smiltenb's blog

MICA's Ocean's Twelve are attending the Oracle/PeopleSoft Higher Ed User Group Conference in Las Vegas this week.  This is another record breaking year for HEUG -- topping more than 5,000 attendees at this international conference.  And this is a record breaking year for MICA as we have 12 people attending the conference and are presenting a six sessions.  We have been so fortunate to have resources like the HEUG and local peers who have helped us through our challenges to realize the values of big technology.  And it is always interesting to get a away from home and gain a perspective on what we've accomplished so far and what lies ahead.

Aside from the awesome presentations and great hallway conversations that happen at an event like HEUG, we had a special treat today.  Stan Jakubik, Assistant Vice Chancellor at the University System of Maryland, begins his term as the HEUG President later this week.  Our group from MICA was honored to pose for this photo op.  We are thrilled to have someone from the neighborhood as a champion for higher ed and for technology.  Way to go Stan!

Last week I attended a meeting with a group of young MICA alums. Nearly two dozen recent graduates offered insights about alumni programming and ways MICA can engage recent graduates. Incorporating feedback like this in our technology planning processes is a big challenge and often many decisions are made based on assumptions of what we think people want or need. So it was really valuable to be part of dialog where alumni shared their ideas and expectations about institutional communication.



As an institution that is getting ready to jump on the bandwagon and offer email-for-life to our 2008 graduating class, the comments from our recent graduates was timely. Our young alumni want to keep in touch with the college but they do not view a campus email account as a tool for making that happen. The group commented that it would be more valuable if the college provided web services and tools that allowed them to update contact information (email and mailing addresses), connect with one another and share news with MICA and their peers.

A few weeks ago Oracle launched a beta site for it's version of a social networking application called Oracle Mix. Their intention is to create a place where people can come together around Oracle products and services. For the most part, Oracle Mix really seems to provide Oracle with information it could use to improve applications, identify opportunities for expanding services and build from ideas and solutions from people outside their organization.

It's been interesting to watch it grow from a site full of mostly Oracle developers and employees to one with almost 3000 participants. What would be really exciting is to see aspects of Mix incorporated into other Oracle products. If you're interested in checking out Oracle Mix, visit https://mix.oracle.com/.

We technicaly began our Oracle/PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and Portal upgrades in May 2007 and, having made my way through countless upgrades/implementations over the past eight years, this project has been suprising uneventful. Just to shake things up a bit we threw in a few wrenches of our own -- deciding to implement the new versions on vmWare, deploying a new SSL switch/load balancer and using (the new for us) Oracle Application Server.



One of the attributes the really pride ourselves on here at MICA is the ability to be agile. When we have a change in plans or challenges that appear at the last minute, our team is not only great at adapting, they often use it as an opportunity to expand knowledge and learn from the experience.

Today I'm attending Adaptive Path's UX Week in Washington DC.  Kevin Brooks from Motorola Labs gave an interesting presentation on storytelling.  The comment I enjoyed most was about silence being the "space of creativity".  Brooks encouraged listeners to accept silence and to let creativity spark and unfold without trying to change it's course by influencing the silence. 

When I was in college, we spent one session of my foundation design class talking exploring the concept of negative space -- this is the visual equivalent of silence.  And I think it's a concept that technologists and web designers often forget.  So often we get caught up in maximizing the available real estate (a web page or the ten minutes we have to present to a committee) to deliver a story that we ignore the incredible value of silence.  By building applications that use more negative spaces (silence) we could really improve our user experience -- because we would be giving them a space to create and collaborate with us to develop the story.

I am attending EduWeb 2007 this week.  This is a conference focused on web technology in Higher Ed -- with a slight tilt toward marketing and recruitment.

At the heart of our MICA Connected strategy we are trying to bridge the gap between marketing/communications/public web  experience and systems/services/private content.  Many of the discussions and presentations at EduWeb offer great examples of how broad the web experience can (should?) be.  In his keynote address, Bob Johnson said "message control is dead" -- yet so many campuses are afraid of letting more people participate in shaping the college's web experience.  So many people I've talked with this week really believe that the best ambassadors for our institutions are our students and faculty.  We believe that our web presence would be richer, more exciting and a more true reflection of our campus experience if we tapped into the authentic resources of our own community.

For many years technology projects at MICA followed a simple formula:  implement tools and services and then get people interesting in using them to improve business.  This approach worked pretty well for us -- as a small, private visual arts college.  People on our campus really respond to things they can see and experience -- particularly when it comes to technology.  So building or upgrading a system first and then showing that what it could provide was an effective approach. 

Occassionally I feel the need to justify my SL adventures by doing "work" -- exploring aspects that may play into higher ed technology and academic programming.  Recently I visited IBM's SOA Adventure island.  The island, much like my impression of SOA, looks pretty cool and offers fun stuff, but gets convoluted the more time you spend with it.  In terms of providing information about SOA I was not particularly impressed.  There is an attempt to make a connection between playing steel drums on the beach and SOA ("because SOA composes your IT like musical notes") but I was at a loss for how the big volcano and under-world chambers of heaven and hell fit in.

Being chased by SOA service goblins?

Service reusability?