Some of these changes are “big”, like the fact that we now can use Google Reader (a very nice RSS reader – I definitely recommend it). Others are more subtle. One of these hard-to-spot changes that happened in the last few weeks is the addition of some new visibility options in Google Calendar. When they first set things up, you could share a calendar, but you couldn’t share any of the details outside of UMM. So local folks could see the details (if you wanted them to), but everyone else (even people on the TC campus) saw everything marked as “Busy”. Recently they quietly changed things so you can open up your calendars to be fully visible if you are so inclined.

Whee! I’ve been waiting for this for a while, and it’s nice that it’s finally happened. Now I can embed my calendar in places like my university web page and folks can see more than lots of little blue blocks marked “busy”. I’ll have to be a little more careful to mark certain events as private, but it’s definitely worth it.

UMM has recently opened a position for a new Director of Information Technology. The full job description is attached, and the description and application page are on-line.

Some highlights from the “Purpose of the Position” section:

General priorities for the position include:

• promoting a 21st century learning and teaching environment for an undergraduate focused residential campus;
• supporting through technology and information resources the research endeavors of a highly qualified and active faculty; and
• advancing the use of technology to engage a growing base of prospective students, donors, and alumni.

Specifically, the Director of Information Technology will:

• Provide IT leadership to the Morris campus and in the broader University community.
• Serve as a key member of the Morris campus and University of Minnesota technology leadership team, which formulates and implements local and institutional goals and initiatives.
• Partner with the academic and administrative leadership across the Morris campus and university-wide to participate in the creation and implementation of strategic goals and IT initiatives.

I’m a member of the search committee, and I want to share this information here for two reasons.

First, if anyone reading this is interested, please consider applying!

Second, the search committee is gathering feedback from various stakeholders about what we want this person to be and do. Before we begin to look at applications, the committee would like to try to clarify as best we can what the campus wants and needs from someone in this position.

So, what do you think are the priorities for UMM’s Director of Information Technology? What do they need to do to support the teaching, research, and service missions of campus? Looking ahead 5 years, what issues do you feel that this person will need to address/get ahead of? On of my concerns in recent years has been that the campus has been far too reactive to technological change, and instead of being ahead of the ball we’re constantly scrambling to respond to events and put out fires. What skills and background does this person need to help us turn that around?

I’d be happy to discuss this at UMM CSci tea tomorrow afternoon (4-6ish in the lab), or hear from anyone by whatever other means work for you. If you have ideas or thoughts, however, please share promptly; we want to wrap up this fact finding process in the next two weeks (by the morning of Tuesday, 20 Apr).

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

Backups are good.

Everybody says so.

Really, Really Good.

So you’d think the University of Minnesota would be working to provide a reasonable on-line, off-site backup system for its folks. Unfortunately, their pricing structure seems to be from another planet where storage is, like, well, really … uh … expensive!

To quote from the relevant web page:

OIT-UDMS Backup pricing (as of 2/2008)

Storage used Cost per month
  <128GB $25
  128GB – 256GB $50
  256GB – 384GB $75

To calculate the cost of backup service, simply round up the amount of data you need backed-up to the nearest increment of 128GB and use the formula of $25/128GB/month multiplied by the retention period (30 day backup is 4X the primary data). Backup data can be held for up to 90 days. Incremental backups are run daily and that data is retained for 2 weeks. Full backups are run weekly and those backups are held for one month.

We have the additional options of 2 weeks, 30 days and 60 days if your requirements for retention are shorter.

Yup, that’s right. $25 a month for 128Gb of storage. I can buy 500 Gb hard drives for under $100, so I could buy 3 drives (1.5 Tb of storage) a year for he cost of their backup system. Mozy.com will backup an unlimited amount of data for $5/month for home users; not sure what their enterprise pricing is like, but I kind of doubt that they’re going to jump to the U’s pricing.

Bet the U doesn’t get a lot of takers at these prices. Bet their staff aren’t backing up nearly as much as they’d like, either. Hmmmm … a relationship worth exploring?

The University of Minnesota Office of Information Technology is proud to announce that the University of Minnesota is soon to become a member of ResearchChannel. ResearchChannel was founded by a consortium of leading research and academic institutions to share the valuable work of their researchers with the public through a cable television distribution network. ResearchChannel is now available to more than 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers and more than 1.6 million people who visit the ResearchChannel Web site at http://www.researchchannel.com each year. The channel also is available on 70 university and school-based cable systems in the United States…

Cable TV was cool when I was college age a zillion years ago (back in the 80’s), and we thought MTV was pretty darn cool.

That was then, though, and now is different. Sub-Evil’s generation don’t channel surf through the cable offerings, amazed that they have more than 4 options. They just don’t watch TV like we did. They time shift like mad, and cruise through a vastness of on-line offerings that make those early cable days seem positivity puny by comparison.

And now the U decides to get excited and pipe its research out to students on a cable television distribution network?!?

Uh, sorry, but I have my doubts. 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers?

Ooh.

Ahh.

Yawn.

In fairness, however, they do almost address this, even if in the tone of an afterthought:

…and was recently launched on iTunes U and YouTube.

w00t! YouTube! They get it!

Well, sort of.

You see, a quick look suggests that what they’re providing is honking great collection of lectures. They’re almost all long (mostly on the order of an hour, some closer to two), and seem to be largely academic “talking head” videos. Just what a college student wants to unwind with after a long day of…um…lectures.

Thus it’s hardly surprising that ResearchChannel’s most viewed video on YouTube has only been viewed (as of 2 Mar 08) 1,592 times, and their 10th most viewed has only been viewed 153 times (so a very steep drop in views). For comparison, the video of Sub-Evil’s performance of “Taco Man” at the ASA Talent Show 1.5 years ago has been viewed 1,033 times. It’s 1.5 minutes long, was shot will a cell phone from the audience, and only shows the second half of the song. But it would place a solid fifth in view count amongst the 166 videos that ResearchChannel has on Youtube. To be fair, it doesn’t look like any of the ResearchChannel videos has been up for much more than a month. Sadly, though, I suspect that the fragmentary “Taco Man” video will continue to hold its own against most of these even if we check back in a year or two, even with whatever marketing and promotion ResearchChannel and the associated universities might put into this.

And that video of the cute kid summarizing Star Wars? Almost 4 million views in less than two weeks.

I’m a big fan of serious content vs. sound bites, and I think ResearchChannel has their heart in the right place. There are cool examples of videos generated by university types that really take advantage of the medium and are successful in reaching an audience. I have grave doubts, however, about the likelihood that this simplistic mapping of the old lecture model onto (semi-)new technology is gonna get any traction with our son’s generation. I’m sure that some are quite good, and I can imagine that some might be quite popular/successful. But I’m guessing that those are the exceptions rather than the rule, in large part because this model just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

It’s like TED, but four times as long-winded, with less quality control, and worse production values.

Ought to just pull in droves of kids.

Really.

Droves.

The Economist has an interesting piece on why government web services tend to suck, especially when compared with the best corporate services. Their take is that a significant part of it is that isn’t any kind of competition, so there isn’t much fall out if government web tools are wretched:

When Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st—the busiest day of its year—the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead.

I suspect there’s significant truth in this, but I’m not convinced it’s the whole story. It’s amazing, for example, how many university web sites/tools are pretty wretched, including those in the computer science departments. You’d think that would drive away prospective students in ways that, in this very competitive environment, would have the kind of direct consequences that purportedly drive Amazon and Google. I certainly know that the U of M’s growing adoption/creation of on-line tools has hardly been without its trials and travails; many of their web tools are really nice, while others totally make me want to cry. Sometimes the problems are lack of infrastructure supporting the development and maintenance of the tools (a problem that’s clearly plagued many business making the transition from bricks and morter to on-line). Sometimes the problem is infighting and bureaucratic silliness that would be cut off at the knees in a well managed company (but isn’t always – not all companies are well managed).

I think, however, that one of the chronic problems (for the U of M, for governments, and for many companies) stems from the fact that the key decision makers just don’t use the internet much, so they’re not well positioned to judge the success and failure of their organization’s efforts. They often don’t use their own tools, so they don’t know how painfully awful they are, and when they do use them they don’t have the rich frame of reference needed to see what could be instead of just what is. And thus we get embarrassingly precambrian web tools. Compare this to Google, for example, where it’s clear that (a) their people are using their tools at all levels and (b) they’re very aware of what other people are doing on the web (and not just in the area of search tools).

Tip of the cap to Naughton once again for the pointer.

This wonderful little video (produced by some U of M Twin Cities mathematicians) has apparently been viewed over 1 million times now, which is a lot more views than it would ever get in class. I frequently run into faculty that are very intent on holding on to their teaching ideas and techniques, and certainly not sharing them openly with the world. They see those ideas as “their property”, to be guarded and controlled as much as possible. It’s a weird attitude, because almost none of them will ever see any money from those ideas, and the potential for wider viewing and usage is just so much greater if they open up (as in this case).

A good video like this takes a lot of time to produce, but faculty often put in huge hours on their lectures, labs, and demonstrations. Get it out there!