I came back from a fabulous gathering of colleagues from Colgate, Davidson, Hamilton, as well as from Wellesley to discuss some of the next steps in blended learning/MOOC collaboration. What brought us together are two similar Mellon planning grants to see how we can collaborate on this subject. Another glue that binds us is that we are all offering or will soon be offering MOOCs through edX. We came up with specific action items and I will write about that later.

Today, at 2 PM, there is a twitter based discussion being organized by SearchCIO.com on the topic “Is the CIO still relevant?”.  An intro to this is available here. And it begins by saying “The traditional CIO is dead. Emerging from the ashes is a new breed of many-sided digital frontiersmen trying to find their place in an evolving enterprise.”. You get the picture.

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It is snowing heavily and snow everywhere you turn!

While I was at a retreat last week, one of the faculty members was explaining to a trustee how easy it was for her to install and use apps like Uber and Lyft, she has a lot of trouble with software that the College asks her to use, such as Banner and Sakai. I wrote about a similar app that I used in India called Ola cabs. I agreed and gave her some reasons why.

One of the major reasons is that many of the software we use were originally developed very early on and due to a variety of factors, the software companies are simply building on top of older software. The newer “apps” are built using very efficient and modern programming paradigms and have a huge advantage as a result. In other words, if one were to design a brand new learning management system from scratch today, it is likely to be far more in line with the available technologies of today and will look and function very differently. Workday is one such example of an administrative system. It looks very polished, functions very efficiently using technologies such as virtualization in a seamless fashion whereas comparable software like Banner or Peoplesoft have the old look and feel and are monsters in terms of resource requirements. They do use virtualization, but nowhere near to its fullest extent.

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