Good day to you.

And Compliments of day, this mail may be a surprise to you because you did not give me the permission to do so and neither do you know me but before I tell you about myself I want you to please forgive me for sending this mail without your permission. I am Mr. Paul Butugua, The regional manager of my bank branch, Takoradi branch, in western region of Ghana, ADB Bank.

With due respect and regard, I have decided to contact you on a Business Transaction that will be very beneficial to both of us and our families in future. I am a Ghanaian married with three kids. I am writing to solicit your assistance in the transfer of $10,500.000.00 U.S Dollars. This fund is the excess of what my branch in which I am the manager made as profit during the 2007 financial year. I have already submitted annual report for that year to my head office here in Accra as I have watched with keen interest as they will never know of this excess.

I have since, placed this amount of $10,500.000.00 U.S Dollars on an Escrow Coded account without a beneficiary (Anonymous) to avoid trace. As an officer of the bank, I cannot be directly connected to this money thus I am impelled to request for your assistance to receive this money into your bank account on my behalf.

Although personally, I kept this information secret within myself to enable the whole plans and idea be profitable and successful during the time of execution. I agree that 40% of this money will be for you as a foreign partner, in respect to the provision of a foreign account, 10% will be set aside for expenses incurred during the business and 50% would be for me. I do need to stress that there are practically no risk involved in this. It’s going to be a bank-to-bank transfer. All I need from you is to stand as the original depositor of this fund so that the fund can be transferred to your account.

If you accept this offer, I will appreciate your timely response to me. Because
the banking law and guideline here stipulates that if such money remained unclaimed after Six years, the money will be transferred into the bank treasury as unclaimed fund. This is why and only reason I contacted you, I am willing to invest the fund into your company with your wealth of experience, So please if you are interested to assist on this venture kindly contact me back for a brief discussion on how to proceed

Please send your response through my  email

Regards,
Mr. Paul Butugua

During this years HighEdWeb 2009 Conference there was a bit of a debacle with one of the keynote speakers. The speaker was David Galper.  Here is a quick run down of this keynote presentation:

College students are an interesting bunch. Everyone thinks they know what they want and the truth is no one knows not even the students. David will share his trials and tribulations building a school sanctioned legal digital entertainment service for college students. He will share how he has successfully reached and interacted with college students online. David will present a general understanding of what does and does not work with college students as well as specific recommendations for University sites. Bring your questions and fun ideas.

This sounded honestly, like a pretty good presentation.  I was curious to see what he had to say, as did many others.  Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out as well as we would have hoped.  Mr. Galper was once an enterprising entrepreneur who knew of a niche (the out of control download of music), and tried to exploit it.  He helped start a company called Ruckus, that helped curb illegal downloading on college campuses, but allowing students to download music legally.

At this time, this was a novel idea.  His ideas were definitely cutting edge back then.  Unfortunately, in today’s world, his ideas have already been considered mainstream.  None of this was news to those of us in the room.  In fact, most of the ideas he presented were in fact, out of date.  He made mentions of older programs like Kazaa and ICQ.  Programs that saw their limelight and have since faded into the interweb.  This caused quite a ruckus, no pun intended.  Read it yourself.  Now you can read lots of other opinions here, here, here, and here.  What I want to talk about is whether this is really as “uncommon” as many people think.

I honestly, think that we see this all the time.  I just don’t think that anyone has really thought about it before.  Most of the time though, we haven’t seen it.  Many of these back channels have been closed to us.  The advent of twitter has changed this.  Twitter gives everyone a place to post what we think, in real time.  I think this is something that has been coming for a really long time.  People flock to places where they can share ideas with like minded people.  Why do we think places like myspace or facebook have become so popular?  This kind of thing can be amazing.  However, it can also be a curse when things snowball.  So is this That’s the amazing thing about this instance…  unlike most flame wars, comments were completely one sided.  No one had anything good to say about the speaker.  No one defended him and at the time, no one questioned the etiquette of those making the posts.  What does that say?   That people inherently are snarky and sarcastic?   I don’t think so.  I think that it does say that the crowd can be a powerful thing, especially when they are completely united against something.  Will we see this more in the future?   You bet.  I do think that it will make presenters think twice about their audiences before they present to them.

Why?  I’d say that in the future, the presenter/audience dynamic will change.  No longer is the audience passively listening to a presentation.  In the future, they will be participants.  Which is amazing and scary at the same time. It will certainly make presentations better.  What does this mean for all of us?…

Social Media FTW!

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Wondering what in the world?  check out:
Web Content Marketing: How to Successfully Publish and Promote A Website With Outdated and Irrelevant Content

If you already have Leopard and are happy with it, I would probably suggest staying with it, unless you feel you need the upgrade.  Why shouldn’t you upgrade?  Well, the big issue is that some of your apps could cease functioning.  Some of the big under the hood changes, could seriously affect how your apps work.  Now many of the app developers are coming up with fixes for these issues, so before you upgrade, make sure that your apps will work, or have a workable fix.  These are some of the issues I’ve seen…

My current version of aMSN (an MSN messenger app) crashes before it even opens…

One of the biggest changes is Microsoft Exchange connectivity using Mail, iCal, and Contacts.  Now, this is probably the biggest reason I got the upgrade.  Belmont uses Exchange Online hosted by Microsoft.  I figured I would be adding everything manually.  What surprised me was how amazingly simple  it was to set up.  I simply put in my email address and password, and Mail found it almost immediately…  until it downloaded my messages, and stopped at August 24th.   For the life of me, I can’t get it to pull any more from the mail server…  talk about strange…

Especially after I used the Connection Doctor to diagnose the problem.  According to it, everything is hunky dory.  In looking at the settings, everything looks right, maybe I’ll figure it out soon. Until then, stuck with Entourage.

Also, iCal refuses to sync from the server.  Which is randomly annoying.  Looks like a spinning wheel of death to me (not to be confused with the spinning beach ball of death).

Maybe this is just snippy…  but there were changes to the wallpapers.  I had a favorite rocks Nature wallpaper. It was nice and dark, and surprisingly soothing.

They were nice enough to replace it with another (which loaded when the OS came up the first time). The weird thing is, they kept all the other wallpapers from the previous version of the OS.  I guess the picture wasn’t zen enough for Steve Jobs.

So instead I picked this one… its not too bad.

All in all, I think that this version of OSX isn’t something to write home about, or even make a big deal about.  I don’t really think it was meant to be a big deal.  That’s somewhat disappointing, especially since Windows 7 is just so freaking awesome.  Maybe they have put all their effort into the tablet that has yet to appear.  For now, I think I might load some Windows 7 boot camp, and enjoy something fun to work with…  wow.  I never expected to say that any time soon…

What is EMT Retain?   Retain is a CRM designed for current students.   It’s a lot different than the other Hobson’s EMT CRM’s that we currently use.  Retain has some interesting features that I’m excited to try out.  At Belmont, we plan to use the system as one of our primary modes of communication between the university and current students attending the university.  We currently use it to communicate with students in a variety of ways, the one flaw is that due to the current implementation, we are unable to adequately target communications, which can be a bit of a pain.  We also haven’t been able to implement the product’s early alert system, which allows us to target at-risk students, and help them.

Now, most of this is in the planning stages… Currently, we are putting together a planning team that consists of all the departments who will have a stake in the project.  This is typically how we build a CRM from the ground up.  However, the difference here is that Retain touches many more departments each with a specific need.  With the previous CRM’s we were focused on admissions, so many of the communications were based off of admissions information pulled from the student information system (SIS).  With Retain, the information is completely different and will come from more than just the SIS.  So we will see how things go.

Today we took the first intial steps, which involved setting our goals and identifying the stakeholders of the product.  We are also in talks with Hobson’s about how other schools have implemented the product, so we can get some ideas that might make this re-implementation go a little smoother.  I’m hoping we can get the system up and functioning and ready for the next full term.  We will see how things go.  As I jokingly like to point out, gremlins tend to be a serious issue.  Hopefully we’ll keep these things down to a minimum.   Right now, I just want to focus on the things we need, so we can build the system correctly the first time.

I’ll certainly keep everyone posted…  Let’s see how things roll.

Open Atrium has a lot of great features.  One can create groups that collaborate using workflows, dashboards, blogs, calendars, shout boxes, and document flows.  Its touted as an “Intranet in a Box”.  I’m not sure if its exactly what we need, but the beauty of it is its open source simplicity (and complication).  Right now, I don’t have a lot to say, since its taken me roughly 2 days to even get it installed.  Now granted, I am more of a designer and thinker than I am a server administrator.   So that probably has something to do with it.   I will say this though, for an open source product, it lacks in one crucial thing.  Documentation and Community Support.  Never in my life have I found so many issues that are almost impossible to find solutions to.  As I’ve learned, software itself is very specific on what kind of platform it needs.  The documentation page itself sells the product, but that’s about all it does.  It has some very simple requirements, PHP5, PHP GD extension, 64MB allocated to PHP resources, MySQL or PostgreSQL (according to the install package), and Apache mod rewrite.

Yesterday, I spent the day working on my new Windows 2003 server.   Apparently, it doesn’t play well with windows.  The install script fails to add key tables to the MySQL database.  I even tried it with PostgreSQL.  In this case, (from what I can tell) the queries are half written for MySQL and half PostgreSQL.  So PostgreSQL doesn’t work.  In the end, I had to create my own Linux box (using Ubuntu 9.04 with LAMP server), and make the build there.  Let me say, its never fun to play around in Linux command lines, I forgot how much I hate VI.  Luckily, I was able to get things up and running, and get the install working on the first try.

The problem is, none of these issues are documented on the collaboration and bug reporting website, which is hosted through GitHub.  I found it extremely hard to find any answers to any of my questions.  In most cases, I didn’t find any mention of it at all, and when it was mentioned, the issues were closed with no response to the users inquiries.

Now, this doesn’t mean the product is bad.  From what I hear and seen, its pretty awesome for what it does, and I hope it does what I need it to do.  Granted it was a pain to install, but hopefully it will be worth it.  I know Linux is great and all, but there is a lot of infrastructure out there that uses Windows Server, you’d think that there would be more support for it.
Anyways, those are just my thoughts.  More to come soon…

Which I find rather humorous.

So now, I suppose I’m going to try and give back to the higher ed world, here in this blog, and chronicle all the ups and downs of this coming year.  This year is a big year.  Belmont’s enrollment has grown from 5,000 students to well over 5300 students.  I’ve gotten lots of new technology this year.  11 netbooks.  2 new laptops.  my first rack server.  We have some interesting initiatives that I am leading up this year.  As well as the continued development of EMT Connect, Grad Connect, ApplyYourself, and Retain.  I hope to talk about all of these things, and how I’m working to make the Higher Ed world easier for you and me  (but with a big emphasis on me)

Belmont President Dr. Bob Fisher said, “Belmont’s continued growth is a reflection of the impressive academic reputation this university is garnering across the nation, a fact that was evident in the recent U.S. News & World Report rankings. Students see Belmont as a source for an academically challenging education that will empower them to engage and transform the world. That mission—and Belmont’s ability to meet it—are drawing the best and the brightest to this campus.”

In the annual U.S. News & World Report ranking of America’s best colleges and universities, Belmont was cited most as a Top School to Watch and was ranked 7th in the South in the “Best Universities – Masters” category, the highest ranking for the university to date. Once again, Belmont was also the highest ranked university in Tennessee in this category and was also praised for its commitment to undergraduate teaching and the strength of its general education programs. The rankings are based on several quality indicators including student retention rates, graduation rates, student-faculty ratios and scores on college entrance exams.

This year’s incoming freshman class represents 45 states and eight foreign countries. The university received a record number of applications—more than 3,200—of which a competitive 70 percent were accepted, down from 79 percent in 2000. The average ACT score for the 2009-10 freshman class is 26. Thirty-five percent of new freshmen at Belmont were in the top 10 percent of their graduating class, and 67 percent were in the top quarter. This year’s freshman class of 995 students held an average un-weighted cumulative high school GPA of 3.53, with 5.6 percent graduating as either valedictorians (42) or salutatorians (14).

In addition to the well-qualified freshman class, Belmont’s graduate programs are growing in size and diversity. The School of Pharmacy welcomed its second class of 75 doctoral students this fall, and the New Teacher Project—a partnership between Belmont and Metro Schools—saw nearly 100 Masters of Education candidates begin coursework this summer.