June 2008 Archives

I've been spending some of my time here at University Libraries trying to figure out the best means for providing information on training material, training opportunities, and technical documentation, both Libraries-wide and University-wide, so that faculty and staff at University and the campuses will not have to search for it.

In this quest to find the best place, so many questions have come up.  Would it be better to use something the University is using like WikiSpaces?  Would it be better to use what University Libraries is using like our CMS?  Should I get a committee involved from the get-go?  Should I start something and then pull a group together?

I won't bore you with all the details, but I've been doing needs assessments to get input.  I've decided to do the beginnings of the site myself.  (Part of our Blogs and Wikis presentation is "Better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, form a committee, and have it killed by a thousand meetings...")  Then, I'll be presenting it to a larger committee for feedback and continue with my needs assessments.

Here's my rationale for this and any large project within an institution like Penn State:

Getting Started

If you work within a committee, especially a large enough one.  Or one with appointees placed there mainly for political reasons rather than functional ones, you are likely to have the project never to get started.

With the amount of meetings some of us have already, I have been on some projects where the project died simply because the committee was never able to find a meeting time yet insisted on meeting face to face.

Check out what Mark Linton has to say about sabotage and committees.

Getting Buy-In

If some projects die by committee some never get the chance to breed because they were conceived in a silo.  As much as I fear too many cooks in the pot, there is a danger in not involving anybody in a service that you want everybody to adopt. 

Why does a departmental unit create a redundant service?  Is it in answer to a feature not offered centrally?  Is it because information about these services not been made readily available?  Is it because they got tired of waiting for the central service's release that was held up by committee?  I wonder how many redundant services and redundant employee hours we could regain be doing more needs assessment with the people we serve.

I am, of course, speaking specifically of my project with centralizing training resources across University Libraries, but these questions could be applied throughout the University.  Is there a routine needs assessment for centralized services to see what features are needed, who is not using them, and why?

Do the needs assessment.  Take action.  Reassess periodically.

You may have noticed that at the time of this posting, I have two blogs, which are conceptualized as follows:

• In Clear Text - My professional blog on technology, training & communication strategies.
• Caution! May Contain Small Parts - My personal blog on parenting, which just happens to be by an IT professional.

Every once in a while these two worlds just happen to overlap. After all, I am the same person, and I can carry my experiences and what I learn from one realm over to the other.  I do this in the real world probably far more than I actually express in the blog.

Today, however, I have a topic in my parenting blog that speaks to my philosophy of openness that bridges both worlds.  As a teacher, programmer, an IT manager, a technology training coordinator and even a parent, I have always believed you should attempt to answer every question you are asked.  You just need to adapt it to your audience.

Please note that as you enter my personal realm, the opinions I may express to my daughter are not those of my professional realm (i.e. What I say to my kid does not reflect an official opinion by my employer or my colleagues).  I'm merely giving you a cute example of my philosophy of Explaining Things on Their Level.

At the Web Conference tutorials, Mark Greenfield brought up an interesting question for discussion in "The Long Tail of Social Networks": How much of your identity do you reveal online?

Answers varied from not revealing true names, not posting any pictures, to making sure that all handles were the same, posting pictures via Flickr and sharing, and using one's digital identity as a portfolio and resume.

Here are some thoughts to consider about your digital identity:

• For younger workers especially, your digital identity (blogs, wikipedia edits, contributions to user communities, your domain name, etc.) may be a way to compensate for experience on a resume.

• Whenever I meet someone new, the techie-stalker in me is tempted to Google search.  How many potential employers, members of search committees, and customers (internal or external) are doing the same?  Do you know what comes up when your name is Googled? When was the last time you checked?  Maybe you're not in the market for a new job, but your reputation is still important to you, so check out Penelope Trunk's Five Ways to Build Buzz Around Yourself.

• What do you stand to lose by not staking claim to your identity? Will someone claim it out from under you?  Mark Greenfield's mentioned that he is now markgr.com because someone made off with markgreenfield.com.  On Jumping Monkeys podcast episode #47, Jennifer Granick of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Brad Stone of the New York Times talked about their differences of opinion as parents on whether or not to secure their children's domain names until they reach adulthood. Look at all the Twitter doppelgangers out there that force the originals to use handles like "TheRealDvorak". (And I won't mention the two Penn Stater who I know who have received this highest form of Twitter flattery.)

Consider the possibility that digital contributions may not just become a normal part of someone's portfolio, but be expected. Begin thinking about your digital identity.  Take charge of what Google says about you.  Tend to it like you tend to your resume.  And finally, don't wake up to find your digital identity already claimed:

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife! —Talking Heads

I spend a lot of time thinking about our departmental Intranets and what we should put in them versus what should go out on the public Internet lately.  Some of this has to do with my talks with Andrew Calvin, who is working on the Penn State University Libraries CMS Implementation team, as well as my own experiences transferring departments.  (I have noted in the past that some of our information choices are more cultural reactions than informed choices.)

Anyway, there are a number of things to consider before putting something on an Intranet:

1. Is there a chance you might want to present your work at a conference?

2. Could someone outside your department offer a potential solution or fresh, unbiased prospective to your problems?  (The IDD Exchange blog, put in place by Brad Kozlek back in the day, has always been out in public space, so when a departmental issue is presented, outsiders--including former employees--are free to offer their advice to internal problems.)

3. Could someone outside your department potentially benefit from the information you have discovered? (Even if your systems are internal to you, perhaps someone else int he University could learn from how you your systems are constructed in solving a similar problem in their department, or potential candidates could learn more about whether or not they are a right fit for your department.)

Obviously, you would not want information like passwords, financial data, student data, or other sensitive information out in the open, but before you assume that your internal documentation is "need to know" or only of interest to you and wall it off behind an departmental iron curtain, consider moving it to a public site.

The following question came up at the Web Conference this week (in my session on Blogs & Wikis for Internal Communications and when I was in Mark Greenfield's tutorial on The Long Tail of Social Networks).  Since then I've been dying to ask other people what their opinions are on the matter:

Is the listserv dead yet?

Here are some related thoughts/questions...

1. In what cases (or for what UP listservs) would Ning be a good substitute?
2. What about using Twitter to get immediate answers to questions we used to clutter others inboxes with via listserv?
3. What other solutions/technologies do you see helping us kill off the listserv?
   
4. What is our listserv exit plan to get people to move from listservs to adopting new technologies?

Respond with your thoughts, I'd love to hear them...

Those of you who follow me regularly know that it is out of the ordinary for me to go this long without a post, but I have not been without ideas, just very, very busy.  Between my late nights working on my Web Conference and CCL Staff Retreat presentations, I have fit in some other activities fo interest.

One such such activity is CBC Radio's Spark podcast.  They interviewed Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody".  (By coincidence Mark Greenfield also mentioned this book at the Web Conference.)  He talked about what he calls a "cognitive surplus" in our society.  Technology has enabled us to have more free time.  In the past, most people used this time on passive activities, like watching television.  With social media, people can participate in activities that interest them.

Isn't it great when you say something with authority and an even more respected authority in the field says the same thing?  This happened to me twice today at the Web Conference. 

The first was during the keynote when I realized that many of the items touched upon by Steve Krug would be elaborated on by our What Not to Wear on the Web session.  Luckily, I am not the type of person to dwell on this or worry.  After all, we were going to expand on what he mentioned anyway. Not a biggie.

The second one, and the one I really want to focus on here, is related to a point I made in Blogs and Wikis for Internal Communications: wikis make great project management tools.  At the keynote, one of our distinguished panel of experts (I could not see who because I was in the back, so please comment if you were there and remember), mentioned that he does not use project management software anymore, just wikis.  Wow, do I feel totally validated!

Here's our other presentation for Penn State Web Conference 2008...

Blogs and Wikis for Internal Communications

Presenters:

• Nancy Hallberg, Programmer/Analyst, Penn State
• Robin Smail, Instructional Design Assistant, Penn State
• Nikki Massaro Kauffman, Technology Training Coordinator, Penn State

We've heard much in the last few years about blogs, microblogs, and wikis. We've heard strategies for using blogs and wikis in the classroom, people have set up blogs using Blogs @ Penn State, and some of us are actually doing strategic planning on wikis. However, we still hear many people wondering how blogs and wikis can be applied to their day to day work. Blogs, microblogs, and wikis are useful tools that should be part of internal communications and training.

Presentation: http://www.personal.psu.edu/lnm105/blogswikis/index.html
Wiki (doubles as printable handout): https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/blogswikis

Here's our presentation for Penn State Web Conference 2008...

What Not to Wear on the Web

(a Fashion Show of Sorts)

Presenters:

• Nikki Massaro Kauffman, Technology Training Coordinator, Penn State
• Andrew Calvin, Web Developer, Penn State
• Robin Smail, Instructional Design Assistant, Penn State
• Natalie Harp, Instructional Design Assistant, Penn State

More people than ever have access to publish content on the Web. Content management systems and applications like FrontPage and Dreamweaver make Web authoring as easy as getting dressed in the morning, but just because your software offers you a closetful of tricks doesn't mean you have to wear them all at once. This presentation provides basic Web Authoring tips in a fun and memorable mock-fashion show format.

Presentation: http://www.personal.psu.edu/lnm105/whatnot/whatnot.ppsx
Wiki (doubles as printable handout): https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/whatnotweb