First, what are some problems facing students, teachers, and administrators could be solved through technology?

1. Students need help in document management and collaborative editing. Where’s the latest copy? What are the new changes? How do I combine everyone’s changes?
2. Faculty and administrators need to be able to change course schedules, syllabi, and assignments and be confident that students will see and understand those changes.
3. The career services office needs to inform students of new opportunities and upcoming  deadlines
4. Everyone needs to be able to hold conference calls and group chats.
5. No one wants to have to worry about the technology: “Do we all have the same IM client? Was that sent by email or posted on the bulletin board?”
6. Professors might want to have their lectures recorded, but limit viewing to students enrolled in the class, or to students with a documented disability or need.

Second, what sorts of functionality might be needed to solve those problems?

1. Asynchronous information distribution
• Text, like in a blog
• Audio or video of lectures, like with a podcast
2. Calendar information and schedule distribution
• Office hours for professors
• Campus and club events
• Job and internship application deadlines
• Free/busy information for rooms and resources
• Free/busy information for people
3. Document distribution and versioning
• Lecture notes and syllabi–how do you know if you have the latest version?
4. Address book and directory services
• Contact information: phone, email, postal, IM, websites, etc.
5. Real time communication
• Instant messaging and text messaging
• Voice chat
• Video chat
• Whiteboarding
• Document distribution
• Both one-on-one and group versions
• Transcripts and recordings available
6. Non-real time communication
• Emails
• Bulletin boards
• Voice mail
• Comments
7. Group editing
• Real time document editing
• Collecting and merging document changes
• Whiteboarding
• Wikis
8. Testing
9. Drop box for handing in assignments
10. Surveys, polling, and voting
11. Data analysis
• Summary statistics
• Pivot tables
• Data collection

Third, what are the restrictions and limitations placed on a technology solution:

1. Can a solution be branded or the appearance changed to match the institutions standards?
2. Will a solution be accessible?
3. Will users always know where to go for information or for a tool?
4. Will users be able to choose their client? Will Outlook be required? A specific browser? Some third-party tool?
5. Doe user access and role information need to be maintained?
6. What security needs exist?
7. How hard will end users need to work? How much education will they require to get started? How many steps or clicks will be needed to use the tools?
8. Where does the server need to be located?
9. Do the tools need to be accessible to people outside the domain or outside the firewall?

Finally, the development and deployment approach needs to be considered:

1. A monolithic or waterfall approach, where projects are properly scoped, spec’d, implemented, and tested before deployment
2. An iterative or agile approach where incomplete or inadequate tools are deployed to users as quickly as possible, and the users participate in frequent revisions and refinements.

While there are many reasons for the traditional waterfall approach, schools struggle because of their very high turnover (students change classes every semester and graduate after a few years). Furthermore, as schools can be extremely bureaucratic, an iterative approach also allows end users to feel more ownership over the product and might increase adoption.

So, what software? I’ve already begun a page on some free tools. But perhaps the best tools to use are the ones that you already own. Most people do not know how to use the collaborative editing features in MS Word: send for review and merge revisions. And most people don’t know how to use group calendars in Outlook.

In terms of easy ways to get your feet wet, it’s worth trying a blog system as a means of distributing information. Better than a news page, most blog software allows makes it easy to create items, to categorize items, and to have viewers subscribe. Not only is software like WordPress free, but there’s even software to easily manage multiple blogs. If you’re hosting the blog yourself, it should be no problem to include documents and multimedia files as enclosures, or you could use one of the many hosting services–some of which let you keep files private, are free, and have no size or bandwidth limits.

And there are lots more geeky tools. Google Calendar allows you to subscribe to calendars (such as class calendars, or club calendars) so there must be some way to do the same thing in Outlook. Developers have many options in version control software: there must be something that allows students to check in and check out documents and compare versions.

FolderShare, now owned by Microsoft, provides a P2P tool that shares and synchronizes files across multiple computers. For example, I have set up a set of “Babson” folders on my laptop and desktop and, after installing the free FolderShare software on each machine have nearly instantaneous replication and synchronization of the files and folder structure. Furthermore, folders can be shared with other registered FolderShare users. The rights of these users can be controlled: read only, read and update, add documents, add and delete documents, and manage user rights are all options. I’m working on a project with a friend, and rather than email files back and forth, we’ve used FolderShare to mirror the documents. FolderShare has a number of advantages over online file sharing tools: you don’t need to be online to access files, local files are fast and responsive, all Windows Explorer and OS/X Finder (yeah, there’s a Mac version of the client) functionality is maintained, and post-installation everything works quickly and automatically. There are, however, some disadvantages: FolderShare doesn’t handle collisions (copies are created with new names) or versioning, and deletions are more or less propagated to all machines. Therefore, it might be worthwhile to use FolderShare in conjunction with some backup or archiving software (we’re using CVS for that).

37Signals has a great product called Campfire. It’s a web-based chat application, allowing groups of users to easily talk and share files. Apparently, it’s fantastic. Unfortunately, it’s not free. I wanted to allow my entire section (all 65 or so of us) to potentially talk at the same time. Roomsays.com provides all that functionality, for free. Right now we’re using it to prep for a test tomorrow. People can ask and answer questions without sending out a group email, and we can post our cheat sheets in there, too. A few minor quibbles with the software: even if you’re already logged in to the site, you still need to reenter your password if you join a room as a registered user. Also, when you enter a room, you don’t see any of the earlier messages. But, honestly, how can you argue with free?

It’s not really software, but sometimes you need to be able to talk, not just IM. My groups have tried Skype, but having a real number to dial is sometimes easier. There are a number of similar services, but LifeOffice’s free teleconferencing worked well, didn’t require any personal information or credit card, and the sound quality is great. Combining conferencing with group text chat should work pretty well.

If you’re using Microsoft Word, the 2002 (XP) and later versions allow you send a document for review by email, and automatically merge the changes back in once you’ve received the updates. If you’re tired of trying to figure out who has the latest copy, it’s worth trying this tool.

Finally, for straight up general communication and document sharing there’s the myriad of blog tools. My wife has set up a private group blog for her PhD classmates on WordPress.com. Since they only meet once a week it’s been a great bonding tool and a handy way to share information.

You’ll note there are no Wikis and none of the purpose-built student applications. To be honest, they’re too geeky and too complicated. I have been using a combination of ScheduleWorld and the Funambol Outlook SyncML client to synchronize my Outlook/Exchange and Google calendars. Here’s where I learned to make it work. Totally geeky, but the upshot is you can all look here and see how busy I am.

If all you need is letter-sized note paper, PDF Pad has you covered with graph paper, note paper, musical staffs, and more. There’s also lifehack.org’s version, and Simson Garfinkel has one as well (if needed, rename index.cgi to something with the PDF extension). Finally, for goofy or unusual templates, check out the graphc organizers section on the Houghton-Mifflin Education Place site.

In sixteen hours we leave for two weeks in Israel and Italy – a last hurrah before an MBA and a PhD in Social Work. While we’re both getting an extremely generous amount of assistance, money will be tight over the text few years and I’ve been wondering what tools the Internet provides for keeping track of our cash.

A while back, Lifehacker asked about good tools for budgeting. Perhaps not surprisingly, most users suggested Excel or other spreadsheet tools. Spreadsheets have the advantages of flexibility and ad hoc reuse. With the advent of Google Spreadsheets, Zoho Sheet, and other similar online tools the primary disadvantage–locking the user to a single computer–has been obviated.

Other commenters suggested Mvelopes, a full featured cash and financial management application, and Snowmint Budget, a desktop budgeting application. These both are based on the envelope budgeting methodology–fine if that’s what you want to follow but not so flexible for the rest of us.

PearBudget is a neat tool built in Excel that combines budget setting with budget tracking, but requires you to save and transcribe receipts. It looks like they’re working on a web version.

The downsides of these web and computer tools–that you need to be at a computer to use them–may be addressed by Filo, a printable expense register. Perhaps this (or any other paper-based expense tracker) could be combined with Pearbudget to avoid having to carry around receipts.

Some tools aren’t designed to help you track your spending. Instead, they motivate you to save. The Lunch Savings Calculator is one example: by being a cheap bastard with my PB&J I can save over $1000 a year!

If your problem is paying bills on time, perhaps reminder services like billQ would, erm, fit the bill.

The problem with most of these solutions are that they don’t provide the full solution set (building a budget, tracking expenses, and measuring performance), lock you in to a proprietary platform, and require that you physically be at a computer. My requirements would be:

• Ability to set budget categories, amounts, and time frames arbitrarily
• Ability to record expenses as they happen with little or no data reentry
• Ability to generate reports showing actuals vs. budgeted, where the money’s going, etc.
• Live access to budgeting an expense data in a structured format like XML for analysis wherever and however I like

Unfortunately, I have yet to find what I want. Lifehacker has a clever trick that accomplishes some of what I want–they hack up some Perl scripts to interface with AIM to allow users to instant message or SMS their expenses. Ubiquity is provided, and the data is accessible as a local text file, but it’s hardly convenient for the non-techies among us.

Finally, we must not be the only ones stressing about money. Also via Lifehacker is Oprah’s Debt Diet.

The best book I’ve read about managing money is the Five Rituals of Wealth. It teaches that wealth comes from the discipline to know where your money is spent.