Every single time I have conversations with my colleagues from other institutions, it is so apparent that we all operate so differently, sometime unnecessarily. Carnegie Classifications is a commonly used classification which groups institutions in a broad sense. However, deep down, every single institution is different in significant ways that it would be impossible to find two institutions that are similar. So, I find the term “Higher Ed” to be emphasizing similarities way more than highlighting the differences. So in reality, we are the Higher Eds.
I want to clarify that having such differences amongst the institutions is healthy and I would say that the students and parents like it that way generally (not exclusively) for the differences in academic offerings. Of course there are other factors such as alumnae network, residential experience and athletics that are significant differentiators.
But, how many students and parents choose a College because it has the best learning management system or ERP, or the best helpdesk ticketing system or even the best wireless coverage? Or even other campus services (I won’t name them!!)? Why is it that we are reluctant to work together to find a common ground and collaborate on these non-differentiators? It is not as if we don’t collaborate. In fact we are excellent at sharing information and best practices in so many areas. It is just that we are reluctant to take that last step of shared services across institutions.
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I was at the NERCOMP Annual Conference last week. There were some really interesting presentations that I attended, but I should say that the first keynote by Gerard Senehi was less than optimal for a conference to open. Danah Boyd, on the other hand, was fantastic, talking about how even the younger members of our society care about privacy, contrary to the myth that they don’t.
One particular talk that I liked and want to follow up has to do with open educational resources. The powerpoint presentation is available along with the abstract, so please review it. Though some of the panelists are from institutions that are very different from us, we feel that there is something here for us to learn from and educate our community.
Artificial Intelligence has been in the news recently and frankly, trying to define it in clear terms is something I am not capable of. It has morphed over the years thanks to advances in computing. Is it possible for machines to emulate humans in the way we think? This is a loaded question as you can imagine.
Theoretically speaking, an artificial intelligence system must pass the Turing test. This test involves a party game where a man and a woman play with a third person who is trying to guess the genders accurately. The man provides all answers to convince the third person that he is a man while the woman provides tricky answers to convince the third person that she is the man. Turing proposed that if you switched one of them with a machine then the person needs to guess who is a human and who is a machine. If the person failed to guess correctly more than half the time, then the machine will be declared having passed the test (that it has enough intelligence on its own to fool the third person).
There are a lot more underlying details to this of course, because of the availability of massive amounts of data and the computing power, even the “brute force” computing can be confused with intelligence.
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As we are beginning our transition to Workday, yet again, the issues surrounding data integrity, definitions etc. which I am fond of writing about, are surfacing. Despite the fact that Chaos theory in itself is a huge field and I don’t necessarily understand all aspects of it, its vastly simplified definition struck a chord with me.
“Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior and condition of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. […] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[3] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.”
and
a quote from Edward Lorenz “Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
The take home lesson (a stretch, I understand!) from this is “We are beginning a major administrative systems project and we are essentially dealing with a lot of (deterministic) dynamic data and we have a golden opportunity to get our initial conditions right so that at least for a long time to come we can avoid divergence and chaos”. (more…)
Apparently, in the 1990’s a student from UC Berkeley by name Bernstein developed an encryption software that he wanted to publish and government tried to stop him. He successfully argued that software is a form of speech and therefore is protected by the first amendment. I came to know about this when I read the details about the current controversy involving unlocking of an iPhone by Apple.
As you know, the FBI is asking Apple to unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooters and Apple is supposedly invoking this first amendment argument to refuse to oblige. In the new iPhones, the content is encrypted and when a lock is set, you have a maximum of 10 tries to get it right. After 10 failures, the phone self destructs the content. Obviously if you don’t know the password, you can’t keep trying. FBI is asking Apple to modify and install a new version of iOS on the phone that bypasses this 10 try limit. One always wonders why not ask Apple to get the password from the phone? Because, the password is always encrypted and Apple doesn’t know it!
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Last week we heard about Apple vs FBI in the fight over a locked iPhone containing presumably valuable data regarding the San Bernardino attackers who killed 14 innocent people. Last night we heard about a gunman who randomly shot people in Kalamazoo, MI who happens to be a driver for Uber. There is no direct connection between the topic of this blog and these two incidences though some indirect link exists and I will leave it to your imagination.
Regardless of our individual positions on Apple’s stand, I would be curious to know what they find in the iPhone that they cannot find elsewhere. In this so well connected and cloud driven world where every vendor seem to want you to sync all of your information with their cloud services, you must be pretty deliberate and careful about not syncing your data with other cloud based systems. A bigger question I have is, with such vast amounts of available data and sophisticated analysis tools, what prevented law enforcement from picking up something like this? Impure data? Inconclusive evidence?
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I am so excited that Dr Paula Johnson has been named the 14th president of Wellesley College. I was unable to be on campus today, so I just listened to her introduction and her brief speech through the livestream. As with all the changes, I am sure that the campus will be re-energized and I am looking forward to the changes that await us.
On a different note, I am happy to be able to publicly say that Wellesley College has decided to move to Workday as our ERP. As you can imagine, this is another huge change for us and there is both considerable enthusiasm and anxiety about this change.
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There are always new things to learn. Some lessons are so powerful and stick in your mind and you put them to work. Others such as Total Quality Management come and go. They don’t tend to be useful unless the context in which you go through this is clearly explained. You can then prepare yourself to learn from them and relate to that context. For example, in the early 90’s TQM was pretty hot in higher ed circles. The institution where I worked at that time asked the staff members from our technology support organization to devote 4 full days to TQM training. Except, no one bothered to tell us ahead of time why we are doing this.
During the introductory remarks by the guy who was going to train us it became clear that the senior administration is making us go through this because our organization was in trouble and the staff had no idea how bad things were. Long story short, I was pretty upset that the context was not explained and was not shy about expressing it (in a cvivil way, of course!). Frankly, many saw me in a completely different light during the TQM training and recommended to the next administration that I will be good in a leadership position! So, I owe TQM for paving the way for me to take on leadership positions.
Wellesley’s HR has a strong leadership development program which I participate in. Its goal is to help senior managers develop leadership skills through exchange of ideas amongst ourselves as well as by listening to experts. We learned about Open Space Technology (OST) last week, which was very interesting on several counts. According to the website “Open Space (Technology) is a simple way to run productive meetings, for five to 2000+ people, and a powerful approach to leadership in any kind of organization, in everyday practice and turbulent change.”
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Disclaimer: Yes, I am not in a good mood because of the poor performance by the Patriots yesterday and their loss to the Broncos!!! I cannot guarantee that the tone of what you read below is not necessarily the result of this.
Once upon a time, like in the 80s, the Higher Ed institutions were ahead of corporate America in terms of innovations in technology and uses of technology. Now I feel like we are far behind, especially in administrative systems. I am proud to say that at Wellesley, we have found interesting ways to help our administrative offices overcome some of the hurdles, but now that I am responsible for the Registrar’s office and we need to deal with other institutions, it is so frustrating.
I will not name the other institutions with whom we have reciprocal arrangements through which students can take classes in each others’ institution. The whole experience from the student perspective is nothing than a nightmare.
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I have an Google Nexus 6P, an android phone. I love it. The apps that I really use on it are only a handful, though, in some weak moments, I end up installing a few which I would use off and on. I am pretty disciplined about getting rid of stuff that I don’t use. First and foremost, I love the fingerprint support on my Nexus. it is not perfect, but it works beautifully and I pray every day that no one cuts my finger off when they want to steal my phone!
I will not go into too much details about the usual suspects – all of the Google Apps that I simply cannot do without. The ability to edit docs & spreadsheets, or share them easily with others from my phone has made my life much simpler! I use these apps all the time. I love Google Hangout and have forwarded all my SMS to it and you already know about my use of Google Voice, so I don’t have to tell you about that either. I do not have a GPS in my car, so I will be totally lost without Google Maps and Waze!
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I look at such beautiful things around us on campus to get out of frustrations!
We hear the frustration about technologies on a regular basis in our business. It is our job to comfort our users and make sure that in the end they are able to get through and accomplish what they need to.
I was at the receiving end of this during the past couple of weeks and let me tell you, what I had to go through was “so frustrating” and I felt the pain first hand. I tell my staff that unless we really experience what our users experience, we are highly unlikely to know the pain that they are experiencing. So, my frustrations provided me a view into this pain. Thankfully, the frustrations I felt were all outside Wellesley 🙂
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