Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
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 🙂
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, we are being called on for advice. 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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I was interviewed by a reporter from Bloomberg regarding Apple’s decision to withdraw from EPEAT ratings and what Wellesley is planning to do about it. Since I don’t control how my responses are going to be used in the story, I felt that it is important to state what I said 🙂
EPEAT ratings provide guidance on how environment friendly the computer systems are. It has been widely known that Apple hardware are not rated very high in EPEAT, whereas some of the PC manufacturers have gotten them pretty high. We purchase PC hardware that are rated gold. In terms of Apple hardware, we do not have the same options that one has with PC hardware.
We make purchasing decisions based on many factors, environmental concerns as well as use cases. In certain academic disciplines they use software to teach that runs only on certain computer platforms. If it is essential to have a Mac based on this reason, the fact that it does not have the stellar environmental rating is less important, because one has no other choice. So, we provide some best practice guidelines on energy conservation and expect the users to follow them.
One of the questions that I was asked was, is Wellesley going to decide to stop purchasing Macs because of this. This was based on the decision by the City of San Francisco to stop purchasing Apple hardware based on this story. My answer was that we will watch how this develops very carefully and decide on further actions such as joining any collective initiative to let Apple know the need to be environmentally conscious in producing their hardware. Apple claims that their hardware is energy efficient, of course.
I also mentioned that I usually watch the discussion on EDUCAUSE CIO Listserve to see how this develops further. It is also the case that we do not have a laptop program and therefore we do not determine what computers the students purchase. We do provide recommended configurations.
So, this is in essence what I conveyed, but who knows how the story will come out!!!
I was at the beautiful state of Vermont twice in a span of a couple of weeks between late May and early June. I wrote already about my trip to Middlebury, VT in my last post. I had to go to Stowe, VT to the Trapp Family Lodge for a NERCOMP Board retreat. It is a sheer coincidence that last year, the NERCOMP retreat preceded the Wellesley senior staff retreat was in Ogunquit in Maine, actually in the same place! The NERCOMP retreat was fun and very productive this year where we engaged in “World Cafe” type of conversations. I feel that this whole idea could have been condensed in the book to 25 pages with the rest of the “stories” made optional. The idea is great and something we are trying to follow at LTS already – have conversations that go beyond the managerial hierarchy so that everyone has a chance to speak up and provide ideas for the organization to grow. The specifics outlined in the book – small round tables covered by white paper and crayons for participants to write on, a flower vase in the center etc. – seem a little silly, but can be important. I encourage you all to watch this seven principles of world cafe. It is a condensed version that captures the essentials.
My wife and I left on our “vacation” to Singapore and Thailand in early June for a couple of weeks. I was really excited about the trip because we have heard a lot about both of these countries and have never been there. So, what exactly is a vacation? (more…)
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. 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 edX 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 🙁
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…)
I went to yet another SunGard (the software vendor for Banner) Executive Summit in Las Vegas from the 24-26th March (yes, a weekend included!) and yes, predictably, I was very disappointed. If you remember, I wrote about my last year experience at this event (again, very disappointed) in a blog post. So, you might ask why did I choose to go there this time around. It all had to do with the fact that we recently renewed our license for Banner and recently SunGard and another competitor Datatel merged. I wanted to find out what exactly this means to us. I am very familiar with Datatel, what its strengths & weaknesses are, so I was genuinely interested in knowing if the new entity’s plans are to pick the strengths of each product to produce a new one.
We did not hear much of anything on the merger nor did we hear much in the way of current product timelines. It was not just me! Some other CIOs, especially from small liberal arts colleges, who generally don’t come to the Summit came along for the same reasons I did and many expressed the same frustrations. Because no agenda is published ahead of time when you need to register, it is very hard to know what is going to happen in this gathering. I registered simply based on hope! I left early on Monday morning before the big announcement – that the combined entity will be called Ellucian. I talked to a few others who went to the Summit from Wellesley to see if they gained any new insight about the merger and product direction and the answer was No.
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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 🙂