khascall's blog

I'm working from home today, nursing a cold and minding my 7-month-old daughter while I take phone calls, catch up on e-mails, and draft some long-overdue proposals. At lunchtime, I pulled out her favorite food -- strained pears. I poked the first spoonful into her suspicious mouth and waited for the inevitable grin of recognition. Her immediate reaction was to seize the spoon with both hands and hold it firmly in her mouth. I tried to convince her to let go. "Stella, I can't give you any more pears if you don't let go of the spoon."  I waved the jar at her. No luck. She loved pears, but she wasn't going to get another drop to eat if she didn't let go. I eventually had to pry her hands off, which made her cry. Her open mouth gave me an opportunity to poke in another bite. She stopped crying, mouthed happily at the new spoonful, and we resumed our usual lunch routine.

Last year, I participated in an effort to explore the ESB (enterprise service bus) technology space in a Mellon-funded effort led by Chas DiFatta. The website describing these efforts is now available!

This year was my fourth time attending the IEEE Supercomputing conference.  My experiences at Super are almost opposite from my experiences at most other conferences I attend. At SC, I tend to hear information that I can't immediately apply back on campus (deeply scientific presentations based on highly advanced projects conducted on heavily specialized equipment). I'm surrounded by people whose occupations tend to be substantially different from mine (professors and scientists, grid/cluster administrators and scientific programmers). It sure isn't Educause.

So, what am I doing here? Other than sometimes bumping into my colleagues from the CIC Research Computing Group, I'm here as a trend-spotter and as an observer of the field and of faculty. I speak entirely in that capacity, and I'd like to share with you my highly un-scientific observations for your consideration.

Data

Imagine: One fine morning, the boss walks into your office and says "I need your group to be more innovative." Hmm. What does she mean by that statement? How are you supposed to go "be innovative"? What questions do you ask her about this new mandate? Can you do it? Can your staff?

Right after I was made a supervisor, I attended an on-campus seminar on management. The instructor described analyzing staffing in terms of two components: Willingness and Ability. Staff might be Willing, Able, both, or neither, and the course included practical suggestions about how supervisors could address each case. This is a reasonable way to begin, but once you add innovation to the list of departmental goals, these two components are too simple a criteria. Innovation requires a third component. We call it "Spark".

Here's a quick collection of my favorite illustrations of the different forms a podcast can take:

- A way to learn something new: http://www.radiolingua.com -- learn Spanish, Italian, German in weekly classes

- A multi-format delivery of goodies: http://www.makezine.com/podcast -- audio, video, pdf files, all about MAKE'ing stuff. MAKE magazine takes a DIY/hacker approach to every aspect of life and technology, from robots/rockets/games to furniture/food/clothes.

- Another way to blog: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow -- week-daily for a year, Frank blogs whatever is on his mind. New episodes are no longer being producted, but it's hilarious (or maybe that's my twisted sense of humor....).

- An "independent" radio show: http://www.cuisinefromspain.com/ -- a monthly "cooking show", put on by a couple in Spain, one Spanish, one British.

- A source for audio books: http://www.podiobooks.com -- lots of great stories available this way, released on a schedule you specify.

These podcasts are my favorite sources of audio content related directly or semi-directly to what I do every day in the office -- innovation, ideas, management, perspective, etc.

The HBR IdeaCast
This is from the Harvard Business Review -- each episode is generally composed of an interview with an author or researcher about a particular set of ideas or advice about management and business, as well as a short "tips" segment toward the end.

Escape From Cubicle Nation
Pamela Slim focuses on creating a work life that you're passionate about -- for many, this may mean starting your own business or otherwise leaving corporate culture. For me, however, the focus is on creating a work environment that is appealing to people and gives them space to grow inside a larger organization. In addition, I find her reflections on marketing, discovering your own strengths, and developing services to be extremely relevant in an academic IT environment. She has a great blog, too.

Startup Nation

I just finished up a week at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego, CA. I came here hoping for a repeat of the rewards of ETech 2006 -- access to the pulse of the emerging tech sector, a six- to nine-month head start thinking about and planning for the technologies that will start to break into widespread public consciousness, an opportunity to talk to people who think deeply about innovation and the future, a refreshment of my own energy for the creation of the better. On these fronts, ETech 2007 delivered -- I'm going back to campus with a number of new technologies in hand, and I'm ready to engage and create and work to shape the emerging world.

Certainly I'm coming home with some practical, look-at-this-soon ideas -- Yahoo pipes as a framework for mashups, Amazon's EC2 hosting model startup projects, a desktop version of Zimbra that can act as an IMAP client, and Adobe's Apollo platform for offline html/flash applications. Further out on the edge of emerging technology, we listened to Peter Biddle and Cory Doctorow debate the future role of Trusted Computing, Melanie Rieback on the future of RFIDs, Andy Kessler on the future of medicine, and perhaps the most viscerally provocative topic, Quinn Norton on "body hacking" -- body enhancing technology.

Last week I attended a Grantwriting course offered by the Graham School -- the Graham School is the continuing education school at the University of Chicago. I am by no means an expert after three days of class, but I did learn from someone with a great deal of experience. The instructor works in development here at the U of C, and did a fantastic job with the course. We had guest speakers, stacks of resources, discussions, in-class exercises, and lots of fun. I picked up so much information from this course, I don't think I could blog about all of it, and I'm not sure it would be useful to other people if I did. That said, I thought I'd sketch out a few elements of vocabulary & jargon in the hopes that others find this useful.

Types of Funding Agents

I was struck by how widely funding agencies can differ -- in structure, in governance, and in expectation. In addition to operating differently based on their type, they also have their own individual organizational culture, like anywhere else. Our instructor compared the process of researching funders to researching for an important job interview -- it's important to know who you're talking to, and what's important to them.

I spent some time today chatting with a colleague about the process we've been following for what might be called "project ingest" -- specifically, when non-IT groups or individuals come to you and say "I have an idea!"....what's next?

I'm in an Academic Technologies department -- I run our projects group. We get some weird and wonderful stuff, filled with unknowns -- so a flexible and creative process that still qualifies as a process is particularly important. Before these get to me, they pass through some kind of filter -- sometimes, the filter is just "the Senior Director says 'Help this person!'", and sometimes, the filter is a group we call START. They support our course management system, and help faculty with short-term projects, particularly ones that can be fulfilled with existing off the shelf products. If we already have something that fulfills most of what they need, they try to fill it that way.

But if not...well, that's where things get interesting :). 3D Modeling? Custom programming? Experiment with a new software package for teaching? Weird new multimedia installation? Innovative technology extravaganza? Hm..........let's talk.

The management institute is not exactly what Educause claims it is -- it's something better. The advance information I had about the sessions and intended audience of the event had me feeling apprehensive before I actually attended. A number of the sessions seemed to address "the basics" and the intended audience is described as new managers, people new to higher ed, etc.  This is not to say that I think of myself as some kind of big expert on all thing managerial -- but it's no use going to Management 101 when you already passed Management 234. Then again, I'm the sort of person who thinks taking a college math course every few years is good for the soul....

While I think that the experience was beneficial to people with little or no management experience, I think it was those of us who have been "in the trenches" for a while that got the greatest benefit from the week. My fellow attendees may disagree (click that comment button, folks!) -- and if all of us, regardless of experience, think that we're the ones who had the best experience, then so be it. I doubt anyone in Educause will shed a tear of regret over that sentiment ;).

Here's why I think that experienced folks can really benefit from this program: