The quote I was going to use to introduce this topic — “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts” — itself illustrates my theme for today: that truths are often less than well founded, and so can turn policy discussions weird. I’d always heard the quote attributed to Pat Moynihan, [...]

Dinner talk turned from Argo and Zero Dark Thirty to movies more generally. A 21-year-old college senior—I’ll call her “S”—recognized most of the films we were discussing. She had seen several, but others she hadn’t, which was a bit surprising, since S was an arts major, wanted to be a screenwriter, and was enthusiastic about her [...]

Just before writing this (and then losing most of it to a Chrome freeze, and then rewriting it), I had a sort-of-Ploughman’s lunch: a couple of Wasa Wholegrain crackers spread with about 1 ounce of nice smelly Buttermilk Blue cheese, and a Pink Lady apple, and a glass of water. For yesterday’s lunch I mixed [...]

…as Oscar Wilde well might have titled an essay about campus-wide IT, had there been such a thing back then. Enterprise IT it accounts for the lion’s share of campus IT staffing, expenditure, and risk. Yet it receives curiously little attention in national discussion of IT’s strategic higher-education role. Perhaps that should change. Two questions [...]

Looking into the near-term future—say, between now and 2020—we in higher-education IT have to address two big challenges. Neither admits easy progress. But if we don’t address them, we’ll find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place. The first challenge, the rock, is to deliver high-quality, effective e-learning and curriculum at scale. We [...]

Old joke. Someone writes a computer program (creates an app?) that translates from English into Russian (say) and vice versa. Works fine on simple stuff, so the next test is a a bit harder: “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  The program/app translates the phrase into Russian, then the tester takes the result, feeds [...]

It’s been an interesting few weeks: Facebook’s upcoming $100-billion IPO has users wondering why owners get all the money while users provide all the assets. Google’s revision of privacy policies has users thinking that something important has changed even though they don’t know what. Google has used a loophole in Apple’s browser to gather data [...]

(This is a copy of one of my EDUCAUSE blog posts) Internet domains in the new “adult” .xxx domain recently became available. So did arbitrary generic top-level domains (gTLDs) beyond the existing .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, and so forth. Both initiatives affect higher education. The effects of these initiatives thus far have been modest, but they have been entirely negative. [...]

Here’s how the New York Times broke the story: In what the federal authorities on Thursday called one of the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized the Web site Megaupload and charged seven people connected with it with running an international enterprise based on Internet [...]

To my amazement, I cleared standby on the 1:30 United flight from Washington to Chicago, and so barely had time to grab a couple of snacks before dashing down to board the plane. Better still: Turned out our flight was carrying time-sensitive medical material (bone marrow, someone said), and so it became a so-called “lifeguard” [...]