Cross-platform documentation

Fair warning: there may be no blog post tomorrow. I'll be at Hersheypark and I suspect we'll be there late. I'll try to make it up over the weekend.

We have a new writer/editor on board as of yesterday. Desperately needed, I might add. I've already passed her two tasks that I really needed an editor's eye on, and she already caught a typo I missed (I did write it and hadn't proofed it yet--nor had I put it up yet, but that's beside the point).

I'd love to tell the story and link it, but it's not ready for public viewing just yet. I'll give some background instead.

In a cost-saving/environmentalist attempt to be more efficient, our office is going to stop sending a letter reminding students who apply that we're missing information from them like standardized test scores and their high school transcript. Instead, we'll be directing them to their online account with us, where they can view their regularly-updated status and see exactly what we're missing at the time.

In the past, this letter and the transcript or scores often crossed in the mail, prompting anxious calls. At the same time, I expect we'll get "I didn't know I had to check that" calls from now on, even though we've made every effort to point them to the resource, and we know that most students are using it. Obsessively, even.

So there's rewriting of current material to be done. We have to catch everywhere we might mention that letter.

Even though the process of halting this letter started almost last year at this time, it was only today that we made the decision to stop the letter entirely. Starting tomorrow.

So there was, of course, a bit of a scramble to make sure we'd killed it everywhere we needed to. Most of it was double-checking on things I'd changed six months ago and forgotten about for certain, but it was a scramble nonetheless. I checked the last place I needed to at about 5:10 this afternoon.

In the process, a few things were proven to me.

I had considered asking the new writer/editor to help me locate the letter references, but quickly dismissed that as folly. She would have no idea where to start other than a search engine. 

If I hadn't been in the office today, this might have been a problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I really do think that I'm the only one in the office that knows all the content on our site backwards and forwards. And given that memory isn't always my strong suit (I digitize most of it to give me more processing room), that resource needs to reside somewhere else too.

Basically, I'd argue that for a large site containing lots of procedures, you need documentation for where things that may need to be changed reside. And it has to cross platforms.

We've yanked a lot of references in my time with Admissions:

• SAT I became just SAT.
  
• We used to recommend against the rush option for their scores--strangely enough, there was a time this came to us via paper, whereas the normal scores came electronically and were loaded faster. 
  
• We used to take scores as official if they were printed on a high school transcript. No longer.

And that's just standardized test scores.

Now that I've been there long enough and I know all of our materials, I can name most of the spots all the above used to appear: which brochures (viewbook, fact brochure), presentations (prospect, out-of-state, SASD), letters (AU001--the missing information letter; a host of others not worth mentioning), pages on our site (news/html/newsat.htm, from our old site--and I'm sure you can recognize the archaic structure there), the application for admission, and a ton of standard email we send out as reminders.

It's the pieces I don't touch regularly that have gotten missed. I found an email from what used to be a separate team in the office that still has both the rush score and transcript mention that was sent out as recently as last January.  And, I suspect, more recently than that still, but have yet to have proof.

Our office is, unfortunately, a bit of a Kraken: multi-armed and sprawling. Such is the nature of a large office with independent functions, much less a large university or a multi-campus institution like ours. We can occasionally collect all our arms, but most of the time a tentacle does get loose. They're squirmy little buggers.

And no, I'm not going to make the Cthulhu comparison some of you might be expecting.

But back to my point.

Not everyone in the organization is going to be an expert. You'll always have new staff. Help with managing sites, processes, etc is always welcome. Documentation may be key to keep all your miscellaneous bits in line.

Everything is Miscellaneous, and it doesn't always flock as neatly as Weinberger demonstrates. Learn to manage your organization's information, both for the benefit of your own memory and sanity, and to help the new folks on your team.

rural/urban: an unusual request

So this afternoon, an unusual request sent me down a rabbit hole.

A colleague over in ITS asked me what seemed on the surface a relatively simple question: how many students that enroll come from rural environments within Pennsylvania?

During the course of the conversation, I expanded that to include those who visit our website but might not end up enrolling who were from Pennsylvania, since a lot of Penn State's services also assist those outside of the officially-affiliated Penn State community.  Not to mention that was an easier number to come by, relatively speaking.

To that end, I went to our web analytics and expanded to look over the course of a year. Just on the high end of traffic, it was pretty easy to see the major population centers in the commonwealth. Likewise, by going to the low end of traffic, you could see the less densely populated areas, though this was less accurate. But here we run into the problem that folks from rural environments may not be online, and thus not even making it onto this count.

So what about our enrollment numbers? There's no checkmark (rural/urban) for us to bounce against, thus the Penn State Fact Book doesn't list it, nor have we ever run these numbers before. After talking to one of my data-minded colleagues, our best solution was to tap into our sociology folks at the university for a list of "rural" zip codes: once we had that, from there we could run these numbers with some degree of accuracy. Problem is, even a ballpark was tough to come by until we had some definitions like this.

Simple question, yes? Not so very.

Committees, usefulness thereof

This post started after reading this blurb questioning the need for committees. And I have to say I agree.

My office excels at bringing together committees, or working groups, or what-have-you. In practice, though, the most effective use of everyone's time that I've seen has been in bringing together the two or three people who will actually do the work for the project and having them keep up with each other.

In a lot of cases, this could be done online. Twitter could be used for up-to-the-minute updates. Or, of course, you could use a more normal project management package. A few of us used Backpack pretty extensively for awhile. The subject experts should only be pulled in as consultants to make a good project run.

But the point of committees in our office (often), unfortunately, and I see the need for it, is generally for buy-in. To keep people aware of how the project is coming.

And I really feel it's a waste sometimes. But there's a huge culture change that would need to take place to make it all work without them.

Has anyone else actually been in a place that has managed that change? Any tips you can share?

One-upsmanship (internet culture)

We're creating our own language here at Penn State.

Then again, people in groups together for any significant period of time do. Does anybody outside of Penn State understand the significance of "BS Breakfast"? Probably not: they'd take it for what it sounds like. Which was, of course, the intent. (BS here stands for "brainstorming," for those not in the know.)

"Language" may be an overstatement, but it's at least a code. You're "in" if you know what we're talking about.

I'm part of a lot of these communities with their own codes: Penn State TLT groupie (joke!) is just one of them. And acronyms are just part of these codes.

One community with a ton of community-made acronyms that I'm part of is BPAL enthusiasts (keep in mind, with the following links, that their aesthetic is quite dark--don't be shocked). Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab is a Los Angeles-based outfit that creates perfume oils, and it has its own parlance. GC (general catalog), LE (limited edition), CD (Carnaval Diabolique) and the like are pretty common to see in discussions on the topic, as is BPTP (Black Phoenix Trading Post, their sister company, which produces all their non-perfume oil goods).

Other communities of a sort are more based on quotes or references. The video Shannon posted yesterday contains a bunch of these. Whether or not you notice them depends on where you spend your time online. One of the first clips is a re-creation of the Numa Numa guy.   There's also "first!" (warning: expletives, immaturity), commonly seen in comments. See also: Internet Commenter Business Meeting (same warning applies, only way more so. plus offensiveness. plus . . . oh, nevermind--it's from College Humor, so you should expect as much), which is basically what would happen if a meeting was run like virtually any popular open forum online.

And, of course, if you haven't yet been hit by a Rick Roll, you haven't been online long enough, and you certainly haven't been taking a look all the way through my links. But that may be just as well, really.

Internet Memes (warning: too many warnings than I can list) attempts to collate all these references. It doesn't hit all of them, but it hits the highlights quite well.

And there's certainly some mocking of that communal language of references. An editorial in the New York Times today, Lord of the Memes, tells us that to be on the cutting edge, we need to be "not only an early adopter, but an early discarder." We should go through these products, services and references before anyone else and then get sick of them and dismiss them with disdain should anyone else bring them up. The article ends with "remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever."

I didn't discover that editorial on my own. In a rare reverse-crossover reference--real life to online rather than the other way around--someone told me about it at lunch and I looked at it on my iPhone when the conversation waned. There's some irony there, believe me.

But this is connectivity. Or the cost of connectivity. Or the advantage of connectivity.

The point is, that too is part of your cultural education. So choose your influences wisely--they will become your references, and part of your language. Maybe I should be a bit more selective in mine. ;)

Serendipity and complications

Amit Gupta wrote about social serendipity today, and it feels like we've got a landslide of that going on here at Penn State, though much closer to home than his examples (he's the guy behind Photojojo, for those not familiar).

As my follow list on Twitter grows, I'm finding more and more amazing, knowledgeable people out there who "get it," in the words of one of those folks, who it just so happens I got to meet for lunch today.

And the give-and-take of that community, online and off, has been amazing. You end up tapping into the collective knowledge of a ton of experts, as long as you're willing to wait for an answer.

This has happened to me before, in other forums and communities, but this is as close to home as it's come. And while it's really cool to have connections wherever you might need them--an online shout-out for info about Buffalo a couple months ago turned up online friends that I didn't know were out there, for example--having them right in your backyard is amazing.

I mean, hey. Impromptu lunches are a possibility, even.

But it does cost attention. Design for Emotion and Flow describes this really well in the second paragraph of the article. The rest is no less important, but it's unrelated to my point here.

There's a point of balance that I think most of us are still trying to find in this newfound community:

• how to give and take equally to one's network;
  
• how to enjoy oneself and others evenly;
  
• how to find a sympathetic ear to vent without alienating others;
  
• where "no invitation [is] required" and crashing the party;
  
• expansion of connections and input overload; 
  
• "value" of contribution and "just being yourself."

Some of this, no one has talked about at much length. But I'm feeling it out there. And it's something we all have to work through. Personally, I worked out some of this by dividing my Twitter presence into personal and professional. Folks I meet at conferences may get one or the other depending on the context.

Some folks have made parts of this problem quite plain: Shannon posted two videos to explain why she might "unfollow" someone on Twitter. Other bits of this are way more unspoken.

It's exciting to me that these new modes of being create new problems, bizarrely enough. It means we're progressing, expanding. Perhaps not in a geologic time sense, but significant nonetheless.

I'm looking forward to solving these problems for myself and seeing what they mean on the grander scale, especially as re-localization becomes a trend.

Geology and tech: the end is the beginning is the end

I think I prefaced over this last weekend that I wasn't going to have a theme with this entry in mind.

I started college as a geology major. Somewhat obviously, I didn't stick with it, but it's still a great interest of mine.

Some of you know and some of you don't that I have an MFA in Creative Writing. So a lot of my so-called "personal" reading is actually keeping up on that end of things for me.

And to combine both interests, I recently read Threshold, by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It's very much in a genre I used to write--a pseudo-magical realism, if magical realism in literature could be divorced from its Latin American roots (which it can't be, really). It starts out gritty, modern, and then wanders gently into science, myth, urban legend, and a particular superstitious nature you find in the south.

But my main point in addressing the experience of reading this book was the following passage, voiced by our narrator, Chance, who was in college as a geology major at the time:

"Can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I'm learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read the words." - p. 177

It's this urge that drives me, strangely enough, in my current work as well.

I'm learning to read in a larger sense than I've ever read so far. And to some extent this was an evolution: I did, after all, start on email quite awhile ago, then moved to forums, then Livejournal, then Blogger, then Facebook/MySpace, then Twitter, and Google Reader and the big feeds (Slashdot, BoingBoing, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, etc) got stuck in there somewhere too (and I may be skipping steps, of course: on the multimedia end, Flickr and YouTube are two examples, but I'm talking about text here, in the main).

But in terms of an educated and informed community that I can have face-to-face contact with and shares my academic/work interests, this is a first (which might be, I might add, because my college/grad work had little to do with technology). Not just casual friends giving updates on their lives, but I get a touch of friendliness and personality alongside the theory.

So I get these fantastic ideas as well as the context surrounding them: the problems that were faced to prompt them to come up with these ideas. It's good stuff.

But larger than that, and for a longer period of time, I've been learning to read people and their interaction with technology; learning to read the evolution of society due to technology's influence; learning to read how technology is changing our minds and changing our spaces.

I'm reading the future. I've already learned to read the past.

So between geology and tech, I feel like I've got the span of things.1 And while this current tech iteration is more minute than an atom in a drop in a bucket in terms of geologic time, it's monumental for us living in it.

And I get to read it. And better yet, write some of it.

[1]Oroboros.

Spend a Summer Day notes

Writing my first post-a-day blog post in August on my iPhone during gaps in a Spend a Summer Day.

SASD, as we know it and love it for short, is a day-long open house event held at all Penn State campuses. At Penn State University Park, due simply to demand, it's held on six days: every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday spanning two weeks, usually bridging July and August.

August 1st, incidentally, is also the day our new application for admission goes live. Given that and the fact that EVERYONE in the office helps during SASD (our Executive Director was running between the HUB and Schwab Auditorium on Monday trying to fix a problem), to say this time of year is stressful is an understatment.

I've been staffing our table at the information fair during the event pretty regularly so far, and I've noted a difference in style between me and some of my colleagues. Some colleagues push our brochures, despite all the information in a few of them being available online.

If I can make a generalization, these tend to be the older admissions folks who are more used to using the brochures. Others offer options: you could grab this AP brochure to see what credit you'd get for what score on which test, or you can look it up on our website. (for my own commentary, why waste the paper and cost us the money for four scores they could easily look up?)

I've also found that when I offer my AIM handle to students I'm talking to, they get super-enthusiastic. And even their parents start telling me I'm the last word in customer service: above and beyond and all that.

So while this doesn't affect the larger conversation of the newest modes of electronic communication, it does tell me that some folks are picking them up no problem (students, to generalize), some folks are slowly picking them up or recognizing their value (parents), and some folks will print out webpages if the brochure is discontinued (the non-technologically-savvy).

But the thing is, we have to serve them all. Penn State is committed to serving the Commonwealth, and any one of the above could either become a student here or at least interface with the University in some way.

So how do we serve all, even those not comfortable with technology?

I think the idea of engaging the early adopters is a good one (apologies that I don't remember who suggested it right now), and certainly paves the way to spreading the word in a grassroots fashion.

Something else I'd like to explore further, perhaps in a later post, is how technology can help us realize cost savings and green initiatives without leaving anyone behind, especially considering the widespread nature of Penn State's mission.

August challenge

Taking up Cole's challenge of a post a day for August, according to the rules outlined there. Me and Daniel and Shannon so far, as far as I've seen.

Love to say more on the matter, but I've got a meeting in a second here. One thing to share before I go: I'm reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations and also was fed a video of Shirky talking about his book by someone in my network (the section about flash mobs is especially engaging: "nothing says dictatorship like arresting people eating ice cream," for example).

And the commentary I'd like to add is that this is, to some extent, what we're doing. Someone has an idea, puts the call out there to see if anyone's interested, and people throw their hats into the ring, cooperatively arranging taxonomies (er, folksonomies, really) to tag and aggregate content, resulting in a pool of information and new ideas being created.

It's what I've seen in action growing slowly over a year, accelerated by the TLT Symposium and Twitter, sparked further by TweetMeets and BS Breakfasts and Bookclub, and burst into full flame (as far as I can tell) in Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State. And I'm convinced that this is the way to do it.

But it's happening this way (or similarly, at least) elsewhere: EduWeb happened recently, and people were Tweeting and videostreaming (alternate) and liveblogging sessions, and it was almost as good as being there, minus a significant amount of in-person networking and fun. But it can be done. I've been caught up in this plus Jeffrey Veen's idea of an audience ombudsman for conferences and trying to figure out how this works in purely-online communities.

And it really goes back to the idea of an alpha user, I think. But the thing is that we've got a bunch of them here at Penn State.

More to develop on this idea. But it will have to hold: I've got a meeting for our campus tour podcast project coming up.

culture

If I haven't mentioned it (and I haven't), I caught Cirque du Soleil last week when they performed locally. And when I say locally, I mean across-the-street-from-my-office locally.

I'm only now getting a chance to listen to the CD version, which is mostly awesome, though it drops into easy listening territory every once in awhile. The show was similarly good-with-one-caveat: fantastic show, few quibbles there, but the venue really wasn't a good one for them. Seating arrangements were weird, with whole fields of seats left empty, seemingly on purpose, and those seated on the floor itself I hear didn't even get a good view because they were below the stage.

I went with L, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it, despite L forgetting his glasses and me my inhaler when I was having asthma troubles. Just a seasonal deal, kicked in by my allergies: nothing to worry about, but still annoying. Happens every two or three years, but I just up the dosage on my maintenance meds and it usually goes away.

On our way out, a man walking in front of us said to the woman he was walking next to: "There's our culture for the month." L and I were rather aghast.

In a couple weeks I'm heading to a conference in Rochester, and the night I return I'm planning to try to catch Elie Wiesel, hopefully with S. This is all dependent upon getting tickets, which I'll find out early next week. If you're not familiar, I'll quote Wikipedia's first few sentences: Wiesel is a "American-Jewish novelist, political activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of over 40 books, the best known of which is Night, a memoir that describes his experiences during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in several concentration camps."

I enjoy being in a place with access to educational/cultural events.

And with that, I've got to run. I need to finish putting together some CDs and folded paper cases (I love those things) and possibly run to the store before we get on our way to our game tonight, and we need to beat the release of football traffic after the Iowa game around 5:30 (thanks for the heads-up, L).