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11/30/2005
So, before Thanksgiving I had told myself that I would read the CIFAC Project report and write about it. A quick glance had told me that it contained useful results from research of computer "incidents" and was probably not yet getting the attention it deserved.
11/16/2005
This morning as I glanced at a news story titled "A Low-Cost Laptop for Every Child," which is about the MIT-related initiative to create a $100 laptop for children in developing countries, the nonprofit organization, One Laptop Per Child.
11/10/2005
Last week, Bill Gates said the information technology industry is experiencing a "sea change" that will be massively disruptive. He was speaking of the move to online software and services, from the traditional software-in-a-box model of sales and distribution.
11/2/2005
Today, November 3, 2005 is the first annual World Usability Day. I learned of it through a message from a friend directing me to a USA Today article called “Why are tech gizmos so hard to figure out?” The concept resonates with me. More and more I use elaborate converged devices, like my wonderful Treo 650, but I use decreasingly smaller subsets of their overall functionality.
10/24/2005
I have no idea why Mozilla Thunderbird crashed on me this morning. First I could not send any messages, not through my “umich” nor my “scup” identity. Then my inbox disappeared. Then Thunderbird refused to boot up at all yet, when I reinstalled it, Windows told me that I couldn’t install it – because it was already running. Of course, I could not see or use it.
10/19/2005
I have been thinking a bit lately about those poor folks on our campus who for many reasons are not adept with laptops, email, wireless, and some of what are becoming the very basic tools of people who work in offices.
10/12/2005
Why should recycling concern campus IT managers and workers? It’s because we design, manage, and use tools which are relatively small yet contain huge amounts of toxic materials.
10/5/2005
While it is a trend on college campuses, where it may be bordering on a craze among the millennial generation, you can still get blank stares when you ask a grayer general audience about wikis.
9/28/2005
In the ocean of media that we live in, what we think of as 'life' may already just be a series of 'media interrupts.'
9/21/2005
Even as everyone engaged by Katrina is still, slowly, realizing the dramatic complexity of the circumstances from that storm, yet another handful of higher education institutions are preparing for a major hit.
9/14/2005
Now, campusrelief.org is currently no technological marvel . . . yet. It’s still serving up downloadable Excel spreadsheets rather than through online interactivity, but it’s going to become what we need, and it is intended to be a permanent resource.
9/7/2005
Disaster planning will undoubtedly be a hot topic for campus IT, following Katrina. What lessons can be learned? What can be done differently? Is it possible to be prepared for every contingency? Some lessons may be fairly obvious. Coming up with better plans and being able to execute them may take more time. Here are a few preliminary thoughts about what we've learned from Katrina so far.
8/31/2005
Well, this year it’s not digital viruses hitting higher ed hard, it’s a hurricane – right as the students returned or were about to. It’s nightmarish to imagine your server room under 30 feet of water; or with its interior exposed to wind and rain because a large tree fell on it.
8/24/2005
Instead of “hardening of the arteries,” public affairs director Ron Nief, of Beloit College, likes to talk about “hardening of the references.” That’s a polite way to say that some of us get so fixed in how we view the structure of our world that we’re sometimes unable to get into the mindset of our students.
8/17/2005
IT people and sustainability coordinators work across the boundaries between departments and disciplines a lot!
8/10/2005
Recently, at a different meeting, the annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, a number of people were critical of the apparent disappearance of HEAG (Higher Education Advisory Group) and what looked like a tendency on Microsoft’s part to convene conferences and meetings at which it presented, rather than listened.
8/3/2005
Almost exactly two years ago I wrote about a forthcoming survey by the National Science Foundation (NSF) which is a biannual event that historically measures research space on college campuses. In 2003 the NSF added an entire section to measure networking capacity and I anticipated that IT folks on campus would be surprised by the request to provide data that had not previously been asked for.
7/27/2005
There was a sixty percent decline during 2000-2004 in the number of freshmen planning to major in computer science. Bill Gates was recently quoted as saying that he was baffled by that declining enrollment, especially since those same young people just love all of their technology toys.
7/20/2005
If you want some insight into users knowledge and behavior about spyware and software there's an important white paper you should read.
7/13/2005
The work of the Anti-Spyware Coalition (ASC) in setting definitions, agreed-upon language that can be used to clearly define the myriad of spyware-type threats, is a promising new step in reducing the problem of unsolicited email.
7/6/2005
Our IT Trends columnist ponders the meaning of vacation in the brave new world of persistent connectivity.
6/29/2005
What happened? Reports from those who monitor file sharing indicate that Internet traffic was indistinguishable Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from the previous week, so consumer behavior is unchanged. Grokster and StreamCast owners, staff, and investors are in a world of hurt, of course, and lawyers have a new way to earn their hourly fees. Many of us are relieved that the decision was narrow enough to not affect the technology (software and hardware) of file-sharing, just the marketing and the business plans of those who provide services based on it.
6/21/2005
It was a daring experiment, and one that caught immediate criticism because some saw the university as “giving away toys” to the incoming freshman class. Well, iPods are ‘toys’ in a sense, and of course they were mostly used for entertainment. But some pretty interesting lessons were learned.
6/15/2005
Campus investments in IT play a critical role in the new world order of assessment and outcome mandates.
6/8/2005
For a long time now, I have been asking around if anyone knows of a piece of software that would let me send email messages to an address where a database would then parse out the message and store it away in data fields-– resulting in an online database that I can then manipulate.
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