As you may or may not know I love some Med Deli. And now with the weather getting nicer a leisurely stroll from campus makes for a very nice lunch. You know what makes for an even better lunch? Yeah, I thought you’d ask. The Turkish Soujouck Fatayer. This delightful collection of sausage, egg and cheese on bread is amazing. What is even better is that the portion is so generous that I take the uneaten portion home and have it for dinner. Really. If you aren’t a gluten fan you can also get gluten-free bread. So, really, you owe it to yourself.
So one of the nice things about attending Educause in person (which I seem to do every 4th year, or so) is that you get to browse the poster sessions. In a way this reminds me of the old days of card catalog browsing, well before it was a term to describe http. I digress, of course, since what I wanted to talk about is eduroam. In short (and from their site):
“allows users (researchers, teachers, students, staff) from participating institutions to securely access the Internet from any eduroam-enabled institution. The eduroam principle is based on the fact that the user’s authentication is done by the user’s home institution, whereas the authorisation decision allowing access to the network resources is done by the visited network.”
The poster that caught my attention and made me say: “I want that” is this one from the University of Tennessee. Partly. that was because I also saw that Duke and a few other ACC schools already had it up and running. Mostly, though, it just seems like zero config authenticated wi-fi would be a really nice benefit for our researchers, faculty, students who travel to do research at other participating institutions particularly if their card catalogs are online.
I had the pleasure of attending the 2012 Educause opening session given by Clay Shirky. You can see (and hear) it in its entirety at the Educause site, but here are some of my stream of consciousness notes:
When asked about finding the time and or administrative approval of new technology-based initiatives Clay responded (and I paraphrase): “Proceed until apprehended” Ha! I love it.
Under the banner of taking advantage of the connected world to do more than we are able to do individually he offered up an example from Smithsonian. Namely in that opening up our data (and in this case a collection) we are able to discover hidden value we would not have been able to understand otherwise. There was also a nice discussion of Gower’s Weblog and the way in which it changes the way we think about publishing. Best line there was concerning the “Journal of I Can Haz Tenur”. lol.
The talk is certainly very much worth viewing online. If you are anything like me you’ll be totally pumped and ready to proceed until apprehended on some new open, zero budget, one month time frame project!
The story here is one about a very early adoption of social networks (pre-Facebook) that students found extremely valuable.
Memorable notes:
“Dad, I don’t use email”. Changing modes of communication in that students really (really!) don’t check email. Of course, if that is the case then would we expect to see Universities stop offering email as a service for students? In other words do we still need to roll out Google Apps or Exchange to our student population. Maybe that misses the point and maybe it isn’t even a constructive point since the purpose of this session
Learnlink, the wildly successful homegrown Emory solution and the commercial solution that is its successor are private academic social networks that allow students to connect with others,find experts, discover and share and find recommendations
The exciting thing for me was to think about the parallels we have with http://web.unc.edu. While this is a WordPress MultiSite instance and it less of a social network relative to a web hosting platform it does have, I believe, the potential to grow into an offering akin to LearnLink. Perhaps looking at adding in BuddyPress would move it in that direction.
In 2009 students started to go to Facebook in addition to LearnLink. There was a clear boundary between the social and academic communities and the students were showing that they wantedthose boundaries.
Into the stack of things I did not know I can now place this: Laws in over 5 states that make it illegal for faculty to “friend” their students on Facebook. That said, I’m only able to find two laws in Missouri and it pertains to K-12 and appears to have been modified to now not disallow online social interactions, but does require local systems to come up with policies. The other is the NYC Department of Education. I suspect it is likely that there are others at the county and city level. The point, of course, is that it may be considered “safer” to have University-specific online social networks.
