I had committed to be with my colleagues at the campus center a couple of days ago to welcome the first years’ and their parents. For reasons we don’t need to go into here, it was not on my calendar, so I was able to go there only for a few minutes. The place was buzzing with the usual excitement with the first year students, parents and relatives and it did cross my mind that I probably read some of their applications! Though there was a lot of activity, my colleagues told me that though our “stress phish” was very popular and were gone mostly by the time I arrived, there were not that many questions at our table. Phishing has become such a big problem that we are spending inordinate amount of time resolving them and we are out there to increase the awareness.
How times change! There was a time when questions like “How do I get connected to the network?” brought so many of the students and parents to our desk. But, thanks to the advances in technologies as well as the hard work by our staff of planning ahead and being prepared has made many of these to be non-issues. We vastly simplified the wireless guest access and we saw a significant increase in the number of guest wireless connections and to the best of our knowledge, no one needed help. That’s pretty good!
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I constantly refer to EDUCAUSE in my blog, which is the organization that fosters the professional relationship amongst Higher Ed IT leaders. Prior to EDUCAUSE, there were two organizations, one called EDUCOM and the other called CAUSE. EDUCOM was primarily the gathering place for academic computing and CAUSE was for administrative computing. In 1998, the two merged to form EDUCAUSE. If you look at what is happening at EDUCAUSE conferences lately, they tend to be light on administrative systems because administrative systems professionals gather more at the meetings organized by the major ERP vendors – Ellucian Live, PeopleSoft HEUG and Jenzabar JAM. I was pleasantly surprised to hear about a collaborative effort between EDUCAUSE and NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers) to bring together CIOs and CBOs (Chief Business Officers) of about 150 institutions for an Administrative IT summit in Chicago in June.
A report was produced based on the proceedings in the summit, which I have found to be very informative and easy reading. One of the most important things, while obvious, is not stated often enough, can be found in this report:
“Although administrative IT systems and services are essential to the operations of our institutions, most of them do not significantly differentiate one institution from another. For example, hiring and paying employees, handling procurements, and managing budgets are all important—even mission-critical—functions, but they don’t influence a student’s decision to attend an institution.”
I thought it would be nice to review the recommendations from this report and see how we are doing with respect to these.
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I have been pained to follow some of the worst things that are happening around the world – the conflict in Gaza, Ukraine, Ebola virus and continued issues in Iraq. I have been amazed how information gets passed around instantaneously now. However, this also has the downside that those who report about these events have not had time to fully understand all issues and report objectively. To make things worse, others react to these information instantaneously, without even thinking about it. Some were complaining in social media about why it is a bad idea to bring two american citizens affected by the Ebola Virus, especially Donald Trump!
Information distribution and consumption have always been problematic because of the subjective nature of the very subject. Whereas those who create “information” for the consumption by the others try very hard to be objective and factual, preconceived notions and biases almost always find their ways in. Whether it is news reporters, editors or scholars, this is true though we have had checks and balances in place to reduce the subjectivity and biases. In many cases, personal opinions are clearly identified. However, when an entire news organization has a certain bias right from the top of the organization, as perceived by those who consume the information, regardless of how the information is distributed, the consumers assume a certain bias.
All of these have gotten worse with the advances in technologies. The world wide web and more recently the social media have become an outlet for instantaneous information and this has added tremendous complexities to the information, primarily, trust. Prof Metaxas from the Computer Science department at Wellesley studies the (mis) information propagation in Twitter, which provides an excellent introduction to this topic. (more…)