Ravi\'s blog

We just completed a fantastic year where Pace witnessed a serious transformation of ITS. Thanks to all the hard work and dedication of the staff, we got a lot done. Soon we will be publishing the ITS annual report where you can see these accomplishments. We need to keep this momentum going and march towards the goal of transforming ourselves from being a commodity to strategic partners (In the interest of full disclosure, this title is derived from a discussion with some colleagues at a NERCOMP annual conference program committee in August). I have been meaning to write this earlier, but a few things have kept me busy – yes, I know that this is a standard excuse!

Beth Klingner, Samantha Egan and I presented a talk at a  NERCOMP SIG (Special Interest Group) meeting on Open Source ePortfolios on Monday, 9/20/2010. The audience were pleasantly surprised by how much progress we have made using Mahara, an open source software that we have chosen to use. We received the audience feedback yesterday and we got very high marks. Prior to that Beth and I spoke about this at the Management Council Meeting on Thursday, 9/16/2010, because we think this is strategic to Pace. It was well received there too. Continue Reading »

The Fall semester officially began earlier this week. The convocation on Tuesday was great and the atmosphere was festive. I decided to “march” with the faculty and fellow administrators, something that I have done for the first time since the graduation ceremonies for my PhD at CUNY in 1984. BTW, exactly 32 years ago on this day (Sep 10, 1978) I arrived at JFK to begin my grad work, totally lost. That is for another day.

I made a mess of wearing my hood, which was subsequently corrected by a few people, Thank You! Though I specified everything right, I had a nagging feeling that they gave me the academic dress from some other University. Obviously, the academic dress is a serious business and you can read more if you are interested. The speech by Temple Grandin was good, where we learned about the importance of recognizing different learning styles and catering to them and she urged all of us “to do things”. Yeah, “Just Do It!”

The classes began on Wednesday and all our assumptions about the great work we did during the summer and how everything is going to be great is being tested as we speak. IT projects are never complete – they are Forever Beta!

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I was not at all happy that my network connection through Verizon MiFi was so flaky that I was not able to write my blog on thursday. Thankfully, I had my iPad where I ended up reading a few more pages of an intense book called “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)” through the Amazon Kindle App. This was recommended to me by Prof Ross Robak sometime ago when we were chatting about the long drive that I go through everyday. I love the book. I can almost see myself in many of the pages – doing all things that are mathematically correct, but socially unacceptable. To me, getting to work and then back home is the most important thing, so, going past all those vehicles stuck on left lanes by driving fast on the slow vehicle lane on the right (wherever possible) is just fine. They all have one less vehicle to deal with that might be dangerous (a Toyota!).

I am SO excited that a discussion with Bill McGrath prompted us to explore if iPad can replace the expensive Crestron touch panels in the classroom and that the Ed Media folks, working with EduTek, the company that we work with on classroom technologies, have shown that it works! We are going to be one of the first ones to do it. How cool is that!

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It will soon be one year since I began my stint at Pace University. Time Flies…

Whereas we, in ITS, have collectively accomplished so much in one year, there is still so much to do. This is both exciting and scary! I have hardly scratched the surface in terms of meeting the faculty in the various schools. Whereas I have “met” far more than those with whom I am in touch, I feel a sense of urgency to get to know them and their IT needs. I know it takes time and I need to be patient. It is very different with staff. There are many more opportunities there – management council, administrative systems steering committee, the Board reception etc.

And I really have not met that many students… And this year’s goal is to meet more of them and learn what we can do to better support their IT needs.

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During some of the recent meetings, one of them being the management council, there was a discussion around what is the best level of organizational communication. It is a topic that comes up all the time. Though I am not an expert in this, I thought I should share with you what we are doing in ITS about general communication to the community.

Before we get to it, I want to share with you a little tech story from last night. Around 6 PM, our friends called and invited us to join them for a simple meal at their cottage. Never to miss an opportunity to get together with them, we agreed. We got ready and wanted to enter the address in the GPS, but we were unable to get the address from anywhere! Despite the fact that we have been there a few times, for some reason, we always miss directions to getting there. And if you think we live in the middle of nowhere, this place is REALLY in the middle of nowhere. We called them and by definition of being in the middle of nowhere, no cell signal there and thus no answer! What to do?

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Many of my friends assume that summer is an easy time for us and I have to remind them that this is no longer the case. Summer happens to be the time when we have the time to execute some of the major projects, many of which are “upgrades”. Increasingly, that window is closing down too. With more and more summer activities planned, it is becoming extremely hard to find windows to do what we need to do. However, ITS staff have been busy planning a lot of things for the summer.

As you all know, after a lot of planning, we did the Banner upgrade in May successfully. Prior to that we did Blackboard upgrade, which also went smoothly. After the Blackboard “upgrade”, we posted a message about using Firefox instead of IE because, after the upgrade, we noticed that certain Blackboard functions either worked poorly or did not work in IE. A faculty member correctly asked “You call this an upgrade?” (I am paraphrasing, of course)

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Some of you may know that we did a pilot ePortfolio project during the Spring semester of 2010 at Pace where about 20 different classes participated. Though there has been considerable debate and discussion around whether it should be e-portfolio, e-Portfolio, E-Portfolio or simply ePortfolio, I was going to use E-Portfolio here, but Beth told me that the experts in the field have decided on ePortfolio. I have discussed briefly what exactly are ePortfolios in other context on my blog, so I will avoid the repetition. Like everything else in life, this means different things to different people.

In essence, it is a centralized framework and repository for students to be able to store all their academic, co- and extra-curricular activities and reflect on them. It is a great vehicle for the faculty and administrators to understand the students better, assess their work and provide feedback and support to enhance their learning.

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OK. I feel pretty bad for not having taken the time to write a post for almost three weeks. This is not good! Of course, I have been away a fair amount and when you get back, you all know how things catch up faster than you can keep up with. Still, that cannot be an excuse.

I have been wanting to write about this for some time, but waited until our friends in University Relations finalized a few items regarding our next Web Content Management Systems. We have been talking to them about the general direction that we should move towards. I have been very impressed with the level of collaboration  that we have been engaged in.

In this post, I will try to explain what a web content management system is, why do we need it, what would be the roles of various folks etc.

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