to defend our data from those who would misprint or mishandle it--including ourselves. So it's not surprising that he dislikes anybody telling him to compromise his professional standards to meet a "lowest common denominator." Still I was somewhat taken aback to hear how far he carried his philosophy. "I can understand that people want ramps to go in and out of buildings, but on the other hand, those ramps have f***'ed up a lot of great architecture."

"Surely," I asked, "there's some price in aesthetics that we have to be willing to pay to make sure that we don't exclude a significant part of our population from participating in society." Corona in hand, he looked away with a mild look of dismay at having to tolerate such heresy. He then politely directed me to Jakob Nielsen's usability site. Fair enough.

I wasn't offended by the exchange. It was a little surprising at first, but when I thought about it a minute after walking away, I realized that a world-class visual designer really doesn't want to be concerned with anything other than world-class visual design. My question was probably directed to the wrong person. When it comes to design, I'm aware that I'm more of a pragmatist than an aesthete. (That's probably a false dichotomy, but play along with the point for now.) It's not any (academic) rock star's job to live up to any of my expectations other than the one that I should hear a good show, which is precisely what I got.

So, What DO you do?

2004-07-30T17:31:00.000-04:00

"What do you do?"
"I work in computing at Swarthmore College."
"Oh, you teach?"
"No."
"So, what do you do?"

[Pause.]

I'm sure everybody has a mundane question that pops up in conversation more often than they'd like to answer it. For some, it might be "How are you?" (If you're depressed, going through a breakup, just lost your job, have been diagnosed with a serious illness.) For others, it might have to do with some aspect of their appearance. "What does that tattoo mean?"

For the contemporary "knowledge worker" with a somewhat unusual field, "what I do" can be an exhausting question to answer. People can relate to some kinds of information technology jobs from their own contexts. If I worked at a help desk or did computer training, for instance, I wouldn't be so hard to figure out.

The accurate answer is the one I've stopped giving. At least, I've stopped giving it to anybody who doesn't work in higher education:

"I head the team of people who assist faculty (and librarians and students) with their curricular and research computing problems."
[Puzzled look.]
"We run the servers that students use to pick up their online readings and assignments from their professors; we help people learn how to use statistical software, multimedia, databases, and the web for their research; we help faculty start up new computing projects; and we run a bunch of computing classrooms and labs."
[Stare.]
"Well, okay then...." they respond, as if to follow with, "I'm going to stand over there now."

The funniest reaction I've ever gotten to my description was from one of my father's cousins, an intermittent farmer. After hearing my spiel, he translated to his wife "He's the kind of guy that could write a program that would calculate how much silage you need to hold the corn for your livestock." I didn't want to embarrass him by pointing out that you didn't need to write a program to solve a problem that required, at worst, a calculator. I instead said, "Well, I'm not really a programmer, but I could probably work up something in a spreadsheet to help you figure that out easily."

Let's be clear about this, I have a great job. Whereas many I.T. jobs push people into defined specialties, tending to an entire college curriculum gives you lots of avenues of exploration. One morning, I'm forced to brush up on digital video to assist an anthropologist. Two hours later, I'm meeting with a visual resources librarian to solve the challenges of databasing thousands of art images for teaching. After lunch, I could be talking with a colleague about problems with the equation editor in our course management system. That conversation might end with an update on how updates of the UNIX systems are going in an Engineering lab.

Unfortunately, the Coolness Quotient of my job is not easily discerned in small talk. Sometimes, I feel a little sheepish about my limitations to explain what I do. I'm convinced that a lot of people have walked away from me thinking, "That's a job?"

I've got a new response now.

"So what do you do?"
"Email and meetings."
[Flash a disarming smirk.]

It usually gets a chuckle in response. The scary part is, it's not that much of a reductionism.