New Project

This has been a pretty eventful week at work. I've been filling in as the Interim IT Director the last few months (one of the reasons the blogging has been pretty light). My boss was filling in at an interim Vice-Chancellor position but this week it was announced he's coming back down to the Director position and I'll be going back to Associate Director. I've made a conscious decision in my career to only move into positions if I love the work. I don't want to move up for the sake of moving up, or for the money, prestige, etc. I love my job and don't want to get into a position where that is not the case any more. It was a great opportunity to test the waters at the next level up and I hope to have a chance again in the future. I won't miss all the meetings and dealing with budgets, but there are some real satisfying aspects to it as well. I'll still be the Director until the end of July so I'll have a little more time to get in trouble.

Our Board of Trustees approved a contract on Monday with a company called Neudesic. They are going to help us build a new student system. It's not the typical path that colleges take, and I am very excited about it. What excites me most about it is the chance we are going to have to do something truly student-centered. My experience with the packaged systems is they tend to be designed around the back office operations and not around the student. We are going to put the students right in the center of the design and build a system around them. It's going to take us about 4 years to do the whole thing and I can't wait to get started. Details will be posted here as they develop...

Invisible Children

On Saturday my daughter and I and some friends participated in the Global Night Commute (GNC) sponsored by Invisible Children. The purpose of the evening was to draw attention to the horrendous situation that is happening in Uganda where a rebel group called the LRA (Lord's Resistance Army) is kidnapping children to use as soldiers or sex slaves. That's right - young children are stolen from their homes at night and forced to kill and perform horrible acts to avoid being killed - or having their families killed in front of them. I first became aware of this situation by viewing the movie created by three young men who started Invisible Children and who are trying to change the world. It's an amazing story and you should check out their web site to get more information.

Every night, while my kids sleep peacefully in their beds, thousands of children in northern Uganda travel miles to find a safe place to sleep. They call them the "night commuters" and the GNC was designed to mimic their actions and hopefully draw some media attention. We parked at Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa and walked for about 45 minutes to Orange Coast College. We joined about 500 people and slept on a field at the college. Or I should say tried to sleep. I was one of only about 5 people in attendance who had grey hair and it turns out that this large group of young people were far more interested in talking and having fun than sleeping (go figure). Overall it was a great experience, and I tried not to act like a crabby old guy, but by 3:00 AM I was very ready for a little quiet (at least until I started snoring).

I checked the LA Times this morning, expecting that there would be some coverage, but guess what? Not a single story. Nada. Zip. This event took place in cities all around the country, but I haven't seen any stories in the media about it yet. I guess if we had burned some buildings or overturned a few cars, we could have received attention, but evidently young people trying to change the world through peaceful means isn't much of a story.

So what does this have to do with technology? Not a whole lot (but it's my blog so who says I have to stay on topic?). This kind of activity is certainly much easier now that we have technology that lets us be publishers as well as consumers. The Invisible Children movement is one that has been fueled by the Internet. You can buy the DVDs that tell the whole story from their website, and the GNC details were publicized using MySpace. It's a great use of technology for a great purpose. That's a great story - too bad the LA Times doesn't think so.