Chicago
I put together a screencast about our News & Blog server for UIC's Office of Admissions & Records:
http://www.oar.uic.edu/circle
The server runs on Drupal and currently supports 5 different Blogs & News services. Built into the system is a publication workflow consisting of 'Authors' who create content and 'Editors' who give that content final approval. All comments are moderated and easily accessed on one page through a special 'Dashboard' utility.
Also, it being Drupal, we can use the deployment for special projects such as registration for last year's UIC Disability Expo or classroom listings for student finals.
I'm not sure why Michael Miner, who writes for the ChicagoReader on the local press scene, decided to dredge up the brouhaha over the recently closed-down listServ JournoList. I mean, it's been all over teh Internets™ for weeks now and doesn't really seem to have much to do with Chicago.
Nevertheless, I immensely appreciated Miner's shameless use of the word 'listServ' in such sentences as:
The Daily Caller exposé of the JournoList listserv [emphasis added] was a parody of a modern major newspaper investigation....
Miner then proceeds to quote fellow journalist Chris Hayes who -- sacré bleu! -- also uses the term.
Then what should I come upon but a post by James Fallows in the Atlantic (no less) where he commits the same crime, using 'listServ' four times! Unfortunately in this case, the language pedants must have gotten to Fallows since he quickly follows up with an apology saying he didn't realize the term was 'trade-marked'.
My reaction was, here you have three extremely articulate language professionals using this word in precisely the way most people understand it -- and yet one of them has to apologize because it's trade-marked by some company that neither they nor probably the rest of the English-speaking world has ever heard of.
Does this make sense? By the same reasoning, 'scotch-tape' should only be used when referring to products from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.
In any case, Fallows later emailed me saying his apology was only partly serious (which reading between the lines of his post you could kind of tell).
Things I find waiting for me when I walk into the office.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Thu, 07/15/2010 - 2:04pm.
A student came by as I was closing up wanting to know if we kept records of people's searches. His hard drive had crashed and all the work he had done the day before, researching for a paper, was now lost.
I explained that the only way to do this is by creating an account on the individual databases (where possible) and then saving the search results to that. Beyond that, there's little record of what people do. And that's a good thing.
(And as consolation, I did mention that it would probably be easier to do the search one more time now that he was familiar with the database and search terms.)
Hot News from Reference: an avalanche of flash drives left abandoned in lab computers by forgetful students have been turning up at the Reference Desk. Will there be no end to this deluge? Our only hope: microchips implanted in all of us coming with at least 16 gb of disk space.
It's near the end of classes -- in fact, we're in finals week -- and I always like to go around campus taking pictures of students -- which I can then use for the UIC OAR website. Here I am on the West Side in the Medical District -- looking for someone, anyone, in scrubs or a white jacket.
The annual UIC Urban Forum took place today. Mayor Daley spoke at the opener and then took part in one of the panel discussions later on. Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel also was there -- participating in a lively discussion along with Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, Motorola CEO Greg Brown and moderator Judy Woodruff.
Discussion at these things tends to lead to platitudes ("collaboration", "shared resources" -- and considering the venue -- "more support for education"). My favorite moment came when Woodruff went on and on about people's "anger" and Rahm pointed out that it might have something to do with the economic situation. "But why does the press focus on it then," Woodruff asked. Rahm looked at her and smiled: "that's the subject for another panel".*
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* Quoted from memory.
So what am I doing on a Sunday morning? Why shooting video at the annual convention of the International Reading Association at McCormick Place, of course! Partnership READ, a joint UIC-CPS program to improve literacy in the Chicago Public Schools is doing a whole series of presentations throughout the day and I got volunteered to videotape at least three sessions.
It's that precious moment in Chicago when the trees start to bloom.
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Tue, 04/06/2010 - 9:23pm.
The best definition of a trade or skill that I can think of is being able, through your 'expertise', to make a significant improvement either in people's lives or in how they get things done. This applies to many things; it even applies to Content Management.
I remember the website I did for a relatively large non-profit organization. The original site consisted of nothing but a drab collection of web links and PDF files. It didn't take much work to automate the site and in that way to fundamentally change how people in that organization approached online content -- to the extent that the energy and dynamism of their activities "on the ground" finally were reflected in their web presence as well.
I was reminded of this again today at UIC. A number of people from Classroom Scheduling were looking at an application I had put together for students to find what room their final exam would be in (see page here). Since it's getting close to the end of the Semester, something like this might be kind of handy.
The demo went well. I had promised that the application would be easy as hell to maintain and it was. But what really impressed them were the feeds. These were formatted not as RSS files but as MS Word and Excel files (thank you, Views Bonus Pack module). This meant that every time they had an edit, they no longer had to distribute or print out for the entire University a completely new Word or Excel file. They could just point to the feed which like all feeds is updated on-the-fly. This they really liked!
Anyway, the time it had taken me to put this feature together wasn't much. In fact, the whole project didn't take me more than a day or two. So what's most gratifying then is the positive effect it produced in others -- almost sinfully out of proportion to the amount of effort I put into it. And that's a good thing!
Posted in Submitted by Leo Klein on Wed, 03/31/2010 - 12:28pm.
