Web 2.0, web 3.0 and all that these terms imply is quite daunting. I have long thought about the concept of “disruptive technology” and believe that it results in some form of “cognitive dissonance”.

Not to get all pyschological on you but the social side of networks and technologies rooted in human communication implies that our cognitive (and emotive) abilities will be affected. Agreed?

When we are charged with paying attention to all the options in the cloud or offered by our immediate environment, it’s pretty easy to go “catonic”….but that’s the charge….figure it out so that all this becomes more functional than dysfunctional.

What got me on this “kick”? You probably have heard of the video “Where the hell is Matt?” . It strikes me as simple but pretty powerful at the same time…it’s worth the watch. Even more interesting to me is Matt’s recent npr essay available in text and audio, emphasizing the science of cognitive evolution and how maybe our “tribalness” is challenged. Have I lost ya yet….I am but don’t let that stop any of us from thinking about these things.

If you want to keep up, don’t try to keep up with technologies, keep up with the literacies technologies make possible.

Apparently it’s come ’round time to talk metrics again, because at a meeting this morning we were given a hefty stack of handouts beginning with “Managing IT as a Business” by Mark D. Lutchen. I’d link to the full article, but not surprisingly you have to pay money to read the whole thing; here’s some excerpts, which, also not surprisingly, leave out what I consider to be the most important point. You might think that I’m not a big fan of metrics but that’s not the case’; metrics matter you just have to be careful what you mean by metrics, snip:

In too many companies, IT metrics focus on operational, technical and transactional components– and whether projects are moving forward on time and within budget. Unfortunately these “shop-floor” type metrics do not, by themselves, get at the heart of what the executive team needs to know about the IT organization. In fact, because such metrics often look good on paper, they actually may be masking problems.

To achieve consistently high performance and value, executives need to be able to measure how effectively the IT organization is positioning itself to be used by its constituents as a driver of business value.

So, as a University what exactly is our business value? The top-level answer is research, teaching, and learning, though not necessarily in that order. But let’s tip the iceberg; all our business depends on attracting and retaining good faculty and good students, and of course turning the latter into a loyal and generous alumni. So the question is how does IT further those values?

Attachment five in the morning’s hand outs was a list of metric suggestions from Chris Gill at Gonzaga University. I’m just going to use Gill’s main topics and add my comments, so you’ll need to switch back and forth or split the screen if you want to follow what’s going on.

• Support Center (Help Desk)– I should probably just leave this alone, but my position is that we should aim to build systems so simple and so stable that we can pretty much eliminate the need for a help desk. The rest of Gill’s items don’t have much to do with what I think of the support center.
• Personal Computers– Currently I’d guess about 1.5 computer for each student, faculty, and staff member; that might be a little low and of course it doesn’t include PDAs, iPhone’s, etc. In other words, these are not machines we own, but rather the juggernaut we’re trying to survive.
• Central Systems—Yup.
• Network– Yup again.
• Academic– Of the seven listed items the first five are quantitative measurements of the LMS system that is assumed to be in place. Now  that assumption should tell us something about how central technology has become to the core mission of the University. However, limiting the academic importance of technology to an LMS or smart classroom uptime misses a great deal of what is, or at least should be, going on.
• Web– What troubles me here is that there seems to be an assumption of “a” Web. Maybe I’m just reading wrong, but the list doesn’t seem to begin to capture the complexity of the web environment at the average University.
• General/Other– surveys are not the only way to capture user attitude or experience, and in fact they’re one of the least reliable methods for doing so. Word-of-mouth is increasingly an online phenomenon; see Web and Support Center above.

I’m not suggesting that this is a bad list, in fact it’s a very good one; it’s just a very incomplete one. It tells us a lot about things, but not very much about how people use things, or about how they feel about using them, or how rapidly they are discovering new ways to use these things to improve the processes of learning, teaching, etc.

Maybe I’m blogging a dead horse here, maybe this has nothing to do with us, and we should leave it to the executive decision team. Maybe it’s not our job to change things, or my job to suggest that we should try, but then again, look at the alternative.

DinoChicken

From outline to full text, witness here the writing of 13 (annotated) sentences about startups in EtherPad. Thanks to Charles McKenzie for this nugget.

When it comes to websites, everyone is a marketer. Every website is selling *something* – whether it’s a widget, a subscription, a journal article, a blog post, a helpdesk ticket, or an engineering degree. Money may not exchange hands, but if you want a user to  do *anything* on your website, you’re selling something. So who is your target audience and what do you want them to do? That’s your goal! Analytics can tell you if you’re achieving that goal. <http://www.trendingupward.net/2008/08/not-a-marketer/>

As we are building a new sites, the ability to collect the relevant data needs to be built in. We need to move forward with more clarity and transparency as to what our users are doing in our sites. Just something else to throw in the already complicated mix!

Some historical perspective is useful. Web 2.0, the latest wave in corporate technology adoptions, could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than technologies adopted in the 1990s—such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (Exhibit 1). The latest Web tools have a strong bottom-up element and engage a broad base of workers. They also demand a mind-set different from that of earlier IT programs, which were instituted primarily by edicts from senior managers…

What distinguishes them from previous technologies is the high degree of participation they require to be effective. Unlike ERP and CRM, where most users either simply process information in the form of reports or use the technology to execute transactions (such as issuing payments or entering customer orders), Web 2.0 technologies are interactive and require users to generate new information and content or to edit the work of other participants…

See also Derek Wenmoth for a pretty good summary as to how the McKinsey report  relates to education.

• *The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
• *The best uses come from users – but they require help to scale.
• *What’s in the workflow is what gets used.
• *Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs – not just their wallets.
• *The right solution comes from the right participants.
• *Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.