On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 11:35 AM, Jen Stokes - jstokes
<jstokes(a)clarkson.edu> wrote:
> I would hesitate to send a draft form out campus wide for review and criticism as I fear it would take several years to agree upon a final draft!
Well, that IS the problem with involving more people in a design. The
creator needs to decide whether local expertise could help by
improving decisions or hinder by adding to the decision load. For
example, I think that the physical plant folks should be consulted
whenever any sidewalk is laid out -- because they're going to have to
keep them safely clear of snow in the winter. I'm looking at the walks
currently being laid around Old Main and I would venture to guess that
nobody was asked "Are there any changes we would make the physical
plant's job of plowing them easier?" That's my concern -- that we're
all on the same team and we should seek ways to work with each other.
In my opinion, there's at least a trillion dollars sitting on the
table for anybody who could help institutions like ours cooperate
internally more effectively.
We recently received an announcement about a new cross registration
policy. Couple of complaints about it, both of them trivial but
hopefully larger than that.
As a computer scientist, we have learned that people read the
beginnings and endings (mostly beginnings), so we have learned not to
use names with opposite meanings that begin with the same few letters.
So naming them "home" and "host" when the words have opposite meanings
is not optimal. How could this have been avoided? By asking "Who at
Clarkson could help improve this document?" before publishing it.
Probably wouldn't be obvious to ask the computer science folks, but
the technical writing might have known.
And as a Clarkson graduate with an advanced degree who wrote a thesis,
Dave Bray beat it into me (thank you, Dave) to define my terms (which
this document did), but then to use them in the document as defined,
which this document didn't do, putting "host" and "home" into quotes.
It's a nit, BUT it's another sign that Clarkson doesn't eat its own
dog food. We have excellent teachers -- why don't we ask them for
help? Don't we trust ourselves? Don't we believe in ourselves?
See why I think these are more than just nits and worthy of discussion?
