This is where you say something clever
Here’s Dylan Evans, a psychologist, arguing that in the future it will be necessary for average folks to actually understand something about how computers work and a bit of coding, and that operating systems that make it visible and transparent are to be preferred to those that try to hide the guts behind a facade of user-friendliness. Interesting.
Thanks to Tim Bray for pointing this one out.
Back home again, trying desperately to catch up.
Our session on the Chandler project on Friday morning went very well – standing room only (that’s what happens when you have luminaries like Mitch Kapor on your panel) and great feedback from folks in the room. I remain really excited about the potential for both the Chandler software and the collaboration between higher ed computing types and the developers at OSAF.
My slides from the talk are available on the web at http://staff.washington.edu/oren/presentations/educause2003/ . There’s an html version of the outline as well as powerpoint slides.
I heard the closing session with Richard Clark was good, but I missed it as I was still talking to folks about Chandler.
I realized that I forgot to mention the interesting sesion I went to on Wednesday about how MIT and Stanford have been jointly benchmarking their help desk operations. I’ll post a link to their site when I retrieve it from my notes – I think I’ll want to use many of the measurement techniques here at the UW.
I closed out the week with a shrimp po’ boy and an Abita amber at Ralph Brennan’s in Downtown Disney along with my colleague Tom Lewis – the ersatz New Orleans atmosphere made me long for a real trip to the Big Easy…ahh well, maybe next year.
And kudos to the hard working Educause staff are definitely deserved – the largest Educause conference yet (6400 attendees!) went off very well, the program was terrific and rich, and the events, especially the night at California Adventure, were great!
Well, I’ve guess I’ve arrived if someone is posting spam as comments to my weblog…sigh.
Interestingly, all the entries are to a single (old) posting in the blog, which leads me to believe that url just got added to some automated process somewhere. I can’t believe anybody actually finds this an effective marketing strategy.
