In Memory of Joan Anderson

On Saturday I went to the memorial service for a dear friend - Joan Anderson. Her husband Matt is one of my best friends and we have been praying for Joan for 9 years as she battled two rounds of breast cancer. She is the one in the white shirt in the picture - even when she was dealing with the horrible side effects of chemo she would often join a group of us who play volleyball on Sunday afternoons.

It was a remarkable service as our church was packed with about 600 people who came to celebrate the life of this extraordinary woman. Matt and their three kids spoke at the service and they were unbelievably eloquent. Matt told us that in the 9 years she fought the cancer, he never once heard her complain - not once. Her son told us that the cancer did not beat his Mom because she never let it stop her from doing the things in life that she wanted to do. One of her daughters spoke movingly of her Mom's amazing optimism and the smile that was constantly on her lips. She encouraged us to "pay it forward" by treating people more kindly, by smiling at people who need to see a smile, by focusing on others instead of ourselves. These were all constant traits of Joan - despite the horrendous struggle she faced every day. They told us of her love of dance and how on her last day she came downstairs while her son was playing the guitar and she somehow managed to do some dance steps even while she was hooked up to oxygen and her life on this earth was fading.

I have known some amazing people in my life, and I am blessed with some remarkable friends, but I have never known anyone quite like Joan. The world is a darker place today because of Joan's absence, but I know heaven is a brighter place as she dances with the Lord she loved so much.

The world needs more people like Joan and I hope that her example will lead many of us at that service to be more like her. A little less self-centered, a little more loving, a little more caring, a little more dedicated to being positive and optimistic. Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us act more like Joan, we can help make up for the void that her absence has created in the lives of all of us who knew her. Maybe...

Design Definition

I was reading Guy Kawasaki's blog yesterday and came across this definition of design from a blog called Design Matters: "Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you've done, then they know exactly what they want, but it's not what you did."

I love the design process and that statement has got to be the most concise and clear definition I have ever heard. It's also very helpful because if we take it to heart, it helps get the designer's ego out of the way. We are going through a user interface redesign right now on a project we have been working on for some time. We went over the interface over a period of months in our design team sessions and we thought we had it nailed - until we actually got it into the hands of the people who were going to use it. Then they told us it was all wrong, even though they were all on the design team that created it! It was tempting to say "too bad" and get them to use it anyway, but instead we are completely redesigning the UI.

It's easy to get frustrated over a situation like this, but this definition of design helps put it in perspective. Most people can't describe what they want, but they know what they don't want - once they see it.

UPDATE: I heard from a member of the design team on the project I reference in this post and he took exception to what I wrote here. He thought I was criticizing the team so let me clarify. Virtually every project I have ever worked on has had the same experience. Software developers do not think like "normal" people. We approach the user interface in a different way so I have found that when we build it in a way that makes sense to us, it often doesn't work for our users. Even when we get the users heavily involved in the design process, until they actually get their hands on it their feedback is not that useful. We had a lot of input on the design of this system, but it was all from demonstrations where I controlled the mouse and I knew exactly where to click (and not to click). As soon as they used it themselves, they told me it was not going to work.

That's why I loved the definition of design that is the subject of this post. It reminded me of why it's so important to not only get lots of feedback during the design, but to get a working prototype into the hands of users as soon as possible. The design team I'm working with on this project is the best I've experienced in 20 years of building software and we are producing an amazing system that is going to be an incredible service to our students.

(OK, I'll stop sucking up now and hopefully I won't get beat up at our next design meeting.)

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.

Unplugged Yet Plugged In

I am back from an amazing six days in Mexico. I joined 24 high school students and 7 other adults from my church on a house-building trip through a group called Amor Ministries. It was a profound week in the lives of everyone - both in our group and the family who has a new home. I wish we had one of those "reality" TV crews following us so they could see the kids in our group and how they worked so hard to improve the life of a family they had never met. We built a home in four days using pretty much nothing but hand tools. That's right - kids from the OC were digging dirt and mixing cement and pounding nails and sawing wood and working long days. And why? Just because they love God and they take seriously his commands to look after the poor.

Of course, they were still teenagers so there was also a lot of cement fights and acting goofy and having a blast around the campfire each night. This group of kids were amazing and I had so much fun just hanging out with them. If you get depressed when you see the narcissistic, selfish, superficial teenagers that are constantly portrayed on television, don't worry - there are some great kids out there also. I was proud to be associated with them.

If you are reading this blog, you are probably a lot like me and are constantly connected to the Internet. One of the aspects of the trip that was so refreshing was to be completely unplugged - no Internet access, no computer, no cell phone service (we were camping so unfortunately there was also no hot water, no showers, and no electricity). I tend to be pretty compulsive about checking my email and using Bloglines to keep up on my favorite blogs. Even going a half-day without checking those services is unusual for me (weekends and vacations included), but it was amazing how quickly all of the things that seem so important suddenly became so irrelevant. Our entire group was focused on helping the family by getting that house done and everything else faded away. It was an awesome experience when we turned the keys over to the family. They went from a 6x12 foot shack with a leaky roof and dirt floor (shown above) to a 22x22 home built with pride and love (see below).

I think it struck everyone in the group how much we have. The home we built would just be a garage by our standards, but to this family it was literally their dream come true. The disparity between our standard of living and the standard just a short drive down the freeway is remarkable. We can argue all day about why it's that way, but the kids in our group wouldn't be interested in that conversation. There is a need, God tells us to meet it, and so they went. And they can hardly wait to go back. And I can hardly wait to unplug again and join them.

Higher Ed Blog Con

Looks like there is a very cool blog conference happening at Higher Ed Blog Con. It bills itself as "a fully web-based event focused on how new online communications technologies and social tools are changing Higher Education". It just started on April 3rd and runs through the end of the month. I haven't had time to check much of it out yet, but at first glance it looks like it will be a fantastic resource to those of us interested in this space.

Web 2.0

There has been a lot of discussion in the technical blogosphere about Web 2.0. Most of the discussion centers around how just about everybody hates the name (but ironically, by talking about it,they just perpetuate the name even more). No one has come out with a new release of the web, but there are some very exciting trends that make the web a far more interactive and compelling place to spend time.

This discussion has now gone mainstream - Newsweek magazine has a cover story about this topic (they call it the "Live Web" which amazingly manages to be an even lamer moniker than "Web 2.0" - was the old web "dead"?). On their web site, they have a quiz entitled How Geeky Are You? Take it and see how you do (I got a 58, which just fell short of the highest level of nerdiness - I'm devastated but determined to get geekier).

Web 2.0 basically involves two emerging trends:

1. New web sites that use technology known as AJAX to create a richer user experience in a web browser
2. New web sites that enable a collaborative community experience

Google Maps was one of the first sites to use AJAX in a very compelling way. The ability to drag a map around the screen, zoom in and out, and flag areas of the map are all examples of what AJAX technology can do for you. Microsoft is releasing technology known as ATLAS that we are starting to use in our MySite 2.0 project and I'm really excited about how it is going to make our services a richer experience for our students. Microsoft is coming out with a new version of their hotmail service that I'm beta-testing that is very cool. It basically gives you the full capabilities of Outlook (including things like drag-and-drop) in a web browser.

The second trend is even more interesting because it doesn't center around the technology (though many of the sites use AJAX), but centers around human interaction. The collaborative side of the Internet is exploding with sites like MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and the thousands of blogs that spring up every day. When I used to teach an Introduction to the Internet course, I emphasized how the Internet has always been more about information and communication than technology. The rapid emergence of these kinds of sites just underscores that point.

The question for those of us working in education is: How do we leverage these trends to better serve students?

Update: If you want to keep an eye on new Web 2.0 sites, I highly recommend TechCrunch.
Another Update: I just ran across a site that lists the Web 2.0 awards. Should be a good place to see some examples of what Web 2.0 is supposed to be about.

Tech Ed 06

I did a presentation at Tech Ed 06 in Pasadena today called "Online Services that Truly Serve Students" (ppt slides can be found on the "Recent Presentations" link to the right). My presentation started at 8:00 AM and given the weather today I didn't expect a lot of attendance (I left home at 5:00 AM just to make sure I wasn't late, but then again, I have a punctuality neurosis). As I expected there were only about 8 people when I started, but more and more arrived as I got going, and by the end it was standing room only and there were people in the hallway. (Reality Check #1: OK, so I was in the smallest room in the Pasadena Convention Center) (Reality Check #2: Well, "room" is actually a tad generous - it was more the size of a closet, but once I moved the mops everyone could see the screen).

I heard some great feedback afterwards and several people mentioned how it was nice to see systems that are designed to be student-centric. It's good that people caught that (since it's the theme of virtually all of my presentations), but it's sad that it stands out. Too many people in my field are chasing technology instead of serving students.

I also got to meet Bob Hughes from the North Orange district in person (he commented on my last post). He was a heck of a nice guy - even if he does like the ERPs (don't worry - I'll keep working on him).

If anyone who was at the session is reading this, I need to make sure I didn't leave you with a wrong impression. I closed the presentation with a demonstration of MySite Agent - it's an interactive agent we built that can respond to natural language queries using the AIM instant messaging service. I use it in the demo to show that we don't always get it right. In this case, I think the technology gets in the way of service and students just play with it instead of using it in a productive way. I just flat out said that we failed with that service because of the quantity and quality of the service it was providing. I was talking to a lady later in the day and she thought I was talking about all of the services I demonstrated. She didn't understand why students were not using our portal, online schedule and shopping cart when they looked so cool. So, in case anyone else had that impression, our other services are very popular - it's just the agent that doesn't get much usage.

CACCRAO Conference

I had the great privilege of speaking at the CACCRAO Region 7 and 8 conference on Friday. What is CACCRAO, you ask? It is the California Association of Community College Registrars and Admissions Officers (sheesh, and I thought us geeks like acronyms). I gave my iPod Generation speech and it was probably the best audience so far. I had a great time and the feedback I received was very appreciative (and if any of you that were there are reading my lonely little blog - welcome!).

Those folks really do have a monumental job. This generation of students is so used to having immediate service I can imagine they get pretty impatient when told they need to wait for something. I could tell I struck a nerve when I talked about that. Their jobs are changing - in the old days they simply processed data. They took information from the student and keypunched into a system. As more and more of our systems become self-service for the student, admissions workers need to transition to become information workers. They'll be handling the exceptions that can't be automated, or providing more useful information for students in need. I would think it would be more fulfilling work and I hope they are ready for the transition.

League for Innovation Part 2

I did two presentations today. Audiences were small but enthusiastic (which I guess is better than large and hostile). The theme I kept hearing in conversations afterwards was how they wished they could do similar things at their college, but couldn't because they had an ERP. One person did say that he liked PeopleSoft, but that was the lone exception. It just affirmed once again that owning our architecture is the right way to go. It's a lot of work and carries its own set of risks, but I think we are on the right track.

I went to a session in the afternoon that made coming to this conference worth it. Mark Champion from Grand Rapids Community College did a presentation on the future of community colleges. He has a web site where he will post the slides within a week. It was everything a session at a conference like this should be: well researched, challenging and thought provoking. In a nutshell, community colleges are facing a huge challenge (which he backed up with demographic studies) and we need to change the way we do business to remain relevant. And (surprise, surprise) the best way for us to do it is through technology. He brought up a lot of the same points I have been talking about at our colleges - that this new generation of students think and learn differently than us and we need to leverage those differences to make learning a more compelling experience. Great stuff!

I'm heading back home tomorrow and am really looking forward to it. I do just enough business travel to remember why I would never want to do this on a regular basis.

League for Innovation Part 1

Well, yesterday I was fairly underwhelmed with the sessions I went to at this conference. If this is the state of innovation at community colleges in this country, then we are in pretty sad shape. I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a technology conference (which should be obvious to me since normal people (non-geeks) dress a lot sharper), but I was really hoping to get inspired by what some other folks are doing.

One session was interesting, not just for the content, but because of my reaction to it. Foothill College created an online counseling system that they demonstrated. I caught myself looking down on it because it wasn't using anything fancy - just a web based forum and email. The speaker pointed out that the simplicity of it was part of what made it successful, and that's really the point, isn't it? What they built works for their counselors and their students, and at the end of the day, that's why we are here - service to students. It was a good reminder that I need to keep my eye on the ball.

Innovations 2006

I'm in Atlanta at the League for Innovation in the Community College conference - Innovations 2006. I'm doing two presentations on Tuesday and the slides can be found by clicking on the "Recent Presentations" link to the right. I'll post anything interesting I run across while I'm here.

Creating Passionate Users

There are a number of great blogs I read on a regular basis. I'm going to post an article soon that describes how I search, discover and track blogs, but I really want to highlight one of my favorite: Creating Passionate Users. It is written by three authors, who are (according to their site), "all passionate about the brain and metacognition, most especially--how the brain works and how to exploit it for better learning and memory".

It's a great site for educators, technologists and especially educational technologists.

Bb World Panel Discussion

The panel discussion I was on last week at Blackboard World turned out to be pretty interesting. We actually wound up with a whopping 20 people in the audience, which was about 18 more than I expected. There were 7 of us on the panel - 3 were from community colleges, two from private universities (USC and Loma Linda) and 2 were from CSUs. We were each asked to share something about our use of Blackboard and specifically how we managed and/or encouraged growth. All three of the community college reps talked about the mechanics of our implementation - server integration, support, etc. The universities mostly talked about faculty training, mentoring, etc.

The person next to me on the panel was James Frazee, the Director of Instructional Technology Services at SDSU. Real nice guy - he showed us a great program called TechStars they use to encourage faculty in the use of technology. He told me he has a staff of about 25 people who do nothing but work with faculty and their use of technology. What an amazing resource! What a great focus for an organization to have - to help faculty help students learn with technology. I don't know of any community college that has anything like it - or even close.

Clearly it's at least partially an issue of funding - the public universities in California get an enormous amount of money compared to community colleges - but I can't help but wonder if it's also an issue of priorities. Why don't we spend more time and money helping faculty with technology? Is it just money, or is it also a matter of institutional focus?

Blackboard World '06

I'm at the Blackboard World conference in San Diego and will be on a panel discussion today showcasing some of the California universities and colleges. We got the very last time slot in the conference (11:00 - 12:30) so I expect about 2 people in the audience. (Sorry about the quality of the picture - it's from my camera phone).

It's very interesting to see how far Blackboard has come. I first saw them in a tiny booth at the Educause conference in Seattle in 1998. There were about 5 people in the booth - none of them looking older than a recent college grad. They had a reception that night where they introduced their first "adult" (typical .com startup lingo) who was their new CEO. Walking into the San Diego Convention Center and seeing the dozens of companies that now contribute to helping Blackboard succeed was pretty amazing. It's indicative of how much higher education has changed recently - a change that is not going to stop, but just accelerate.

I went to several interesting panel discussions yesterday. One of them, "The Future of eLearning" can be seen on Ready2Net. A couple of statements stood out for me. One of the panelists said that he/she (don't remember which) was waiting for the time when we would just start calling it learning instead of eLearning. In other words the "e" is here to stay.

The second was a statement from the representative from the University of Phoenix. He recounted a conversation he had with a friend from the CSU system who told him that once we got our act together in the public sector of higher ed, we were going to eat his lunch. His response was: "Your faculty are our secret weapon". I think that was a very telling statement and a challenge to all of us in higher education. We need to bring our resources to bear - for the sake of our students - without compromising the quality of the education. I strongly believe technology is the way to do that, and all of us (faculty and administrators) need to keep focused on how students learn best in the new digital world.

We have a lot of plans forming at the South Orange County CCD along these lines and I'm excited about what is going to be happening (hopefully) soon. More to follow...

Thank You Lindsey Jacobellis!

As you are probably aware (if you are hooked on the Olympics like many of us) that Lindsey Jacobellis won the silver medal in snowboarding after taking a fall on the last jump. She had a huge lead and would have undoubtedly won the gold except she got carried away and did a "method" (what us older folks would call showboating) on the last jump. It's the type of thing that would have been a signature moment had she won it, but many people have criticized her for not paying attention to winning the race.

I think what she did was great. By her own admission, she got caught up in the moment and decided to have some fun. I think too many people are consumed with finishing first and forget to enjoy themselves. Life is not all about getting there first - some times it's just about having fun along the way.

Good job Lindsey - and keep having fun!

Happy Birthday

Sixty years ago this month, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was created by some very smart folks. There is an interesting article over on CNET that describes some of the history and trivia about this historic event. Imagine going back in time and showing the ENIAC inventors a laptop computer or a PDA!

20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have

At one of my "iPod Generation" sessions this week, I was asked what the next step should be for an instructor interested in becoming more "tech savvy". It was a great question and I felt bad that I didn't have a great answer. We decided that we were going to get a group of people together and do some brainstorming about where the biggest needs were, and how we could help the college move forward.

I ran across an interesting article in The Journal by Laura Turner called 20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have. I'm not sure I completely agree with the list (I think some of the skills are a little advanced for the typical instructor), but she provides a wealth of resources for each of the 20 skills. If you see an area in which you would like to improve, you can find numerous links to online tutorials. It looks like a great resource.

Another resource for instructors is right in their classrooms. An article in eSchool News talks about "Power Users" and how they are shaping the way instructors teach. It points out that they enjoy helping their instructors with technology issues.

iPod Generation

I'm doing three sessions on my "Reaching and Teaching the iPod Generation" presentation at IVC this week. Powerpoint slides can be found here. The basic idea that I'm promoting is that the generation of students who have grown up with digital technology have been affected by it in some profound - and some subtle - ways. A lot of my information comes from an excellent publication from Educause called Educating the Net Generation. It is a resource that I highly recommend and hope that anyone interested in higher education technology read it.

Every generation thinks the one following it is different (and usually not as good), but the advent of ubiquitous technology really has changed the way students act, think and learn and we owe it to them to try to understand - and leverage - those differences.

Google Earth

One of - if not the - coolest pieces of software I have ever seen is Google Earth. It was originally called Keyhole and I saw a demo of it a couple of years ago at a technology conference. Google bought the company that created Keyhole and greatly improved the program. It's very easy to use, has an intuitive interface, and best of all - it's free. It's a program that you will have to install on your computer - they just released a Mac version also.

The programming geniuses who put this together have stitched together a set of satellite and other high altitude pictures into one, seamless 3-D program. You will be blown away by the images you see, and how effortlessly you can navigate around the world. To the left is a screen snapshot of the Grand Canyon - you can click on it to see a larger version.

Several websites have cropped up that can show you a number of interesting sites they have discovered in Google Earth - my two favorites are GoogleSightseeing.com and GoogleEarthHacks.com. Those sites also point to GoogleMaps.com - which is a two-dimensional version that appears in your web browser.

The abilities of this program are really too numerous to list here. You can zoom in and out, set placemarks, plan routes, view 3-D buildings, and fly through terrain. It's truly an amazing implementation of technology and would be a great help in teaching History, Geology, Political Science, Geography and really any topic where you need to show maps.

This is a great example of the intelligent application of technology. Check it out - you'll have a blast with it!