In a recent InfoWorld article Bob Lewis offers a strategy to “the promised land, where IT is a strategic partner to the rest of the business, not a subservient order taker content to process work requests while accepting the blame for everything that goes wrong.”  Sound like a familiar problem?  He maintains that the common practice of treating technology services as an internal business treating other departments as customers in a fee for service relationship is at the heart of the problem.

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LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and now Yammer?  How many Adobe Air desktop clients can I have running at once?  TweetDeck does Twitter and Facebook, but not Yammer (yet).  How many live streams should I keep up with?  Once you start on a social network can you stop?  Why can’t everyone just agree on one for personal and one for business use?

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OK, so we’re all trying to figure out what, if anything, social media is useful for — other than having fun and wasting time with friends and family.   The New Media Consortium has put together a site reviewing what they’ve been experimenting with.  We have a group here that is viewing a webinar on October 27 on Effective Use of Social Media for Student recruitment ( if you’re in New Haven and want to join us just let me know.)  I’ve had some success with Twitter in advancing business interests, but nothing I’m ready to wrap an official company strategy around.  I really like LinkedIn (especially for helping students/alumni with career networking), but it seems like Facebook gets all the attention.  And don’t forget blogs — not quite as sexy as Twitter or Facebook perhaps, but still finding a place in college communication efforts.  Talking with peers, experimenting, and exploring — that’s a type of progress, right?

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Do you still keep track of the how many kilobytes, or even megabytes, your web pages are delivering to the customer?  Back in the day of dial-up modems your minimized files sizes or perished.  But not that we all have speedy cable/dsl connections does it matter anymore?  I think so, and here’s why: Read the rest of this entry »

In The Transformation of Learning with Technology authors Bush/Mott argue that much of current technology implementation in educaional settings perpetuates current teaching models instead of launching new ones.  And that without radical change real benefits of technology in teaching will not be realized.  The shifts include moving from a teaching to a learning focus and from teacher-centric to student-centric models.  They make a good case for the validity of this argument, but unfortunately don’t offer suggestions on what this shift will look like.  Here are some of my thoughts…

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It seems like everyone is either on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn — or all three.  In communicating with my family these days email is mostly used to pass on notices of Facebook updates.  So it is no surprise that traffic for these networks has surpassed email traffic.  Although it is a pretty big deal.   But do note that this is a major shift in internet use.  Since the very beginning of the internet email has far outstripped all other internet traffic — and the rise in spam certainly helped that along.  If you have a business or organization who’s primary way of communicating with audiences is via email, it is probably time (if not past time) to rethink your strategy.

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