Monday Matters
Do you ever get up on Monday morning and say, "Here I go again?" Sometimes we are reluctant to see the weekend end so that Monday becomes the unwanted boundary between time for what we want to do and time for what the job demands. I know that on more than one occasion I have driven to work on Monday morning thinking that perhaps it was finally time for me to start a petition for a three-day weekend. This could be my calling in life. I could be remembered throughout history as the man who finally brought world governments to their senses and made them realize that two days off each week just is not quite enough.
To be honest, I doubt I would have much success with that. Besides, I love working for the College of Education. There must be some way to help make Mondays feel a little bit more like the start of a new week's adventure and a little less like the end of the good times. That is the impetus behind this new weekly column entitled Monday Matters. A number of staff members have been working hard to create new systems, purchase new equipment, and develop new tools that are designed to make your work life more enjoyable and enable us all to work more efficiently. That is what this column is about.
We are going to begin unveiling these new organizational features. Though others have worked to put these features together, I have the fun job of introducing you to what they are doing and what our plans are for the future. Most of what I will introduce will not be fully developed. New systems take time to implement and it is only through your feedback and trial and error that we can work out the kinks and make these as useful as possible. Nonetheless, I thought that you would like to know what is going on behind-the-scenes. So please plan on joining me every week at this column for a glimpse of our future. For the first few weeks, I will e-mail you a reminder that a new column has been posted. I hope you take the time to learn about the work of your colleagues and what this might mean for your own work.
These Are Not Your Daddy's Web Pages
In this first installment of Monday Matters I would like to introduce you to the new College web pages. If you're reading this column, you have already accessed these pages. You will notice that the pages look similar to the University's main pages, as well as those of several colleges and offices around campus. We have adopted the University templates for our pages and in so doing hope to achieve a look and feel that is consistent with the University community.
The new look is only part of the story. More importantly, we plan to use the College web pages as an active and dynamic core for many communication and administrative functions. The pages will contain news items that will be changed on an almost-daily basis. We will have a central directory, a central place to find meeting minutes and documents of interest, and a page for accessing most of the forms that you might need on a regular basis. In short, I want you to find it easier to log on to the College web page for news, schedules, accessing forms, or making requests, than it currently is too walk to the file cabinet, make a phone call, or search around campus for information that you need.
We have built the pages with the intent that they will be frequently changed. This means that we no longer need to look to web programmers in order to change our content. Instead, the pages have administrative tools to allow any designated member of the faculty or staff to post news, maintain schedules, insert documents, and so forth. In a few short months you should be used to getting regular e-mail from several College offices that provide links to forms that you need, rather than having these forms sent to you through campus mail or as an attachment. In addition to convenience, electronic archives will also help us move to a system that relies less on paper and more on electronic storage.
This leads to another issue that you should be aware of. We have established and are continuing to work on systems for backing up all of the material on the web pages, all of the data that you enter into forms, and any items that need to be archived on a regular basis. It takes awhile to get used to changing from filling out every form in triplicate and then filing records in file cabinets to filling out online forms and having the information backed up electronically, but rest assured that we recognize how important your data are. We are taking all the necessary steps to back this up in a way that is more readily accessible without taking up the large quantities of space that are typically consume by all the paper that we file away for years.
In sum, I hope that as we develop our web pages you continue to see these pages as useful tools. I encourage you to visit various links as they are published to see what is happening in other departments and offices. The College web will continue to grow with each passing week. In this column I will keep you apprised of some of the more interesting pages that appear.
I Want to be Just Like You
When you start roaming around the College web pages you'll soon notice that some of the department and office pages do not have the same look and feel as the main College pages. That is because we allow individual units to design and maintain their own web pages if they wish. We will even provide you storage for your web pages so that you can have peace of mind knowing that your pages are being backed up on a regular basis without you having to be concerned about it. What if, however, you want your office pages to look like ours? We can help you there, too. David Michaels and his staff in the Office of Information Technology are willing and able to help you set up some initial pages that have the same design as the pages you see on the main College Web. If you are interested in accessing this service, visit the IT web page at:
Fill out the Technology Service Request Form and indicate that you're interested in having a web page that matches the College templates. We anticipate a large number of requests at first, so I've established an order of priority for the development of these pages. We will first turn our attention to academic departments and then College offices, followed by individual academic program areas, and finally affiliated projects (e.g. externally-funded research and service projects). We want to have all of our departments, offices, programs, and projects on board. I would eventually like to have a web page for each faculty member as well. We will be happy to provide you space and links for these pages.
Prospective students as well as constituents that we work with visit our web pages to obtain information. More and more this is becoming the first method that people use to access a business or organization that they are interested in. We need to provide as much information as we can and do it in a way that is neat, attractive, and readily accessible. You can help us by either developing your own web page or letting us help you develop one. In either case, the College can provide the web server space and backup services.
That's it for this addition of Monday Matters. There are many other initiatives to present to you, so I can't wait for next Monday. So much for thinking of Monday as drudgery!
Until next week,
Mike