On being "service-oriented"

There has been an awful lot of discussion and action among IT divisions within the university sector in regards to the provision of services to the university in which they operate. This notion of IT divisions as service providers has resulted in methodologies such as ITIL being implemented and a greater increase in the view of students as clients.

I've been giving a fair bit of thought to service provision within universities and my thinking goes like this:
Universities have two main outputs: Research and teaching. Yes I know there is a whole element of contribution to the broader knowledge of the community bear with me as I oversimplify things. To simplify it even further, you could say that the academic elements of a university (eg. faculties, schools, research centers) produce two products: research output and program offerings. My thinking is that every other element of the university including IT divisions, teaching and learning centers, student administration, libraries, marketing and so on are therefore engaged in either the service of those academic elements, or the service of the clients of those academic elements (eg. the students).

Bear with me as I know my thinking is half-baked at best, but the point I am attempting to make is that those of us within a university not involved in teaching or research, need to focus on how best we can service those who are. They are after all, making sure we even have a role to play.

I consider myself to be a professional engaged in the provision of services in support of the teaching activities of the university.

On teaching with technology

I came across a great quote today, from an anonymous author:

If you can't do something, you can't do it with a computer.

I like the connotations this quote carries when applied to the use of instructional technology. It succinctly reinforces in my mind the notion that teaching with technology is still just teaching. An ineffective teacher will be no more effective once you teach them how to use an LMS, or blogs, or social software. I think the adoption of PowerPoint as a teaching tool has taught us that.

Fun with Blackboard Release 7's Language Pack Editor

I've been working with the Blackboard Language Pack Editor, which is a new component in release 7. The editor allows you to customise the Blackboard interface to accommodate foreign languages, institution-specific terminology, and um, other customisations.

I had a bit of a play with the extensive editing capabilities and thought I would share some of the most amusing. Don't get me wrong, the Language Pack Editor is one the easiest to use, most powerful, and most user-responsive bit of functionality Blackboard has come out with. I think these images illustrate just how simple to use and powerful it really is. All images were taken from our development environment only and promptly returned to their original text. Enjoy.

I started off with the Control Panel:








Then had a play with the portal.