Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
After several days of coordination and preparation, we successfully announced the first four Wellesley courses to be offered in WellesleyX, our grand MOOC experiment. They are:
- Introduction to Human Evolution, taught by Adam Van Arsdale, Fall 2013
- Was Alexander Great? The Life, Leadership, and Legacies of History’s Greatest Warrior, taught by Guy Rogers, Spring 2014
- Introduction to Global Sociology, taught by Smitha Radhakrishnan, Fall 2014
- Shakespeare: On the Page and in Performance, taught by Yu Jin Ko, with Diego Arciniegas as a partner teacher, Fall 2014
After our announcement in Dec 2012, the Provost created an ad hoc WellesleyX committee and invited proposals from the faculty. When the process closed on March 1, we had several excellent proposals that the committee reviewed and presented their feedback based on which these four were selected as the first four courses. As you can see from the description of these courses, they are excellent choices with a diverse set of topics. These faculty are excited to be experimenting with this new medium and have great ideas for the students. We are excited to offer support and also learn through this process.
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I have been attending the NERCOMP Board retreat at Water’s Edge in Westbrook, CT. Since it is close to home, I have chosen to come home and attend all the meetings and hanging outs. The weather was not that great early on, but has been gorgeous since thursday afternoon. One of the major themes at the retreat is, yes, you guessed it right – how to improve communications. This is exactly what we have been talking about at Wellesley. In fact, we are going to discuss this amongst ourselves in LTS and chart a plan for the upcoming year. Though we have done an excellent job by centralizing all communications, bringing a simple and common vocabulary, there are many in the community who complain that they don’t hear about many of the things we communicate.
To me, this is a major unsolved problem. Whereas many unsolved problems in the sciences have been documented, such as the famous protein folding or “Do any odd weird numbers exist?” (hmmm.. i thought all weird numbers are kind of odd), communications is not listed as an unsolved problem. In my mind, it is a huge unsolved problem. There are plenty of free advice on fixing communication problems involving relationships. And this interesting advice from the office of HR in University of Minnesota on “Communicating to Solve Problems“. Obviously these are generalizations and don’t necessarily work across the board. What I am interested in the narrow slice – how do effective organizations communicate with their audience. In other words, what should we do to communicate effectively with our faculty, staff, students and alumnae. Or, what should NERCOMP do about effective communications with its members?
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Another academic year is coming to an end and these are mostly happy times. Our commencement is still a few days away, but, when I noticed that a friend was off to his son’s graduation at Penn State last weekend, it dawned on me that we are in that season already! I am sure that all those first years who made their college choices are the happiest bunch, dreaming about the college while preparing for high school graduation. I remember those days vividly though it has been a while with our two boys. It is pretty hard for me to believe that this is the third summer for me at Wellesley. Sometimes I feel like I am still settling in – people still have to explain to me certain terms and traditions 🙂
I was invited to go to a gathering of Higher Ed CIOs organized by a company called Consero. I was pretty skeptical about the whole thing. In the end, it was fun and useful. We met for a couple of days in San Diego to discuss various topics that the Higher Ed CIOs are interested in. In many cases, this turned out to be what many Higher Ed CIOs are worried about. Of course there are some who worry more than the others and the worry spectrum is highly influenced by local issues and the type of person the CIO is.
Frankly, though there are some common thread to discussions, the term “Higher Ed” is increasingly appearing to be as challenging as the term “American People”. Private College issues are different from public, large universities are different from small ones, liberal arts colleges seem to worry about completely different things than the rest, so on and so forth. In fact, someone even began making a distinction amongst the liberal arts colleges based on the endowment! The challenge therefore is to pick and choose ways in which you can benefit from these discussions as well as contribute to them in ways that they don’t appear to come from the CIO from a “wealthy”, highly selective, women’s liberal arts college from the state of Massachusetts (and therefore not applicable to the others). Despite all these challenges, we all had one thing in common – we had a lot of fun!
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Many of us are saddened by the Boston Marathon bombings and are relieved that the ordeal has come to an end. Or, has it? I think each of us will take our own time to reflect on the events, digest both the reliable as well as the mis-information that is being directed us from all directions, and derive our own conclusions. As I wrote in my last post, various technologies played important roles in identifying the suspects and eventually capturing one of them. They brought to light several important things – explosion of technologies, how the law enforcement relied on distributed technologies (video tapings from sources other than Law enforcement), social media and crowd-searching (crowd sourced searching), and thermal imaging.
Frankly what got lost in all of these discussions is how every one of these items is far more complicated than the positive aspects which helped us in the end. And most importantly, what led to the surviving suspect was an actual curious human being and not the technology. Quite obviously, every step of the way, there were pitfalls – privacy, security, misuse of captured information, dangers of subjectivity arising from crowdsourcing the search whi has a high probability of the wrong people being implicated etc. etc. And the massive data that was helpful in cases like this and others is the “Big Data“.
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Events like the bombings in Boston affect you in ways that is very hard to predict or even understand. It is so close to where we live and work. Even people like me who visit that part of Boston infrequently know the area well enough. So, it is understandable that these tend to leave lasting impressions on us. As we get to hear more information about the three who died and over 170 or so who were injured, we feel shaken.
During tragedies like these, the recent advances in technologies have played tremendous roles – both positive and negative. As reported in Huffington Post and Chicago Tribune, apparently the circuit board used to trigger the bomb has been located. Of course, as we all know, during these times, it pays to be skeptical about such news until official word comes out, but if past knowledge about such bombings elsewhere is the world are any indication, there are electronic circuits involved and possibly a triggering device such as a cell phone. This is obviously how devious minds use technology to cause destruction.
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The admissions cycle is over here at Wellesley and everywhere. I always felt that releasing admissions results on April 1 was a cruel joke. Of course, Wellesley does it a bit earlier. This year we partnered with Admissions to implement a paperless admissions process and I, as a member of the Board of Admissions, read applications. This gave me a much better understanding of the process. Admissions staff were terrific partners, willing to work with us to tweak the systems as needed, and most importantly, they are believers and the best advocates one could have hoped for. We have one of the most impressive and more diverse group of students who have been admitted. Congratulations to our colleagues in Admissions.
When we began discussions about paperless admissions approximately a year ago, we faced the same exact questions all CIOs face. Should we build something or buy something, like Slate? Of course, there is no clear answer this loaded question and it depends on so many factors. I would say I am clearly an outlier in the way I think about the answer to these questions.
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Jelly Bean
Looks like we are in for more snow today and possibly a messy ride back home in the evening. NCAA basketball was keeping me busy last few days, though my favorite UConn Huskies are not playing this year. So, my engagement with the games are not as intense as it has been in the past. My bracket does not look that great, but Ohio State game was a scare because I have them winning it all… (Not that I am an expert in this stuff) Then, of course, Monday rolls along and I feel like I wasted a lot of time doing nothing. In fact, I completed a homework assignment for the MOOC I am enrolled in, did a fair amount of errands and installed a motion detector LCD light outside the garage door without being electrocuted! And spent most of Saturday driving to Hanover, NH and back. It was not all that bad. However, now I am having second thoughts about it. It actually moves based on the object’s position and is based on heat sensitivity. There are some complaints about it being insensitive during hotter months. On the other hand, I may not have to turn it on during the hotter months…
In talking to a colleague last week, I was reminded of the good old days (like a year and a half ago) when I used to have a Google Nexus phone until it was stolen from my lap in a roadside cafe in Athens. This was very disturbing to me on a lot of fronts. Being robbed (even if it is a phone – it was a nice parting gift from friends at Pace) is not a pleasant experience, but then, the threat of data loss is even more scary. Anyways, the colleague was telling me the virtues of having a Nexus, which I knew from my earlier experiences. Basically, you get all the most recent versions of the Droid operating system first released on Nexus. He was showing off Google Now and I asked how I get it. Based on his suggestion, I tried the Play Store, but it was not to be found. He asked me what version of OS I had and I was positive I had the most up to date. It turns out I had the most up to date as decided by AT&T, which is not by any stretch the most recent one. He was polite, but I can see him laughing. I had Gingerbread and he had the Jelly Bean. I felt old and terrible. I wanted the Jelly Bean at all cost! (more…)
It is snowing again, so what’s new? I was at a conference organized by MIT and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” last weekend. I was able to go only for part of it. On Sunday evening I attended a dinner & listened to Drew Faust, president of Harvard, Rafael Reif, president of MIT and Gene Sperling, Director, National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy talk about the broader issues surrounding the online education as a disruption. I was actually going to blog about that, but I found that Tom Friedman, who attended the conference did a great job in this piece yesterday in NY Times, so I won’t repeat it.
I was sitting next to Daphne Koller from Stanford, and the co-founder of Coursera. We had very interesting conversation. I also thanked Eric Grimson for his wonderful Introduction to Computer Science & Programming class in edX. The place was packed with many of the well known names from MIT & Harvard and over 60 other institutions. I had a chance to connect with some of the liberal arts college folks that were there and with a friend who works at MIT after a long time. He and I overlapped in College in India, and connected back in the mid-80’s here. He is such a busy guy, it is so hard to find a time to meet with him. So it was good to catch up.
I also visited Bates on Monday to participate in a panel where I was asked to talk about WellesleyX. It was a beautiful drive, but I wonder whether all of the drive was worth it. I could have done the same job remotely. Oh well, we can’t turn the clock back. Wait… May be. I am waiting for that discussion in my Quantum Mechanics class – Tunneling and time reversal and all that jazz.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk to Wellesley faculty and staff on “Milking Google for What it is Worth” which was well attended and I received several emails from the attendees about how they discovered so many capabilities of Google Docs that they were not aware of. I just wanted to recount some of what I talked at that meeting here.
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Looks like another mini-blizzard is on its way this weekend. At least in CT it may be more rain than snow. In the edX course Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computing, we are entering the second week and we are learning about “entanglement“. I am really fascinated by this stuff. The first assignment that was due last Monday required some inner product calculations for projecting vectors. And I had to resort to pen and paper! My wife could not believe what I was doing and wanted to take a picture of me! I am really enjoying this class. It is pretty hard math and but I am going to stick with it to the end. We shall see.
Talking about entanglement, one of the books that I read a while ago is one of my favorites – The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn by Louisa Gilder. It is so well written, with just enough scientific concepts, but more of a story about the debate about quantum mechanics and gives you a glimpse into the lives of some of the great scientists. I read it a second time recently.
When we announced extended hours for the library, there were several concerned community members who wrote to us to ask what we are doing about the safety of our Library Collections. It was really heartening to hear from so many people with genuine concerns. We have thought about this a lot and have tried to convey many of the measures we have taken, but I thought it is worth discussing some of them here. I want to caution that LTS staff are preparing a detailed plan and will communicate a response to these questions in short order. These are simply my ramblings on the subject.
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I had a very interesting couple of weeks. On Friday, Feb 1, I had to present to the Board of Trustees a brief outline of the technology planning. The hard part of this is that you have a short time to communicate effectively what you are planning to do. With help from a few colleagues who helped massage my presentation, I got that done. Then I gave a talk on “Milking Google for All it is Worth” to faculty and staff on the following Monday. It was well attended and I will write about it in my next blog post. The most satisfying thing about the talk was a couple of followup emails from the attendees on how they already applied some of what they learned. This was followed by Academic Council on Wed. where I had to answer a question regarding what we are doing about the Library Collections Safety (which I will write about also), but the council voted to support the Open Access Legislation – a HUGE step for us as a College.
Then of course, the Blizzard struck. It was not bad at all because we did not lose power. Then, who cares? Really… We have a person who promptly clears our driveway and our roads were cleaned reasonably well. I watched a total of 5 Tamil movies while it was snowing. Life was good.
I heard a speaker during my recent visit to Google mention the Procrustes bed (which I explain below) and I thought “This is perfect for what I have been talking about” – how the technologists always produce technologies that they want us to fit in!
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