After reading about the completed doctorates of Michael Stephens, Joyce Valenza and Leslie Crang, I decided it was time to do the same. I have become part of the first “stand alone” cohort leading to an educational doctorate at California State University, Fresno. I have decided to write about my doctoral journey here. And will continue writing about library and technology related information on this blog. If you have any ideas about what needs to be studied, please comment below!
Archive for September, 2007
As I was getting back into exercising at the gym this morning, I listened to David Warlick’s latest podcast (August 24). While at the NECC conference in July, he interviewed one of the representatives from Lulu, the self-publishing company. As David explains in the podcast, he has sold many of his books through Lulu. The person he interviewed said they are now seeing 5000 new published materials per week. I’m not sure if that means books or articles or a picture or what. Any way you look at it, this is a lot of information being put all in one place! As the speaker said, this is 20,000 new things being uploaded per week. A lot of people have a lot of stuff to say! Talk about information overload!
This past week I learned that my email was not getting through to a company whose products we use in the school district. There was some data that was not quite right and I was letting them know what needed to be adjusted. After several weeks of learning that my email was not being received, I learned that my email was being blocked by the email filter of the company. And, it wasn’t just because I was frustrated with the data not being accurate!
Turns out that my “email signature” was the problem. About a month ago, I added to my email signature block and included the line “Rob’s Blog – http://robdarrow.wordpress.com“. After research by a company representative, they have now “white listed” my email along with the signature that includes Rob’s Blog.
So, at first I’m angry because I spent the last two weeks emailing with company representatives and got no response (though this is no fault of the outstanding representatives that work with me). I did call them on the phone and we got things resolved. Secondly, I know school districts have to filter websites, and, in some cases, email to avoid email spam. Overall, I guess I am surprised that companies filter out email of customers based on words in the email and/or the signature line. I guess this is just another example of someone at some level deciding what we should read and/or receive in our companies and school districts.
In this increasingly collaborative world, organizations and school districts should be including many people in decisions such as web or email filtering so we all undestand how and why these decisions were made. Too often, it seems that it is one or two people that make decisions that affect the efficiency of many others in the organization. And then, it is us “end users” that are left scratching our heads and wondering why.
