Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I feel pretty bad for not having written any blog posts for almost two months. It has really been a pretty busy couple of months, but that is not an excuse. I need to get back to writing my blog posts on a regular basis. Though I do not believe in setting a regular schedule for blogging, I am going to try to set aside some time in my calendar.

Yet again, we had a fantastic year where many projects were completed or begun, and all the systems worked well. We were able to do them all despite the difficulties arising from the financial crisis. We could not have done this without the dedication and hard work of all the ITS staff members. I will soon request the help of the Directors to collect items for the ITS Annual report, which provides an excellent opportunity for us to centrally collect and reflect on all of our achievements while letting the community know about them.

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Tags: Google Voice, Kindle, MiFi, Twitter

I read recently President Roth’s most recent post titled “Universities in Crisis? From Compartmentalization to Collaboration“, which discusses Mark Taylor’s Op-Ed in New York Times titled “End the University as We Know It“. Both are very interesting and thought provoking.

As I was reading these, I was reminded of conversations that I have had with some of my colleagues about Technology collaborations (or the lack of it) and wanted to write about it here.

I am all for collaboration! The advantages of collaboration are obvious and I won’t go into them. It is also the case that the very nature of what we do in ITS requires that we collaborate with others in almost everything we do.

We do a great job collaborating with others on campus and I can’t think of many projects that we are engaged in that is not collaborative. However, I feel that there are many opportunities for inter or trans-institutional technology collaborations that are not being capitalized on for various reasons, primarily because institutions are unwilling to compromise. Merely having discussions on listserves does not necessarily constitute collaboration in my mind. There are so many other areas in which we can collaborate, thereby reducing duplication of efforts, and learning from each other to do things differently and better.

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Tags: collaboration, respect, share the glory, trust

I just realized that because I have been so busy for the past several weeks that I had not written anything in the blog. So, it is time to write. Since I have not had time to think about one topic to write about, I will simply write about a few thoughts that are currently on my mind.

First off, in the event you have not read yet, Oracle has agreed to buy Sun Microsystems. On the surface this may not be relevant to what we do, because, we stopped purchasing Sun hardware several years ago. However, we do use MySQL, an Open Source database software, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems last year. It is too early to tell what the future of MySQL is now that Oracle has taken it over. Especially the Open Source nature of it. There are two options: 1. continue to have a less developed open source version while promoting a commercial version of it. 2. Over a period of time, get rid of it and make the users transition to Oracle. Option 1 is most likely for the short run because of the MySQL installed base. Who knows what Oracle is thinking for the long haul!

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Tags: Oracle, Public Radio Tuner, Sun Microsystems

On Monday, 3/17/09, I had gone to the Legislative Office Building in the Capitol area of Hartford, CT to testify on behalf of the Network Infrastructure and Services Advisory Council that I chair to recommend that the state retain the Commission for Education Technology (CET). I have attached my written testimony below. Basically, Governor Jody Rell had issued a directive to eliminate or combine the functions of the various State established Commissions to save money. Our advisory council felt very strongly that the elimination of CET at this time is a bad idea on many counts. First off, it will not save money because almost all members serve voluntarily. It was pointed out that a few state employees attent the CET meeting, which is a cost to the State, and therefore this will be a savings. But it is miniscule in a larger scheme of things.

Secondly, CET oversees CEN, the state funded network, and various aspects such as collaboration and content sharing between K-12 schools and libraries. These are some of the highest priority items for this administration and to the country as a whole. So, eliminating CET, and thereby not having an oversight over these activities will mean disaster to a very forward thinking and serious investment. Please read on…

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I was at the NERCOMP Annual conference last couple of days where I participated in one of the lightning rounds on Web 2.0 (talking about our YouTube experience) and a poster session on the same subject. My presentation was well received and there were many visitors to our table during the poster session with a lot of questions.

I was also a member of the Program Committee for the annual conference and was very happy to hear that the quality of the presentations were excellent. The attendance was less than what it was last year and many (including us) cut cost by not staying in Providence, instead choosing to either drive or take the train from Boston area.

Not surprisingly, everyone is affected by the financial turmoil, but the attitude seemed to be “We are all equally affected by this and we don’t have much of a choice except to make the hard decisions that we have to”.

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Tags: Cloud Computing, Diigo, iTunesU, NERCOMP, Twitter, VoiceThread, YouTube

As many of you know, I am a big fan of Jott. I know that many users of Jott were not happy that recently they began charging for several of the useful services. I found it to be so useful that I singed up for their $3.95 a month service and have been using many of the extended services to the fullest extent.

For those who are not familiar with Jott, it is a voice to text conversion service. It used to be the case that you called your message in and they will send the equivalent text as an email with a link to listen to your voice recording. I have always been very impressed with the success of the voice to text conversion given my accent (which led Vacek Miglus from the Physics department to comment once that this was because this was an outsourced service where workers in India were listening to the voice and converted them to text!).

But based on some of th esuggestions from the users (including me), they have integrated their service in very creative ways to many other web services. I spent a Sunday to experiment with a few and sign up and this post discusses what I did.

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Tags: Facebook, Google Calendar, Jott, Trapster, Twitter, Xpenser

I discussed some the late night network bandwidth issue in detail in one of my recent posting to this blog. One of the items that I discussed there was a proposal to CEN to purchase additional bandwidth at night. This posting is to let you know that we will be piloting a variable bandwidth strategy in cooperation with CEN for the next 3 1/2 months. Our bandwidth will remain 100 Mb from 6 AM till 8 PM everyday and from 8 PM till 6 AM the following day, it will be increased to 150 Mb.

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Tags: Connecticut Education Network, variable bandwidth allocation

Since the time I read the book Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres and then re-read Freakanomics by Steven Levitt I have been energized by the notion that there is so much data that is available already or can be collected to help guide many of the decisions. Many of our technology decisions tend to be driven by either a very biased or not well represented set of data. We talk about new technologies typically because we are excited about it and feel that it will benefit our user community and then start collecting the data to support it in an incomplete fashion – mostly, contacting those who have already done this, rather than a proper sample that also includes those who have not or those who wanted to but chose not to. Of course, as with everything else, there are exceptions to all such statements.

I would therefore encourage you to start thinking about using the enormous amount of  data that exists out there or suggest collecting them to guide our decision making. It goes without saying that when it comes to data, we need to be extremely careful to respect the privacy issues. So, simply because the technology allows us to collect data should not mean that we can be careless about these issues. We need to make sure to consult with the appropriate offices if we are talking about data that involves our own community.

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Tags: CLAC, Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges, ECAR, EDUCAUSE, Freakanomics, Horizon Report, Ian Ayres, Steven Levitt, Super Crunchers

Many of us have heard from both Michael and John about the current state of University budget and I sure hope any questions that you all had have been answered through the opportunities we had to ask questions. Bottom line – we have problems like every one else, but the senior administration (in consultation with faculty, staff and students) is on top of things and we will all be called to make some sacrifices along the way. In the end, we should be good institutional citizens to help Wesleyan continue to be one of the premiere liberal arts institutions.

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This question came up in the Manager’s meeting from Jolee. It is a good question and I began thinking more about this…

I wrote about Cloud Computing last October in this blog – click here to read it. I have become a fan of this concept and feel that this has a lot of potential if appropriately used. The answer to the question of whether “moving to the cloud” is outsourcing will depend a lot on the definition of each of these terms.

To me, both of them refer to identifying aspects of business processes that can be done elsewhere more efficiently and cost effectively. So far, Cloud Computing is more restrictive in that the typical services you get in the cloud are things like software as a service, and hardware cycles for compute heavy calculations. In most instances these services are provided as is. Outsourcing on the other hand provides a lot more flexibility and customization. However, the differences between the two are fuzzy and cloudy!

In terms of the the tests for efficiency and cost effectiveness – they should take into consideration all aspects of the processes and these tests by their very nature depend on the organization. We, as a higher education organization, cannot apply the same tests as a private corporation. For example, when it comes to IT related matters, the lack of standard computing environments and the importance of customer relationship building in our environment would dictate a different set of metrics and decision making than a corporation.

What follows are some random thoughts on this subject.

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