Educause, 2nd full day - Dry Boulder, CO

First things first, in maintaining a good, strong seminar you need to keep your seminees fed. And every morning we get a nice breakfast to be consumed in the half-hour before we begin. Fruit, breads, juice, coffe, and an egg dish have been available both mornings so far, and it's quite good. Just enough to enable us to have a energy crash before the first session is done.

Well, in theory at least.

Our first activity today was a session on 'Emotional Intelligence', basically how you read and understand the emotional state of both yourself and others. There are plenty of managers who can't do this, but still the material was ill prepared. The handout in folder didn't gel with what was being discussed, we finished way to early so we just filled time, and we got way off topic. So this was more than a bit of a wash.

After this we broke then went into our individual units. First up was a session on 'Project Managing', and this one was extremely informative. There was a lot of material I hadn't thought of before or even been aware enough to think of. My redoing consultant training will be much more interesting when I apply some of these things. And, for that matter, my projects outside of work will benefit immensely too, once I get the hang of this.

I also learned of Project Management Professional certification, "pimp" as it was dubbed. It's offered by the Project Management Institute and is rapidly becoming a standard in education, more so than even a PhD. Only caveat, you need a minimum of 4500 hours of project management before you can enroll to take the test. No, 4500 is not a typo.

Anyways, we broke for lunch as usual and were joined by the Educause President. I didn't get a chance to talk with him as he was at another table, but I sat with the Project Management people and soaked up more information on projects. UCSB seems quite behind on a number of fields, this one included.

But I'm finding out we're way ahead on things like net security. I also picked up a couple of nifty software packages I'll have to mention to Steve, he might find them useful.

After lunch we went through a session on hiring, training, motivating, and retaining staff. As I have such high through-put on staff most of it was old hat, but I helped a few new managers with tips on interviews and rewards. I've learned that managing student staff is vastly easier and more rewarding than career staff.

Yes, I don't have as much 'respect' or 'cache', but I have less stress and more flexibility.
We took the class photo at 3 then broke for the day. I went back to walking about Boulder, and have been most places within about half-a-mile of the hotel. The city's gorgeous from a scenery perspective, but has some seedier parts. The biggest turn off is how overrun the town plaza is with drifters and panhandlers. It's a lot like SB and might just be a symptom of rich, vacation-destination towns. Probably a symptom of the political leanings of the town, as this place is very similar to SB politically.

Here's a picture of the Boulderado taken from a bit north on 13th street. It's a really pretty building, one that I'm quite familiar with now. Should I come back to Boulder, I will stay here again. I recommend it highly.

It lacks a pool though...I could really use a pool. (Or the one here is just well hidden...I'll ask later).

Next update tomorrow, which is our busiest day. Then a short day on Thursday and I fly home on Friday.

Let me know if you have any requests on things to photograph or do while here, I'll try to work them in.