Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I attended the EDUCAUSE annual meeting this year (John and Jolee were also there) after taking a break for a couple of years. After arriving at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas, I took the shuttle to the Convention Center to take care of the conference registration (which took On Tuesday, the conference started with a talk by Vinton G. Cerf (currently at Google), widely credited for being a co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol and known as the Father of the Internet. And, yes, there was a lame joke about Al Gore and his claim about the inventor of Internet and yes, no one laughed and the speaker had to tell people it was a joke! The only interesting thing about this talk was the garb he was wearing. It was the robe that he was presented with when he received an honorary degree from the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma, Majorca. The title of the talk was “Uncovering the Science in Computer Science”. You can view the entire talk here. The talk was not so inspiring and you need to search very hard to see the connection between what he was talking and the conference title of “Spurring Innovation and Marchalling Resources”.

To make things worse, one member of the EDUCAUSE CIO mailing list replied to a posting that went to everyone in the list his honest assessment – “Vinton Cerf is a dull speaker”. The sender later apologized and blamed the blackberry for it!

I spent most of the rest of the day looking at various vendor booths, listening to a few talks, meeting several attendees, including David Todd and Allynn Chase from the previous Wesleyan ITS. Unfortunately I saw very little in talks… Nothing great and made me feel that in many instances we are way ahead of the game.

I saw several outsourcing vendors… This is new in comparison to some of the earlier EDUCAUSE meetings. Infosys, an Indian company, was there and Stanford is one of their prized customers and many of these companies actually have bagged contracts from various educational institutions.

John and I spent a fair amount talking to Rave Wireless, a company with whom we have been talking about rolling out a feature rich cell phone service. We have been going back and forth on the financial details and this meeting helped clarify a few things. I attended many vendor booths including the SUN booth and saw the HPC cluster hardware and their Thumper high performance disk subsystem. It was lackluster and there were very few things that I was already not aware of and there was absolutely no excitement!!! All the vendors that I spoke to were complaining about the lack of attendance.

I attended a briefing by CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) which was an informational meeting and wanted to attend the NITLE reception in the evening, but they moved the meeting by half hour, which conflicted with a presentation by google on Google Apps for Education for which I had signed up earlier. Since Jolee was anyway going to the NITLE reception, I went to Google Apps presentation. I will write in more detail about this offering separately.

The general session on Wednesday morning by Ray Kurzweil was way more interesting than Vint’s presentation. He is a “restless” inventor and he showed a device that scanned a random page from a book and read it in English… and half way through, it translated in German on the fly (not knowing German, I can’t tell you how accurate it was). His predictions were all over the place – “Computers as we know them will be obsolete by 2010…”; “Approximately every 15 years your life expectancy increases by 1 year, that is, if you happen to live that long”;

Visited more vendor presentations on Wednesday, went to lunch with a very good friend of mine from college (33 years ago we were in the same college back in a small village in Southern India) and attended a few more presentations. One on clickers was interesting… The presenters were from the University of Wisconsin system and what was impressive was their assessment. 90% of the participating faculty believed that the use of clickers helped students learn certain concepts better. Only 70% of the students felt that way.

EDUCAUSE usually has many PCs available for attendees to use to check their email etc. and usually there used to be lines forming to use them. No lines this year!!! Many had their own laptops and wireless was available. Many more were using their Treos and Blackberries.

My overall assessment: The conference was OK. Because of the way information is getting disseminated these days, it is very hard to go to a conference and find anything that is new and exciting. Meeting others and discussing common issues and pressures is a valuable piece of all these conferences. As I said above, we are doing great in comparison to many other comparable schools… and it was good to hear that from our colleagues.