Another Year Over

I failed at blogging weekly. I'm not going to say I didn't have time, that would be a cop out. What I will say is that I need to improve my time management skills and reprioritize a bit. That said, I intend for this post to be a sort of reflection of the past year, so perhaps from that those of you who are disappointed in the frequency of this blog will feel at least a bit of sympathy for me. Before I get into that, however, I would like to mention that I will be participating in a blog style round table discussion of Clausewitz' "On War". More details can be found here with the schedule and format of the discussion here. I hope I can contribute intelligently. With that, let's get right to the year in review or things I learned:

1. Fishing can be fun. I used to hate fishing. Sitting around for hours for a minute or two of excitement was never my thing. My father-in-law took us to Northern Minnesota this spring however and changed my mind. I've never caught so many fish. It may have just been that we were in the right place at the right time, but I think there is more to it. My father-in-law knows the lakes we were fishing, so he knew where the good spots were. He gets as impatient as I do, and perhaps more-so, so we moved if we didn't see any signs of activity. I also think that we happened to hit the lakes at a good time, but what do I know? I look forward to going back again soon, and I would be willing to give fishing in this area another look, though I'm not sure I'd want to eat what I caught around here.

2. If you really like your job, and care about what you do, doing what is best for the organisation comes before everything else, even preservation of said job. There were some rocky patches at the University this year, and some shake-ups in the department. It caused me to stand back and reflect. Knowing that there is not much upward mobility in my position, I could leave for something with more growth potential, keep my head down and go with the flow, or speak up and do what's right, even if no one else likes it. I decided option three was the best course. If I get fired for doing the right thing, so be it. It just puts back at option one. That sounds really dramatic. It wasn't as exciting as it looks, no heavy ethical issues or anything. I just don't want to get into a long, boring story that most people don't care about. Mat is not a hero.

3. It could always be worse, material objects don't mean much, it's your health that matters, grass is always greener... etc. I have relearned several of these truisms. probably the more important thing here is it's easy to get wrapped up in the day to day slogging and forget what's really important.

4. Grad school is hard. Individual classes may vary, but the commitment required is really tough. In addition to being a student, I was (and in most cases still am) an instructor, a husband, a home owner, a systems engineer/admin/manager/etc., a part time mechanic, a lousy friend, an avid gamer, and I'm sure some other things at various times that I've forgotten or lumped into other roles. These roles often overlapped, and sometimes conflicted, as each really required more time than I really had to devote to them, all things being equal. This is where the reprioritizing mentioned above comes in. If you are considering grad school, look at your commitments. If you are supported by your parents and have no real commitments, or you are single and work a day job, you'll probably be OK. If you have anything more than that on your plate... think through it. I thought I was prepared, and academically I still think I was, but if my wife were less understanding or my employees less tolerant of my mood swings and half-crazed mumbling, I'm not sure I would have made it through the semester. 

That's it. Four points. Did I learn more than this? Likely. But these are the major things that stick out to me right now. That said, I will attempt to make this blog more of a priority in the coming year. I hope everybody had a merry Christmas whether you celebrate it or not, and that any traditions you observe are happy. May next year be better than last year.

Look ma, I Blogged two weeks in a row!

That's right, two weeks in a row. It's a new record for me. It's now one week after what turned out to be the worst flood the Region remembers. I finally started cleaning our basement. It's not too bad, and from what I can tell we haven't lost anything of value, but we were way over do for a cleaning. During this whole flooding mess Purdue Calumet opened a day, and in some cases two days before other institutions in the area. Why? Was it to maintain normalcy for the students' benefit? If that's the reason, it failed miserably. Regardless of what the ultimate goal is, a large majority of PUC students still commute to school. With most of the major roads in the area under water, this was no easy task. Add to this the flooded basements and in some cases whole houses that they had to deal with, and school being open was just one more hassle everyone had to deal with. I know as an instructor that it's hard when you fall unexpectedly behind in the curriculum. I understand that days of the school closing mean salaried employees who are paid not to work. But (This may shock some people) sometimes money's not the most important driver. Maybe there was a good reason for doing what he did, but if I were the Chancellor, I would have waited at least until 80/94 opened. It would have been easier on the students faculty and staff. 

In other flood related news, my friend who owns Critical Effect, the local game store, is feeling the secondary effects of disaster. a small but vital bridge, or the roadway in front of the bridge, suffered severe damage in the flood. The store sits very near though is thankfully a few feet higher than the bridge and they received no damage. However, the city is worried about the gas and electric lines that ran across the bridge and under the road. Until they give the all clear, he has been ordered to remain closed. Does insurance cover revenue loss when there is no direct damage?

I bring this up because I feel bad for my friend and his wife. Though this is not their only source of income, they have worked hard to be fairly successful, and a week or more of lost revenue can't be good for anyone in small business. But I also have a more selfish reason. I realized today that gaming has become an important part of what makes me who I am. (Those who didn't already know this can feel free to make their geek jokes now, I'm not bothered by them anyway.) The few hours a week I spend gaming provides me with an escape from the weekly stresses I deal with. Painting my miniature armies gives me a creative outlet, though I'm not all that good at it. It's also kind of nice to do something that's not IT related all the time, and to talk to people whose lives don't revolve around IT and in most cases don't know much about IT. Maybe that's a techie sin, I don't know. I have (or had,) other hobbies too (also non-computer related in most cases), but life has gotten in the way of a lot of them. It's hard for me in my current situation to leave work at work, and school has become ingrained in some way in most of my life, so it's nice to still have an outlet from both. 

BTW, Chris, if you read this, get in touch with me in a more direct method. We haven't talked in too long, and I don't have any good contact information on you. 

So-called weekly Blog

OK, so this is what? my fourth post in four months? So much for posting weekly, I guess. I will try to be better about keeping up that schedule, now that the beginning of the semester fires are burning themselves out, and I'm starting to get used to the fact that free-time doesn't exist when you are a student, and you work full time, and have a wife and a house and responsibilities, and oh, by the way, technically hold down a part time job on the side. I had a plan to manage my time today. I had a list of things I needed to do, and I was going to get up when Criss left for the kids' band competition (early) and perform a series of mundane house associated tasks and then grade papers, followed by homework. 

Instead I woke to a flood of near biblical proportions. That's an obvious exaggeration, but it was the worst it's been since we've been here. The street was flooded up to the door step, and our back yard had obvious standing water. My poor beat-up Neon is now waterlogged on top of everything else. 

Crissy still intended to go to work, and went into the basement to get her pants out of the dryer. The only problem was, the entire basement was under a little more than a foot of water. 

I went and bought a pump. It's the best $100 I've spent in a long time, once I got the floor drain cleared, it and the pump got most of the water cleared up in about 20 minutes. 

So, I was only about two or three hours behind at this point and could have jumped into action with the housework... instead I went back to bed and slept.

In other news, we had an SOT meeting yesterday. I'm not going to into many details because I don't want to say anything that may jeopardize my employment. I will say though that it put me in mind of my last posts here, so let's take another look at higher education. 

Last time I wrote, I came up with the following definition: An institution of higher learning with teaching and research facilities, made up of colleges and professional schools, which grants both graduate and undergraduate degrees, and is governed by the state and not a private body. 

That's all fine, but it still doesn't answer the question. So, in order to measure anything we need a valid metric. I mentioned before that the metrics currently in use were not appropriate, so let's look at our definition to try to find something valid. The pieces I see as being important to the mission of a university are " with teaching and research facilities" and "grants both graduate and undergraduate degrees". If we take just "with teaching and research facilities" we end up measuring the facilities and not the mission. So instead we focus on he granting of degrees. If we just count number of degrees awarded, or number of different types of degrees awarded, however, we end up back where we started, counting throughput rather than quality. 

Something is still missing. but if we go back and look again at the context under which our public universities are founded, we may find the key. While I said before that not all public universities were founded for the same reason, most have in common the fact that the original purpose was for the training of the population (usually at the state level) in various professional pursuits. Taking those things together, I'm going to make a leap here, and propose a metric. I say that quality should be measured by the number of degree recipients from a given university (who so desire)  that are actively employed in the field for which they were educated. 

I could be wrong, but I think it's a valid metric, and one that is only marginally tracked. Why? I have my thoughts. Maybe I'll talk more about it in a later post.

Quality Education continued

I've decided that the best way to start looking at the question is to define what a public university is. So let's start with just "university". After digging through several dictionaries and the Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as various less reputable sources, I've compiled this definition: "An institution of higher learning, with teaching and research facilities, made up of colleges and professional schools, which grants both graduate and undergraduate degrees. 

A "public" university, I've found, is something slightly different depending on where in the world the University is located. This means I need to rephrase my question. So I'm going to change it to: How can you empirically measure the effectiveness of a public university in the United States? 

This leads us to defining exactly what a public university is in the U.S. The landmark document in this case appears to be the Morrill act of 1862, which provided states with Federally owned land to sell in order to fund "... at least one college, where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts... in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." 

Certainly not all "public" universities were created as a direct result of this act,  and, it would be a mistake to apply the "leading object" above to every public university. Other public universities, for example, were started as teachers colleges or strictly agricultural schools, and were founded by individual state act, or as the result of private donations to the state. What we can say is that the Morrill act provided the precedent for universities to be governed by the state rather than a private body.

So, this makes my definition "An institution of higher learning, with teaching and research facilities, made up of colleges and professional schools, which grants both graduate and undergraduate degrees, and is governed by the state, and not a private body." But now, based on my definition, I need to determine what the measurable output(s) should be in order to answer my question. 

More on this later, hopefully less than a month this time.

Quality Education

I had an interesting conversation yesterday that brought up the question, "How do you measure the quality of a university?" It's a question that I know has been posed before, and it is important enough that there was a documentary on PBS about the situation, (though unfortunately I missed it). If we analyze some of the common metrics that universities use to measure themselves, we quickly find them to be inappropriate. For example, retention is often a key mark for schools. However, retention measures only the number of students who stay enrolled from one period to another, not how well those students did or the difficultly or appropriateness of their classes. Other often advertised statistics like first term enrollment and incoming student GPA or standardized test scores only reflect the institution's ability to market its self. No matter where we turn, it appears that by using any of the standard measurements, we end up with misleading or irrelevant data. So this leads me to one conclusion: we must be asking the wrong question. 

So what is the right question? As a working start, I was given "How can you empirically measure the effectiveness of a public university?" It's a start, but it leads to other questions. The most glaring is, what is the purpose of a public university? In fact, what is the purpose of a university? More to come, as I try to answer these questions, and possibly come up with more questions. It's going take some research. 

Grad School

It has been pointed out to me that I don't write enough, so I've started this Blog. There were several options, but I chose this format, because it is hosted from a neutral location, is open to the public without need for membership or registration, and is easy to use. I have applied to and been accepted to Graduate School at Purdue University Calumet, and will be pursuing a Master of Science Degree in Technology. What follows is the main part of my purpose statement from my application:

In the past twenty years, information technology has moved from the domain of the ultra-specialized to a commonplace feature of daily life. Because of this integration into all aspects of our society, we must be aware, not only of the benefits technology provides, but also the danger it poses. I believe that it is critical to understand not only the technical means by which both state and non-state actors may execute attacks using information technology, but also the social impact these actions may have, in order to appropriately mitigate and respond.

To this end, I would like to continue my study of information technology, focusing on the methods used to assure the security of data. I would also like to examine the social impact of technology on the global society. I believe that this combined approach to my education will allow me to positively contribute to national security initiatives and provides the potential for contributions to the overall body of knowledge in this area. 

So, basically, I've identified two areas, society and information security, and combined them in the context of "cyber-warfare". What I need however, is a question. What is it that I want to prove, or solve? It's not a question that needs to be answered right away, but it is something I need to think about.