Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I attended EDUCAUSE annual meeting in Orlando last week. Before that I participated in a panel discussion organized by NITLE on cloud computing where I explained the discussions that are going on at Wesleyan about Google Apps for Education. I will be writing about the decision to move student email to Google Apps with an opt out for those who do not wish to move in a future posting here. I am not a big fan of EDUCAUSE in terms of programming; however, it provides a fantastic opportunity to network with others, compare notes and take a general pulse of where things are going in the near future. And that is what I did mostly.

The first topic of all conversations was the global financial crisis and how everyone is expecting it to affect their own organizations. Everyone expects an impact – in some cases it is likely to happen a little later than the others.

The other major topic of conversation was “Cloud Computing”. Not many are actually doing it yet, but everyone feels that this is such a good idea. The consensus is that we will never reach a point whereby every single service that we support will be running on the “cloud” somewhere, but there are aspects of what we do that is better suited to run on the cloud, so we can look for ways to add more value to teaching, learning and research through creative uses of technologies. As I wrote before in my blog, we need to start thinking about it.

The keynote speech by Prof V. S. Ramachandran from UCSD on Brain and Cognition can be heard here. I thoroughly enjoyed the talk which had no direct IT connection, but he has an excellent sense of humor and is a very engaging speaker. The types of research that they are engaged in, which in some form or the other is trying to understand the functioning of a complex organ like the brain is fascinating. Here are a few things he said:

• Synesthesia seems to be related to the use of drugs in some cases – this is why you will find it more common at UC Berkeley than at UCSD.
• He suggests that we teach little kids in school about how to tell jokes. This requires creating unusual connections in brain that in the end it will enhance creativity.
• He does not believe in intelligent design and believes in the natural selection. “It is a bit ironic that our President has been championing the concept of intelligent design, even though his own very existence is a living negation of this principle”

The second keynote speech was by Moira Gunn who hosts TechNation and Biotech Nation on NPR. You can listen the speech here. It was a pretty disappointing speech. She was recounting where the various technologies have been and since she was right there and is a “techie” herself, it was pretty detailed recount of things. How many times can one get interested about it? She mentioned that ITS always tries to apply what we learn from the past technology revolutions and apply them to new ones, which is not always the best way to do it. She mentioned how open source and cloud computing are going to be some of the new ways of doing things. It was pretty embarassing that there was NOT even one question from the audience…

I enjoyed going to the NITLE reception where I showed off our YouTube, a blog for a Music Class by Eric Charry, Elvin Lim’s blog etc. which, Bryan Alexander from NITLE has agreed to mention in some of his blog postings. Then we were taken to a madhouse by Blackboard – so loud that you could not talk to anyone. So, Fred Tarca from Quinnipiac and I went out and talked about CEN and a few other initiatives that they are engaged in.

I attended a talk by an Apple Engineer who walked us through application development for iPhones. Fascinating stuff and the speaker was really funny. I already have a couple of iPhone apps that I have written. I also attended another talk on Video Annotation, which is a nice idea. Basically, any video on the Internet can be independently annotated. The annotations are saved as an XML file with timecodes for the annotations and the presentation interface brings the video and the annotations together. You can read about VideoAnt, the software here.

There was a lot of talk about Moodle from everyone. Everyone who has moved to Moodle from other LMS were raving about the quality of the software, its extensibility and how the community responds to those with questions. We will take this question up fairly quickly here.

The vendor booths were uninspiring. There was not much. It also looked poorly attended.

I am going to write to the EDUCAUSE leadership asking them to commit to being greener than they currently are. No recycling bins in the lunch area for cans and bottles. So much plastic for cups and lunch boxes, many of which are non-recyclable. The number of kiosk machines are excessive – most of us bring our own laptop (or should be asked to bring) and the general usage of these kiosks seemed to be low. So, why waste the energy and what is the “green expense” of transporting them back and forth?