I teach Mathematics & Statistics at Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, Queensland in Australia.

The students that I interact with, the subjects that I teach, and my immediate colleagues in my department engage me. Those are the things that allow me to enjoy going to work every day and doing my job. I love my job.

The administrative processes that are put in place around my job and administrative staff that derive these processes without knowing or consulting the academic process are what disengage me from my work.

For example, we are required to write the end of term exam by the end of the second week of the term and submit it to the admin staff for formatting and approval. Sometimes they change what the exam looks like. Sometimes they even try to edit and change the wording of the questions. Sometimes these changes make the question entirely different which does not test the concept intended and changes the anticipated answer. This infuriates me. What right do they have to change the content of my exam ! There are 12 weeks in the term. They say it takes them 8 weeks to finalise the exams. What the heck do they do ? How can we write a meaningful and thoughtful exam in two weeks ? It takes time to write good examination questions. I don’t get it. They don’t listen to us when we tell them it doesn’t work for us. They just say, too bad, get it done.

Our new Vice Chancellor and President of the University has put forward a goal to become the most engaged university in Australia. More engaged with the students ? Easy. More engaged as university staff ? Not likely. He’s gunna have to fire and get fresh new people in the top executives if he wants that. We’ll see.

I’m one of the service people. I love my job. I have grown to really not like the University that I work for.

,` )

I love Skitch as well… I’d forgotten about that one!

Also, I absolutely love Skitch – makes is *so* easy to send screenshots, and make little tutorial images for my co-bloggers, etc.

We’re a small team working on GradShare, so things don’t always get done as quickly as I’d like, but we saw that there was no cross-university peer mentoring site and we decided to get the base of the community up and running for others to use. I figure, the best way to see what’s useful for the community is to put it out there and see what people use (or don’t use) and what they like (or don’t like). We have a lot of plans for GradShare, so I think you’ll see significant changes coming up, and you can always make suggestions on our feedback forum (http://gradshare.uservoice.com/). You can vote on suggestions that you like and we keep you updated on which suggestions we’re working on.

You certainly have a point about the PR materials on our site. More help is going up soon. We’re also planning more integration with other social networks, but that’s going to take us a little bit of time to do it right.

In the end, GradShare is about giving grads a place to share their unique experiences and to reach out to the boarder community for help. I think we have that, but there’s a lot more that we plan to do. If you stay a member you’ll get weekly email about the questions that have been asked in your subject area and it’s pretty easy to answer them. The best way for us to build up the tools on the site is to see how people are interacting with it and which direction the community wants us to grow. I hope you’ll check us out again and let us know what we can do to make GradShare the place for exploring and learning about the rigors of grad school.

I’m one of the founders of Mendeley, and I’m very sorry to hear that Mendeley hasn’t managed to live up to your expectations yet. Please accept my sincere apologies for causing you so much frustration.

As you pointed out, Mendeley is still in beta – while we’ve resolved most synchronization issues of the earlier versions, some obviously still remain. One of our problems is that we’re still a pretty small team taking care of all three platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), and as you said yourself, it’s quite hard to get it to run perfectly for everyone.

I also followed the tickets you filed (thanks for all your feedback!), and I’m sorry you didn’t get the answers you were expecting. Our goal in setting up UserVoice instead of a forum was to see how our users would vote for new features. However, as the userbase is growing, we’re starting to notice the deficits of UserVoice for discussions. One of the upcoming features in Mendeley Web will be groups and discussion forums, and then we’ll set up a Mendeley discussion forum as well.

Again, I can understand your frustration. For now, I can’t do anything else but apologize and promise that we are continuously pushing Mendeley to make it more stable, less buggy, and include more features to get it out of beta soon and realize the idea you and we all like so much.

If you have any further comments or questions, feel free to send me an e-mail

Jan
(jan.reichelt@mendeley.com)