Presentation

Here is the presentation I did not held at todays meeting with all the web coordinators of MU. It was a relaxed atmosphere with me as the newest attraction. Tim talked about the steering board and showed two organisational charts depicting the relationship between people involved in the "webproject" and an overview of the functional parts the "webproject" actually consist of. I think his presentation is available on the intranet. The next round was about the upcoming training for the flexible knowledgworkers that we are here at UM. Yesterday I finished the list of people at SBE that will participate in that training. So if you find yourself here than you get a free skills upgrade.

Download Document here.
SBE is among the first schools at MU to implement the training and the migration of the departments into the new Content Management System. This gives us a first mover advantage and the possibility to experiment within some limits. But it also means that there will be a lot of people watching us. And to make it easier for them I do the blog a bit about the experience and progress.
In my presentation I wanted to point out that the real challenge is not a technical one. The real challenge is the attitude change that is required to confront the demands of new technology.As an engineer I know that once a technology works its obsolete. To illustrate this one can look at the telephone on his/her desk. It works fine if one has the right number to get a hold of the right person. And once it works, nobody spends time thinking about what it does to the speaker/listener or the organization. The same is true for the Microsoft Outlook. The moment it works nobody cares about it any more but uses it in their daily routine. The same is true for the 'webproject' that everybody is obsessed about. As soon as the website works, something new will come along and replace its function. Nobody in the media business talks about websites any more. Cloud computing, Augmented Reality, Application Programme Interfaces (API), mobile ubiquitous computing, .... are tags like web3.0, the real time web or the semantic web. At todays meeting it was the same. The tag 'Social Media' causes questions among my fellow colleges like how to use it? is there a policy? how can I embed this or that? So in this sense the website as it is currently online is already obsolete. Social media (which as a matter of fact is just the continuation of what was 15 years ago called the Web) is already knocking on the doors of MU. But beyond that, there is already a whole industry preparing and orchestrating the "next new thing" that will make everything else obsolete. Second Life is already obsolete. Nobody talks about Second Life anymore because everybody lifes already a second life but on one of millions of other platforms.

A stable user base of 1 million is not exactly 80% of all internet users in 2011. But to make the point clear I am not preaching that as a school we have to go with every trend. I oppose most of the developments but I am willing to understand them.That they are as irresistible as artificial is a further point of reflection.
The question I kept myself asking after the meeting was how to facilitate the attitude change required? Is training in GX enough and even wise? I have no clue but it cannot harm.