Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving. We had a great time as always. Whereas for each of us there is a lot to be thankful for on the personal front, there is very little to be happy about in terms of what is happening around us in this country. One of the most disturbing topic (really mild in light of some of the other despicable news) is this administration’s resolve to revoke the net neutrality provisions that were passed in 2015. That in itself was a close call that many don’t seem to remember. I wrote about a court ruling that preceded FCC’s ruling in 2015 here. In short, the Federal Appeals Court’s rulings were based on the way the Internet Service Providers were classified and FCC basically reclassified the ISPs to make sure that the net neutrality can be imposed on them. The new chairman of the FCC wants to reverse them. This administration, whose only coherent message seems to be “reverse everything that the Obama administration did”, claims that deregulation is the key to innovation.
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8,000 plus attendees converged in Philadelphia from Oct 31 till Nov 3rd for the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. The anticipation and expectations were high going into the conference. The agenda was rich and exhaustive (and exhausting too!). Here is my take on the conference.
I know how much time and effort goes into organizing such a huge conference, so I want to thank EDUCAUSE and all the volunteers for their hard work to make this happen. I am going to express the honest way I felt with the hope that some of this will be taken into consideration in the future conferences. I have shared this with others including a board member! You can also see my tweets which can help better understand my points below. I have completely omitted the vendors below because I derive absolutely no value in seeing them at the conference. I totally get it that they sponsor the conference and we need their support, but I also know that there are a lot of other attendees who are interested in visiting and learning from these vendors, including collecting those silly swags. I am not one of them!
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Month of October has been a little crazier than usual. I attended Workday Rising 2017 in Chicago earlier this month, which was a great experience. The conference was huge and I got to meet very interesting group of people. Keynotes were interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary, but some of the sessions were fantastic. All of us who attended learned a lot. Then I organized a NERCOMP Professional Development Opportunity on finding a unified alumnae system on Oct 19th. It was well attended and the attendees benefited from hearing from all of us who are in various stages of finding a solution to this.
I was in Philly for EDUCAUSE from Oct 31 till Nov 2nd and will be leaving for Hong Kong next week. Here is the scoop on Workday…
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It all began a couple of weeks ago. One of our cars, a 2010 Toyota Prius which we bought in 2009 had 182K miles (yup, we drive a LOT) and started flashing some strange lights like “Low Coolant” and “Check Engine” light. To be fair, during the past year, it was making some uncharacteristic noise and flashing check engine light. We took it to the dealer and it was one thing first and then something else and it really wasn’t fully solved, but the light stopped flashing for a while. We burned some good money on this repair.
Multiple lights started flashing during the past two weeks, so you know that there is some serious problems. We immediately took it to the dealer. Their verdict was “The engine needs to be replaced and the approximate cost is about $5K and it is not worth it. This is dangerous to drive”. So, we began the lookout for a new car.
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I was on a flight to Chicago to attend Workday Rising, the annual conference of Workday. Whenever I get on a flight, some of my early travels always run through my mind.
I distinctly remember my very first flight out of Colombo to Trichy in South India. It was in 1972, when I was coming to India for my “higher studies”. It was all so strange and I had no idea what to do and followed whatever the person next to me was doing. They gave a hot towel, which my neighbor didn’t want (clever guy). By the time I figured out what the others were doing, it was no longer hot. I was so nervous that I forgot to look out and enjoy the take off etc., which are typically the thrills of a first flight. Of course, the technology of flights themselves never crossed my mind until later.
The next one was my flight in 1978 to come to the US. Another nervous and anxious flight. I was very depressed to be leaving my family back home. All the outwardly brave statements I made to friends and family about going to the US and not coming back for years turned into an outright scare. I took a Swissair flight because it was the cheapest at that time. Everything smelled strange, including the smoke from cigarettes in such a confined space. (more…)
It must be pretty hard to be a senior executive at Google, Facebook or Twitter. Though their technologies are predominantly used in interesting and positive ways, increasingly they have become the communication platform for terrorists and many other illegal activities. In the rush to claim victory for having millions and millions of users and monetize that for billions and billions of dollars, these companies have put many important matters in the back burner – such as developing strong acceptable use policies, detection and containment of illegal activities.
Many of these issues are hard and cumbersome, but it is not clear whether these companies even feel it is their obligation to worry about them or whether we should even expect them to. The recent revelations that these platforms played an important role in the interference by Russia in the US elections is serious enough to ask hard questions about what are their obligations. They all tout the use of new technologies to improve user experience everyday, while hiding the fact that they are doing it primarily to boost their profits. I understand that they are in the business of making money, but why are they not using these new technologies also to detect and prevent illegal activities?
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As we thought about our organizational goals, one of the things we wanted to emphasize was how, Library and Technology Services should strive to be one of the best learning organizations. Taken from Wikipedia – “a learning organization is a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself” Which organization doesn’t want to do this, right? But, as an organization, are we facilitating the learning process enough? that is the big question. In order for this to be successful, both the leadership and the staff must be committed to it.
I just want to make sure that some of the underlying characteristics described in the Wikipedia article as quoted from The Fifth Discipline written by Peter Senge are not directly applicable to an organization like ours. But true to being a learning organization, we should study them and distill from them what we can take away!
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Today was the first day of classes and Convocation at the College. It was great to see all our students back. I saw a couple of our Helpdesk students working hard to clear the tickets even after we closed! I wanted to write about a few things with no particular connections to each other…
Social Media Problems
A student applied and was admitted to Univ of Rochester. Then, like all teenagers, she wrote about it in Facebook! It turns out that someone from the private high school she attended who saw this information on Facebook found this to be a little disconcerting, because the administrators do not remember the student asking for grades or recommendations be sent to Univ of Rochester. Anyways, upon further investigation, the University Admissions officers revealed that she claimed that she was home schooled and used a transcript service that helps home schooled children to send transcripts and sent in recommendation letters too. Once they found the real scoop, they rescinded her admission!
Along the same lines, in June, Harvard rescinded admissions to 10 students for a “a group exchange of racist and sexually offensive Facebook messages”.
One way to look at it is that Social Media brought out the true colors of people that are otherwise hard to gauge! Tough luck for those students whose admissions were rescinded!
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Specialization is healthcare has gotten to a point where body parts and functions are being sliced and diced into so many different parts and each has a separate specialist. I remember that, a few years ago, I had to be seen by an Electrophysiologist (who focuses on your heart’s timing, or electrical, system and on diagnosing and treating irregular heartbeats or arrhythmias) in the cardiologist’s office (no worries, I am fine!). That was the first time I learned that such a specialist existed.
On the one hand, it is great to see that people devote their entire life to become experts at such a minute level, which hopefully translates to better care. But, you also have a problem that when you become so focussed on one such thing, one wonders whether the specialists understand all the interdependencies with all other things and provide a holistic treatment. One hopes that the glue to all of this is your general practitioner, but that depends!
Software in Higher Ed is fast approaching this model and all the problems associated with the healthcare generally applies here too!
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A “birdie” hole!
I have been enjoying the summer tremendously as you can tell from my tan if you happen to see me (otherwise, believe me!) 🙂 During my week off, I played golf for 6 of the 7 days, mostly with one of my kids. Such an enjoyable experience, especially because we had a couple of excellent rounds. I have also been taking some time to catch up on emerging technologies, especially one that I simply could not get my head around – bitcoin or generally, the idea of blockchains.
Whether it is technologies such as bitcoin or the gene editing story that is in the news recently, once again, the creativity and good intentions that are driving new innovations, are being rushed without proper thinking of their implications. When I was younger I ignored that thinking part and was all excited about the advances and pooh-poohed the need for policies and governance for new and emerging technologies. But as I get older, I am beginning to shift my thinking on this a lot. (more…)
