The blogosphere is abuzz this week about an Oxfam study that estimates that the net worth of the 85 richest individuals in the world equals that of the bottom half of the world population, 3.5 billion individuals. I won’t add any commentary about this extreme inequality (for that, see articles in places like The Atlantic, Slate, and the Huffington Post). I’ll just note that if anyone out there knows one of The Eighty-Five please urge them to share some of that wealth with universities to create more opportunities for our students!
etc.
The forthcoming Christmas-New Year holiday season will mark the end of my first six months as a dean. I’m looking forward to a couple of weeks of no meetings, and time to catch up on reading. I’ll also take a break from this “Dispatches From a New Dean” blog, restarting the week of January 6. Happy Holidays!
As I write I am supposed to be on a plane to Jacksonville, FL for the CCAS Annual Conference. The first leg was delayed several times due to problems with the inbound plane, and when it finally got in the air it had to turn around due to additional problems (!). At that point a colleague and I had to re-book our flights since we would miss our connection in Atlanta. The colleague — a fellow dean in the U of Wisconsin system — called the UW system travel agent while I used the Delta iPhone app to rebook. I was done in 5 minutes, while the colleague was on the phone for awhile, and then had to stand in line to confirm the seat the agent arranged. I was also able to pick a later flight after seeing that the next flight included a long layover in The ATL; I decided to make the 30-minute drive back to my apartment to catch up on work, and also to use my desktop computer to walk through steps with an online Delta agent to fix a problem with my TSA Pre-Check, which did not work on my first visit. (Agents at the gate and at ticketing told me that they could not fix the problem.) One drawback in leaving the airport: I lost a rock star parking space right next to the door to the terminal. Oh well, it’s a small price to pay for not having to sit around in airports for several additional hours….
Today marks the end of an era: it’s the last day that iGoogle pages will be available. iGoogle is a personalized home page for web browsers, and I’ve used it ever since it was launched in 2008. I glance at it several times a day, to keep track of news, tweets, and Remember the Milk tasks. Tomorrow I’ll have to find a new source for keeping all of these items on one page. Two of the leading replacement contenders are Protopage and Netvibes, but I don’t love either option. Anyone have other suggestions?
In a past life I was an engineer. While getting my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in the late 1980s at Georgia Tech I enjoyed my liberal arts classes much more thoroughly than my engineering classes. I know, that should have told me something back then…I analyzed those years as a component of my memoir. Today, though, I’m thinking about the importance of receiving a well-rounded education given all sorts of calls for a narrower focus on STEM education. Here on the UW-Parkside campus, for example, the building floors are labeled D1 and D2, and L1 – L3. I recently learned that the “D” in the D1 and D2 designation stands for “down.” It seems that while L1 is considered to be the main level with a busy pedestrian walkway, D1 is “down one floor,” and D2 is “down two floors.” That made perfect sense to designers and engineers in the 1960s, but maybe if they had consulted others they would have realized that this system is cumbersome. (“If D2 is down two floors, is L2 up two floors? Up 2 floors from L1? Wait, that would make it L3??”) Or maybe they should have been required to take more liberal arts classes…
Recently I’ve been thinking about two poorly designed items here on campus. The first concerns sets of trash bins next to the residence halls and apartments; in each pair one bin is for recycling, and the other is for garbage. The problem: they are both the same size and color (green), but the recycling bin has small stickers that are easy to miss. So what happens? You guessed it: the recycling bins usually have trash in them. I’m used to blue recycling bins with large signage. I wonder why that is not the norm here?
The second bad design: the bike racks look nice, but they are too narrow for the U-locks that are ubiquitous on all other college campuses I’ve been on that have “regular” bike racks. Here students have to use the much less secure chain lock, and frequently they just lock the front wheel, as that’s the only think that (partially) fits into the bike racks. Maybe bike thefts are rare here, but I miss normal bike racks!
Last week I wrote about task management tools. In one of the comments a reader suggested that I try trello. While I liked it, it doesn’t quite knock Remember the Milk (RTM) from the top spot, as RTM handles my specific functions more efficiently. I received a note that $25 is due on October 2 to renew my RTM Pro account, so if anyone has any other favorite task management systems let me know before then, please!
As a dean I have tons of tasks that need to be tracked; each day I create several new to-do items and complete existing entries. While at the U of Minnesota my main task management system was “Remember the Milk,” which allows a user to enter, edit, and complete tasks online or via smartphone and tablet apps. I liked it, aside from 2 issues: it costs $25 a year for the “pro” version (the free version limits the number of times per day you can synch tasks across devices), and the system has a bug where a task entered while in one time zone will get shifted up a day when you travel to a different time zone. When I moved to UW-Parkside I tried alternates: Outlook tasks, and Reminders for iOS devices. Both were unsatisfactory, so it’s back to Remember the Milk. Check it out if you need a good task management system!
As was the case at the University of Minnesota, here at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside I’ll be working with living-learning communities. The Dean of Students wanted me to have an initial meeting in the second or third week of classes, after the initial rush of orientation activities passed. She also suggested that I write a letter to introduce myself before the first face to face meeting. I’ll share the draft in a post today. I’m looking forward to meeting the students!
***
Students in the Exploration Living-Learning Community:
My name is Walt Jacobs, and I am a professor here at UW-Parkside. I am also the Dean of the College of Social Sciences & Professional Studies, which means that I oversee everything in seven departments: Criminal Justice; Geography; History; International Studies; the Institute of Professional Educator Development (IPED); Politics, Philosophy, and Law; and Sociology and Anthropology.
Like you, this is my first year at UW-P. Also like you, I am living in University Housing! Before coming to UW-Parkside I was at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for 14 years. Last year I helped start a Living-Learning Community (LLC) there, and I definitely want to continue working with them here at UW-Parkside, so this year I will be helping out with the Exploration LLC by attending some of the activities that the Office of Residence Life always schedules. I’d also like to do a few extra things this year with you, such as
- Have dinner in Brickstone once a week.
- Organize a once a month movie discussion after seeing an on-campus movie in the cinema.
- Organize a once a month Open House where you’d have the opportunity to meet faculty and students in one of the seven departments in the College of Social Sciences & Professional Studies.
The Office of Residence Life has scheduled a meeting on XXXX in YYYY for me to meet with you to start the conversation about how we can work together over the year. I look forward to seeing you then!
In my last post I mentioned that an adjustment to my new role as a dean has been adapting to a Microsoft cloud computing campus after several years on a Google cloud computing campus. The main component of that transition has been getting used to Outlook mail, which has a lot more settings than Gmail. Additionally, the settings on my desktop client don’t carry over to the web-based client…and they are in different places on the dashboards (!). My wife has used Outlook for over 10 years and says that I will learn to love it. Maybe, but for now I prefer Google’s simpler approach and more streamlined design.
It was also a bit of a pain to select my insurance and health benefits plans, as I was presented with a billion options. Well, maybe not a billion, but I had a lot more choices than when I signed up for benefits at the U of Minnesota in 1999. At that time there was a low- or no- cost option in each area that served as a default choice, but employees had other choices available for specialized needs. I would have loved such a curated approach here at UW-Parkside. Hopefully I will not have to wade into that sea of possibilities again anytime soon to change my coverages.
The forthcoming Christmas-New Year holiday season will mark the end of my first six months as a dean. I’m looking forward to a couple of weeks of no meetings, and time to catch up on reading. I’ll also take a break from this “Dispatches From a New Dean” blog, restarting the week of January 6. Happy Holidays!
As I write I am supposed to be on a plane to Jacksonville, FL for the CCAS Annual Conference. The first leg was delayed several times due to problems with the inbound plane, and when it finally got in the air it had to turn around due to additional problems (!). At that point a colleague and I had to re-book our flights since we would miss our connection in Atlanta. The colleague — a fellow dean in the U of Wisconsin system — called the UW system travel agent while I used the Delta iPhone app to rebook. I was done in 5 minutes, while the colleague was on the phone for awhile, and then had to stand in line to confirm the seat the agent arranged. I was also able to pick a later flight after seeing that the next flight included a long layover in The ATL; I decided to make the 30-minute drive back to my apartment to catch up on work, and also to use my desktop computer to walk through steps with an online Delta agent to fix a problem with my TSA Pre-Check, which did not work on my first visit. (Agents at the gate and at ticketing told me that they could not fix the problem.) One drawback in leaving the airport: I lost a rock star parking space right next to the door to the terminal. Oh well, it’s a small price to pay for not having to sit around in airports for several additional hours….
Today marks the end of an era: it’s the last day that iGoogle pages will be available. iGoogle is a personalized home page for web browsers, and I’ve used it ever since it was launched in 2008. I glance at it several times a day, to keep track of news, tweets, and Remember the Milk tasks. Tomorrow I’ll have to find a new source for keeping all of these items on one page. Two of the leading replacement contenders are Protopage and Netvibes, but I don’t love either option. Anyone have other suggestions?
In a past life I was an engineer. While getting my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in the late 1980s at Georgia Tech I enjoyed my liberal arts classes much more thoroughly than my engineering classes. I know, that should have told me something back then…I analyzed those years as a component of my memoir. Today, though, I’m thinking about the importance of receiving a well-rounded education given all sorts of calls for a narrower focus on STEM education. Here on the UW-Parkside campus, for example, the building floors are labeled D1 and D2, and L1 – L3. I recently learned that the “D” in the D1 and D2 designation stands for “down.” It seems that while L1 is considered to be the main level with a busy pedestrian walkway, D1 is “down one floor,” and D2 is “down two floors.” That made perfect sense to designers and engineers in the 1960s, but maybe if they had consulted others they would have realized that this system is cumbersome. (“If D2 is down two floors, is L2 up two floors? Up 2 floors from L1? Wait, that would make it L3??”) Or maybe they should have been required to take more liberal arts classes…
Recently I’ve been thinking about two poorly designed items here on campus. The first concerns sets of trash bins next to the residence halls and apartments; in each pair one bin is for recycling, and the other is for garbage. The problem: they are both the same size and color (green), but the recycling bin has small stickers that are easy to miss. So what happens? You guessed it: the recycling bins usually have trash in them. I’m used to blue recycling bins with large signage. I wonder why that is not the norm here?
The second bad design: the bike racks look nice, but they are too narrow for the U-locks that are ubiquitous on all other college campuses I’ve been on that have “regular” bike racks. Here students have to use the much less secure chain lock, and frequently they just lock the front wheel, as that’s the only think that (partially) fits into the bike racks. Maybe bike thefts are rare here, but I miss normal bike racks!
Last week I wrote about task management tools. In one of the comments a reader suggested that I try trello. While I liked it, it doesn’t quite knock Remember the Milk (RTM) from the top spot, as RTM handles my specific functions more efficiently. I received a note that $25 is due on October 2 to renew my RTM Pro account, so if anyone has any other favorite task management systems let me know before then, please!
As a dean I have tons of tasks that need to be tracked; each day I create several new to-do items and complete existing entries. While at the U of Minnesota my main task management system was “Remember the Milk,” which allows a user to enter, edit, and complete tasks online or via smartphone and tablet apps. I liked it, aside from 2 issues: it costs $25 a year for the “pro” version (the free version limits the number of times per day you can synch tasks across devices), and the system has a bug where a task entered while in one time zone will get shifted up a day when you travel to a different time zone. When I moved to UW-Parkside I tried alternates: Outlook tasks, and Reminders for iOS devices. Both were unsatisfactory, so it’s back to Remember the Milk. Check it out if you need a good task management system!
As was the case at the University of Minnesota, here at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside I’ll be working with living-learning communities. The Dean of Students wanted me to have an initial meeting in the second or third week of classes, after the initial rush of orientation activities passed. She also suggested that I write a letter to introduce myself before the first face to face meeting. I’ll share the draft in a post today. I’m looking forward to meeting the students!
***
Students in the Exploration Living-Learning Community:
My name is Walt Jacobs, and I am a professor here at UW-Parkside. I am also the Dean of the College of Social Sciences & Professional Studies, which means that I oversee everything in seven departments: Criminal Justice; Geography; History; International Studies; the Institute of Professional Educator Development (IPED); Politics, Philosophy, and Law; and Sociology and Anthropology.
Like you, this is my first year at UW-P. Also like you, I am living in University Housing! Before coming to UW-Parkside I was at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities for 14 years. Last year I helped start a Living-Learning Community (LLC) there, and I definitely want to continue working with them here at UW-Parkside, so this year I will be helping out with the Exploration LLC by attending some of the activities that the Office of Residence Life always schedules. I’d also like to do a few extra things this year with you, such as
- Have dinner in Brickstone once a week.
- Organize a once a month movie discussion after seeing an on-campus movie in the cinema.
- Organize a once a month Open House where you’d have the opportunity to meet faculty and students in one of the seven departments in the College of Social Sciences & Professional Studies.
The Office of Residence Life has scheduled a meeting on XXXX in YYYY for me to meet with you to start the conversation about how we can work together over the year. I look forward to seeing you then!
In my last post I mentioned that an adjustment to my new role as a dean has been adapting to a Microsoft cloud computing campus after several years on a Google cloud computing campus. The main component of that transition has been getting used to Outlook mail, which has a lot more settings than Gmail. Additionally, the settings on my desktop client don’t carry over to the web-based client…and they are in different places on the dashboards (!). My wife has used Outlook for over 10 years and says that I will learn to love it. Maybe, but for now I prefer Google’s simpler approach and more streamlined design.
It was also a bit of a pain to select my insurance and health benefits plans, as I was presented with a billion options. Well, maybe not a billion, but I had a lot more choices than when I signed up for benefits at the U of Minnesota in 1999. At that time there was a low- or no- cost option in each area that served as a default choice, but employees had other choices available for specialized needs. I would have loved such a curated approach here at UW-Parkside. Hopefully I will not have to wade into that sea of possibilities again anytime soon to change my coverages.