Tuesday, Day 2

The day opened with a great chat with Mike from Whitman. We talked Sakai/moodle and instructional technology and more. And there were waffles at breakfast.

Today in the morning we got the faculty perspective. One thing I want to follow-up on is looking for this article, “No Time to Think” by David Levy. There is a youtube talk version. We also had an exercise looking at some faculty-focused scenarios which all let me to wonder what policies we have in place for intellectual property and if we have a general counsel. I’m sure we do have a general counsel but so many other institutions sound like they consult theirs all the time.

The afternoon kicked off hearing about a new initiative between Columbia and Cornell libraries called 2cool. It’s about creating a separate organization to run the two libraries and pool resources and realize savings. Very interesting. We also hear about the Hathi Trust which aims to become the digital book repository for libraries. We were also fortunate to hear from Deanna Marcum at the Library of Congress (formerly of CLIR). She shared some amazing leadership experiences and gave us much to think about. We finished up with an exercise in a campus crisis. It made me think, “do we have a campus crisis management plan?” We have a plan if the server room burns down but what if a student is shot on campus (one school in my group just experienced that and was able to execute their plan successfully). Something else I’ll have to look into when I’m back.

Monday, Day 1 (full day that is)

Breakfast started out fun today. I got to chat with Sandra from Manchester at our breakfast table about Manchester and Ireland. She had met Tony Wilson whom she described as quite a figure in the city. We also talked about Ireland as her husband is Irish and they go there often. I got to remember my travels there. And it makes me want to return and to visit the UK too.

Today we focused what it means to be a leader coming up with various definitions of leaders. We touched on the contrast between managers (doing things right) vs leaders (doing the right things) and how you need to be a good manager before being a good leader. Diana also shared some of her perspectives one of which lead me to think hard about developing a better scrutiny filter. She talked about being relentlessly realistic about projects, people, why we do things, how we do things, how much we do, doing things better, and if we should do things. These all make up a scrutiny filter for me.

We also touched on John Maeda’s recent Nercomp conference. He contrasted the traditional leadership model with a creative leadership model. These slides show it concisely. This really resonated with me. I can see, in contrast to other organizations, that Augsburg is more creative than traditional. But what was more interesting was though I am drawn to the creative behaviors I feel the internal tension questioning “but that’s not what a leader does.” I can hear the traditional, societal, model of a leader ingrained in me. Much to reflect on from today.

Made it to Atlanta

I made it to Atlanta, or Hotlanta as it were. I think it was 90 degrees today and humid. The plane ride was mostly uneventful though it took an hour to get the baggage claim. The plane had to be towed to the terminal for some reason so we sat on the tarmac for a while. I made it with barely 30 minutes before the opening session.

I’m encouraged by their focus on reflection. Each day will end with some reflection time. They even provided a little notebook meant to be a journal. Diana Oblinger, yes the Educause president, lead the opening session. She mentioned 4 key ideas to help us frame our time here:

1. lifelong learning — we will always need to be learning, we can’t know everything
2. how to think about things — leaders need to know how to frame (or re-frame) issues, build judgement skills, know what you believe in. We need to make time to think about things as opposed to doing things.
3. interact — with each other and the speakers.
4. reflect — spend time processing and reflecting

We paired off and interviewed someone else and introduced them. Always a good exercise. There are a lot of library folks and some people from far-off places like Australia or Manchester (yay!).

Visited with a nice group at dinner — learned about how different libraries are at big universities — digitization huge. Also got a good tip on reading the Register for a UK perspective on IT (more weary of google). I’ll put it in my Netvibes feed and see how I like it. I recently added the Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog and am enjoying that.

Sakai-based course evaluation system crashes

U. of Michigan’s Online Teaching-Evaluation System Fails
Uh-oh. Not good press for Sakai (though it’s not mentioned in the article). UMich is in my annotated bibliography for online course evaluations which is why I know they’re Sakai. The comments on the article unfortunately echo the polarizing reaction to online course evaluations. Maybe I’ll post too….

I’m back.

Actually, the blog is back. I’ve moved it to my new hosted server. It was running on a linux box in my basement for the past 5 years. Time to retire that thing and move to a hosted option. It’s on the same site as my main domain name that I haven’t touched in years (hence the strange URL to some). Sorry about the funky characters in the old posts — the mysqldump must have done it. I’ll also have to go back and fix many of my picture links. I plan to re-activate this especially as I’m going to be at Frye in June. Seems like a good time to blog about my experience to help me remember it — much like Ireland!

The virtual world crossing over to the real world … in music

I was listening to Weekend Edition today and was spellbound by this story on Video Games Live.  This is a traveling concert experience where a full orchestra plays video game songs with a multimedia show behind.  For one thing it brings young people into concert halls which is great.  But I’ve been thinking about how its another way the virtual life more of us are experiencing is brought into our real life.  There’s of course the World of Warcraft gold farmers that make the news that shows how commerce can crossover between worlds.  That should not be surprising.  If there’s money to be made people will find it.

But I find it interesting that people are seeking traditional (real) expressions of the experiences they have in virtual worlds.  I know hearing certain video game themes trigger memories of completing a difficult objective and the sense of accomplishment that followed.  This is so interestingly similar to how different pop songs make us think of times of our lives and what we were experiencing then.  This is also a strange generational connection.  Parents of today’s kids played video games, although visually simpler, just like the kids are.  Both can come to this concert and share in a strangely modern experience of virtual meets real.