Pride of Szeged

While we were at CAUSE, I noticed a consistent theme coming out of several presentations- "how do we reach the students?" When there are communication needs between the IT groups and the students- such as virus warnings, training events, or whatever- how do you broadcast that message?

It occurred to me that one possible answer might be found in the tools that students actively seek out when using their laptops. One such possibility is the social networking site Facebook, which the folks over at Ibiblio have been looking into. If nearly 90% of UNC's undergraduates are using the tool, is it possible for ITS to reach them through it? Well, probably not, unless we're willing to shell out funds to buy advertising through Facebook's Announcements.

However, another solution occurred to me, based on our experience helping the ITRC fight a virus outbreak on campus a few years back. After looking at a dozen different student laptops, I started to realize that most of the students had installed Weatherbug. I asked one of them about it, and suggested she uninstall it (being a vector for spyware). Her response? "well, if I can't have stuff like that, what's the fun in having a laptop?". Hmmm…

So I started thinking that maybe ITS could capitalize on their interests and develop a light application, either for download or as part of the default CCI load, that would take the place of Weatherbug. We could talk to the students and make sure we understood the draw ("I want to know if it's raining!"). Once we have the requirements, we could build the app to provide those features without the spyware. In addition, we could add UNC-specific features, such as a desktop search of help.unc.edu, virus alerts, Perhaps even campus announcements. All available from a toolbar application.

Of course, this idea has some problems. For one, my impression of what students do with their laptops might be dated. Maybe Weatherbug is so, like, yesterday. Another problem is the age-old lack of resources- who's going to develop this (mostly likely C++ or .Net) application? Who will maintain it?

Still, it's an idea, and one that I think could have some traction. Anyway, if you have thoughts or suggestions (or vicious criticisms), feel free to drop me a line. I'd be interested in seeing if anybody has had thoughts along these lines.

It's been weeks since I've been able to get any sort of post up here, but it hasn't been for lack of things to write about. In that time we've been to the ICKM Conference in Charlotte, NC, and UNC CAUSE in Wilmington. The time in between these events has been busy as well, with us catching up on editing concerns and trainings.

The ICKM was truly international – we met people from all over the world, and most of them were academics. We met people working on ways to share agricultural knowledge among farmers in India, and others trying to find ways to use KM to develop collaborative online communities. The approach at this conference was often less than practical ("is it 'Strategic Knowledge Management', or 'Knowledge Strategic Management'? Hmm…"), yet I heard many good ideas over that week.

While ICKM was international, CAUSE was completely local- many of the folks there were from our own school, and all of them were from the UNC system. Our interactions with them felt familiar; these were our counterparts from all over the state, dealing with the same needs and barriers that we do, and eager to share solutions. Our presentation on our 'Information Commons' project and the 'Knowledge Base Suite' was very well received, and I think we have a lot of interest in our plans to develop a collaborative KM solution.

Although it's too much effort to try to report on everything we heard and did during those conferences, I've tried to list some of the highlights below. Ultimately, I think the most substantial benefit from going to them is that we've learned that we're far from the only people working on these sorts of problems (managing institutional knowledge), and in many cases, we're ahead of the game. It's good to see the many ways in which these ideas and technologies are being put to use, and that our ideas of the best way to do KM (open-source technologies, standards compliance, structured information, collaboration) are turning out to be considered 'best practices' from professionals from all over the field.
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