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”.

The conference opened with a very engaging talk by John Maeda, the president of RISD. A very young and dynamic leader, he presented really innovative ideas on how the current hierarchical structures in Higher Ed inhibit free flow of ideas and communication and that the answer is in flattening the organization by creating networks. Some of what he is tlaking about is being practiced in his organization and they are very similar to what is happening at Wesleyan. By creating more transparency and creating ways to be inclusive, our senior administration is showing definite shift in philosophy.  John is someone who understands clearly the role that the technologies can play in helping achieve these goals – for example, he began a blog and encouraged free flow of information including a fixed time every week for anonymous postings, which is so popular that now, it has become more of a community blog than “his” blog. I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, and this kind of keynote has been a rarity in both NERCOMP and EDUCAUSE in recent years.

I also attended a presentation on cloud computing, where some schools are purchasing time on Amazon’s EC2 for compute time as S3 for storage. MIT purchases time on Amazon (at a cost of $2K-$4K a class per semester for a 9 node HPC) for use in classes that teach parallel programming as well as a couple of others that use highly parallelized compute heavy programs. In addition, other schools are using the S3 for remote backup and one school is using Enomaly as an Elastic Computing Platform.

I also attended a talk on how someone is using twitter in the classroom (nothing particulary innovative and nothing that cannot be done using other tools). That person also uses VoiceThread which is a very easy to use collaborative, multimedia slide show that accommodates, images, text, audio and video. I already wrote to you all about the web annotation tool that this peson pointed out called Diigo. I certainly think that Diigo has some potential for collaborative critiquing of web sites as we launch the web site redesign process.

The second keynote speech was pretty disappointing and is all about how technologists should develop people skills and bridge the gap between those that are not technologically advanced and the technologists. Especially after listening to John Maeda, this was pretty bad…

During our presentaiton that followed this, Kenny Freundlich from Wellesley spoke about their iTunesU and I spoke about WesTube. As I mentioned above, there was a lot of interest in our topics. One other presenter talked about using various tools to produce multimedia heavy instructional support material and the last speaker about the use of Blackboard blogs and wikis…

Finally, I went to a talk on Moodle Collaboration by speakers from Smith College and Lafayette College. A group of NITLE schools, either 5 or 7, I am not sure, who wrote a NITLE grant to collaborate on Moodle. What was interesting was how well the collaboration was working – some schools do not have a php programmer to support advanced moodle changes, but Smith, which has an advanced PHP programmer was developing and supporting modules jointly agreed to by the participants. The decision making happens in many ways, including a “Hack Doc Fest” when everyone gets together and talks about their needs and jointly make decisions. Gradebook was cited as such an example. The speakers did point out how some of the schools like certain modules of Moodle, which have the danger of being discontinued in future releases. Members of this collaboration have “committed” to supporting some of these modules even if they were discontinued.

Obviously there are a lot of questions as to how long such commitments can last (since most of these are informal agreements) etc. But this seems to be my favorite “Just Do It” model, where they seem to have decided to go with it and have a very strong short term plan and hope that things work out in the long run – rather than spend all the time worrying about how these arrangements will work 7-8 years from now (of course, they are important, but they should not stop us from thinking and acting creatively).

We will follow up with this group and learn a lot, as we explore the Moodle avenue. There are a LOT of schools that have already moved to Moodle or are in the process.

Finally, I volunteered to be a twitter for the conference. We all used the twitter hashtags to send our tweets. To see ALL tweets of the conference, you can go to: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nc09 or to see just what I did, go to: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23nc09+ravishan

We need to be on top of this technology to look for opportunities if and when they arise.

One of the major advantages of the cloud computing is that one does not have to worry about locally managing a data center – you don’t have to provision new computers, no need to worry about redundancy, hardware maintenance, uptime, and the environmental preparation such as air conditioner (and redundancy for that). However, cloud computing comes at a cost and a careful analysis of what it would cost to host a set of services elsewhere vs locally need to be done. In addition, we need to carefully assess the security assurances that we receive for the data stored on their servers, and possibly increase the network bandwidth to accommodate the access from on campus to the internet.

The attractive thing about the cloud computing model pricing is that you pay for only the resources you consume. They have a metric that is typically based on the amount of memory your application requires and the CPU time that it consumes. For example, Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) charges 10 cents 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform. You can view other charges here.

GoGrid.com is another such service which will provide you with a virtualized environment for Windows as well as Linux operating systems.

Thankfully, the technology has matured enough that many of these issues have been addressed or is being addressed. My question to the readers is, do you think there are services that we offer which would lend itself to using this type of facility?