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June 15, 2009
Auld Lang Syne
Let me zoom out for a minute: I believe strongly in the future of universities as global education brands rather than physical campuses, towns, communities or facilities. Although we like to think we're the vanguard of technology and innovation, in a lot of ways we lag behind even the retail industry. Relying on the "one-to-many" pattern in the lecture hall is going to get us in trouble. Web culture has taught us that openness is more effective, practical, and even monetizable in many cases than old-fashioned models.
There are a couple conclusions here. First, it's our responsibility to be one hundred percent transparent with our research projects, our technological developments, and our culture in order to effectively sell the brand globally. The benefit of this is saturating underserved markets, instilling love - not respect or envy - of the institutional brand into the genius kid with an OLPC in Ghana, who will remember that relationship and then want to become part of the brand in the future.
Second, to bring this back around to something vaguely related to the project at hand - we should take every opportunity to make projects like this revolve around teaching and learning. Today's student isn't served as well in a lecture hall as she is by being part of a team whose product (even if it iterates in a year's time and looks nothing like the interface she worked on) is public and creating actual value; we could accomplish this by approaching our educational mission more like entrepreneurship than like content distribution.
Posted by dchase at 09:48 PM | Comments (0)
June 01, 2009
Communication and Community
Besides the obvious goal of, like, hanging up a bunch of digital signs, our goals in undertaking this project included avoiding duplicated work (imagine how much would be duplicated if even a hundred groups installed separate systems!) and providing an opportunity for the campus IT community to work together. I think we've been reasonably successful, with only a couple major departments denying to participate, that we're aware of; one said that they "didn't want digital signage," and another purchased a competing product.
If we have been successful, it's because we evangelized this project successfully. A lot of this started with an already-established collaborative IT projects group whose e-mail list we cannibalized.
We tried our best to get the word out to every IT leader on campus, including the medical campus, by holding a catered vendor fair, meeting with IT leadership groups, creating e-mail lists, and pounding the pavement. I've probably given the Digital Signage dog-and-pony show at least twenty times.
Posted by dchase at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)