Techfoot

Saint Richard (Dick) Bolles, author of What Color is Your Parachute and founder of the concept of “life-work designing” suggests that one key step in preparing for an uncertain future is to sit down at the end of each week and answer one fundamental question: “what have I done this week that added more value to my organization than I took away from it?

As fallible human beings, all of us will have weeks when we take away more than we give, but if that becomes a pattern, we’re in danger of either losing our jobs or wasting our lives in doing work that’s not really meaningful to us. Saint Richard believes that if we find ourselves in that situation we either change the way we do our jobs or that we change the jobs themselves. (We’ve seen several of our colleagues in the blogosphere make those kinds of changes over the last year or so.)

One of the hardest things for those of us in the academic IT world is to figure out actual value we add to our institutions. In some strategic planning work that I’m doing, we’re trying to identify a few fundamental questions that we think need to be addressed by the institution in evaluating the importance of technology in teaching and learning. Here’s one of the first that I’m proposing:

Ongoing studies by the Pew, Kaiser and MacArthur foundations suggest that students entering our colleges today bring fundamentally different expectations, thinking styles–even basic literacies–than generations before. To what extent to you agree with that assertion?

As I’ve been raising that question with colleagues, responses have ranged from “Duh” to “Poppycock”–though most are quick to identify at least surface changes in classroom behavior, etiquette or expectations. Few are as convinced that these changes are as essential or significant as some of us in the technology arena believe they are. One potentially fruitful area of conversation is to try to come to some common understanding of the types of shifts we’re seeing in the capability of our students and the magnitude of those changes.

Technology Review: How Obama Really Did It

In 1992, Carville said, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’” Trippi says, recalling the exhortation of Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, James Carville. “This year, it was the network, stupid!

You have an entire generation of folks under age 25 no longer using
e-mails, not even using Facebook; a majority are using text messaging,”
All says. “I get Obama’s text messages, and every one is exactly what
it should be. It is never pointless, it is always worth reading, and it
has an action for you to take. You can have hundreds of recipients on a
text message. You have hundreds of people trying to change the world in
160 characters or less. What’s the SMS strategy for John McCain? None.”

One of the ongoing questions that I have about Web 2.0 applications is the extent to which they can contribute to solving real problems.   I wonder if our students understand that Facebook, mySpace, and the other sites that they use so effectively in their social lives have such enormous potential in the real world.  This article in the MIT Technology Review provides an extended treatment of how the basic tools of social networking can be tailored to meet the specific goals of a political campain–fundraising, canvassing, and communication.  “MyBo”, the Barack Obama networking site enrolled over a million members and is credited with raising record amounts of cash and delivering key primary wins that were essential to gaining the nomination.

MyBo offered a pretty amazing set of specific campaigning tools.  Powerful database queries allowed members to “slice and dice the geographic microdata” in ways that were previously only accessible to technically sophisticated political consultants.  The site, developed by Blue State Digital with the assistance of Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, represented “the ultimate online political machine.”  The power of the site comes from the integration of a suite of individual tools that had been tested in the earlier campaign of Howard Dean, into a coherent whole.

It’s long article, but well worth reading.  Like so many of the others, it challenges us to wonder how we might tap into this same kind of communicative power in ways that quickly leave our bloated CMS software behind.  It also challenges us to rethink what it means to be liberally educated in the 21st century–can a person being truly literate without understanding the potential impact on our culture of these commuity building and activiation tools?

re.web – The William & Mary Web Redesign

Andy DeSoto, a junior psychology major at William and Mary, has written a guide for students (and faculty) on how to use the new Tribe Voices tool to manage their presence on the web. He argues that a small investment of time can yield big benefits in 1) bringing an element of control about what readers see when they Google you, 2) increasing the reach of your community and 3) “tying up the loose ends” by pulling your digital footprints into one container.

Folks who want more features than those available with Tribe Voices can take a look at wmblogs, William and Mary’s wordpress multiuser solution.

Disclaimer: Both Tribe Voices and wmblogs require a William and Mary userid. Folks from outside the William and Mary community can easily get the same benefits by starting their personal space at WordPress.com or a similar service.

Andy provides a series of suggestions of ways to establish your web presence:

• Pick the right name (yours) for your site.
• Update regularly.
• Link freely.

He also suggests that folks do a little light reading on “search engine optimization”–which might be beyond what most folks are willing to invest in this process.

Read up on search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization, a multi-million dollar industry, is the science of improving the volume and quality of traffic your website receives. It’s a pretty technical topic, but worth a little bit of further reading. Take a look at Wayne Smallman’s Blah, Blah! Technology blog for some beginner articles.