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My Little League baseball coach was a good communicator. On the first day of practice, he told us we were going to use the “KISS principle” for our signs. He meant we were going to “Keep It Simple, Stupid.”

“If I touch my skin,” coach Redpath told us, “that means steal. Get it? Skin. Steal. If I touch my belt, that means bunt. Get it? Belt. Bunt.”

That was it.

Coach would go through all kinds of crazy gyrations from the third-base box. Nearly all of it was to distract the other team. All we had to do was watch for him to touch his skin or touch his belt.

We remembered the signs throughout the season (and into midlife) because they were indeed simple and memorable. And perhaps because using words like “kiss” and “stupid” with 12-year-old boys makes them giggle. And listen.

As I struggle to develop effective communication about technology on campus, I’ve concluded that we make almost everything too complicated. Case in point: I could not articulately explain campus email to you. We made it too complex.

IT professionals obfuscate when we should elucidate. We need to change that. If you read Wikipedia’s entry for the KISS principle, you’ll see a reference to Albert Einstein’s maxim that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

If Albert Einstein could make his world simple, imagine what we could do with ours.

Tags: Communication, People, Support by Gordy Pace
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I occassionally hear from people on campus that they are reading the IT Community blog. That’s encouraging. But when we started this endeavor, I had hoped there would be more dialogue and sharing of ideas that would help us do a better job of fulfilling the University’s mission.

So, today I’m giving readers of the IT Community blog an opportunity to get the ball rolling. Here’s the assignment:

In the discussion area below, complete this sentence:

We could improve [fill in the blank] by [fill in the blank].

An example to get things started:

We could improve IT communications by following the lead of HR director Betsy Hawkins in engaging stakeholders in conversations about policy changes and new initiatives, and then creating and executing detailed communication plans.

Feel free to submit more than one idea. It can be about anything the University does. If you have ideas but don’t want to post publicly, send me an email and I’ll share your ideas anonymously.

Tags: Communication, Innovation, Leadership and Management, People, Policies by Gordy Pace
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As we welcome our first group of students and parents to orientation today, a conversation is taking place in the Educause portal forum about providing parent access to student data through campus portals.

Gettysburg College, Iowa State, the University of Arizona and the Pennsylvania College of Technology all shared how they allow parents to access academic and financial records-FERPA-protected information-specific to their son or daughter.

These campuses handle parent (or guest) account creation in different ways. Some allow the parent to request an account and connect that account to a registered student. Others require the student to create and manage their own guest accounts.

While account creation mechanisms differ, all of these campuses deal with FERPA -protected information the same way. The student has control through a web interface to choose what data the parent account can access.

Gettysburg College built its web portal 10 years ago and has been a thought leader in portal develoment. You can visit their parent portal information page at http://public.gettysburg.edu/it/cnav/parents.htm.

Tags: Communication, Innovation, People, Policies, Strategy, Systems, Web by Gordy Pace
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Tags: Communication by Gordy Pace
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The latest edition to UM’s blogoshere is getting some good traffic.

Cycle the Rockies is a blog following the journey of nine students, two instructors and two documentary film-makers who are biking from Billings to Whitefish while exploring energy issues in Montana. The Billings Gazette did a story on the adventure earlier this week.

Tags: Academic, Communication by Gordy Pace
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No, this is not another post about technology saving fuels; this is a look at how technology is becoming common place in our society to the point of replacing butane lighters…

…in the glory days of rock ‘n roll musicians would gaze upon the warm glow of happy faces softly silhouetted by the light from a butane lighter. Crowds swayed to heart-felt ballads, displaying joy by igniting a flame, held at arm’s length above their head. Sure it sounds dangerous, but the prefect mood was set by millions of concert goes during the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Enter into the mid-2000s, the dawning of the mobile technology epoch. No longer do we scorch our fingers on HOT lighters, but we illuminate and capture with cell phones.

Last week I attended the Swell Season concert at the Wilma Theater in downtown Missoula. Not a lighter in sight, probably due to the fire code, but the glow of LCD displays lit the night as pictures and videos were recorded on a multitude of mobile devices. No longer do the words “cameras or recording devices not allowed” mean a thing! Most of the audience has this device attached to their belt, in their purse, or held to their ear. And they are not afraid to use it!

While I have yet to find video from the Missoula concert on YouTube, I did spend a portion of last evening watching clips from other Swell Season concerts. Quickly I was transported back to the magic of the evening while watching Glen and Marketa sing the songs they performed here.

Butane sales may be down, I have no data to verify this, but I can assure you the usage of mobile devices extends beyond the realm of placing phone calls. Rockers unite! Light the night! Pixel by pixel!

Tags: Communication, Innovation, Media, People, Wireless by Randy Gottfried
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I bet you weren’t aware that May 1 is RSS Awareness Day. Now you know.

If you don’t know what RSS is, celebrate RSS Awareness Day by learning a little something about it.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It allows you to subscribe to web content of your choice. It saves you the time and effort of visiting all of your favorite websites. I hope to convince campus colleagues who bombard us with email messages to adopt RSS-enabled communication channels instead. That transition will only take place when a critical mass has bought into the RSS solution.

I subscribe to dozens of RSS feeds in OneStop - my preferred RSS feed aggregator. In a short amount of time, I can scan news and nuggets of wisdom from my favorite websites and blogs. I became aware that May 1 is “RSS Awareness Day” because of an RSS feed. More importantly, I am aware of how some of the smartest, most creative and most visionary people on the planet are shaping the future of communication, education, business and human relationships through technology because their ideas are available to me the minute they are published.

Happy RSS Awareness Day.

Tags: Communication, Web by Gordy Pace
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I’ve been getting an earful about email from campus colleagues lately. I understand your frustration when your inbox fills with emails you don’t want, or when you can’t send out emails that other people don’t want.

Yesterday, a colleague asked me why we had so much spam in our University email. She claimed she had never received a single spam message in her Google gmail account.

Really? Never? How could that be, I wondered?

Less than 24 hours later, Seth Godin wrote in his blog:

“I just discovered that my gmail spam filter has been blocking orders from Google checkout! Astonishing.

I have also heard from two people who applied to my internship and never got the note I sent announcing that we’d completed our hiring cycle . . . Stopping spam is a worthless endeavor when you also stop non-spam.”

It’s hard to make everyone happy when it comes to email.

Tags: Communication by Gordy Pace
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Robert Kennedy famously said, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

I’ve been doing a little of both lately as I’ve been talking to people around campus about how we should be using technology to communicate effectively. I look at our current state of campus electronic communication — primarily email spam and less-than-stellar websites — and I ask why. And I dream of things that could be — sophisticated targeted messaging, flawless search results, subscription-based and community-generated content, control given to the people we serve — and I ask why not.

Technological change is relentless. It won’t be slowing down anytime soon. We will adapt and thrive when we let ourselves dream of things that never were and ask why not.

Tags: Communication, Innovation, Leadership and Management, Policies, Strategy, Web by Gordy Pace
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I recently started paying attention to what my friends are up to (at least what they say they are up to) in Facebook. It’s easy for me to do now with the new “Facebook Friends Status” channel in OneStop.

To my friends (and friends of friends in social networks everywhere), I hereby challenge you to raise the level of your twittering to new heights.

Here’s what I want my friends to share with me:

• A new skill you’re acquiring
• A hard lesson you just learned
• An interesting person just met
• An innovative idea you’ve been kicking around
• Something you created and how you did it
• A project you’re working on that will make the world a better place
• Something that motivates me to act
• Something that expands my awareness of the world
• Something that makes me smile

I will try to do the same.

Tags: Communication, People by Gordy Pace
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