November 2007 Archives

A week ago Tuesday, we had our triannual (?) ITS all-staff meeting. As we walked into the meeting, we were given a clicker. Penn State has chosen the Interwrite PRS RF clicker as our publishing company independent solution to student feedback. You can read more about clickers at the Penn State clicker support site.

We were told not to turn the clicker on until the demonstration later in the meeting. As explained in an earlier post, I turned it on immediately. As you can see from the images on the support site, the clicker has the digits 0-9, a decimal point, the letters A-E, a minus sign, a T, and an F button. What I was doing was checking the variety of inputs one could give after I stumbled across the code to the receiver. I think the main use of these are to vote given a multiple choice (i.e. A-E), or True/False question. The interesting thing is that there are other possibilities given the inputs:

1. An hexadecimal answer, e.g., FD230 (using the F from T/F)
2. An exponential answer, e.g., 6.022E23 (E to denote 10 to the power of)
3. Any number of computer geek words, e.g., D00D or DECAFBAD

The only downside of the exponential notation was I couldn't seem to use the minus sign to negate the exponent, e.g. –1.602E-19. Pressing the minus sign only seemed to change the sign of the mantissa (I admit I had to look this up) rather than the exponent.

I have no idea what the back end of this service looks like, but it seems to be an interesting technology.

I'll speak for myself, but I think what I'm saying is characteristic of what I'd call the "computer geek" persona.

Last week, Brian McDonald from MOR Associates was on campus for a IT Leadership Program (ITLP) alumni meeting. It was an energizing talk which reminded us of what we've done, the goals we set, and our current progress.

One of the things that Brian spoke about was Marshall Goldsmith's book "What Got You Here Won't Get You There". He reminded the group that many of us have our positions in IT at Penn State because we were, or still are, good at implementing things (programmers, systems folks, designers, etc.). We now have to focus less on how to implement things and more on why those things need to be implemented or what the consequences of those implementations are. He said, "Look, I know you can't help yourselves, but it's what you need to do."

Consider me one of those folks who can't help himself. I'm trying to get better, but I think implementation details are part of the very nature of being a scientist or engineer. When we had this discussion in my ITLP class, I told the group about my favorite sign in the Computer Building. It's above a printer in our copy room and says, "Do not under any circumstances attempt to repair.. " I'm always amused by this sign. My response is that while I understand why we shouldn't try to repair the printer, "We can't help ourselves."

My new favorite sign is located in the Men's bathroom on the first floor of the Computer Building (and although I suspect there are some equally creative women in the building, I do not plan on checking). It's a sign provided by Penn State Environmental Health and Safety, which states "Good Health Habits...During Flu Season Wash Your Hands!" Ours has the "During Flu Season" crossed out and says, "Always!"

What can I say, "We can't help ourselves."

Rather than rationalize this, and leave it at that, let me say that I've been trying very hard in the last 18 months to LISTEN to the whole problem, REFLECT on the requirements, and then, and only then, THINK about an implementation. Please help me if you catch me implementing on the fly.

What can I say, "I can't help myself."

We held our second ITS-ITANA meeting last week. In our first meeting, we went around the room and each person described an architectural decision or two which (s)he made within the last 6 months or will make in the next 6 months. Between meetings, Scott Smith and I categorized these issues and looked for ones where at least three units of ITS were facing similar decisions. We then created seven (7) focus groups to discuss each area of overlap. They are (with chair in parentheses):

• Data Centers/Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity (Mark Saussure)
• Identity and Access Management (Renée Shuey)
• Storage (Phil Pishioneri)
• Service Oriented Architecture (Carl Seybold)
• Collaborative Technologies (Christian Vinten-Johansen)
• Virtualization (Matt Scott)
• Networking Futures (Jeff Reel)

If you are an ITS employee and are interested in any of these groups, please feel free to contact Scott Smith, the focus group chair, or me.

I've created a Wikispace so that all members of ITS can remain aware of what we're doing.

I'll post more soon...

These days, we seem to be pursuing a dual path on work space -- one for students and one for the rest of us. As space gets tighter in the buildings we have, we are taking away conference rooms and open spaces in order to make more offices to accommodate more people in the same amount of space. Implicit in this is that everyone needs his/her own office and that other solutions are not possible (telecommuting, doubling up). As someone who didn't have an office for about four years, I can attest to the fact that one only really needs a laptop, wireless, and voice mail (yes, I didn't answer my phone for four years.).

I've also observed we begrudge those who see the importance of open or collaborative spaces and try to maintain them at the expense of more offices. Ironically, we are busy trying to retrofit out student lab spaces, libraries, and classrooms to accommodate teams of students doing collaborative work. If collaboration is the new way of working, why would we design our work spaces discourage it?

I for one advocate wide open spaces. I'll even give up an office for it.