Student Affairs ITS Blog

If you’re new to the world of texting or instant messaging, you’ve no doubt been hit with a barrage of confusing acronyms and abbreviations such as “BRB,” “LOL,” and “AFK.” These are shorthand for common English phrases and originated from the days when mobile phones didn’t have full keyboards.

Today, many people continue to use them out of convenience, even though there’s no longer a need, and social networking services such as Twitter have revived the practice due to their restrictions on the length of messages. Twitter limits users to 140 characters, for example, so users often have to make every letter count.

There’s a bewildering array of abbreviations and acronyms out there, far too many for even the most dedicated text messenger to remember. So, to help you out, I’ve located an exhaustive list of text messaging abbreviations. Keep it handy for the next time your teenager sends you an indecipherable message!

(Also, the list is hosted at Webopedia, which is a great resource for looking up all kinds of technical terminology. Have a look around while you’re there!)

As promised, I have a post about Twitter and Educause 2009.

There were a couple of sessions at the conference that addressed Twitter and it’s use in higher education. One was a Point/Counterpoint session featuring Gardner Campbell and Bruce Maas. Another was presentation from Joanna Dunlap and Patrick Lowenthal.

The first session was recorded and is available online for viewing. The second session was not recorded, but a paper authored by the presenters as well as their slideshow are available for download.

The debate over Twitter often comes down to whether Twitter, and other micro-blogging services, actually build community or just waste your time with pointless drivel.

While the viewpoint that Twitter is just a waste of time was presented, I think most people at the Educause conference will support the argument that Twitter is useful in creating networks and building relationships.

Many faculty members and IT professionals have already found that using Twitter on campus can provide links to vital information and to new people. Twitter has been used by these people to build professional networks and to quickly and easily share information around the globe. So why not apply this model to student learning? When done thoughtfully, Twitter enables students in a classroom to have real-time access to vital resources, faculty members, research librarians, and to each other.

Take a look at an example of this from the University of Texas, Dallas.

This video shows what many of the presenters at the Educause conference were telling us. When Twitter is used properly in the classroom, students can be more engaged in the learning process. Imagine the example of a reference librarian following a classroom discussion via Twitter. The librarian can easily join the conversation to suggest additional material from the library that will enhance the classroom experience.

Some people may be concerned that having a classroom full of students on Twitter is distracting. But many who use Twitter in the classroom have found that students who post comments or questions are those who are thinking the most about the subject matter. In many ways, Twitter is just as much a listening device as it is a sharing one. The back channel communications that takes place is evidence of real listening and learning.

In fact, the Twitter back channel was a great benefit to many of the attendees at this year’s conference. Not only did this promote discussion among the audience in each session, but there was even some discussion taking place across multiple sessions that were taking place at the same time in different locations.

Of course the use of Twitter - or any technology - isn’t perfect. If Twitter is to be used in higher education, it must be done in a thoughtful way and be included in any assessment of student performance. So while there are risks to introducing Twitter into the classroom, the risks seem to be far outweighed by what we can gain from the messy experimentation that is creativity and student engagement.

The third in a series of updates from last week’s Educause annual conference.

I’ll go ahead and apologize now for the name cloud computing. The name probably doesn’t help anyone non-technical figure out what we are talking about. But cloud computing has been a hot topic in Educause as well as other technical communities for a few years.

I’ll let this short video be an introduction to the concepts. Go ahead, watch the video - it will explain the ideas behind cloud computing.

You did click the link and watch the video, right? If so, you may proceed.

You may have realized that you probably already use cloud computing for some of your own personal services. If you use Google or Yahoo for email or calendars, you are using the cloud. Some universities have even stopped providing their own email and calendar services and rely on cloud services, such as Google, to provide all of the infrastructure required to deliver these services to the campus.

As you deal with students at our campus, how many of them send you email from a gmail or yahoo address? Most of these students are forwarding their campus email to these accounts - they never even login to a campus system to check their email. So, whether you know it or not, you are already working in the cloud.

But not everyone is ready to move all of their university data to an off campus provider. And this is where the debate begins around cloud computing.

There are advantages to moving services to the cloud. As we saw in the video, cloud based services are based on an on-demand, shared model. They are location independent - you can access them from anywhere. And you pay only for what you use. In fact, some cloud services are ad supported and are currently free to use.

But before anyone just jumps into this new model, important questions need to be addressed. For instance, where is your data really stored? Is it really secure? Who else may have access to it? All of these questions are easy to answer if you maintain your own infrastructure on campus. But once you send your data somewhere else, these questions are complex.

And, once services and resources are pooled, a service outage has a much greater impact. What happens when GMail has an outage? Even when the outages are isolated or for short periods of time, there are tens of thousands (or even more) of people impacted. This presents significant risk to anyone using the services.

Like anything else, cloud computing has advantages and disadvantages. But the time has passed when we could blindly invest large amounts of money in server hardware and infrastructure every time we needed a new system. We must seriously consider taking advantage of cloud computing for every need that we have. We may end up providing the service ourselves but, more and more, the decision to do this is a strategic one based on the needs of the university and not one based on the merits of the technical choices alone.

For much more information, watch the Point/Counterpoint session from the Educause conference - Cloud Computing: Hype or Hope?

And check back tomorrow for the final update. A discussion of Twitter use in higher education.

Are you new to the Mac or just want to learn more about the basics of a mac and it’s built-in software. Apple has some great article’s that can help you with this:

The Grand Tour - This is a serious of 5 lessons including topics on “The Finder”, “The Desktop”, “The Menu Bar”, “The Dock”, and “Applications, Files, and Folders”

Expose

Mail

TextEdit

Preview

Safari

Happy Reading

One of the highlights of each year’s Educause conference are the keynote speakers. One of this year’s featured speakers wasLawrence Lessig.

Lessig challenged those of us in higher education to wake up to the costs of limiting access to our culture. He showed how books, films, music and more are being lost because copyright law just does not work in our current environment and with new technologies. Consider that, in a digital world, almost every use of culture triggers copyright law.

Lessig not only fears that we are losing our culture due to copyright law, he also warns that we are criminalizing an entire generation. And we have not just criminalized the daily activities of the digital generation, the fact that this generation knowingly acts illegally is corrosive to a democratic society.

Lessig’s message was about much more than copyright law. He fears the loss of some of the great creative works of our culture and the loss of democracy.

It is time to wake up.

Lessig posted his talk online for us to watch. You will hear him talking for a couple of minutes before the slides start to change. It is well worth your time to watch this.

Last week, I attended the annual Educause conference in Denver, CO. I had the opportunity to present some ideas on the IT organization while I was there. The title of this presentation is “It’s Not About the Technology; Moving the IT Organization from Service Provider to Valuable Asset.”

I first thought of doing this when it became clear that, in many cases, the IT organization can be a roadblock to progress. About a year ago, I was introduced to someone and explained what I did as an IT professional. Her first response was that her IT organization “always says no.” That’s not how an effective IT organization should be described. So I thought about how we can be successful as an IT organization and about how we should strive to make ourselves be seen as an asset instead of an obstacle.

These are the main points that I think are essential in this goal.

1. Customer Service
2. Say “Yes”
3. Understanding the Mission
4. Experimentation
5. Involvement
6. Transparency
7. Embracing the “Troublemakers”
8. Diverse Individuals
9. Professional Development

You can download my handout from the presentation for a further explanation of each of these items.

Below is the presentation that ran on the projector screen as we discussed each of the items. (Click the play icon to start. Then you can go through one step at a time or select Autoplay from the More menu.)

And check back soon for more information from the conference. I have lots of good stuff to share.

We have an outage scheduled for our Windows Virtual machine tomorrow morning. When trying to connect to 7i, RMS or dCal in Windows, users will receive an access denied error. The outage window should be short and last until 10AM.

In accordance with the upcoming chances to the Division website, Student Affairs has a new logo. So that means it’s time for a new Student Affairs desktop wallpaper!

As predicted, Mac OS X version 10.6 indeed came out before the end of August, and is available today. As we noted in our last post, please don’t upgrade any Division-owned computers to Snow Leopard. There are several critical applications that have not yet been updated to be compatible with 10.6. Don’t worry, we’ll be happy to upgrade your computer once we’re sure all Student Affairs systems are compatible!

Way back in June of last year, Apple announced the next version of OS X, Snow Leopard, to be released sometime in 2009. If any of you follow tech news, you’ll know that Apple has been working on this new operating system ever since.

Snow Leopard, also known as OS X version 10.6, is intended to be a performance-oriented update. Rather than lots of new “bells and whistles,” 10.6 will concentrate on speed and efficiency. Snow Leopard will make better use of multi-core processors and graphics cards, and will use less memory and storage space.

Rumor has it that Snow Leopard is nearing completion and could be released as early as the end of the month. We in ITS understand that it can be fun to try out new software products, but at the moment we advise against upgrading any Macintosh you might be using for Duke-related work. There are several critical software packages that are not currently compatible with Snow Leopard. As always, ITS will obtain a copy of the new OS as soon as possible and begin testing it with Student Affairs software and systems. Unfortunately, we can’t update Division computers until we’re sure that everything will run smoothly.

We know that Division employees are used to having the latest and greatest in technology, so we appreciate your patience. Don’t worry, we’ll get you all upgraded as soon as possible. In the meantime, feel free to head over to Apple’s website and have a look at everything Snow Leopard will have to offer.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/