Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
After a brief visit to Scripps College , I headed to Orlando to attend the EDUCAUSE annual conference. It was well attended as evidenced by long lines during lunch times. I have never seen such lines before. If you are interested in my tweets during the conference, you can check them out here. If you want to see all tweets with the hashtag #edu14, click here. Though the latter one is long, it is worth reading through some of them or by further filtering based on your interest. I was too tired to tweet after a while because the sessions I went to did not have much for me to tweet and the others were doing a better job.
I always look forward to general sessions at EDUCAUSE. This year the first one was by Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation. The entire talk will be available to the public in 90 days here, unless you have a valid EDUCAUSE account, in which case you should be able to listen now. Since I have heard Christensen a few times before, there was not much here for me. Also, he has had recent health issues, and it showed. He himself mentioned his recent stroke, when he was unable to recall a word during the talk. He mentioned how Higher Ed is in a crisis and unless it is disrupted in some serious fashion, the consequences can be dire. Obviously, recent technologies have already disrupted Higher Ed, but the basic methods of teaching, learning and research have not changed and the indirect message that everyone heard is that we, as technologists, can make a difference here. Perhaps! Also, I was not fond of some of the analogies he presented because they may work for corporate America, but not necessarily in Higher Ed. On the other hand, may be that is the disruption that he was referring to.
Chsitensen was also arguing for more open, modular and interoperable “things” in general. We all, especially me, support this wholeheartedly. However, there was a problem. The slide where this appeared, was copyrighted by him!
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“Big data” is a relative term in that at least for the past 25-30 years, with the advances in digital technologies, the collected data would look “big” relative to say, a year ago. However, we are currently at a point where the rate of growth looks far more than ever before. According to Wikipedia “Big data is an all-encompassing term for any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using traditional data processing applications.” I believe that all along, we have been keen to collect as much of the data as possible and worry about processing and analysing them later. The act of collecting data has gotten so easy these days that no one wants to get rid of any of these data with the hope that the data will be useful in some fashion, some day!
On the one hand, the availability of such vast quantities of data is very exciting for researchers. On the other there are many issues about analyzing and processing them that need to be sorted out. And then, we need to worry about a whole slew of associated secondary issues such as the misuse of data, long term storage of the data and the impact on the society because of misinterpretation of the data.
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We had a few things that contributed to difficulties during the first week of classes. Our last minute communication to the faculty regarding a welcome change in the time time it took them to login to a Mac in the classroom got us in trouble with some faculty. They felt that such last minute emails create a lot of confusion and concern. I agree that we could have worded it differently by starting the communication with something like “This is about an improvement to the login procedure in classrooms. However, the method you have always used will continue to work. If you are not interested in learning about the new method, you don’t have to read further.” Then a network outage on Friday afternoon disrupted activities on campus and access to the campus resources. Though we have a second connectivity through a different provider, as luck would have it, one of their equipment failed too!
After they came back up, we started seeing weird behaviors – on campus users not being able to get to media heavy resources such as Kaltura or YouTube, and Comcast customers from Massachusetts and New Hampshire were unable to get to the campus resources. Long story short, there were lot of fingerpointing between the ISPs on the actual cause of this and finally, we restored service on Saturday afternoon by clearing routing tables that were found to be corrupt, presumably from all these things going down and passing confusing information back to us.
Now that we are back on line, I thought I would write a bit about the technology “Hype Cycle“, a term coined by Gartner, a well-regarded technology research firm. As you see in the Wikipedia article, the Hype Cycle consists of five phases.
| No. |
Phase |
Description |
| 1 |
Technology Trigger |
A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven. |
| 2 |
Peak of Inflated Expectations |
Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not. |
| 3 |
Trough of Disillusionment |
Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters. |
| 4 |
Slope of Enlightenment |
More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious. |
| 5 |
Plateau of Productivity |
Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off. |
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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…)
We spent five days in Cancun, Mexico and just got back. It was a lot of fun and relaxation. The beaches were fantastic! During the travels this summer I used a lot of technologies myself and noticed the use of various technologies around me. The first and foremost thing I notice is that no matter where one is, most people are carrying a mobile device. Whether it is the trains in Malaysia or relaxing on the beaches in Cancun, many have a cell phone they are checking or talking on or are looking at things on their tablets. Of course, it goes without saying that it included me and it made me not feel guilty 🙂
Secondly, wireless was everywhere. However, depending on where you are, the access can be an issue. In Kuala Lumpur, I was able to get WiFi access perfectly in the hotel, guest WiFi at University of Malaya was a bit of an issue, wireless at Starbucks was perfect. In Cancun, one of the hotels we stayed in had no WiFi in the room (we vacated the place the next day and moved to another hotel!), but the other was perfect and the WiFi was available even in the beaches adjoining the hotel (several feet away). However, Starbucks required you to purchase something and you had to use the password printed on the receipt (waste of paper) and you had only 15 minutes of access.
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Pygmy Elephants in the banks of Kinabatangan River in Sabah, Malaysia
As many of you know, my wife and I spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia. One of the things I knew going in was that we were going to spend a week in Malaysian Borneo and that the internet connection would be essentially non-existent. I was very concerned about my own well being under those conditions.
I am happy to tell you that we survived being unplugged. The reason was that the unplugging was only for the first three days and even during that time, I could go to a cafe in the rainforest and after many retries, at least get to read my email.
I know that many of you feel I am crazy to be checking email on my vacation. Guess what, we are absolutely fine with it and we still enjoy our vacations tremendously. The added advantage is that I don’t have a mound of email to deal with when I get back. Anyways, these are personal preferences that we don’t have to go into.
Our first stop in Borneo was Gunung Mulu national park. It is a rainforest with some of the most impressive and massive caves. We spent three days there. We walked a lot in humid and hot conditions, took a night walk and saw some insects. However, our imagination of what a rainforest would be turned out to be very different from what it really is. For one, there was no rain for three days and though you could hear a lot of bird sounds, we did not see many of them. The canopy walk was interesting and a very early morning walk up a watch tower with a newly bought pair of binoculars yielded pretty much nothing. Nope, you can’t blame it on my inexperience with the binoculars. A gentleman from Holland who accompanied us has a lot of experience and he reminded us that these are not “sure shots”.
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I am sitting here in Istanbul airport, waiting to board a flight. Thankfully the internet is working great and because of the long layover we got lot accomplished sitting in a Starbucks.
I wanted to write about my printing experience during last week. Those who know me also know that I am paperless and hardly print. I had to print the salary letters so I could write a note to the LTS staff in their letters. It needed to be printed in color because of a signature in color. I was told that the best place to print is the Community printer in Clapp Library.
First step, I had to install Papercut. I was very happy to see the documentation here. It is detailed and well done! One of our staff at the reference desk helped me through it. I was racing against time, so I was a bit impatient with the install, which required several steps, but I attributed that more to me than poor software design such as “Do you really want to install this?” (Why ask such a question?, puhleese)
Then started the problems. The staff member inserted the letterhead in a tray from which it was supposed to be picked up, which didn’t work. However, I needed to give a username and password on my Mac everytime I printed (which I went ahead and saved for the long haul). But to release it every time, I needed to provide my username and password (about 15 characters long) in the printer. It was annoying, but I understand why. (more…)
These past several weeks have been very busy and exciting. One of our sons got married and the other graduated. Everything went off well and we are extremely proud of our children and their accomplishments.
I am planning to keep the next few posts short 🙂
I was talking to a few of my colleagues about why is it that some of the projects take so long. I care a lot about efficiencies. Unfortunately efficiency works against culture, and it is extremely important to find the right balance between the two. Obviously, finding such a balance is non-trivial and takes a lot of practice and time. However, if we don’t keep reminding ourselves of this, more often than not, we will sacrifice efficiencies for the sake of cultural reasons. Which way to tilt the balance depends entirely on what we are trying to do.
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