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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 đ
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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Summer is going along great but it is passing us by way too fast, or so it seems. As I wrote earlier, we traveled a fair amount in June and attended a couple of weddings. In one of the weddings, there were events for 4 days which was exciting, but we were tired. I have a lot of golfing to catch up on. I have been helping out with a couple of software projects as well as co-write a report on the symposium we held in the Spring – “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age”. And then, wanted to get a good handle on how well we did in the past year financially. By our count, we did great. However, the system of record – Banner, says otherwise. That provided some summer drama for a few hours/days until we sorted them all out and all is well.
I also spent considerable amount of time calling AT&T trying to get credit ($60) for mistakes that they made in my bill. This happens every time we go on an international trip. In reality, you should be able to manage all of this on the web, but you can’t. You can certainly do all activities on the web that brings in money for the companies. But you cannot do anything like requesting credit online with proper explanation, that their agents can then either approve or reject based on its merit. You have to call! And you have to remember some 4 digit code, which I don’t because I rarely make calls. They then send it through text that you have to punch in and then change. You punch in your phone number, zip code and last four digits of your social security number only to be told that for security reasons I need to recite the whole thing again to the agent. Then rewind and state the problem all over. I did this six times. One good soul REALLY understood the issue and then I lost the connection (which I honestly believe AT&T arranges) just when I thought I was getting through. Thankfully, he called back and assured me that he will issue the credit in 48 hours. I thanked him profusely and waited for 96 hours, because I know that the companies don’t like to part with money. But I found no credit. Last thursday, while stuck in traffic due to heavy rains, all determined to sort this out, I made the call and told the woman at the other end my frustration and asked for a supervisor. She told me that she will be happy to pass it on if she cannot solve the problem. All it took was 5 minutes. She understood, issued the credit, and sent a confirmation email. I am happy to report that the credit came through.
Whether it is the year end reconciliation issues in Banner or the AT&T inefficiencies, I blame the software “systems” that are simply broken!
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The rain seems to be constant these days and from what I gather, we are going to see more rain for the rest of the week. I cancelled a golf outing yesterday evening with friends so I could watch the Memorial tournament played in Ohio last week. Something told me that we are in for an exciting finish with Tiger going for his 73rd win to tie Jack Nicklaus for the second place in all time PGA wins. And it was exciting indeed. Tiger’s enormously risky shot on the 16th set the stage for the rest of the tournament and a great finish.
I spent a couple of days last week in beautiful Middlebury, VT, attending a gathering of Oberlin 17, the Northeast schools who belong to the Oberlin group. Â The very first exercise was a chance to talk about what we have done in the past year, what questions we have for the others and what are the opportunities for collaboration. There were considerable overlap in that most of us are doing very similar things, have questions regarding very similar issues and would like to talk about collaborations in areas of considerable interest to many. Except, when we sat down to talk about the specifics of collaboration, I didn’t get the feeling that we are going to see much in the way of progress. Call me a skeptic! The reason is, as one of the participants pointed out, some of the calls for collaborations are weakened by the “these problems are local” issue. For eg. a call for shared instructional technology resources is a great concept on which we should be able to collaborate. But, the faculty who are used to a support model and service expectations from our own staff are anxious about this model where the support person is elsewhere. There are also a lot other logistical constraints such as who is managing this person, how are we dividing up the time that this person is expected to allocate to each campus, so on and so forth.
There was a question about digital storage management for which I answered based on what we are doing, but then I was reminded that the issue of digital preservation is a much bigger one. And it is indeed a huge issue!
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Weather has been beautiful and I finally got out and played golf at the Nehoiden Golf Course a couple of times this week. Next week is an exciting week. One of our son is graduating after MBA and the commencement is on thursday, 24th May. Wellesley’s commencement is on Friday, May 25th. I have now been at Wellesley long enough that I know at least five of the graduating seniors. And I “know” a sixth one through twitter who thanked me for helping move forward the “lifetime” Wellesley email for the senior class. We had an exciting Drupal upgrade on thursday where our staff demonstrated how such a complex upgrade can be done without the site really going down. And then, we encountered some issues and going back to the previous version was also done very elegantly and quickly. Go team! Absolutely no comparison to the situation before!
It is also that time of the year when we all have to write performance reviews and attend to compensation recommendations. This is not an easy task for many!
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During the first week of May, I attended a couple of presentations by students. One was Digital Stories by students in an Education class taught by Soo Hong on topics ranging from bullying in schools to multicultural requirements. The reason why some of us from LTS were invited was because we assisted in providing technology support for the production of these stories and also the class used a software called Mediathread from Columbia University. We also attended a presentation by students from CS 349A taught by Eni Mustafaraj who demonstrated a course recommendation system which uses a cosine similarity function to compare past history of classes taken by students to suggest courses of interest to other students. Both were very impressive and as I mentioned to some of my colleagues, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the students collaborated to produce the course recommendation system so quickly.
I am sure that all of us have heard about edXÂ by now, a joint venture by MIT and Harvard to offer online courses for enhancing teaching and learning all around the world. In addition, earlier, we all heard about Stanford’s online courses and to a lesser extent, Yale’s Open Yale Courses. In a recent article in the Chronicle highlighting the company 2tor is also relevant to this discussion in that they are looking to extend their offerings and are talking to a lot of institutions. So, I thought, it is probably a good time for me to express my views on this subject.
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Last week was a fantastic week weather-wise, not so fantastic a week for the Red Sox (who are doing well in Minnesota so far), but then we are back to “seasonal weather” again. Today is a big day at Wellesley where there are over 150 presentations by students in the Ruhlman Conference. I am very happy to say that we designed the application that the students and their advisors used during the submission and approval process – one of our PHP app connected via the My Wellesley portal. In the true spirit of collaboration, we shared the collected information with the CS department, who have developed an excellent online tool called RAPP, by which you can browse the program and create your own schedule. I plan to attend a few talks in the afternoon. I would love to attend a few in the morning on protein modeling to relive my years as a researcher in molecular modeling, but I have other commitments in the morning đ
The annual performance cycle is upon us and this provides us a great opportunity for reflections on how much we accomplished during the past year. It is a LOT and LTS staff should be proud of all of our collective accomplishments. It is also a time that we plan ahead for the upcoming year. As I have mentioned in the past, I was a skeptic of this whole process for a while mainly because we were all beginning to do this for the first time and didn’t do it right. I now am a believer because we have tools and mechanisms to help us manage these tasks better. Most criticisms come from the fact that goals go by the wayside because unexpected things happen during the year that takes away time from us to be able to achieve the goals. Whereas there is some truth to this, I believe this can be handled through constant communication, setting achievable and realistic goals (taking into consideration the time it takes to put out fires) and time management. If you are still a skeptic, talk to me!
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It was a very busy weekend for us that started last Friday (04/13) evening. That was Tamil New Year . Since we follow a lunar calendar, the exact dates when this happens fluctuates. We have actually stopped celebrating many of these holidays that were the source of real excitement when we were growing up. This time around, an association we belong to in CT had arranged for an evening of celebration. We attended the function and had a great time. We watched a “drama” by a famous group from India. A silly comedy that required a lot of local knowledge about Tamil Nadu where we all belong to. Thanks to the Web and internet, we keep up enough to be able to relate to all the jokes. Saturday was a beautiful day and I golfed with friends from Wesleyan and Sunday we drove all the way to Hanover, NH to visit our son, have a meal, catch up and return!
In between all of this, I was following the happenings on in the world and most notably, a piece in NY Times titled “Where your Money Goes?” where Jane Wellman, who was part of the Delta Project concerned with the cost of Higher Education, was discussing ways to curb the cost of Higher Ed. I was also following the tweets from many that I follow who were at the NITLE Summit. Particularly interesting were the tweets regarding the Digital Humanities. In my humble opinion, in both of these cases, the topic is of utmost importance, but key players are missing. We can have a lot of brainstorming and generate creative solutions and ideas whether it is about reducing the cost of higher education through the use of technologies or Digital Humanities projects, but without the faculty and students participating in these discussions, these are unlikely to go too far. This is why the discussions on Digital Media and Quantitative Analysis Initiative that were part of the Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age Symposium were great – participants were faculty and in one case a student. (more…)
Our Drupal installation went live on March 29. Drupal is replacing a web content management system called Bluenog. I made a determination when I began at Wellesley that this is yet another technology where we had to make a decision on what is best for us. The choice was either to stick with Bluenog and adapt ourselves and our needs to what the product demands or find a solution that better matches our needs. No single technology ever matches ALL of our needs, so the criteria was to choose something that covers MOST of our needs. We took a look at whether the current CMS is satisfying the needs of the College and it became apparent that in many areas, which I won’t go into detail here, we were struggling.
I had gone through the same exercise at Wesleyan and Pace in the recent past. At Wesleyan, we were very close to going with Drupal, except, it was not as mature four years ago as it is now. To the disappointment of a few open source fans, we chose a product called Cascade, which is still in use there. At Pace, the product in use was Hot Banana (I have no idea how they pick these names) which everyone was struggling with. Once, the product failed and the site was down. We called support in Canada and we were told that we will receive help for the next 10 minutes and if problem cannot be solved by then, we have to wait for the next morning! And at exactly 5 PM their time, the person said bye and hung up the phone! There was no Hot Banana “community” to seek help from. Thankfully, the company announced that they are stopping further development on Hot Banana (it generally means – “it is being put on life support and is being prepared for a slow death”). We looked at Drupal, WordPress and Joomla and after a careful evaluation, chose Drupal.
I used that evaluation as the basis for recommending that we move to Drupal for Wellesley. I should say that we received support from almost all quarters fairly quickly. We then began an implementation plan.
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I attended yet another excellent NERCOMP annual conference from March 12-14. I am not saying this simply because Wellesley was very well represented and all of our presentations were VERY well received đ It is a small enough conference where you can establish long lasting partnerships and catch up with others on what is going on. We all wore color coded T-shirts with QR code strategically placed on the back and because the theme was Mardi Gras, wore some beads! “Gold color” represented power – I am a Board member đ
I was part of a leadership forum on Monday where we discussed a paper by Clayton Christensen called “Disrupting College“. It is a long 70 page position paper where, Christensen argues that disruptive technologies, especially online learning, Â should be adopted by the academia soon as a way to reduce the cost of postsecondary education while not compromising on the quality. It is a very interesting read. He also agrees that what he proposes may not be directly applicable to many of the elite institutions, however, not keeping on top of it and developing strategies is highly recommended.
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On March 6, 2012, LTS held the second conversation in the “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age” Symposium where Angel David Nieves gave an excellent talk on “Hamilton Collegeâs Digital Humanities Initiative: A Liberal Arts Model for Future Scholarship, Research and Teaching”. It was a very interesting and thought provoking presentation and the discussion that followed was very interesting as well. We had good attendance including several who watched the presentation remotely. Angel kindly agreed for us to post his presentation on YouTube, which you will see below.
So, what exactly is “Digital Humanities?” If anyone (including me) expected to get a clearer definition of this during this presentation that what we may already know, I don’t think that question was answered. Taken from the Digital Humanities Initiative website: “digital parlance for a research and teaching collaboration – where new media and computing technologies are used to promote humanities-based teaching, research, and scholarship across the liberal arts.” Obviously, if you replaced humanities with any other discipline, the same exact description would work too, so there is nothing particularly unique about such a broad definition. I think what Angel tried to convey was that the way in which scholarly works in Humanities are being produced in this new digital world is radically different from the way it has been done so far – mostly, the scholars working alone, using the institution’s resources, primarily libraries and librarians. By using the digital media and through collaborations extending worldwide, the work that is getting produced is very different and highly collaborative.
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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 đ
