Easy media publishing

I’ve come across a variety of tools that I’ve been testing in my personal life as well as seeing how it may apply to academia. The first such tool is posterous. In a nutshell this is a quick blogging platform that allows for simple, yet elegant media publishing.

I co-teach a course for a group of honors students, and one of the exercises we have them do is to output a short powerpoint presentation to enable them to share the content on their iPods. I found this tool to be a tremendous asset for me to display their final output in a quick, relatively uniform way, also adding capability for them to critique each others content. I just gave them the post e-mail address, they composed an e-mail with their photos attached. I received a request to post through my e-mail as well as the posterous administrative interface, and after I approved the post, all the work was done for me.

On the personal side, I coached Ryan’s first grade soccer team this year. I used this as a tool, along with sms and e-mail to push updates as to when soccer practice was canceled, changes in schedules, etc. I didn’t formally ask the parents what they thought of my process, though for me it was major time saver.  None the less, we only lost 1 game the entire year. Go Magic!

2009-11-13 ITS Staff Meeting

I found that our ITS staff meeting was very productive. Pam lead a discussion of IS Values that we could agree and take forth as a common platform through our organizational changes. Mark also attended and pointed out our necessity to change, as has been referenced by consultants and other peer institutions. Unfortunately I did not capture our board comments. I look forward to minutes posted. Final thoughts, while we have our smaller (ITS meetings) I feel that it be highly important that these values be commonplace that pervade the organizational culture.

On another note, Gary Caster sent out a synopsis of our ‘effective meetings’ effort that has occurred over the last 6 months or so, though I was a bit confused as to how to read the charts. In a sense I think generally they state that IS as a whole is in consensus that meetings are important, though agendas need to be established and the topics need to be addressed specifically without a lot of straying. One final thought is that while most IS employees felt that the right people were at the table, action items were lacking at the conclusion of the meeting. I personally would like to thank Gary for his efforts and I for one found the process and data valuable.

Effective Meeting Survey

UPDATE: Pam subsequently sent out a note mentioning that the directors are going to work with HR and map job descriptions with roles. Members of the organization will then be asked for feedback as an overlay on how accurate the descriptions are to the actual job duties being performed.