Institutional Knowledge

Recently I listened in on a webinar (a WebEx presentation + conference call) given by RedDot and UNICON on how they integrated content management (provided by RedDot) with a portal (Academus, provided by UNICON). Besides being a sales pitch for the two products (Why buy one when you could get two at twice the cost?) there was some interesting commentary from UNICON about portals and how they can be used to get information to specific groups of people.

Everyone wants to target specific groups people in this age of information overload and that’s fine. I think the two main issues are 1) is your message worth it to the target and 2) can you define your target group. There are many other issues, obviously, but these are the main ones I want to focus on.

For the first issue it really comes down to does the message have to be pushed to the target or can that information be found when needed. Yes, that opens up a can of IA worms, but that’s for another post. To me this means “stuff” that’s out of the ordinary, like system downtimes and important dates that have been changed.

The second issue is also tricky. Lets say you want to target 4th year students. What is a 4th year student? The answer is not as obvious as it may seem. Is it a student that has been at Chico for 4 years? Do they have a certain number of units? What about transfer students? What about continuing education students? Even after you’ve answered all the questions that define your group, do you have the answers in place where they can be queried by the applications that will deliver information to your group? “Well, this part is in LDAP, but this part is in the data warehouse, and this last part is in a file cabinet.” It looks like you’ve got some work to do…

I attended Kristin Johnson’s staff workshop entitled, “The Blah, Blah, Blah About Blogs: Practical Applications of Blogging for Higher Education”. Being fairly familiar with blogs already, I was curious to hear how much others on campus knew about blogs. Also, having just finished the Ambient Findability, where the author described librarians as divided on the usefulness of blogs in our information society, I was interested what type of librarians we have at CSU, Chico. (In a word: forward thinking)

Kristin’s presentation was a good overview for the audience who was mostly comprised of faculty. She showed some examples of how bloggers were using the blog tool in their classroom. In addition, she pointed out a bunch of existing blogs on campus (more for the directory). There seems to be a ground swell of blogging from the library staff. It would be great if they could combine all those resources into one blog source (beta) that was officially blessed by the campus.

One of the big points that everyone kept coming back to was the problem of signal vs. noise and how do we increase information literacy so we, as consumers of information from the web, know how to weed out the useful nuggets from the mounds of junk out there.

Here’s the presentation notes which includes links to some good blogging references. She is also presenting at this years HigherEd BlogCon, check out her presentation notes which will be made available with a screencast next week.

Technorati Tags: blogs, csuchico, HigherEdBlogCon

This week at Mix06 Microsoft announced the release of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2. Anticipating wide spread adaption when it goes live, I’ve been testing the IE 7 betas against Web Services flagship project, the portal.

Cosmetically, things look good with IE7. Part of that is because we’re not using too may fancy CSS layout techniques. However, one concern that has cropped up is that the top navigation in the portal either isn’t clickable(in the production environment) and occasionally doesn’t appear (in development environment). That could be a big problem because if this isn’t addressed in IE7 development or is actually due to our current CSS techniques, users will have a much harder time of getting to the appropriate page.

At this point I’m not too concerned since it’s still in Beta. However, as the time grows closer to the final release I’ll need to revisit and see if things have improved simply because IE has majority of the market share. Coupled with it’s tight integration in Windows, if users start to upgrade, presumably it will be more difficult to downgrade, unlike Firefox or Opera.

The question in my mind is how quickly will the university adapt IE7 as an “officially supported browser”?

Interllectual has the bullet points of rule from the keynote presentation at HighEdWebDev 2005. I gotta go to some of these things…

1. Corporate expectations in a non-profit budget

“Yup.”

Slide 17 PDF is crazy. Slide 8 is hilarious.