Tuesday 6 November 2007

Reboots, Leopards and Digital Natives...

A bad start to the day as I'm phoned at home in the morning as we've lost some portal services. I am lucky (unlucky?) enough to live about 2 minutes from work so am often the first person people call when they can't get anyone else. I'm good at passing messages on, but can't actually fix anything! Perhaps I should learn. I'm told all of our technical information is in a wiki which anyone can follow. Maybe I'll test it next time something needs restarting - can't be too difficult turning something on and off again can it? Just joking guys - I know it's much more complex than that!

Day got a bit worse when I went to a meeting and tried connecting my laptop to the wireless network. For some time I've been refusing to print huge piles of paper out to take to meetings, and I just take my laptop instead - we print far too much paper. More than we've ever done, and we need to stop. Unfortunately I made the mistake of upgrading the operating system on my laptop last night from Tiger to Leopard (it's a mac, before windows users think I've gone mad). Worked perfectly, until I tried to use it wirelessly. Basically, it doesn't work now. Pretty useless for a laptop really. I had 3 of the best brains in the department working on it during the afternoon (anyone want to guess who?) but still it doesn't work. However, I have every hope that a fix will be found tomorrow....

Went to a very interesting meeting about how we in the Professional Services - including the Library, LeTS, Careers Services, Student Services, CiCS - could communicate better to the University about the development work we're doing in support of learning and teaching. We also talked about how we communicate with the digital natives - our prospective and current students who don't use email because it's "old fashioned", who think that instant messaging is old hat, and for whom social networking is the way they communicate with each other, but they don't necessarily want us to use it.

I'm going to a workshop soon on exploiting the potential of blogs and social networks which I hope will help me understand some of the issues. I certainly think it's something we in CiCS need to address fairly urgently.

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