As the center of your digital identity, your web site can give you of a fighting chance in creating a web presence that helps you accomplish your professional goals.  Your blog can provide a forum for narrating you work and help attract a community to inspire, challenge and expand your thinking.  It also can provide a way to save you some keystrokes.

As Jon Udell has pointed out, saving keystrokes can be very important, particularly if Scott Hansleman is right in his assessment:

There are a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die. Next time someone emails you, ask yourself “Is emailing this person back the best use of my remaining keystrokes?”

If you can communicate with more people with fewer keystrokes before you die–that’s a good thing.  I had the opportunity for the last few days to put the principle of conservation of keystrokes into practice, using another blog that I post to occasionally.  Earlier this week, William and Mary got hit with a particularly nasty phishing attack and a group of faculty accounts were compromised.  The resulting flood of spam resulted in William and Mary’s outgoing mail being blocked by most large ISP’s, including Blackberry.  Every time someone sent email to Blackberry, the mail bounced.  Every time the mail bounced, I got email asking what was going on with Blackberry.

Rather  than answer each one those emails individually, I made a quick post to the SoE blog, then I could direct email to that link rather than respond individually.  Using a blog entry works well in this case because I want to provide a little bit of the back story and show how important it is for all of us in the community to be involved if we want to protect our precious Internet.

Here’s a challenge for you to those of us in the EPPL 714 class.  Can you find a way–high tech or low tech–to invest 1 hour in learning something that will save you 5 hours over the next month?  Can you share it with 10 of your friends so that they can save some time, too? If an hour is too much, can you find a way to invest 10 minutes in something that will save you an hour?  ( Want a hint of a place to look?  If you use Microsoft Word, explore using named styles.)

We’ve worked closely with the folks at the Charles Center on a number of initiatives, including one focused on understanding the process of undergraduate research, and we’ve laid the groundwork even more expansive projects in the future. The grand plan for the next two years calls for our group to focus the time and resources that we’d been investing in the former Technology Integration Program on expanding the reach of the University Teaching Project. Our efforts in creating TIP had some very real successes, but we never achieved the kind of seamless integration that we had hoped for.

In practical terms, we’re going to help develop a fully interactive web site that fosters communications and consolidates resources about teaching in a common location. We know that teaching is highly valued at WM, but a visitor from Mars would have to look pretty hard for evidence of our commitment. Efforts at teaching improvement have generally been highly personal and private–shared only with a few close colleagues and department members. Our goal is to keep the support for grassroots efforts at teaching improvement, closely tied to the individual classroom, while publicizing some of successes so that others can build on them. In the early stages of the project, we’ll focus on listening, gathering information and trying to understand what the teaching community of practice is really like.

We’re optimistic about the potential value of this partnership because of the strong alignment between our way of working in the academic computing group and that of Joel Schwartz, Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies:

I am a catalyst,” he said. “What a good teacher does is kind of catalyze thinking and productivity in students. Teaching is not something in which you have a student sit at your feet while you dispense wisdom down to them and they soak it into their heads. You try to help them become original, creative people.” (link)

Links

University Teaching Project

Back in my former life as a career counselor, one of my favorite articles was social psychologist Albert Bandura’s “The Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths”, a journal article that highlighted how often the intentional career planning advocated in college career centers was subverted by real-life events and choices. I’d often explain to students one main goal of all the work they were doing in the career preparation was to help them become much luckier in the job search. They’d be much more likely to find just the right contact, hear about the perfect job opening, or be offered a very special internship or summer job, if they were clear on what they were looking for.

The right contact, the perfect job, and the very special internship are defined by personal passions and interests; one student’s perfect summer job is another’s hell-hole. Identifying and owning your passion–even if it’s unusual or not popular in the press–for me is one of the key “ends of education”, and one that we all should be thinking more about.

So, some guy (Nick Petterssen, who it turns out wasn’t even a tech writer) working for a small software company (Electric Rain) cares enough about users to go way beyond what’s needed and write a killer, inviting, memorable user manual. As a direct result, an engineering student from Canada will end up as one of the youngest O’Reilly-signed authors. Nick, and Electric Rain, changed the direction of a user’s life in a substantial and unexpected way. All because of a manual.

If a user manual can have that impact on a student, imagine the possibilities for a class, a course or a curriculum.