Why is everyone more interested in the answer than the question?

When you have a problem that needs to be solved, you should be more interested in the questions than the answers. Solutions come from good questions, not prepackaged answers. I know you are pressed on every side and feel like you do not have enough time to worry about good questions. But good questions now, will save you exponential time in the future. If you allow many small under-pressure-solutions to stack up, you end up with a building that cannot be repaired, but can only be torn down and rebuilt.

There is a tendency in my field to provide a set number of answers, rather than taking time to consider the questions with people. I look forward to the day when we feel like we have time to ask the best questions and consider the best answers.

We’re working on developing a community site to better connect with prospective and accepted students. Many students are use to interacting with social networking sites, and college applications are well suited for a layout similar to profile creation. So we’re combining the best of both worlds to create a space where students can apply, get to know other students, and have all their questions answered. After a bit of searching, we landed on elgg, an opensource project which has a strong level of adoption in HighEd.

The install process was not too difficult, though I had to take two passes at it. I believe my issue was one of permissions or file ownership–something along those lines. The whole site was installed and ready to go, but the only thing that would load was a completely blank page with out any errors. So, I wiped the directory, walked through the steps again, and everything loaded.

The I.T. & Marketing crews are testing it out right now. On our side of campus, there weren’t any major errors, just a number of instructions and vocabulary hat need to be tweaked to reduce confusion. We will need to work out a few processes to bend elgg for our purposes, but it really is a solid platform with plenty of room to customize. I can’t wait to get in there and start hacking things up.

I just finished setting up all the regular backups for our LAMP server. We’re not going to wait until it’s too late to start backing up.

I just setup a daily cron job to mysqldump and zip each database, and tgz each web directory. Once our new server comes in, those files will be rsync’d to another server.