I just got back from a couple of days in Baton Rouge, LA, attending a meeting regarding Workday Student. I will be honest and say that I did not like the location, the food and the weather (it was rainy and cloudy and in the 50’s)! Since we were constantly reminded of Safe Harbor statements, I would rather not delve into the details of what we saw and heard. But, in general terms, the student module of Workday is shaping up nicely. Some areas of it are really well developed and well thought of, but the others are “in the works”. I was pretty impressed with the progress that has been made, so I am feeling confident that we will have some of the crucial things ready for us when we plan our implementation next Fall.
During these meetings you find out a great deal. I attended a presentation on transfer articulation, close to my heart, because I wrote what we currently use at Wellesley. I feel that our process for granting transfer credits is pretty convoluted and complicated. But, after listening to the complexities of transfer articulation from some of the community colleges and state universities, I was thanking how relatively simple ours is. And even more impressive was that the presenters from Workday understood all of this and have been accommodating their needs. Since it is all configurable, we are covered! I can see how ours can be vastly simplified in Workday. (more…)
I am sure I have written about this before, so forgive me for the repetition. I landed in this country in September 1978 to do my PhD. Unlike others, I knew exactly what I wanted to work on for my thesis, so I wrote to Prof. David Beveridge at Hunter College, CUNY and he enthusiastically accepted me into his group. So, the day I arrived at Hunter, I had a desk in his lab! I was terribly homesick, hated all the smell and the strange food and despite my fellow Indian grad students trying to cheer me up with things like “How many from India get to walk on the streets on NY and look at the beautiful Empire State Building everyday?”, all I wanted to do was to finish my PhD as fast as I could and get back home.
Then, we were invited to join Prof Beveridge and family for Thanksgiving in their home in Westport, CT. I had no clue about what this was for, but the car ride was an interesting one. It was cold and all the food and drinks looked so alien to me that I hardly touched anything. I remember eating an apple and that’s about it. Regardless, I have a lot to thank for. First and foremost, I want to thank Prof Beveridge, whose support and generosity over the years is clearly a major reason for my professional success. (more…)
I, like many around the country, have been in sheer shock and confusion about the results of the election and pretty depressed about the various things happening around the country in its aftermath. It is pretty scary that things can change so drastically, bringing some of the hidden ugliness out of the woodwork just in matter of a few days. But, this is not what I want to write about!
Whenever new technologies come out, no matter how carefully thought out, they have unanticipated and unintended consequences. There is a long list of these. (more…)
Last week I attended the annual conference of EDUCAUSE, the organization of Higher Ed technology organizations. It was attended by some 8000 professionals and vendors. The meeting was held in Anaheim, CA. I am happy to say that I was pleased with the meeting this year. You can see my tweets during the conference here.
I joined a few colleagues for a dinner to celebrate the retirement of a long term CIO from a small liberal arts college. This colleague is a terrific individual and though I have seen him in the liberal arts college gatherings and EDUCAUSE over the years, I have gotten to know him only in the past 6 years or so. He is a true leader who is a champion for collaboration and has taught us many things about how to be successful in collaborations. We will miss him very much. The dinner conversation was terrific and many attendees reminisced about the good old times (as in the ’80s and ’90s). (more…)
It is pretty clear that technology has played an important part in elections in this country, ranging from the first JFK-Nixon debate and how a televised debate led the viewers to a different conclusion than those who listened to it on radio. Dial forward and we all witnessed the power of the social media and data analytics starting from the 2008 election.
In this election technology has been a huge influencer on how things are beginning to unravel. The Trump videos from 2005 (Warning: Graphic Language!) show the dangers of digital media. Once recorded, digital content generally has a long shelf life. Especially if the content is about celebrities or of historic significance etc. Increasingly, thanks to free or cheap storage from cloud service providers such as Google, Microsoft and Dropbox, even we all tend to save everything at our disposal. Many do not understand the long term implication of all of this – their safety, who has access to them, how deleting them in one place doesn’t really delete them everywhere etc.
Then you have WikiLeaks releasing alleged emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well as her speeches to wall street companies. Whereas leaking documents and letters applies equally to paper as it does to born digital content in that someone with access can leak it to other parties easily or they can be both be stolen. However, we can all agree that it is easier to “steal” them in the electronic realm because one doesn’t have to be physically present to commit such an act. (more…)
It is fair to say that very few in Higher Ed have been fortunate to be working in an institution where priority has been given to maintaining the facilities at the level that they should have been. Sightlines, a company that provides guidance to higher ed institutions on facilities management, publishes an annual report titled “State of Facilities in Higher Education”. You can download and read the 2015 report here (note that you have to provide personal information to download and you may be contacted by Sightlines). This report is very detailed and you will notice that many of the institutions have deferred facilities maintenance by underinvesting over a long period. This underinvestment reached a new low as a result of the financial meltdown of 2008 and many haven’t caught up.
Given the scarce financial resources many institutions work with, prioritizing facilities expenditure is hard. In a widely quoted research, it has been shown that it takes roughly $4 for every $1 in deferred maintenance. Basically, postponing maintenance turns out to be far costlier than preventive maintenance, which requires commitment to spend on a regular basis. You can see how continually avoiding preventive maintenance compounds this problem several fold.
I believe that there is a lesson to learn from this when it comes to expenditures in Library and Technology. These are two important areas that connect strongly to the core mission of the higher ed institutions. We can no longer argue that technology is a “nice to have” in that it is here to stay and is integral to teaching, learning and research as well as business operations! How do we prioritize the investments in these areas so that the “deferred maintenance” problem does not catch up with us? It is an extremely difficult question to answer.
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I have been in Chicago for the last three days attending the annual Workday conference, which they call Rising. It was exciting and today I will be flying back and looking forward to another exciting event – the Inauguration of Dr Paula Johnson, the College’s 14th president. Paula has already brought so much energy, optimism and enthusiasm to the College and I am really looking forward to the new beginning.
It has been a while since I have gone to a vendor sponsored conference like the Rising. There were something like 7000 attendees. There was the usual entertainment, receptions, too much food and keynotes. But I attended some really useful presentations that were well done. You can see my tweets here.
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A Disclaimer: Though I would like to think that I came up with these ideas first and I am the only one who came up with these ideas, the reality is that there are many others who would have come up with the same or much better ideas and worse, some of these already exist and I just don’t know about them!
Credit Cards/NFC (Near Field Communication) – Many banks now give you the option to get emails or texts when your credit card charges are over a certain limit. Now that many merchants are accepting payments via NFC through mobile phone, the same applies. Great feature. What I need additionally is the receipts for purchases also be communicated along with it, so I don’t have to print receipts. Similarly, if I want to return something, no need to hunt down the receipt, just use the same credit card/NFC and the merchant can pull up the receipt. I know that some privacy advocates wouldn’t want this, so make it optional.
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As everyone says “I don’t know where the summer went”. Right, it came and went before we knew it. In LTS, as always, summer was very productive. Our staff worked on several exciting projects, notably, a large contingent of both LTS staff and those from Human Resources and Finance were working extremely hard on Workday related activities as well as others working to make sure that the classroom technologies were in good shape for the start of the semester. Based on the feedback we have received so far, classroom problem calls are down to a handful, which is great news.
We also have had a few glitches that we will be attending to aggressively to sort out. Most notably, our course browser and waitlist system were way too slow for a period of time and we have already provisioned additional hardware with more memory and CPUs which hopefully will help address these issues.
We rolled out an initial version of dashboards for alumnae data using Microsoft SQL server, which I think will vastly simplify the way many offices access this data. The modern and easy to use PowerBI interface from Microsoft drives all of this and our technologists have done a terrific job of packaging the data and creating easy to use interfaces to slice and dice the data. (more…)
The map of our drive from Santa Monica Beach to our hotel, in the email receipt.
I did not travel as much during this summer as I normally do. I recently visited Los Angeles for a few days. I vividly remember the time that my wife and I, both graduate students in New York City, drove from NY City to the west coast and back in 1984. Olympics was held in LA and our friends who lived in the area purchased tickets for Indian men’s field hockey match against Australia. India was a field hockey power house early on. Indian men’s team bagged gold for 7 times between 1928 and 1964, bagging a silver in 1960. It has been all sagging since then!
Travel in the 80’s was exciting in its own ways, with limited technologies. We became AAA members just for this, got all the maps and the TripTik travel planners. Soon, our adventurous spirit took over and we bagged the TripTiks and simply wandered to interesting places that we found in the AAA books. No cell phones, no emails, no Google Maps! We were not that adventurous with food, so we took a rice cooker with us and would cover it with a towel to avoid the motel’s fire alarm from going off! Then we had all varieties of south Indian concoctions to mix the rice and eat with. We also stopped at a lot of our friends’ homes for great meals and memories. It was from there we would call our friends back in NY City to update our progress, whether they cared or not. Calling from motels was a costly proposition for graduate students.
India lost the game against Australia. Frankly they played so poorly that we found a husband and wife in the audience to be way more entertaining than the game. Every time India made a mistake, and there were too many of those, the wife would hit the husband as if it was his mistake and would literally cry… We ended up purchasing tickets for track and field from scalpers near the Coliseum and had a lot of fun experiencing the ’84 Olympics.
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