2004
DecemberBest tunes
Tough to pick one, Animal Collective was a great revelation, mash-ups like The Grey Album and Go Home Productions put a great spin on old tunes, Joana Molina Tres Cosias was fantastic, and the concert of the year. But nothing is dearer to my heart than the sonic craziness of Ariel Pink - The Doldrums.
October Intranets and Extranets
Information Resources needed someone to put together a sharepoint solution for the client services division. It was a situation with a few too many Z drives filled with documents no one used, or could find. The challenge was to help spread ownership to all the key stakeholders. Sharepoint is a great managerial tool, and I spent most of my time training management in how to use document libraries properly (still ta trick that comes in handy) and how to help spread the love so people learn to own their solutions.
At the same time comes the portal for the VP Linda Myers and her Pepsi crew among many others. This was where the ugly head of email really showed itself, and I was only marginally sucessful turning the 'digest' email Linda took all week to put together to a portal news feed with each of her major reports actually contributing their own stories and Linda just approving. A major change in workflow, a huge productivity gain, and if I could only redo their intranet, I'd have the trifecta, this time its only the hat trick. Too bad they shut down the hot tub level years ago.
Last classNovember Last Class
I really wanted to to show off some of the semantic web stuff I had really been trying to bring to the CTI site as I moved it into the modern age and finally embraced standards and 4.01 compliance. By using Zeldman as my text I helped out my friends by designing from scratch the site for Wounded in America, and learning along the way. Who knew that the curriculum would change next year, so this was the final hurrah, but I must say I had a great time, hope the students got as much out of it as I did.
December Walking wounded
My friends Bob and Stephanie Drea needed to put their work, and their activism and photography about gun violence online. Its a straightforward site. I suppose my biggest 'achievement' was to do it all in XHTML (for the first time) - no tables, and all done by hand. Also, the embedding of media and the 'visited' link became very important. Also the only person on earth to use the ¤ glyph, well, since it doesn't work in IE for mac, i suppose I was the first? And was I the first to note IE 6 for windows isn't standards compliant?
June Evaluations for Educause
The evaluation system I did last year is really working perfectly. We have straight compliance rates of 93%, and with only 2 hours real work to make it happen, I've turned it over to Adam Kashuba to set it up and run. It's bittersweet to not be on the frontlines, reading student concerns and reacting to them. But, its been a good run and this was the real reason I stayed to see if I could make this happen. Cyber advising is a bit more ambitious, and while working with Andy Drefahl and Vince Kellen and hopefully making this a real value proposition for DePaul, its time to say goodbye to CTI, and move on.
March Cyber advising
So, if you have turned all of student infomation (enrollments, courses, history, majors, goals) into easy to access streams of data (see 1999-2003), you can start to see a pattern. Basically, students have a bad quarter (bad grades), then they drop out of school (enrollment next quarter is null). Hmmm, we have hundreds of highly trained (paid) faculty who each have students 'earmarked' to them to advise (no publish or perish). Students tend not to seek out the appointments we have also quantized and have avaliable in the stream (less than 30% capacity) Hmmm, if they would forge a relationship (email, 3 minutes work tops) to these students. If the students got the mail (remember we got them to use MyCTI so email is 85% effective), we personalize the message (saw you had a bad quarter, I'm a PhD, how can I help?) from a respected source. Do you think this would result in reduced attrition, proactive trouble solving and steadier enrollment through the hard phase of the degree, not to mention happier students?
Ok, second thought lets just do it for them (professors are 'busy' even though the interface was green, yellow and red, sheesh) and in the meantime commodotize the whole process for the University (most profs don't use computers). If we could come up with the logic tree of what to say in what situation, could we create the perfect advisor? Or, to be less big brotherish, could we trick them with the first salvo, then the student can write the professor back and we can have a real relationship afterwards? As they say, its getting the conversation started that counts. Time to write this thing up to publish, I think France this year looks good. That is of course if it works...