You may think that this is a fairly frivolous undertaking until you look at the numbers.  I’m reaching more people, with less effort than at any time in my 3+ years at BOCES or my 10+ years teaching people anything, anywhere. The newsletters are about 5 minutes long (on average) and take me anywhere from 5 to 10 hours to produce. The newsletter is published to a Moodle course page where guest access is allowed and a link is then sent to our entire staff. This means I can see the stats for how many times the newsletters were viewed. As I write this, the three newsletters published to date have a total of 561 views. If I averaged 7 hours per newsletter then I’ve invested 21 hours into these informative videos.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to teach 561 people anything in 7 hours and I’m not sure that anyone could in any other way. This is an incredible resource for us, in my humble opinion. I think it’s doing a hell of a lot of good for our reputation also. It shows that we’re concerned with the ability of our customers (the staff, faculty and students) to have a better experience with technology and that there is an entire team of people dedicated to supporting it for them.

And I’m not done yet.

I’ve already added an iTunes specific feed and product (.m4v files) as another variation on the newsletter. Adding a small amount of time to processing, but providing the content to (potentially) more customers to consume at their leisure. Soon, there will be yet another product. A version suitable for Windows compatible PMP’s. This will most likely be an AVI or MPG version that will be formatted for a smallish screen. This is in the hopes that we will have a Windows Media server on-line soon so that we can distribute this content over the network to anyone that would have it, on any device that can support it.

• Streaming the super bowl from my PVR.
• Burning a music CD from my music library on my home network.
• Editing a Google doc.
• Writing this blog post.
• Running Twhirl (2 accounts) so I can keep up with others watching the game.
• Running Trillian, which is alerting me about tweets and allowing me to catch hell from friends that know I’m on-line (this could ave been a mistake, LOL)
• Fetching email from work and Gmail.
• Editing in Photoshop CS3.
• Intermittently recording audio and video as I try to get my newsletter scripts “just right”.
• Editing in Camtasia the audio and video that is recorded.

Best part is that it’s not even breathing heavy. Task manager states less than 20% processor used and less than 1GB memory in use (amazing what happens when you turn virtual memory off). This is true PC nirvana even though I could really use my second monitor. Please don’t take that to mean that I wish I was at work right now.

The IT department is made up of just a few dedicated support personnel. Key job titles include a developer, telephone support specialist, network administrator and LAN tech to name a few. The total membership in this department is around a dozen and they support, in total, close to 800 people and that’s just within their organization. This doesn’t include the outside institutions that they support via telephone and with itinerant workers.

The majority of the support provided to these employees is done remotely or in some other on-line fashion as with training or other materials that can be used to educate the users as to how to effectively use their technology. There is almost no face to face support provided by the IT department currently unless you include training (either in a class environment or in 1:1 situations) or when the employee is asked to stop by the IT department to drop off or pick up equipment/supplies.

So, here is the dilemma; how can a splintered IT department work? Can it work in an environment where the vast majority of the full time IT workers are responsible for systems or processes that are in constant need of attention or are in a state of continual upgrading or feature addition/change to support staff needs? Should those workers be subjected to questions by end users who have forgotten how to empty their trash in Outlook when their primary task is writing code or configuring servers?

Do you know of any situation where this has been attempted and succeeded? Do you know of any instances where this was attempted and failed?

So how did this happen you ask? A little micro-blogging tool called Twitter. That’s how.

Since using Twitter I’ve made several very valuable contacts, see my last post for just one example. Today I found a way that I could be useful in much the same way. With Twitter I’ve attempted to respond when I could to other Twits (that’s what we call ourselves, I guess) when they’ve asked questions about Moodle. Something I spend a lot of time with. Beyond just a short tweet for an answer or a direction to follow, I decided that I’d open a Connect meeting room on our server and invite my fellow twits in to see what I could do. I would have never guessed at the response that it received.

Several collegiate level technology professionals from around the US dropped in and became active listeners to whatever I could give them about Moodle. One of my fellow workmates referred to this as something to be expected as who wouldn’t want to get free information? I think it was much more than that however as there isn’t anything that I talked about or showed them that they couldn’t have found out by simply visiting the Moodle support forums.

What happened today was an example of what this new techno-world has become. Social and professional networking at it’s finest. I think I finally get it and I can’t wait to get some more.

For those of you that think this is wrong, don’t worry. This is for my own use only. I’ll be sure to destroy the files when I’m done.

Look at it this way, someone else will be enjoying this book while I’m still consuming it.

I’ll hold my review until I’m done with it.