What will happen in the next 10 years?

“Ten years ago this month, Google’s first employee turned up at the garage where the search engine was originally housed. What technology at a similar early stage today will have changed our world as much by 2018? Nature asked some researchers and business people to speculate — or lay out their wares. Their responses are wide ranging, but one common theme emerges: the integration of the worlds of matter and information, whether it be by the blurring of boundaries between online and real environments, touchy-feely feedback from a phone or chromosomes tucked away on databases.”

Thanks to Shel Sax for the tip!

Tickets opened and resolved by our group since the first of June: 2362
Top 5 Categories:

1. Passwords and PINs (including the BIG password reset day)
2. Application support ( Mostly Outlook and INB)
3. Equipment issue ( Computers and Printers)
4. Network Issues (Connectivity and Registration)
5. Account Management (Permissions, SPAM control, quotas)

This week we get to play Santa Claus. New students who have qualified for financial aid funded laptops have been coming in to pick them up. They are so grateful and appreciative. This is our favorite part of start up!

Check out our new WIKI . Let us know what else you would like to see there!

Submitted by Peggy Fischel

The heavy rain in early August washed out the road to Burdick House at the Bread Loaf campus in Ripton. Burdick was home to some BL School of English summer faculty. Our telephone system contractor, Jim Fitzgerald, was called out to repair the telephone line in the house, but as the attached photos indicate, the road was not drivable. Intrepid Jim walked the 1/2 mile in to repair the phone connection.

In late July we installed an upgrade to our enhanced 911 notification system. Thanks to Rick James for his assistance in setting up the new server and applications. With this new equipment, we are using four dedicated circuits from existing PRI lines to send calls. This allows us to remove the FairPoint special service trunks and PS/ALI service at a savings of $7700 per year which will pay for the new system in less than two years.

In August several AlertFind administrators from the President’s staff were given a tutorial on the recently upgraded message composition features. Documentation was re-written in the form of a quick reference guide to aid administrators if/when they need to send an emergency campus notification.

Segue v2 went into production at Middlebury on August 18. Since then over 100 sites have been created in the new version (see: Segue Usage). To help people learn how to use Segue v2 we have made a number of screencast videos that demonstrate basic features and have been offering introductory workshops.

iPods were popular again this summer with the Language Schools. Jin Zhang of the Chinese School had her students produce weekly podcasts. A number of classes required students to complete weekly audio recording assignments. More language resources were reformatted for use on iPods and other mobile devices. For more details, see the iPods and 2nd Language Acquisition site.

Many students have been using Measure to take placement exams online. Measure is heavily used by the Language Schools for entrance and exit exams. Some academic year departments have also begun using it to place students in courses for the fall and spring semesters.

1. the draft outline of the plan

and

2. the interim organizational chart that is in place while we go through the longer-term reorganization

We are in the process of putting together materials for learning about how to do a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analysis, as well as a means for sharing other useful materials (org charts from other schools, articles about managing teams, etc.) Stay tuned!