New Technology

This 57 minute podcast features the opening keynote address from the EDUCAUSE 2008 Midwest Regional Conference. The speech was delivered by Susan E. Metros, Deputy CIO & Associate Vice Provost at the University of Southern California, and is entitled, "Challenging IT Leaders to Mashup, Twitter, Tag, and Poke: New IT Strategies for a Digital Society".

Today's youth are digitally titillated, visually stimulated, and socially connected. To educate and engage this new breed of learners, institutions of higher education are revisiting and revising the basic tenants of a general education by asking, What does it means to be literate in today's society? As educators transform the way they teach and conduct research, IT leaders also must alter their institution's IT strategy to best support a mobile, global digital citizenry.

In this 17 minute podcast we feature a conversation with Gardner Campbell, Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. He is joined later in the conversation by one of his students, Serena Epstein. They co-presented a session at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting entitled, "Information Fluency as Curricular Innovation: New Media Studies in General Education". Our conversation addresses questions about institutional change in the new media environment and how instructors and administrators might innovate within the traditional university system.

In October of 2005, I emailed about forty individuals who have expertise in faculty development as it pertains to instructional technologies. In my email, I asked them this question: in a workshop or training program that's designed to help instructors learn to use online technologies in ways that promote active, student-centered learning, at what point should those instructors actually be introduced to the technology? That is, should one discuss the technology before discussing the pedagogy, or should one discuss the technology after discussing the pedagogy, or should one blend together the discussions of technology and pedagogy in an iterative manner? As it turned out, there was a clear consensus among the 37 individuals who responded to my query; I discuss that consensus in the attached PDF, which comprises a synthesis of the responses as well as an appendix that includes all of the responses in their entirety. -- Mark
PS I've replaced the original PDF, which wasn't opening in all versions of Acrobat. It now should open in any version. -m

A collection of articles to summarize some of the cool stuff:
Sling Media’s Slingboxhttp://www.slingmedia.com/~$250The Slingbox enables you to watch your TV programming from wherever you are by turning virtually any Internet-connected PC into your personal TV. Whether you’re in another room or in another country, you’ll always have access to your television.
ED Digital - 30 inch flatscreen with wi-fi embedded, allows tv to display windows media edition content from any networked computer in your house
the new treo 700w - windows mobile alternative to blackbery:http://web.palm.com/

Bill Gates Keynote:ubiquitous computing, location sensing, device interoperability:http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2006/01-04ces.asp Google Video Store:http://video.google.com/

Like something out of "Minority Report" or 1984 -

from Wired News: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69612,00.html?tw=rss.TEK

A leading defense contractor has successfully demonstrated a system that lets foot soldiers command unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to see real-time overhead images on their handheld computers while fighting in urban battle zones.

Individual war fighters can receive video-surveillance data on a target of interest by moving a cursor over the subject, as part of a Northrop Grumman system to automate reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition, or RSTA, within urban environments.

Jambo Networks - Simplify Your Social Networking by Aggregating Your MySpace, Facebook, Friendster Profiles In One Place.

The convenience of having all of your bookmarks and accounts in one place is seductive. Being able to tie these things into a social profile, that allows you to search wirelessly for like minded individuals in a certain geographic range is awesome - in the literal sense.

Privacy, Security, and new forms of "social interaction" - spam, stalking, hijacking, emergency services, friendships and employment networking are all potential applications. Policy, anyone?

http://www.jambo.net/web-site/Home.html

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.htmlOne persepctive on Google's plans to take over the internet, and why that might not be a bad thing...

One part of my job as Instructional Program Manager is to help faculty members develop pedagogical strategies that work effectively in an online environment. There are a number of challenges to this, and the primary one is probably the looming presence of the technology itself: that is, the complex and powerful online course management system is there in front of the instructors -- they can almost stub their toe on it -- and so when they start to think about incorporating an online component into one of their face-to-face courses, the first thing that comes into their mind is "how do I use the technology" rather than "what do I do with the technology." In other words, they are well aware that they need guidance and probably even training with regard to the nuts and bolts aspects of logging on, making online quizzes, using the online gradebook, and so on. But this focus on the technology AS technology causes them to overlook less tangible things, such as the need to develop new pedagogical approaches, and the need (and opportunity) to make online learning as active and student-centred as possible. On a day to day basis, this problem is manifested in the fact that many of our faculty mistakenly think that our unit -- The Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology (LT3)-- is a kind of "technology help desk," the place that they phone when they are having a problem with a computer or with software. In short, it's lamentable that LT3 sometimes gets confused with IST (Information and Systems Technology); and sometimes we are also confused with other quite distinct units, such as Distance Education.

It's summer, which means it's time to break everything we can't touch when classes are in session. We've got entire labs offline: time to play!

Our big experiment with lab technology this summer is going to be a product from Ardence, essentially netboot + management features, for Windows. Our current model is to create and push a build using Altiris -- a product similar to Symantec's Ghost, but which had some key features Ghost didn't, at the time of our purchase. We're pretty happy with Altiris, and we're quite good at using it. Our labs are pretty stable and happy. We have the time we need to complete a myriad of other projects during the year.

It's not really broken...so why fix it? Why are we looking at a paradigm shift?

Over the last few years, we've gotten the process of build development and deployment down to a science -- we've optimized, streamlined, and outsourced until we pared the process down to only the things we specialize in and the things we can't avoid. Unfortunately, the unavoidable process of pushing builds and preparing packages for midquarter updates still requires more man-hours than we'd like to spend, and it's pretty boring work, too. Even if we can shave time off the push process with faster networks and servers, it's never going to be all that speedy to install 10+ GB of data over the network to 200+ machines in 6 locations -- as time goes on, networks will get faster, but builds will get bigger and our number of locations is still growing. It has to be done, and it has to be done over interims, i.e. in 5 days (or less, if anything goes wrong). By 2008, we need to be able to manage builds of 30GB of data and 500+ machines -- in those same 5 days, with the same number of staff.

The other factor bringing us to the table is complexity. Our well-honed security model is defense in depth -- required logins, restricted access to c:, no access to cmd.exe, no right click on the desktop, registry lockdowns, group policies, the whole nine yards. Nonetheless our model is inevitably weakened each quarter as the latest must-have applications (and we added a dozen new items last quarter) require higher priveleges, write access to directory after directory, registry key after registry key. We're beginning to see the impact of this continual need to loosen up our security here and there -- some mysterious instability in some machines late-quarter, problems only reproducible on certain machines, and so forth.

Moving forward, these two factors are rapidly approaching intractibility. Network booting has the potential to break us out of the track we're on -- if updating a build or refreshing it back to its pristine state is as simple as rebooting the machine, and our network performance is sufficient to cover the load, we can cut our development and deployment time and immunize users from the daily damage done by applications which don't respect boundaries.

Ardence may prove to be too expensive to buy compared to what it saves us in time, but we're going to give it a shot. Eventually, something is going to come along that requires more access than we're willing to give to people even under a netboot model, and our only option at that point is likely to be Citrix, which is a solution of an entirely different flavor. But Ardence certainly beats Citrix on price per-seat and capital costs, and almost certainly on staff time. Adding a single point of failure makes me nervous in some ways -- but in reality, we already rely on the network for LDAP logins and Keyserver.

It's summer...let the adventures begin.