We can point to so many different success stories in the open source world. I have a long list of favorites, but some of the top ones are: Linux, Apache, Drupal, Moodle, Hadoop and R. I have personally benefited from all of this tremendously and at Wellesley we use Linux, Apache, Drupal and R. We also use Sakai, which is another open source software. I am taking a course titled “The Analytics Edge” from MIT and loving it. As a part of this, I am cracking away at R. It is such a brilliant system, which has matured so much in the past two years. I have been involved in data modeling in collaboration with my wife for quite some time and was looking at R to replace SAS for . The last time I seriously looked at it was 2 years ago, but ruled out on lot of counts. But, the progress in the past couple of years has been tremendous and along with R Studio, a GUI front end to it, it is awesome.
Along the similar lines, I wanted to talk about eduroam, another brilliant idea. It is one of those collaborations amongst higher ed that works great. As I have written several times before, collaboration in higher ed a lot of times is simply more talk than action. Here is one where it is a tangible collaboration that we can all point to and be proud of.
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It is that time of the year – Baseball playoffs, football, short days etc. I was able to squeeze a round of golf a couple of days ago. The desperation showed – we were unwilling to stop though there was not enough light. The Red Sox are still alive but so are the Rays. Hope the Red Sox make it to the playoffs and turn their worst performance in September into a soaring October performance. Things in LTS are moving along well. We will soon be sending the Annual Report for 2010-2011 which will highlight many of our collective accomplishments. We will also be sending a communication today announcing a Google Support hotline, availability of additional Email aliases and a single point of contact for managing major projects for the academic departments.
Yesterday I met with Melissa Trevvett (Executive Director) and Amanda Schmidt (Asst. Director) from the Boston Library Consortium (BLC). We are one of the 17 members of the BLC and enjoy the benefits of the consortium at several levels. Melissa began her role as the Executive Director recently and is visiting the member institutions. During our brief meeting, we touched on the “C” word – “Collaboration” and I told Melissa about my views on Collaboration. It reminds me of the “A” word used by the media and politicians – “American People”. They are words that are used a lot but the answer to “Where is it?” or “Which American People told you this?” will likely to be a useless exercise.
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