In fact, it’s not.  It’s largely firefighting, getting little things sorted in a less than decorous fashion, with the exception of Veronica’s project and Nicola’s Creative Thinking – it’s been a lot of business as usual.  And the LMS review.  I have done 12 sessions with staff in the last three weeks.

Do we do a Moodle trial?

This is the question – and the committee may be ready to make a decision on Wednesday.   I’ve compiled a document comparing Blackboad and Moodle, and Podcast as well.  My sessions were to elicit feedback on IF we have a trial and any comment on the PROCESS of a trial.

I’ve had a lot to do with Moodle in a short time.  I’ll need to do a silly little things easlity fixed with Moodle post soon.

Why did we choose Drupal??

Still tinkering with drupal for our UCTL.  Got a request for a revamp two weeks after we launched, and are now working on this.  Drupal is cool!!  But it is just a framework.  Needs a lot of fixing to get it anywhere – needed is a template install with some stuff done.  May be coming: Via Glen Davies:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/pirillo-starts-large-scale-community-cms-project/

In summary: Chris Pirillo (LockerGnome) wants to produce decent installs of Drupal for non geeks, out of the box functionality.  Not just a framework.

Having just been through a drupal install, some built in installs would be great.  There are several things I don’t really know much about in Chris’s talk. Chris is behind “activity streams”, a Drupal plugin. http://drupal.org/project/activitystream He is a little polemical and evangelistic in this video.

Getting things Done.  GTD.  My story continues . . .

I now do have a system where pretty well my whole life is in folders and lists.  Piece of cake.  It’s the psychic side that has been a problem.  Tim Barnes, an old friend from the 60′s visited from California and has talked about a Canadia consultant (whose name escapes me)who describes three types of days:

1. Days where yooyu are really focused on your delivery of core business stuff.  You are on the top of your game.  You are delivering %110
2. Day’s off.  Resting.  No work.  Re-creating.
3. Days to make sure type I and II actually happen.

A simple little template, which has been quite helpful during the busy March that is just about to end.  My unit is less than a day.  But the principle applies.

E-mail worries.

I’ve tried the 43 Folders approach.  Didn’t work. Merlin has several buckets to toss e-mail into. I’ve checked a few of the variatins on this model, and until M$ outlook implements decent tagging, I’m sticking with three buckets.

• In
• Follow Up - no more than 30 e-mails, but it can drift up.  All the stuff Merlin has in Waiting for, Action, Follow up etc.  I have NOT been able to get hard edges, and rely on search in this folder . . .
• Recent Past. A plie, that often includes “May need”  I sort these later into Monthly buckets.

I also have a ton of subject related folders.  These are growing at the rate of one a week.  I am cavalier with these.  I just chuck things into them as references I may use.  My mail is empty several times a week at the moment.   BUT:

Committee involvement

The wiki committee. The day I got a new wiki toy to play with with any classes I went to the University (Dekiwiki - but that is another story) I joined a committee to have it’s first meeting.  The purpose: To investigate whether we needed a centrally supported wiki.   We are doing the usual university thing: terms of reference, minutes . . . .  we are sort of using a wiki, but it is not available outside the firewall, and at the moment people are still using e-mail.

The LMS Review committee. We have a superb forum, notifications etc – but people are still using e-mail.  I am not actually on the committee (whew!!) but I am at their beck and call.  We are now playing e-mail non-collabnoration in the countdown to a decision on Wednesday.

Which brings me to my next matter.

Death to e-mail at work

Today I stumbed across the blog of Luis Suarez http://www.elsua.net/
One of the worst designed wordpress blogs I have ever seen (little things like Blue on blue side columns, no post summaries, Scores and scores of links and stuff that prints in a single column out if you print a page (No print CSS!!!), lousy search, but I digress – ) – this guy is onto something about e-mail.  It’s been hard to locate the posts in his latest theme, but there are several dating back over 7 week on a theme:  death to work e-mail.

(quote to come, I cannot locate on the site the first post . .)

Death to work e-mail: with one exception . . . (personal, private/sensitive e-mails from one person to you) The rest??  Put it in some decent social software tool.  Cool. Here are the posts: Week 1 (the announcement) | Week 3 | Week 6 | Week 7

As an aside, his comments about Twitter I will come back to later.

OK.  Enough for now.  Still to come.  Blogging and wiki policies.  TALO.  China.