Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
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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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 🙂 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 🙂
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, 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 College’s 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 began the long awaited Spring symposium “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age” yesterday. Mala Radhakrishnan (Chemistry), Orit Shaer (Computer Science), Brian Tjaden (Computer Science), and Michelle Ferreirae ’13 talked about Interdisciplinary Science to a packed crowd in the Science Center 278 y’day evening. We had another 40 who viewed the webcast. The recorded version of the presentation will be made available on Wellesley’s YouTube later today. It was yet another display of the high quality teaching, learning and research taking place at the College. The presentations clearly demonstrated how the most interesting scientific research today requires knowledge that extends far beyond just the core subject. It was clear that the computational science is a core competency that would be required of all researchers and quite obviously, this is one of the areas of relevance to LTS as we move forward – how do we collaborate and engage with the faculty and students in helping with this competency.
The presenters talked about genomic data analysis , computational chemistry of protein-protein interactions and drug development and human computer interaction. In the first case, Brian, a CS faculty, is carrying out research that requires a deeper understanding of biology, biochemistry and chemistry amongst a few other disciplines. Similarly, in the second case, Mala needed to learn cell biology, physics, and applied math. BTW, she is also a poet who has written poems about atoms and molecules. Both Orit and Michelle shared their work in developing intuitive, gesture based software frameworks that helps biologists in their collaborative lab work. In each case, the presenter highlighted the importance of the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of their work and how the liberal arts education paradigm fits nicely with this model.
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I am very happy that the digitization of Browning Love letters has received all the attention that it deserves. Perfect timing and excellent collaboration with Baylor University is making it possible for a large audience to get access to the letters that otherwise required the scholars to visit our Special Collections. I am also thrilled that we have been able to finalize the schedule for the “Liberal Arts Learning in the Digital Age”. I strongly encourage everyone on campus to participate. After all, we are discussing the future of the Library and Technology on campus and we want the community input on these matters.
The “flattened world” resulting from the internet and the web has clear advantages, but has also brought with it the ability to expose the weaknesses in software technologies. The reason is that the advances in the technologies driving the internet are moving at a pace much faster than software development tools. And it is extremely hard to keep up with. In other words, software developers develop expertise by spending a lot of time learning the tools of the trade in a select few “systems” – be it programming languages, or development platforms. The agility required to move from one to the next in a few months or years is a daunting task. And every time you do it, you are basically starting over. When you start over, you are likely to make mistakes – or introduce “bugs”.
The term “bug” is traced back to a failure of an early computing machine called Mark II (in 1947) due to a bug that got trapped in an electronic relay. This was carefully saved in a logbook. The image on the left is from Wikimedia Commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:H96566k.jpg) and the actual logbook is preserved in the National Museum of American History. The term “debugging” therefore refers to the act of locating and removing such bugs. However, like everything else in life, the attribution of the term debugging to the story about the bug remains unresolved – apparently it was used by aeronautical engineers in 1945.
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The most hyped event of the year is over and the result was disappointing for the Patriots fans. However, it was a good game with a couple of unfortunate calls by the referee and a lot of dropped passes. Well, we had a great time at our home watching the game with a lot of friends. I just realized that I have not written for a couple of weeks because I have been extremely busy with a few software projects that I am working on. I am on Acela express right now, heading to NY City to participate in a Google Apps user group meeting at Google NY. Hope to not run into the ticker tape parade for the Giants and get delayed going to the meeting.
We have been marching along in terms of software development with a slight twist – web applications for the portal which rely on authoritative data stored in Banner and other systems (such as 25Live) that look and act with a level of consistency that the users expect in software. As I have written many times over, I favor this approach to “Let us wait for Banner to deliver these services” because we will be waiting for a loooong time! Also, because this framework is under our control, the interface can be manipulated in ways that are otherwise not possible. Also, if the users are happy with the navigational approach and display of data we provide, we can leave that alone for however long the users desire. This is obviously not the case with software vendors. They seem to know what is good for us when! We all know that they rarely do a good job and choose the most inopportune moments to make changes.
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