It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure…

A snapshot of three days in IT:

–overseeing work with Apple’s top level server troubleshooters on a mail server problem they can’t solve

–troubleshooting 2 new interactive whiteboards

–composing a tricky, tactful email about urgent software updates

–working with parents, teachers, and principals on a media literacy presentation

–helping coordinate final pre-launch steps on a major web portal launch

–engaging in a fruitless attempt to educate a user about why we don’t have the same resources for serving mail as Google does

–sharing great memories following a colleague’s retirement announcement

–analyzing usage statistics to help decide on renewals  for web based subscription services

–deleting my Twitter account after 2 years of more annoyance than value

–finalizing my exit from six years of ISED-L listserv co-management

–helping a co-presenter work around my unexpected absence at a upcoming  conference presentation

–seeking  legal advice about copyright issues with proposed use of  Turnitin.com

–sharing information about media literacy at the High School Open House

–pulling together a detailed calendar for our IT workgroup’s recurring summer tasks

–composing articles for the biweekly technology newsletter

–two hours of getting help with iPhone/iCal/mobile me syncing issues

Never a dull moment!

A Good One Leaves Us

I was sad to say goodbye recently to UC CIO Greg Jackson, who’s moved on to a wonderful position at Educause. Greg was the whole package as an IT leader: deeply experienced, a superb communicator, analytical yet empathetic, funny as all get out, and knew how to  walk the talk. He also answered emails really quickly, and was the best writer I have seen anywhere in educational administration. His message of apology and explanation following an extended University email outage several years ago is the Gettysburg Address of owning IT problems; I refer to it often when I need reminders about using moments of accountability as teaching opportunities.

He also had a wonderfully rich web page of his own, which included lists of restaurants he’d tried, his extensive coffee mug collection, and best of all, a set of hard-won leadership principles he had learned.

The great thing about Greg’s principles was that pretty much everyone who worked for him, and there were hundreds, knew lots of these principles. This only became clear to me at his good bye party, when employees successfully answered trivia questions about the principles, which included items like “Never surprise up,” “Red wine goes with everything,” and “If you can’t explain it to Josh [his young son when the priniciple was written], you don’t understand it.”

As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” I observed a lot just by watching Greg do his work with style, skill, and class. Thanks, Greg, for all I learned from you. Best wishes at Educause, and all you do thereafter.

Maybe it’s a fitting tribute, and maybe it isn’t, but I’ve compiled a beginning list of my own equally hard-won principles in Greg’s honor.  I’ll be sure to add to them as time goes on, as he did. Perhaps other IT leaders reading them would like to share some of their own.

–It’s not about what technology does. It’s about what it means.

–Educate out and up, always.

–Context is king, not content. Content without context means little.

–Silos are for corn and missiles, not educators. Grownups’ turf wars *always* hurt students.

–Learn to lean into discomfort. It’s the only way to see the opportunities buried inside problems.

–There is a fine line between being spontaneous and being disorganized. I can tell which is which.

–Avoid techspeak and decode acronyms or people will hate you. And never, ever turns nouns into verbs; no one can “obsolete” or “nutshell” anything.

–When smart people who care about what they do keeping running into the same problems over and over again, it’s not the people. It’s the structure.

–Changing structures is much easier than changing people.

–If you build it, they will *not* come.

–Autonomy does not mean doing whatever you please. Pilots have lots of autonomy, but they still have to file a flight plan because sharing airspace affects a lot of other pilots.

–Sharing a decent pizza can solve many workplace problems.

–Networked technology compels interdependence, whether or not you like it or know it.

–The best lesson from years of sandlot baseball: “Play your position.”

–Never miss a good chance to shut up.

–Input does not equal authority.

–Most important technology problems don’t have anything to do with technology.

The High Cost of Turnover

I had a resignation come in very late in the school year. Yesterday, a candidate accepted my offer of employment. In the intervening weeks, it seemed like an inordinate amount of my time was devoted to filling this vacancy, so I went back and reviewed the process and the generated some interesting (at least to me) data.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

# of emails sent/received about this hire: 121

# of documents reviewed or created (resumes, cover letters, reference lists, online application data, interview summaries, reference call reports, other miscellaneous HR docs): 101

# of hours spent doing interviews, both phone and in person: 22

# of phone calls made/received about this hire, not including phone interviews: 40 (this is a rough estimate an probably conservative)

My overall estimate is that this hire took 60 hours of my time and probably 30 additional hours from my Manager of Information Systems (mostly in interviews) during those precious summer weeks when time to plan and think strategically about the coming year and beyond is more readily available.

Of course, there are many more direct and indirect costs associated with personnel changes, and most of those are yet to come as the new hire goes through orientation and training. And my statistics don’t reflect any costs associated with what I had to set aside in order to get this hire done. But even though I’ve been doing this for 11 years now, I was reminded once again how costly turnover can be and how important it is to hire quality people who are likely to stay with you, and to take all the reasonable steps necessary to keep high performing people on board. Thankfully, I have not had much turnover in full-time positions because I work hard at keeping people challenged and empowered while supporting their professional growth. I am also fortunate in getting great support from my superiors in these efforts, too.

What do you do to keep turnover at a minimum? If you have a lot of turnover, why do you think it happens, and what, as a school IT leader, can you do about it?

Twitter Honeymoon Over, continued…

See, this is what I’m talking about. When toilets and toasters can Twitter, it’s time to move on.

Twitter Honeymoon Over

I’ve been using Twitter pretty regularly for well over a year and I’m thinkng about letting it go. Over time, I find it less and less useful and increasingly annoying. I’ve been pretty careful about whom I follow, but the tweets seem to fall into two camps: obsessive ed tech tweeters who give me a dozen links a day to resources I don’t have time to follow up on, or personal tweets about airplane flights, feeling the urge to go to White Castle, or complaining about parking meters. Managing who follows you also became a pain when the marketing people started inundating Twitter with follow requests.

The best reason to keep it is for those people and organizations I don’t normally encounter elsewhere online — Tour De France cyclists, conference organizers who update on Twitter faster and sooner than on their websites, former colleagues I don’t usually IM or email…those tweets I would miss. But for the most part, other online tools like iChat, LinkedIn, and Facebook seem much better suited to my style of working and sharing. With the time it takes to manage one’s online profile, there’s not really much room for tools that don’t deliver the goods.

Whither Summer?

How is it that summer escapes IT workers so quickly? Even with careful project plans we concoct each spring, there are always enough curve balls to force tough choices about how summer time is spent.

This year, a few unexpected departures have jostled our workload some. One member of our IT team resigned very late in the spring for a different job in higher ed; I’ve spent at least six full days working on the hire, between getting the job posted, reviewing applications, arranging and conducting interviews, preparing background information for the interviews, writing up the interviews, and so on.

A key administrator resigned suddenly, as did a key staff member; both these people played important roles in our administrative data management strategies. Their leaving complicates projects in process and will affect our workload well into the school year.

Another curve ball came when several school offices were unexpectedly relocated to spaces new to the Schools, meaning significant voice and data networking tasks for IT staff.

As for me, I’m making headway on our IT Service Catalog. I think this is a vital resource to have in place in a time of shrinking budgets and higher demand for IT services. We have been pretty transparent in sharing what we do in an anecdotal way with our quarterly activity reports, but a formal listing of all the services we provide, phrased in accessible language all can understand, will surprise many (probably ourselves included) and flesh out the context in which we make decisions about how we allocate resources and for what mission-driven outcomes.

We’ve also had one good curve ball come our way. As the University revises its handling of part-time casual positions, we can’t rely any longer on the strategy of using  these kinds of positions for doing level one support work. There will be some room to keep one or two of these slots in a more limited fashion, but by working with our HR people at school, we’ve been able to collapse a couple of these positions into a full time benefits eligible position. This is a good thing; in my eleven years in this job, we’ve had 48 people come and go in these part-time spots. I’ll be glad to put a dent in that number and add more stability to our support efforts.

A Real Vacation

Between InfoComm and a two week vacation, I’ve been away from work for just about three weeks. Seems like forever. It has been a while since I’ve had the chance to really relax; having a great staff to handle what comes up during my absence is a real blessing. I don’t want to be thinking about IT projects while paddling in big whitewater. Thanks, people.

I composed the rest of this post while at InfoComm and thought I would share it with you even though it was marinating on my desktop for a while.

“So I’ve finally hit the wall after two days on the show floor at InfoComm. After walking past hundreds of booths and thousands of products, here are a few initial reactions:

The capabilities of teleconferencing products are spooky powerful. Life size HD images are displayed on huge screens in a comfortable setting with fine furniture and great audio, and dead easy to use. It’s more like science fiction than science fiction.

Projection technology is evolving at a stunning pace. I saw the first bulbless projector using the Luminus PhlatLight LED technology. I also saw a rudimentary projector built into a cell phone (acceptable performance and cost for these is said to be 12-18 months out). 2500 lumen projectors are now the size of a netbook. 3D projection systems, complete with goofy glasses, are entering the market. Advances in short throw lenses are making installation cheaper and easier. Six months is a long product cycle now. I remember paying nearly $3000 for 1500 lumens and XGA resolution just a few years ago.

Everyone is in the interactive whiteboard market. There used to be a handful of vendors in this space; now there are hundreds, and they all have their own software. Have fun with that.

Plasma still has the best picture in the flat panel market. No contest.

So that’s the big picture stuff. Here’s some “little picture” stuff:

- I saw a collaboration software package I liked a lot called Tidebreak. It lets groups of people around an LCD display share what’s on their screen with the screen and each other. Simple, easy to use, platform agnostic. It’ll be a great fit for the library, the language lab, and most other places where small groups are working on a project together with computers.

- Anchor Audio has a decent portable audio loudspeaker system with 2 wireless and 2 wired mike inputs each with a volume control and a PA speaker that folds into a rolling case. It puts out 70 watts running off the rechargeable on board battery or 300 watts running off AC power. Could be a good fit for athletic events, student gatherings, and skits and plays in classrooms.

- Spectrum still makes the best laptop carts. Bretford still doesn’t get it. They keep improving everything else about the cart, but you still need to be a contortionist to get at the laptops in the 20-unit cart. You’re  still stuck with vertical slots on the larger cart that ensures the laptops will bounce around in transit. Nobody makes an a/v cart that will handle a document camera, laptop, and projector in an elementary classroom where the teacher wants to use it sitting down and maybe have kids come up to use it, too. They’re all the size of an SUV with cheesy flip up shelves bolted on to the sides. When a plain old kid-sized table is still the best option for this, something is very wrong. Are you listening, cart manufacturers?”

Tuesday at EduComm

EduComm is the higher ed conference on all things audiovisual. The conference program shows that a majority of conference sessions are about creating and delivering online courses. K-12, especially high schools, should take a hint from this.

Keep an eye out for this one-day conference

After attending the midwest Tech Forum for the first time April 24, I can heartily recommend it as a good, accessible, one-day conference to keep up to speed with technology integration, management, and leadership. A series of effective, well-paced presentations were punctuated by opportunities for professional network, chats with vendors, round table discussions, and enjoying a bountiful spread at breakfast, lunch, and cocktail time. The event is sponsored by the folks from Tech and Learning magazine, who also maintain a web site, now in my blogroll.

I particularly enjoyed hearing and meeting Scott Meech. He brings a down-to-earth quality to tech presentations and isn’t reluctant to challenge conventional wisdom about technology and how it is and isn’t used effectively. I recommend his blog.

Math Apps for the iPhone

An update today from the folks at Wired reviews several math games for kids available for the iPhone. I also heard that a pair of techno-precocious Lab students have gotten approval to sell a math game iPhone app they developed. It’s fascinating to watch disruptive technologies blur the boundaries between computers, phones, and gaming platforms. With all our recent discussions about the future of education, it seems increasingly obvious that handheld devices are highly likely to play a significant role in learning sooner rather than later.
Do you see this happening, too, and if so, what do you think it will look like in your classroom and in the Schools?