Friday, June 23, 2006
Yogurt for pre-breakfast. Today I traveled to Oakland for a meeting called by Dan G about IT strategy and how UCOP can help. Representatives from all the UC campuses were present and included faculty, students, staff, and systems administrators. The meeting was well organized and I thought the time flew by very quickly. Breakfast was provided—I had a salty bagel with cream cheese, a small slice of quiche, some fresh fruit (the strawberry I had was particularly sweet). During the provided lunch they did an Oprah-in-the-audience style of question and answer panel with students which was very informative. One student from UCLA talked about how she and her classmates use handheld, infrared, vote-taking devices to take quizzes and the results are show within seconds on a display. Many of the students called for IT developers to involve students earlier in the design process—an old familiar tune from recommended web usability best practices ten years ago and just plain usability best practices from before that. Students use Facebook, LiveJournal, and other social networking sites and check them daily. Students are starting to rely on RSS and are very enthusiastic about it. What one person said struck me as very valuable: "the student experience from prospect to alumni"—all too often computer systems are procured, designed, and implemented without this regard to creating relationships with students at every point of contact over time, and this is the reason for many of our IT problems along the way. They used a different vote-taking system called OptionFinder during our meeting—it was the first time I had seen or used it and it was pretty neat even if the controllers looked like out of the 1970s or 1980s. I forgot to mention that at the filmfest showing on Wednesday Joel and I enjoyed chatting with several of the women in the audience. Napped. Late meal: leftovers. Read news, studied OS X keyboard shortcuts. I am seeking an OS X screensaver that will pull image data from Flickr RSS feeds. If you know of one, please let me know.