CIO's Blog

Tagging is Fun

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:29:00 +0800

Last week I mentioned “hashtags” and how I hope the CityU online community can help build up a momentum in using “#cityu” and “#hk” as tags in our tweets. This week, I just want to remind everyone that the ability to put tags on things is not restricted to tweets. Tags are what we computer scientists called “metadata” - data about data - a fancy way of saying “What is this piece of data about?” By “data”, we mean any piece of content, may it be a blog post, photo, video, audio file, etc. The reason we need metadata is because computers are, unfortunately, not yet smart enough to automatically figure it out on its own. For example, a human can easily recognize the content of a photograph, but a computer only knows that it is a JPG file. To help computers understand what’s in a photo, or video, or anything else, we rely on tags. Tags are just simple everyday keywords or labels that we attach to a piece of data. With tags, computers will know what that piece of data is about. Search engines will be able to give us more precise results. Computers can link similar contents together. All very powerful capabilities to further connect and link people together. So next time you upload a photo, video, or anything that paints a picture of life, work and play at CityU, please remember to add 2 simple tags “cityu” and “hk”. This will allow us to find CityU related photos, videos, etc. The teaching/learning experience we create at CityU is quite exciting and unique. With tags and social networking, it will be a lot easier to connect and share our experience with others around the world.

(cc) http://www.wordle.net/

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:51:07 +0800

(cc) http://www.wordle.net/

Microblogging and Twitter

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:46:00 +0800

This week I would like to talk about microblogging, a modern form of communication that is popularized by Twitter. Microblogs are short messages, usually a sentence long. For Twitter, this is limited to only 140 characters. Most people are already accustomed to writing and reading short text messages, such as those sent through short message service (SMS) or instant messaging (IM). Microblogging is similar to these technologies, except that instead of one-to-one or one-to-many for chat, microblogs can potentially be read by anyone in the world. This makes microblogging a very powerful platform for communication.

Traditional blogs, like this one, consist of a larger body of text. Blogs are also not published too frequently; for me, this is once a week. Microblogs, on the other hand are usually published several times a day, sort of filling in the gap between blog postings. These microblogs, also known as “tweets” in Twitter lingo, are short messages about personal opinions, what a person is doing, upcoming events,… basically anything you like that fits within a line of text.

Many Universities around the world use microblogging, to supplement RSS, to notify students/staff and general public of events or news. It allows us to publish information without being intrusive like email spam. If you prefer email, you can still send and get tweet updates through email or mobile phone.

For CityU, we are gradually building up a community of twitter users. For example, the Communications and Public Relations Office (CPRO) has a “CityUHongKong” twitter feed for CityU announcements. Our Library has a “cityulib_eres” twitter feed as well. I, of course, have the “CityUCIO” twitter feed. In addition, many individual CityU staff and students have their personal twitter feeds that might also talk about CityU events.

I envision that more and more departments/units will be using microblogging in the future. To make it easier for our students and the general public to find our microblogs, I am proposing that we following a very simple convention - just include “#cityu #hk” within the line. This method of using hashs and tags together is called hashtagging. The individual tags are called hashtags. By following this simple convention, we can now search Twitter for “#cityu #hk” or simply “cityu hk” to get all updates related to CityU. You can extend the hashtags to, say “#cityu #hk #seminar” for seminar announcements. This way if someone searches for “hk seminars” they will also see our announcements. Hashtags will, of course, consume part of the 140 characters limitation. So they should be used sparingly.

If your tweet contains a link, a common practice is to compress a long URL into a short one to save on the number of characters. There are many tools that do this for free; I use bit.ly.

Besides Twitter, other Web 2.0 software also provide similar microblogging feature. For example, facebook and Google Talk both have a status line. Most Web 2.0 applications have connectors and interfaces that allows you to share information and synchronize updates. For example, every time I post something in this blog, Twitter gets an update. Every time I post something on facebook, my Twitter gets updated as well. This is done automatically through my blog and facebook.

I’m constantly fascinated by all the neat and advanced technologies our students are using day-to-day to stay in touch with their friends and classmates. Our channels of communication and teaching can greatly be improved if we use the same tools as they do. I hope to see more use of Web 2.0 throughout the University. If any department of administrative unit needs help in getting started, I will be more than happy to participate.

What’s New This Week:

MS Windows 7 - All departments/units get copies of MS Windows 7 for testing. All lecture theatres and classrooms will be upgraded during break!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthamm/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:41:01 +0800

http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthamm/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

CityU Blackboard User Group

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:47:05 +0800

Yesterday, with the help of EDO, we held our first CityU Blackboard User Group Meeting. Also present were friends from the HK Institute of Education as well as representatives from Blackboard and their local reseller BEENET. We heard talks from Dr. Hebe Wong on using a comment bank to give suggestions on English writing improvements and grading English with rubrics. Delegates from Blackboard/BEENET gave brief talk/demo on Blackboard Outcomes. We also had a brief sharing of good practices among all the participants. The effective use of a Learning Management System (LMS) and other supporting e-Learning tools can greatly enhance the learning experience of our students. I see the user group as a community of educators helping other educators to use these e-learning tools more effectively and efficiently as well as sharing their experiences and best practices. The group would probably only have time to meet once or twice within a semester. To keep the dialog going between meetings, Crusher Wong (EDO) has set up a Ning site (social network) for anyone in CityU who might be interested in e-learning to join. The Ning site is private. If you have not received an email invitation, please contact me or Crusher to get invited. I look forward to seeing you in Ning.

Photo

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:23:18 +0800

Cha Siu Bao 叉燒包

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:02:00 +0800

For the past 4 years, I’ve been organizing an annual CityU competition called the “eXtreme Web Designer Award” contest, nicknamed the “CityU Web Hacker” contest. This year is our 5^th year. It is also a very special year because I invited students from other Universities to join as well as the Hong Kong Computer Society to sponsor the event. Each year we have a different theme; this year it is “cha siu bao” 叉燒包 – Chinese pork buns. In previous years, we had cats and dogs, turtle, butterfly, and goldfish.

The main objective of the competition is simple - to encourage students to learn and use professional Web development techniques through a fun competition.

The task is also simple, create a minimum of one Web page and make it professional quality. The judging panel then assesses the pages to see how well it follows various guidelines and best practices. The following are some of the things we are promoting:

Good design skills – The page should be visually interesting and related to our theme
Good writing skills – The page should have well-written content that is relevant to our theme
Good coding skills – The page must follow international Web standards
Good search engine optimization skills – Search engines must be able to find your page and rank it high
Good usability skills – The page must be user-friendly and follows usability guidelines
Good accessibility skills – The page must be easily accessible with different devices and by people with different abilities/disabilities
Good modern aesthetics – The page should look modern in Web 2.0 style

If you are a student, please join, or encourage others to join. Deadline is 4^th December at noon. More info can be found at the official 2009 eXtreme Web Designer Award website.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 05:48:00 +0800

http://www.flickr.com/photos/avlxyz/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Green IT: Saving Trees

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:16:00 +0800

Last week I mentioned that students’ printing at CSC kills roughly 2 trees a week. I did not factor in all the printing that is done by the academic departments and administrative units. This can easily amount to a dozen large trees destroyed each week. The sad thing is that a vast majority of what is printed might be thrown out soon after a few weeks or even immediately after a meeting. But this does not have to be the case. There are many things we can do to eliminate or reduce printing. However, some of these do require changes in our reading or working habits. But saving the earth is well worth the effort, won’t you say?

“Softcopy Not Hardcopy”
Firstly, instead of giving students hardcopies of notes/presentations, consider emailing softcopies or PDFs. Its faster and doesn’t kill trees. It is also easier to read since you can zoom in and out as well as use search to locate information. It is simple to create a PDF file. Most of our computers are configured to allow you to “print” to a PDF file. If your computer isn’t, you can use one of many free software packages that produce PDF from different file formats. The easiest one to use is probably Google Docs. Just upload your file in whatever format and then download it again as PDF.

“Photocopy to PDF Not Paper”
Secondly, even if you don’t have the original softcopy of a document, you can still easily create PDFs. Most of the newer photocopy machines around CityU allow you to “photocopy” to a PDF file and then email the file to youself. Simply type in your email address. Some of our photocopiers even scan both sides of a paper at the same time. Using PDF not only saves paper but your time.

“Laptop and Desktop”
Thirdly, we routinely print stacks of papers, documents and minutes just for a 1 or 2 hour meeting. Many of these documents are confidential and have to be destroyed immediately after the meeting. This wastes paper and time. Why not prepare a laptop for each of the meeting participants with all the documents ready on the computer “desktop”. Once a meeting is over, just delete the file from the “desktop”; no shredding is needed.

“Circulate Links Not Paper”
Fourth, we routinely make photocopies of important documents to share with everyone in a department or an administrative unit. Instead, these documents can just as easily be stored permanently in a Web-based document management system. The advantage is that you only need to email a link to everyone and the document can be version-controlled so that people will always read the latest version each time. If needed, CSC can provide a general-purpose document management solution that is easy to use.

“Duplex”
Finally, if you must print, print both sides of the paper, i.e. duplex mode. Just by doing that will half our paper wastage.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23209605@N00/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:00:00 +0800

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23209605@N00/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The CityU Community Bulletin Board

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:08:00 +0800

This week I would like to share some personal thoughts on our email broadcasting system (EBS). Our current system has been serving us for close to a decade now. Originally, it was designed as a quick and easy tool for departments and units to broadcast important and critical messages to a wide audience, such as the entire department or even the entire University population. Probably because of its easy of use, our number of email messages sent through this system has steadily risen to the current day volume of roughly 1,000 to 2,000 per month, out of which 100 to 200 were broadcasted to the entire staff/student population. Some of these messages are routine announcements and reminders of seminars and other events, while others are important messages that require special attention. Due to the volume of broadcasted email, it has become increasing hard to separate the needle from the hay, impacting our overall e-productivity.

Email is a type of communication that we sometimes characterize as “push” communication; content is pushed onto us whether we want it or not. An analogy is radio. Once you tune into a particular station, you have no control of what comes over. If a radio station constantly broadcasts advertisements that you are not interested in, you would probably change radio station very quickly. Unfortunately, we cannot change our email address. What we can change is to give people more flexibility in the way they receive these messages.

Earlier this year, we added “My EBS Options” to allow you to subscribe/unsubscribe to email broadcast messages from selected groups of departments/units. However, only a few percentages of users actually used this feature. Most people were probably afraid of potentially missing important emails and did not bother to unsubscribe anything.

In the summer, we experimented with using a different channel of communication; a more flexible ‘alert’ based broadcast that allows you to configure exactly how you want to be notified if a particular event occurred. We then moved all the “Furniture” email broadcast messages to this new platform. This allowed people who are interested in recycling furniture to either (1) read furniture availability through the web, or (2) get email “alerts” either immediately, daily or weekly. This has tremendously improved our quality of email broadcast. Firstly, it reduced unsolicited email for a category of broadcast emails. Secondly, it gave control back to the user. User can now decide how to get information - through web, by alerts, and soon by RSS (a “pull” type communication).

With the success of the “Furniture” alert system, we are now looking into replacing the archaic EBS with a modern communication platform that puts control back to the users. We are thinking of calling this new platform “The CityU Community Bulletin Board” - similar in utility to common community bulletin boards that you might find in supermarkets and coffee shops.

What’s New This Week:

Green IT at CityU! - Student printing kills 93 trees each year; almost 2 trees destroyed every week. Don’t print; use softcopy instead of hardcopy!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudiriet/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:00:00 +0800

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudiriet/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Let's Make Our Internet/Intranet Even Better

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:00:00 +0800

This is my second weekly blog post. This week, I would like to share some ideas and thoughts on strategies to help make our CityU website even more effective and useful. These are just my initial thoughts, please feel free to comment; I would love to hear from others in the greater CityU community.

This week I would like to talk about our CityU website. Our website is our window to the world. It is an important tool to help others understand who we are and what we do. It is our channel and platform to communicate with the world and to let others know our plans, strategies, and successes. In order to achieve this, our website must be convenient to use and information easy to find.

Our website is divided into two parts - the public Internet website and the private Intranet website - each serving different people with different needs.

Let’s first take a look at our public Internet site. It provides valuable information to parents, prospective/current students, teachers, researchers and the media. Information such as press releases, news articles, university magazine/newsletter articles, staff profiles, research project information, college/department information, programme/major/minor information, etc. In the modern Web 2.0 world of ours, there are 2 important rules. Firstly, content must be searchable by search engines. If search engines cannot find it, no one else will. Secondly, content must be linkable so that they can be quickly shared with potentially hundreds or thousands of other people through various blogs and social networks.

CityU has a lot of valuable data, information and knowledge about who we are and most importantly about our many successes. But some of these contents are currently buried in formats that many search engines cannot read or indexed. For those that are accessible to search engines, we need good linking mechanisms. Some of our pages use frames which make linking impossible. Some pages are just PDF files, so linking to a particular page or article is also impossible.

In order for our public Internet site to be more effective and useful, we need more searchable and linkable content. We need to make it super easy for people to find information. This means when people search for information, our relevant pages do show up in search results. In the coming months, we will work with various departments and administrative units to see how we can further optimize our Internet strategy, so that we can more effectively share information about CityU and our successes with others around the world.

Secondly, our Intranet. Our Intranet is huge with hundreds of thousands of pages of information, documents, spreadsheets, and software applications. Our problem is not a lack of content, but an over abundance of content and Web-based functions/applications. We need a way to easily and conveniently find what we are looking for.

Our one-stop Intranet portal is only the first step to try to create some organization out of our enormous information and application source. But it takes time and experience to understand the structure of our extensive portal and where to find what you are looking for.

A logical next step is to provide an extensive Intranet search capability, so that students/staff need not remember and click long sequences of navigation to get to what they are looking for. Due to search technology that has just been made available to Hong Kong, we might finally be able to provide customized Intranet search for the CityU community.

With Intranet search, it does not matter where pages or documents reside, either on the internal web, on departmental shared disks, or even document management systems. This will add a totally new dimension to the usability of our Intranet. Search results can be displayed in a new contextual knowledge portal - a portal that provides one-stop access to information and applications that are precisely relevant to what you are looking for. This can greatly enhance our overall productivity and the usability and effectiveness of our Intranet. In the coming months, we will investigate the possibility of making our Intranet even easier to use with Intranet search.

What’s New This Week:

Universities Wifi Network - Student/staff can now use their CityU login/passwords for free wireless access (without prior approval) at HKU, CUHK, PolyU, HKUST, HKBU, LU and HKIEd through the “Universities WiFi” collaborative network offered by the Joint Universities Computer Centre (JUCC). You can check out locations of wifi hotspots.

Long Term Loan Scheme (LLS) - The popular LLS is back. Registration is now opened to eligible students to apply for a laptop to use during their stay with CityU. More information can be found at the 2009 LLS website.

Thoughts on Our ICT Priorities

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:59:00 +0800

Although I have been in transition for over a month, last Friday was my official first day as the CIO for CityU. In this blog, I would like to share with the greater CityU community - teachers, students, staffs, alumni and friends, some of my thoughts on our current ICT needs and priorities. By sharing, I hope we can all work together to create an even better CityU by leveraging ICT for teaching, learning, research, administration and outreach. I sincerely welcome any suggestions, comments or thoughts you might have on this or any other ICT-related issues.

At the top of my list of ICT priorities is clearly IT readiness for the 3+3+4 Academic Reform. We need to ensure all our central and departmental IT systems are well prepared and ready. These include systems for admissions, student records, academic advising, etc. Enhancements and modifications are needed to handle the more flexible major/minor curriculum structure as well as support for different types of admissions, such as college/department admissions, and advanced standings - exemptions versus the old credit transfer.

My next priority is to see how we can use IT to be better at what we do, and to further increase our efficiency and effectiveness. For example, for teaching, we will continue to explore new tools and platforms to streamline our delivery of knowledge and students’ learning/sharing. For research, we will explore tools that facilitate collaboration among academic staff and graduate students, both within research groups and cross departments. For administration, we will explore new technologies to further enhance the quality of data and knowledge presented in our executive systems.

For example, we need to find better ways to streamline how we distribute news and messages to the general CityU community. We will need to take advantage of newer Web 2.0 tools and platforms that encourages productivity, collaboration and knowledge sharing. We need better tools to allow us to quickly and easily search and locate data, information, knowledge, documents, and forms from our Intranet. We need to continue to improve the quality of the learning environment for our students by providing them with tools that they are most comfortable with.

Externally, we need to enhance our Web strategy and further strengthen our online presence. We will need to continue the momentum created by our new homepage to spread our branding concepts and ideas to colleges, departments and administrative units. Our identity and message can be made clearer through consistent branding and better information architecture.

Within CityU’s greater IT organization, I would like to encourage more collaboration and knowledge sharing of best practices among all IT staff from CSC, ESU, to those within colleges, departments, and administrative units. CityU has a lot of valuable resources; we need to leverage off each others’ strengths and expertise.

Finally, CityU has always pride itself for being ahead of the curve and taking a leading role in terms of the use of technology within Hong Kong’s higher education community. Along this line, we will continue to explore new technology developments and trends and take full advantage of them whenever possible. For example, technology trends such as virtualization, cloud computing, WAN optimization, and executive dashboards. Some of these are already deployed and in use at CityU.

Welcome to my blog!

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:20:00 +0800

This blog is mainly for students, teachers, staffs, alumni and friends of the City University of Hong Kong. I plan to write about general ICT issues for higher education. In addition, I have a facebook page that I will use to interact with the greater CityU community. I also have a twitter page that summarizes both this blog and my facebook interactions as well as contain my daily status updates. Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions. Just a note: all postings/interactions on my blog, facebook and twitter reflect only my personal comments and opinions and should not be construed as official CityU policies or views.