I’m starting a new theme/meme. Maybe it’ll get me posting more. Possibly it will entertain the 12.9 average weekly readers of this quiet blog. In the least, it’s about open sharing and fair trade of information and greatness, and that’s something I think everyone can support.

Every Tuesday I’m going to share a blog, a Twitter, a TV show; some source of something that I think is great. If you Twitter, this is like a #followFriday. But this is on Tuesday, and not necessarily Twitter related.

This “sharing a blog I read” is something I’ve previously argued against doing. Clearly there’s risk. I could offend you with what I think is great. I could insult you with my low-brow levels of entertainment. Even worse, when you eventually read everything I read, you’ll lose interest in me. You’ll know what I know, before I have the chance to tell it to you. I mean, my humor is repetitive enough as is; what happens when you know the joke/story/news before I tell it? Eventually you won’t need me.

But, in the meantime, I’ll share what I can and maybe you’ll share things back with me.

We would be remiss to start our #sharingTuesday without nodding to my Canadian beer loving Saints over at pintday.org (or pd.o, or pode if you say it outloud). Their blog, the first I ever saw with their own ISSN, is a weekly collection of beer (laden? induced?) supported rants. This week’s draft (get it?) is especially funny because the boys teach you how to properly rant at a bar on a Tuesday. (pintday.org/archive/20011113)

Okay, two things. One, I know pintday’s blog is now defunct (the pintday spirit lives on, and I still try to worship). No one says funny has to be current. Old things can still be funny. How many times have I watched Ghostbusters in my life? And it still makes me laugh every. single. time. So it’s okay to dip into the vault at #sharingTuesday. pd.o will also be funnier if you like Canadian politics, computers, and hating traffic.

Secondly, yes, I know it’s Wednesday. Get off my back. Let’s be honest: these aren’t going to EVERY week, and maybe not even all on Tuesdays.

So, there we are. #sharingTuesday #1 is pintday.org Enjoy, and see you next week.

A listserv of campus lab managers is having a discussion about how to make a directory of computer labs on campus, and their services and authorized users, in a way that’s maintainable and easily shareable. This lines up with some of my IT Open House goals, and IT@Illinois, so to hit an audience larger than just the labmasters-l list, I’m reposting my reply here. If you have any feedback, or can help us move along those goals, please let me know.

Hi all,

I run an IT Open House in Siebel Center the first week of classes and
field a lot of incoming student questions. Some of them are Computer
Science specific, but many are campus-wide — reflecting that our
students/customers/users are not as territorial or pigeon-holed as our
unit IT organizations. (An observation that a more campus-wide,
IT@Illinois perspective really does service our users better — at least
the student ones.)

I’m all for having a centralized repository of facilities (and their
info) available to students. If I can help let me know. But the walled
garden of only certain users in certain labs really makes this
complicated, and fragmented. From a user perspective, I don’t care that
ACES or VetMed have computer labs if I cannot use them. (And that cuts
the other way too — CS has labs, csil.cs.uiuc.edu, that are
restricted just to CS students. It means we’re also burned the first
week of the semester as Banner and auth groups don’t get updated as
quickly as students want.)

We could do better as a community of labmasters to unite under one
framework (authentication, authorization, applications, documentation,
signage, printing, promotion, support, labsitting, etc.) than we do as
isolated labs. Even if we are organizationally different, if we
appeared to our students as a common-front, we would service them better
(and might even make the job easier for us).

… That’s not too much to ask, is it?

The bigger questions that comes up in the open house isn’t “where are
the labs?” but “where can I print?” It’s an exercise for an IT Pro to
find 1) all the public labs on campus and their websites, 2) then their
printing information, charges and instructions. No wonder it confuses
our students so much. The best I could come up with to document and
share was: www-dave.cs.uiuc.edu/OH08-printing.pdf I would be
glad to replace that with something better (and share that with others).

How do we start to do that?

Dave

PS. You can see my Spring CCSP poster about the IT Open House at
www-dave.cs.uiuc.edu/CCSP-2009-ITOpenHouse.pdf