I heard a very interesting & timely piece on NPR this evening – “The Most Secure Password In The World Might Be You” I strongly encourage you to listen to it or read about it. It is a quick review of how some big tech firms are predicting that the passwords are dead and biometrics are the way to go. The proliferation of systems that requires us to authenticate and the hodgepodge of rules for strong passwords have created a nightmare. Most users have the same password for accessing everything and worse, it is also an easily guessable password. Biometrics on the other hand relies on you as a person to do something to identify yourself to the systems – either a finger swipe, or retinal scan or a voice recognition system along with a pass phrase. Just the same way the passwords has weaknesses, each of these also have weaknesses, but they certainly have clear advantages. One of them is that you don’t need to maintain multiple passwords! Each of the biometric methods exploit the fact that they are unique to the person. One of the arguments made in favor of biometrics is that stealing the info is not scalable. That is, whereas millions of passwords stored on a server can be hacked and unencrypted in hours or days, it is hard to imagine stealing fingerprints and retinas on that scale, especially anonymously! However, some form of fingerprints and retinal scans must be saved somewhere in order to verify that it is yours. It is quite possible that these can be hacked and transmitted in some fashion to fool the system. This is pure speculation on my part, of course! If you ask me, I would like to see the passwords dead in favor of a more reliable and easy to use authentication system, but I don’t think passwords will be die that soon.
Clayton Christensen reminded yet again in NY Times this past weekend about the disruptions taking place in Higher Ed – “Innovations Imperative: Change Everything“. Thunderbird School of Management merging with Laureate Education, for example. Is this just the start of something bigger to come?
We are trying very hard to be tuned into major advances and disruptions that are taking place. The Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policies (ACLTP) has begun an overview of Library trends in order to understand disruptions in managing Collections and understand what services we should be prepared to provide. We are excited because such collaborative planning for the future always pays hefty dividends.
(more…)
During the first week of May, I attended a couple of presentations by students. One was Digital Stories by students in an Education class taught by Soo Hong on topics ranging from bullying in schools to multicultural requirements. The reason why some of us from LTS were invited was because we assisted in providing technology support for the production of these stories and also the class used a software called Mediathread from Columbia University. We also attended a presentation by students from CS 349A taught by Eni Mustafaraj who demonstrated a course recommendation system which uses a cosine similarity function to compare past history of classes taken by students to suggest courses of interest to other students. Both were very impressive and as I mentioned to some of my colleagues, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the students collaborated to produce the course recommendation system so quickly.
I am sure that all of us have heard about edX by now, a joint venture by MIT and Harvard to offer online courses for enhancing teaching and learning all around the world. In addition, earlier, we all heard about Stanford’s online courses and to a lesser extent, Yale’s Open Yale Courses. In a recent article in the Chronicle highlighting the company 2tor is also relevant to this discussion in that they are looking to extend their offerings and are talking to a lot of institutions. So, I thought, it is probably a good time for me to express my views on this subject.
(more…)
I attended yet another excellent NERCOMP annual conference from March 12-14. I am not saying this simply because Wellesley was very well represented and all of our presentations were VERY well received 🙂 It is a small enough conference where you can establish long lasting partnerships and catch up with others on what is going on. We all wore color coded T-shirts with QR code strategically placed on the back and because the theme was Mardi Gras, wore some beads! “Gold color” represented power – I am a Board member 🙂
I was part of a leadership forum on Monday where we discussed a paper by Clayton Christensen called “Disrupting College“. It is a long 70 page position paper where, Christensen argues that disruptive technologies, especially online learning, should be adopted by the academia soon as a way to reduce the cost of postsecondary education while not compromising on the quality. It is a very interesting read. He also agrees that what he proposes may not be directly applicable to many of the elite institutions, however, not keeping on top of it and developing strategies is highly recommended.
(more…)
