Author Archive
I was saddened to hear about the death of Steve Jobs last night. I have been a user of many of the Apple products from day one like many of you are. Steve was one of those rare visionaries who revolutionized the usability of computing devices by anyone. How many iPhone or iPod users ever used a manual to start using the device? I was also one of those folks who were in love with the NeXT operating system and I remember installing it and using it for a long time in the early to mid 90’s. He will be missed very much.
Yesterday, I spoke at the Academic Council regarding the two major projects that we are currently engaged in – Sakai and Google Apps for Education. I showed the current state of affairs, such as how many courses are using Sakai, to what extent and which tools of Sakai are being used the most. It turns out that the resources and forums are the two mostly used with tools such as Assignments and Gradebook usage picking up.
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It is that time of the year – Baseball playoffs, football, short days etc. I was able to squeeze a round of golf a couple of days ago. The desperation showed – we were unwilling to stop though there was not enough light. The Red Sox are still alive but so are the Rays. Hope the Red Sox make it to the playoffs and turn their worst performance in September into a soaring October performance. Things in LTS are moving along well. We will soon be sending the Annual Report for 2010-2011 which will highlight many of our collective accomplishments. We will also be sending a communication today announcing a Google Support hotline, availability of additional Email aliases and a single point of contact for managing major projects for the academic departments.
Yesterday I met with Melissa Trevvett (Executive Director) and Amanda Schmidt (Asst. Director) from the Boston Library Consortium (BLC). We are one of the 17 members of the BLC and enjoy the benefits of the consortium at several levels. Melissa began her role as the Executive Director recently and is visiting the member institutions. During our brief meeting, we touched on the “C” word – “Collaboration” and I told Melissa about my views on Collaboration. It reminds me of the “A” word used by the media and politicians – “American People”. They are words that are used a lot but the answer to “Where is it?” or “Which American People told you this?” will likely to be a useless exercise.
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I can’t believe that it was a year ago that I interviewed for the CIO job at Wellesley. My first interview was on Sep 10 when I met with the search committee in two groups and then the second one was on Sep 17th, which was a day-long visit to the campus with some individual and some group interviews. This was followed by a student from South Africa giving me a tour of the College campus and then dinner with a few members of the search committee. During the interviews I heard about FirstClass a little bit, but the student talked a lot about it. Honestly, I had no clue about it until then. After I accepted the job in early October, FirstClass would occupy a significant portion of my life and it still continues, a year later.
I remember Sept 17th vividly – I was staying in a hotel in Needham and was trying to look up directions to the College and the website was down. I looked in Google Maps and left the hotel. I had totally underestimated the time it would take to get to the College. I parked in the garage and was desperately looking to see how to get to the President’s office for my first interview with President Bottomly and there were no clear signs. I asked a student who pointed me in the direction of Green Hall and I rushed, but no idea which entrance to use. Somehow, I made it with 5 minutes to spare. And praying that I will not get a crisis call from Pace University (where I was working) during the day. And my prayers were answered.
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We were supposed to travel to Charlotte, NC to meet with our dear friends there and spend the July 4th weekend, but on Friday morning I got the call saying that our flight was cancelled. The next flight they can book us was on Saturday, late afternoon. So, I took the option of canceling our plans and receive a refund. Well, the reservation was through Expedia for a United Flight, sort of. It is really a USAir flight. So, USAir person could not give me the refund. She could only add a note. I had to call Expedia. After 1 hour, they validated and agreed that I am eligible for a refund. I hope I will get it. Lesson learned: Whereas Expedia is fantastic in taking your money, they are not so good in giving back money that is legitimately yours. I guess one can change Expedia with any business name and the statement will hold true.
As a result of this cancellation, we had one of the most restful four days. I got an invite to join Google Plus, Google’s FaceBook. It looks and acts like Facebook with some nicer features, but also lacks some of the social networking tool integrations such as those with Twitter and Foursquare and such. They will come in due course. But, the very fact that Facebook was the earliest and that many millions are already familiar with it poses a huge problem for Google Plus or any other FB wannabes.
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I wrote my last post on a day that is special to me and the next one is today which is also a special day for me 🙂
I got back from travel to Turkey and Greece last thursday. My wife had a meeting in Turkey, so we began there and had a wonderful time and then went to Greece, which, while a beautiful country, was not as enjoyable as Turkey for us. I will spare the details. Our Greece opinion was definitely not clouded by a not so happy incidence – my Google Nexus phone was snatched away from my hand while we were just wrapping up our last dinner in Athens before heading back to the States. It was what I would call perfect execution!
I always look to see how the other countries are doing technology as a way to benchmark ours. So, this post is some random thoughts about it. Talking about random, I am not sure how many of you heard the story that the State Department goofing up the “random” selection of applicant to an immigration lottery.
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I was out in Jupiter FL during the Memorial day weekend to attend my wife’s nephew’s high school graduation. For me who has been used to small high school graduations (my children’s graduating classes were 155 and 170 students respectively), this was grand. It was held at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, where a group had to go early to reserve seats, despite being asked not to do it! Some of us joined a little late after a nice nap. As a result of this trip, I missed the commencement, well sort of… I was out that day, so I watched it on my PDA. It was great quality stream. There were 700-1000 views during the 10:30-1:00 PM live cast. We have heard very good feedback, and I am sure several parents and relatives of international students who could not make it here in person, benefited from watching this remotely.
Information overload is everywhere, it is also local. We routinely hear from our users how they did not know about something important that we have communicated to. This will continue to be the case because what is important and relevant is in the eyes of the beholders and depending on how it is conveyed, it may or may not sound important! One of the major problems is the lack of coherence – information is all over the place. This is where, the promised land of enterprise portals comes in.
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It has been a couple of weeks since I wrote a post here. It is certainly not because I have been busier than usual – in fact I forced myself to work from home a couple of days in the past two weeks to get some real work done. Time just flies, especially when there is a lot going on. Yesterday evening we went to hear a South Indian classical music concert by T.M. Krishna at the Stata Center in MIT. It was a fantastic 4 hour concert that once upon a time only those living in Chennai in South India were treated to. This is one of the benefits of living near Boston – we get to hear a lot of quality Indian music. We used to drive two hours from Middletown, CT to come to Boston to hear some of the best artists. Our jealous friends from central CT, who had two hours of driving left while it was a mere 20 minutes for us now, were making a note that how bright it was (at 8 PM) – as if it was going to last till 10 PM!
I got up at my usual time at 5:30 to see the brightness after a whole week of miserable weather. The apocalypse that was promised on 21st of May has come and gone and we all are still here. I remember the days when the academic cycle’s effect on libraries and technologies were far more noticeable than now – especially on technology support. Summer was a time to engage in all sorts of major projects (because it was the “lean time”) to get ready for the Fall. Whereas this continues to be true (you can tell that the summer has begun by looking at all the books that are waiting to be shelved!), it just doesn’t feel the same. It seems that we are engaged in major projects all the time!
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It is that time of the year when semesters wind down and everyone is looking forward to the summer and graduations. I am off to Florida later this month to attend my wife’s nephew’s high school graduation, and of course play some golf. I was talking to a friend from India this past weekend when my wife was at UConn commencement about how different things were back home. We did not have graduation ceremonies for high school or for finishing undergraduate degrees! We all wrote our final exams and the results were published in newspapers (now they are available online). The day after the results, newspapers carried stories about the disappointed souls – some of them way too disappointed because they did not get the highest ranks in their respective schools! I completed my Masters degree in Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where we had a commencement, primarily due to the foreign connections of the IITs. Things are beginning to change there.
For administrative staff in Higher Ed, this is also the time when performance reviews are done and goals are set for the upcoming year. Having worked in Higher Ed for 25 years, I know that these processes have been relatively new. I was a skeptic about this whole thing when we got started, but over the years, I have come to understand the value of the process.
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We had a fabulous parents weekend in Hanover, NH, where we spent time from Friday till Sunday afternoon. Listened to President Jim Yong Kim, a terrific speaker, who described some of the serious issues such as bringing binge drinking and sexual assaults and what the administration is doing to address these. He also discussed the 16 Habits of the Mind and how this will figure in the curriculum planning going forward. We also met with the parents/guardians of our son Varun’s roommates, which is always a lot of fun. One of Varun’s roommate is William Kamkwamba, the kid from Malawi, who built a windmill to power his own home. Tom Rielly, who is a community director at the famous TED conferences, had a part to play in William coming to Dartmouth, so he joined us for dinner one night. We had a fantastic time and talked a lot about emerging technologies and Tom’s views on ubiquitous connectivity.
Tired after long nights on Friday and Saturday, we went to bed a little earlier than normal and were woken up by a phone call from our son Vivek who called us about Osama bin Laden’s death because I did not respond to his chat message. We got up to watch the President speak and see all the celebration on TV. Great news after ten years and amazing how the mission was carried out. I should share with you a tweet from GhostOsama which read “Well this sucks…I accidentally enabled location on my tweets.” On that note about ubiquity of connections…
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Do you know where you have been during the last few days? No worries, especially if you have an iPhone. There seems to be an App for that! I’m sure many of you heard about how iOS 4, the Apple operating system for iPhones and iPads, “secretly” records your location in a file (consolidated.db). If you sync your device to a Mac, you can look at it – here is the recipe. I am safe on my iPad because I don’t have a 3G. On the other hand, I voluntarily let everyone know where I am (using Twitter and Foursquare).
This is indeed big news, but, as Scott McNealy (former CEO of Sun) pointed out “You already have zero privacy, get over it” has unfortunately been true in this well connected world. Your cell phone carriers have had this exact information all along – except, they need a subpoena before they look at it (Hmmm….).
With technologies coming at us such a rapid pace and with companies (OK, not all companies!) paying a lot of attention to friendly user interfaces, technology training is fast becoming a challenge. Take the iPhones and iPads as examples. They are so easy to use that there are no user manuals. Great! Except, many users are not diligent about syncing their devices to a PC or a Mac, until that day arrives when their device dies. Many home users set up wireless and don’t either read or don’t understand the techno mumbo-jumbo that their access point is up for open manipulation by tech savvy neighbors.
Having some basic training would help in these and many other cases. But who has the time and inclination? This is a huge challenge.
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I was saddened to hear about the death of Steve Jobs last night. I have been a user of many of the Apple products from day one like many of you are. Steve was one of those rare visionaries who revolutionized the usability of computing devices by anyone. How many iPhone or iPod users ever used a manual to start using the device? I was also one of those folks who were in love with the NeXT operating system and I remember installing it and using it for a long time in the early to mid 90’s. He will be missed very much.