Yesterday, Orientation ’12 began and the class of 2016 and their proud parents could be seen all around campus. I made a brief visit to the “Welcome Wagon”. LTS staff were busy helping the students by excluding their PDAs from Cisco NAC. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of these devices that I saw. I also saw one student proudly declaring that she took care of the exclusion “first thing”. It would be interesting to study how the student behavior during the start of their College years translate to their ongoing academic work 🙂 Are those who filled out the checklist first, chose the Writing courses and first year seminars early the ones that are also submitting their assignments early? OK, just kidding and be assured that we are not tracking such data. I have two data points (our two boys) and I can tell you that there was absolutely no correlation between the initial enthusiasm and afterwards.
Olympics is over and the presidential elections are in full swing. As always, there are way too many things on the web to follow. I have restricted mine to a select few. I have many who I follow on twitter whose posts provide me a great list of filtered information. I have added Google Politics & Elections to one of my  Circles in Google Plus. I also follow Real Clear Politics and Five Thirty Eight by Nate Silver. I should say that Five Thirty Eight has become a bit more guarded and less exciting after it moved to NY Times. In 2008 it was a bit more exciting. Actually, in 2008, everything was exciting, especially around this time. Our older son decided to work for the Obama campaign and started in late August.
I am sure that last Friday’s verdict in favor of Apple and against Samsung would have been far more in the front pages, if it is not for the Republican National Convention and Hurricane Isaac. Frankly I was very surprised by the verdict on many counts. As has been discussed numerous times, many experts blame the patent law for this mess. For eg. Apple having a patent on rectangular phone is beyond ridicule. Would you buy a phone that is not rectangular? Does this mean that only Apple can make mobile phones or as a monopoly on rectangular phones, Apple can dictate what the license fee that the other manufacturers have to pay to Apple (and therefore pass it on to us the customers)? This article provides a balanced view of the possible long term outcomes. Intellectual property & patents is a hot topic beyond this and the confusing laws in the US and lack of international standards makes it extremely hard to operate.
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The summer is winding down and we are all getting ready for the start of yet another academic year. As always, there are noticeable changes that will affect our faculty and students when they get back. Some will see them as welcome changes whereas others will see them as annoyances. In a few cases, the changes we have to make are out of our control, but the users don’t necessarily care. We are getting ready to communicate these changes.
I attended a day long meeting last Monday in Northampton organized by NERCOMP. The program committee which plans the annual conference met in the morning and I was assigned to one of the most boring tracks – Policy, Regulations and Security. We were a fun group so it was OK. One of our tasks was also to come up with the theme and suggestions for keynote speakers for the upcoming conference. Because of the topics I suggested, I may have earned a nickname “The Disruptive Technologist”. No, I was not disrupting the proceedings, but earned the title based on the topics I was suggesting.
During the subsequent discussions, I heard more than once, “Working in Higher Ed is not what it used to be”. I have a feeling that some of what I was proposing prompted the others to mention this to me. I was stressing on the urgency for us to realize that we cannot get too comfortable with what we do, instead, we need to be extremely agile and develop constantly in new areas. I totally agree with this statement. In fact, who wouldn’t? More importantly, isn’t this true everywhere we look? Isn’t it also true that it has always been this way, it is just that it has been accelerating more recently?
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We just came back after spending a week in Research Triangle Park (RTP) area in North Carolina where my wife had a workshop. From there we drove to Hampton, VA to attend a friend’s daughter’s wedding reception. On the way, we stopped at the Dismal Swamp State Park. It was pretty hot there, but the RTP area is fabulous and provides a lot of opportunities to walk around. I also played a lot of golf, once paired with a grandfather and his 14-yr old grandson. The kid played awesome and was one under for the course – Raleigh Golf Association. If he goes on to become a pro, I can claim that I gave him some tips 🙂
I was thinking about where we were a year ago – right in the middle of Google transition while beginning our work on Drupal. I am very happy to see how through the excellent work that the LTS staff have put into these projects, we have achieved so much in such a short time. And, now, Â we are being called on for advice. Â At a Drupal gathering a couple of weeks back in Waltham, there were several interested parties who wanted to know about our Drupal implementation. They were collectively impressed by the speed at which we moved as well as the process we have established and the technological innovations we have brought to the table. I have fielded calls from at least six other institutions about our Google implementation, especially our LMS built on Google and LTS staff did a show and tell recently to a couple of other institutions. This is great progress.
Though I use my Droid phone for accessing the internet a lot, I have also seen a huge shift recently to Mobile friendly apps. Pretty much everything that I need to do such as banking, bill payment, editing google docs, can all be done relatively easily on the mobile device. We are increasingly hearing the term “Responsive Design“, which basically refers to a site that responds with the content in a way that it renders well in the device that is requesting content. This is also tied to the “Mobile First” strategy in that increasingly, the users are doing business from their Mobile devices and recognizing that and serving content that way is critical for future success. It is high time that our strategy includes this.
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Yesterday, Orientation ’12 began and the class of 2016 and their proud parents could be seen all around campus. I made a brief visit to the “Welcome Wagon”. LTS staff were busy helping the students by excluding their PDAs from Cisco NAC. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of these devices that I saw. I also saw one student proudly declaring that she took care of the exclusion “first thing”. It would be interesting to study how the student behavior during the start of their College years translate to their ongoing academic work 🙂 Are those who filled out the checklist first, chose the Writing courses and first year seminars early the ones that are also submitting their assignments early? OK, just kidding and be assured that we are not tracking such data. I have two data points (our two boys) and I can tell you that there was absolutely no correlation between the initial enthusiasm and afterwards.