(My MIT 50th reunion this year, albeit likely to cancel. Anyway, thinking back. And then ran across something interesting. In January 1970, I had a 21.07 paper due, and was having trouble with it. I was also thinking about the intense fall of 1969, including the Moratorium, the November Actions, and the Information Center that […]
Fresh eyes are important: they see differently, uncover issues, broaden perspective, clarify thinking, suggest alternatives. This is why cross-cutting teams are so important to successful IT management and innovation. It’s also one reason to use consultants. But not the only one. By “consultants” I don’t mean outsiders who are contracted to operate a service, implement a […]
It’s 2006, and we’re at Duke, for a meeting of the Common Solutions Group. On the formal agenda, Paul Courant seeks to resurrect an old idea of Ira Fuch‘s, for a collective higher-education IT development-and-procurement entity provisionally called Educore. On the informal agenda, a bunch of us work behind the scenes trying to persuade two existing higher-education IT […]
A while back I wrote here about hyphens, and some related usage issues. Since then I’ve taken that line of commentary over into my LinkedIn posts, and I’ll update this post periodically with the relevant links. Here’s what they are so far: Carrots, Pigs, Hyphens, Style, & Boston Red Lights Writers who care about commas […]
The so-called “star wars” campuses of the mid-1980s (Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, and MIT) invented (or at least believe they invented–IT folklore runs rampant) much of what we take for granted and appreciate today in daily electronic life: single signon, secure authentication, instant messaging, cloud storage, interactive online help, automatic updates, group policy, and on and […]
“It’s one of the real black marks on the history of higher education, ” Leon Botstein, the long-time President of Bard College, recently told The New Yorker’s Alice Gregory, “that an entire industry that’s supposedly populated by the best minds in the country … is bamboozled by a third-rate news magazine.” He was objecting, of […]
(…with apologies to Susan Sontag, of course.) Visiting the trade show at the EDUCAUSE conference requires strategy. At one time it was simple: collect every pen being given away (having some conversations with vendors in the process), so that back home the kid could give them to his friends at school. Kid grew up, though, and […]
Kim reread the message from Jack Oiler: My concern is about one Michael Zareny, who is using his University identity to post comments in Reddit and elsewhere and to send messages with extremely derogatory claims about gay men. Normally I would be most solidly against censorship, but if similar remarks about the immorality of Jews […]
Is there a computer cluster somewhere where someone can be safe from pornography and harassment? I’m sick of this. Kim, the University’s Director of Academic Computing, knew from a conversation with the University Ombudswoman what Judy Hamilton was complaining about: she had gone into a public computing cluster and sat down next to a male […]
I’m at loose ends after graduating. The Dean for Student Affairs, whom I’ve gotten to know through a year of complicated political and educational advocacy, wants to know more about MIT‘s nascent pass/fail experiment, under which first-year students receive written rather than graded evaluations of their work. MIT being MIT, “know more” means data: the Dean wants […]