There is simply too much going on. There have been several days of back to back meetings, some exciting software development and some minor crisis management and course corrections to a major project – the usual stuff that a CIO has to deal with. Talking about course correction, we had installed a SMART board in one of our classrooms (we planned four this semester) which was interfering with the use of the chalk board. This was not caught earlier because of some minor communications issues. We needed to do something quick, so we scrambled to move it to a mobile stand. One of our staff found a stand available in eBay, bid and won the bid. Of course, not many all over the world are waiting in line for a Mobile stand for a SMART Board, but still, it was fun. As a backup we also ordered the “real thing”, which apparently is manufactured or assembled only on demand. In the end, the eBay version had some missing parts and could not be used and the “real thing” came, but scheduling human resources to put it together took time, but finally it is done. The board itself weighs about 500 pounds and the stand another 200. I am being told that it was manageable to move short distances. The board’s movement up and down is done with a switch. Though this has been delayed, the faculty who were planning on using it have been very understanding, so all is well.
Professor Jay Turner from Environmental Studies asked if I would like to join a reading group of students and faculty (Jay, Kristina Jones and Alden Griffith) discussing Technology and Environmental Sustainability this semester. This week’s topic of life-cycle of digital electronics and solar panels was interesting, so I decided to go. I took some time to read through the assigned readings – Paper vs Digital, Solar Panels, and Chapter 2 from the book “High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health” by Elizabeth Grossman. They are all excellent reads and I especially recommend the last one. I think many of us who are technologists have no clue about what is the real environmental cost of making digital devices. We all know that it is pretty high, but I doubt very much that anyone knows that mining for 1 ton of copper results in 310 tons of waste in terms of rocks and ore. This is huge. But like everything else, there is a lot more to it. For example, base metals like copper are also easily recyclable – whether they get recycled at a rate that is high and desirable is a whole another question. What follows is a short collection of a wide ranging set of topics discussed during the class without particular attribution to who said what.
Disclaimer: It is highly possible that my interpretations of a few things discussed may not be accurate, so feel free to comment on them or send me the corrections!
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The new academic year began last week and the College is full of activity. The Clapp Library is looking busy and alive. One knows how busy the Library is just as you enter – the exterior door has some issue (wear and tear) and the next set of doors are typically left open (patrons are too busy to close them; they really think that they are swing doors that should close automatically, but they don’t!). Sorry, the doors are my pet peeve and my attempts to get them fixed permanently have always resulted in the answer of how costly it would be! I even suggested an old style cord of sorts for the interior door that the student or the staff at the service desk can pull to shut them. But then we have insurance liability to worry about because some may trip over the cord. All kidding aside, we are on a mission to get these fixed soon (Hope is everything)!
There are some days that you never forget – the landing on the moon (I was here listening to tamil translation of a BBC broadcast on radio), the Challenger disaster (Watching TV here ) and of course 9/11 (I was at work at Wesleyan where we all gathered to watch the horrible scenes on TV). I found this op-ed in NY Times on 9/11/2012 to be interesting (though we have heard many of these before, when you look at it collectively, it sheds a different light on the problem). Of course, this is just one version of the events preceding the horrible tragedy. Hearing some of the survivors of the tragedy recount their loved ones even now makes one feel so sad. On to other things.
We are in the process of developing a short term strategic plan. One question we are interested in the question is the future of networking. It is the most fundamental technology we rely on 24/7/365 (or 366 every four years) and take for granted. Whether it is cloud computing or Mobile First, all of which we will incorporate, having a reliable and fast network infrastructure is critical. Note that I said reliable first! (more…)
Yesterday, Orientation ’12 began and the class of 2016 and their proud parents could be seen all around campus. I made a brief visit to the “Welcome Wagon”. LTS staff were busy helping the students by excluding their PDAs from Cisco NAC. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of these devices that I saw. I also saw one student proudly declaring that she took care of the exclusion “first thing”. It would be interesting to study how the student behavior during the start of their College years translate to their ongoing academic work 🙂 Are those who filled out the checklist first, chose the Writing courses and first year seminars early the ones that are also submitting their assignments early? OK, just kidding and be assured that we are not tracking such data. I have two data points (our two boys) and I can tell you that there was absolutely no correlation between the initial enthusiasm and afterwards.
Olympics is over and the presidential elections are in full swing. As always, there are way too many things on the web to follow. I have restricted mine to a select few. I have many who I follow on twitter whose posts provide me a great list of filtered information. I have added Google Politics & Elections to one of my Circles in Google Plus. I also follow Real Clear Politics and Five Thirty Eight by Nate Silver. I should say that Five Thirty Eight has become a bit more guarded and less exciting after it moved to NY Times. In 2008 it was a bit more exciting. Actually, in 2008, everything was exciting, especially around this time. Our older son decided to work for the Obama campaign and started in late August.
I am sure that last Friday’s verdict in favor of Apple and against Samsung would have been far more in the front pages, if it is not for the Republican National Convention and Hurricane Isaac. Frankly I was very surprised by the verdict on many counts. As has been discussed numerous times, many experts blame the patent law for this mess. For eg. Apple having a patent on rectangular phone is beyond ridicule. Would you buy a phone that is not rectangular? Does this mean that only Apple can make mobile phones or as a monopoly on rectangular phones, Apple can dictate what the license fee that the other manufacturers have to pay to Apple (and therefore pass it on to us the customers)? This article provides a balanced view of the possible long term outcomes. Intellectual property & patents is a hot topic beyond this and the confusing laws in the US and lack of international standards makes it extremely hard to operate.
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The summer is winding down and we are all getting ready for the start of yet another academic year. As always, there are noticeable changes that will affect our faculty and students when they get back. Some will see them as welcome changes whereas others will see them as annoyances. In a few cases, the changes we have to make are out of our control, but the users don’t necessarily care. We are getting ready to communicate these changes.
I attended a day long meeting last Monday in Northampton organized by NERCOMP. The program committee which plans the annual conference met in the morning and I was assigned to one of the most boring tracks – Policy, Regulations and Security. We were a fun group so it was OK. One of our tasks was also to come up with the theme and suggestions for keynote speakers for the upcoming conference. Because of the topics I suggested, I may have earned a nickname “The Disruptive Technologist”. No, I was not disrupting the proceedings, but earned the title based on the topics I was suggesting.
During the subsequent discussions, I heard more than once, “Working in Higher Ed is not what it used to be”. I have a feeling that some of what I was proposing prompted the others to mention this to me. I was stressing on the urgency for us to realize that we cannot get too comfortable with what we do, instead, we need to be extremely agile and develop constantly in new areas. I totally agree with this statement. In fact, who wouldn’t? More importantly, isn’t this true everywhere we look? Isn’t it also true that it has always been this way, it is just that it has been accelerating more recently?
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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 🙂
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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There is simply too much going on. There have been several days of back to back meetings, some exciting software development and some minor crisis management and course corrections to a major project – the usual stuff that a CIO has to deal with. Talking about course correction, we had installed a SMART board in one of our classrooms (we planned four this semester) which was interfering with the use of the chalk board. This was not caught earlier because of some minor communications issues. We needed to do something quick, so we scrambled to move it to a mobile stand. One of our staff found a stand available in eBay, bid and won the bid. Of course, not many all over the world are waiting in line for a Mobile stand for a SMART Board, but still, it was fun. As a backup we also ordered the “real thing”, which apparently is manufactured or assembled only on demand. In the end, the eBay version had some missing parts and could not be used and the “real thing” came, but scheduling human resources to put it together took time, but finally it is done. The board itself weighs about 500 pounds and the stand another 200. I am being told that it was manageable to move short distances. The board’s movement up and down is done with a switch. Though this has been delayed, the faculty who were planning on using it have been very understanding, so all is well.
