I have been thoroughly enjoying the past several days as every day from Saturday we have had a UConn team advance forward in the NCAA Basketball. UConn men’s win yesterday was fantastic and totally unpredicted. They outsmarted some of the best teams along the way and proved that height alone cannot win games. Looking forward to the UConn women’s game tonight.

I don’t have to tell you how mad the “March Madness” has been. As of last Sunday, only 1,780 brackets remain which correctly predicted a Kentucky v UConn finals. Wait, that many predicted this final? These folks must not know basketball or must have been in some unseemly state to have chosen these two teams. I resisted the temptations to make choices this year. I watched only a few critical match ups in NCAA Men’s basketball during the year. Was way too busy watching all the rest of the stuff on TV.

As a surprise gift, we got to see a cricket finals on ESPN2 on Sunday! It was a shortened version of a cricket match which is immensely popular now, called T20. India played Sri Lanka for the title. India played poorly and the Sri Lankans won the title for the first time. It was great to see Sri Lanka win (how can I be disappointed by my birth country winning) because this was the last game for some of the fantastic, gentlemanly players in the team.

Whether it is the replays during the basketball games or cricket, cool technologies are being developed all around us, many of them, every day. It is becoming so hard to keep up. In fact many of them seem to just come and go. As we are launching the major facilities renovation at Wellesley, we are rethinking classroom spaces and some of the newer technologies that we are looking at are really exciting. The vendors remind me that interactive displays that we are excited about is no longer “new”. They have been in the market for over 5 years and are very prevalent in K-12 space. Why do I have to be constantly reminded that Higher ed is slow to adopt newer technologies?

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