A survey of the North Carolina branches shows that 2/3 assess themselves as good or excellent in the use of technology. [In contrast, for other skills encouraged for branches - membership recruitment, visibility, leadership development and strategic planning, about half ranked themselves poor/fair.] This is surprising, but hopeful. Maybe I’ll be able to find some other folks in NC to shoulder some of the technology efforts. But maybe some of the branches aren’t yet aware of what they could be doing. It’ll be interesting to see if the training efforts recommended here really do have an “audience”. See http://news.aauwnc.org for the full results of the survey.
Severity: enhancement request
Audience: moderate
Fiscal effect: maybe
Policy question: yes
Reported: no
Link: http://svc.aauw.org/join/value/cu_listing.cfm
Could the list of C/U institutions also include the names of the C/U representatives. This would be immensely helpful for branches trying to form partnerships with nearby institutions. Realistically, a branch in the area has a way to find USMail, phone or e-mail info once they have a name, so that information would not need to be published. An “opt out” might be necessary — but what really is the risk of an individual faculty or staff member being identified as a member of AAUW?
FIXED by 4/27/06 (but I don’t think I had a message about it).
(more…)
Severity: moderate
Audience: small
Fiscal effect: could be if affects distribution of AAUW news
Policy question: no
Reported: I’m pretty sure I sent this in during the initial few months of the testing on the discussion boards
Link: (for example): http://discuss.aauw.org/forum/rss.cfm?forumid=1&catid=11
That link is to the RSS file for the general discussion boards. If you look at the XML on that page, you’ll see that the information about the posts appears, but that the links to the articles are in the form
http://discuss.aauw.org//messageview.cfm?catid=11&threadid=100
That should be
http://discuss.aauw.org/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=11&threadid=100
The problem here is that when news aggregators display the link to the full article, and the user clicks the link, they get a pretty ugly looking Cold Fusion error message. For those who can “look under the covers,” it’s not hard to “fix” — but this error limits the ability of folks to put lists of the articles on other web sites. [For instance on the “more news” page on this blog, we needed to do some fancy footwork to correct that error behind the scenes.]
Of course, particularly with things that change as fast as computing environments, there’s never “enough” training. One of the topics of the training, then, needs to be “where to get more help”?
I’ve found the e-newsletters (now RSS feeds) from www.logicaltips.com to be very helpful. They’ve just started a forum, too, which may be a good supplement to the newsletter and its archives. See http://forum.logicalexpressions.com/
Anyone have other suggestions? Please post a comment.
The TUAG has collaborated with the Communications Working Group on the Association’s use of e-mail listserves: how many lists exists and how subscriptions are managed, which are “discussion” lists and which are “announcement” lists, etc. As part of that discussion we submitted the following list of suggestions for updated listserve practices:
Subject: PRIORITY/ADVISE: Format of One Shared World E-mail
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2006 18:10:54 -0500
Questions/concerns/ideas that resulted from the March 9 distribution of the “One Shared World” e-mail.
1. Some systems only display the first 15 characters of the sender’s name and then ask the recipient if they know the sender. As a result, some recipients determined that this was spam and deleted the message. Who authored this e-mail? We had not seen the administrator@aauw.org as the sender before. The sender’s name/department should be used with these “general” messages.
2. Every message sent to a list MUST clearly identify what list was used to send the message. Did this message go to everyone with an e-mail address on file with AAUW?
3. The subject line did not contain a tag that identified the message as a listserv/blast message. In the case of a blast, the tag preceding the subject could have said AAUW-ALL.
4. Because of incomplete information about the sender and recipient list, members were unable to determine if they should forward the message to their respective networks.
5. There was no ability to opt out of future messages of this type or to change an address if someone does want to continue to receive the messages. That ability is provided as boilerplate at the end of other AAUW listserv messages and should be included with blast messages. The software provides this option.
We understand that AAUW does have important information to share with its leaders and members. We want them to be willing recipients of information as well as providers of information. However, this example demonstrates that we must define an e-mail protocol/etiquette to be used in future e-mail distribution. We don’t want people to stop reading AAUW messages!
The group has been given access to the e-online application as it is to be released later this spring. We’ve been asked to comment on features and ease of use.The description of the application’s initial modules: AAUW Member Services E-OnLine Application
The underlying data access principles accepted by the board in January: Initial data access policy [See note near the end of “key messages from the board meeting” in EdEqChange #11, Feb. 2006 and another comment in this blog.]
We were given access on March 15 and were asked to respond by March 22. Oh, well.
Severity: moderate
Audience: moderate
Fiscal effect: unknown
Policy question: no
Reported: no
Link: http://www.aauw.org/issue_advocacy/actionpages/index.cfm
Okay, I know this is a hard problem when site changes are implemented without tight central control (which we really can’t afford), but it *is* crazy-making.
On the page above there are two links to “single-sex education” (one under Education and one under Title IX). One goes to the page
http://www.aauw.org/issue_advocacy/actionpages/singlesex.cfm
and the other goes to the page
http://www.aauw.org/issue_advocacy/actionpages/positionpapers/singlesex.cfm
The first has a link to the second, but it’s confusing when one expects the two links to give the same information. So this may be one more thing to audit in the site.