Wireless coming to SJSU

These numbers are a guess and will be wrong
San Jose State University is going to have wireless networking across the entire campus. This is great and will greatly increase student Internet access at our campus. This network will depend on SJSUOne as an authentication mechanism and we support SJSUOne at the Help Desk. As of now, the scheduled go-live date is August 15, 2005. This is going to result in a projected wireless user growth from 4,000 wireless users to 12,000 users in September, 2005. Based on past trends 12% of all users seek help at semester start-up from the ITSS Help Desk, and this could result in a huge number of folks seeking support at the Help Desk. By using the services of other support facilities and creating better on-line documentation we may be able to get some mitigation of this from the other Help Desks at SJSU, but there are other new initiatives, like ePhone Book and the removal of UNIX authentication for wireless that will create more demand for Help Desk support. What I show here is my own best guess based on past usage trends. If I am anywhere near right, this will make September 2005 be around twice as busy as the busiest month we have ever had, September 2004.

KRON4 Blogger Meet-Up Great Event

On Saturday I attended the first blogger meet-up [see their write-up] at KRON4 TV in San Francisco. SJSU was well represented. My co-worker Harish Chakravarthy also was there as was SJSU Alum Scott Mace. This was a great event and it was exciting to hear how KRON4 is contemplating embracing the blogosphere. It was also great running into some of the folks whom I have met in Emerging Technology there. This was a fun event.

The Cluetrain Manifesto States that Markets are Conversations

The Cluetrain Manifesto is an important record of the shift in organizations from top-down, to bottom-up. If markets are conversations how can education, and educational institutions, not also be conversations? As we have seen on this and other blogs; increasingly the voices that are defining, and redefining, the institution are not coming from the top they are coming from the bottom. In my opinion, if there is a global conversation going on about the university, and all the universities of the world, it is not being conducted on the relatively static pages that are represented in the .edu domain, this conversation is happening on the edge, even beyond the edge in domains like blogspot.com, typepad.com or other personal domains ending in things other than .edu. It is the students and the faculties and the staffs who are leading the charge, not by passing edicts or setting policies, but by adding to the global conversation through their blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds.

The question is, as the voice of the institutions shift will the universities of the world accept loosing control of the message? This is a new world view. The loss of control may be seen as a loss of power (hint, it is not.) Will some universities respond as the institutions of the day responded to Galileo when he had the audacity to say that the Earth revolved around the sun? In my opinion when top university administrators, deans, and department chairs start blogging, we will know they are starting to get it.

Big universities in a small world

Seth Godin is a sharp guy! In his blog he wrote this piece, Small is the new big. He was not talking about education. He could have been, perhaps he should have been. Another smart fellow (and SJSU Alum) Robert Scoble wrote this post about thinking small. In my opinion big is one of our biggest problems. One of the most frustrating aspects of working for the university for me is all the times I have seen us let great opportunities slip through our fingers because of our Byzantine bureaucracy. That is a result of our bigness, the absence of a need to produce a profit and our historic lack of competitive pressure. Do our students care about big, do they want us to be big? Yes, now they do.

But, when the business community, parents and students start to see more value in degrees from smaller universities that are more willing to innovate, more able to adjust to learning needs and use more efficient teaching methods to produce better learning experiences and improved learning outcomes; we could be in big trouble. The world is increasingly getting small and we are used to our big size and our geography protecting our student base and feeding us constant enrollments. But, emerging technologies are destroying the insulation of geography and we have to prepare to compete and sometimes it seems as though we don't even know the meaning of the word.

Beware, camera phones great for copying exams

The shadow is my hand holding the phone. Just to see what it would look like I took a quick snap of this document using my camera phone. It was so easy and fast that I could have easily acted like I was answering an unexpected phone call when I was doing it. Imagine a student during an exam saying, "Oh, it is my baby sitter!" The student may not even have a child, but without your knowledge the exam could have been photographed and pix mailed to a whole group of other people in the time it takes to say, "the cough medicine is in the medicine cabinet."

Recommended Listening: Two great podcasts

Recommended listening (podcasts)
Robert Scoble on Reboot, where is the world going? [MP3]
SJSU Alum Robert Scoble is in Europe and here you can listen to him speak about the future of Emerging Technology. This is a great podcast to listen to to get a real world perspective of where this whole world of new technology is going. An added bonus. The presentation is recorded on Skype, so you can hear what a transatlantic free Skype session sounds like! Thanks to Ryan Sholin for turning me onto this session.

Jim Wenzloff Podcasts about my wife's dress [MP3]
This is way cool. Jim Wenzloff gets it! I posted this post about my wife's dress. Really it is about the information exchange where I was able to stop in the middle of a bicycle ride and using my mobile phone take a picture of my wife's new dress and using my blog tell the world about it. It is about the power of using portable devices and weblogs as tools of global mass communications. It is about how easy this all is and about how it empowers people and changes education.
Thanks to PubSub, I was able to stay on top of these conversations. The world is an amazing place!

Cell cameras to improve safety

Using devices like cell phone cameras; employees and students have a powerful tool to literally expose unsafe work and learning environments. Everything from chemical handling methods to trip hazards can be visually documented and reported. If institutions do not make changes to create safer work and learning conditions the images can be posted, anonymously if necessary, to the Internet on weblogs and the process of either cleaning up the hazard, or not, can be reported.

I tamed down my previous "manifesto" post

I noticed that Ryan Sholin had linked to my prior post and used the "old" URL for it. The new URL is different because I changed the title and Blogger changes URLs when you change titles. The current post is here and it is toned down a bit. Why is it toned down? Let's just say at the moment my blog is "a matter" between the university and I. I am arguing freedom of speech. I don't think there is much chance of me ending up like Mark Jen. But, let me make clear, what I post represents my opinion, not the University, as a citizen, a taxpayer and an alum my opinion is something I am entitled to share. This is a public institution after all. As a citizen passionate about education, emerging technology and SJSU; I like the manifesto idea. Please note, I am writing this on my lunch hour...

Susie buys a new dress (and changes the world)

When I am riding my bicycle I keep my cell phone in my back pocket. I was riding my bicycle through Los Gatos yesterday when my cell phone rang. It was my wife Sue who asked where I was. I told her I was in downtown Los Gatos. She said good, she was there too and was trying on a new dress and she wanted me to see it. I said, okay, I will be there in five minutes. I arrived, we looked at the dress and liked it. I said, wait a minute and I took her picture. Then I blogged her picture so the whole world can potentially see her new dress.

Susie buys a new dress, is hardly big news. But, this information transaction is illustrative of the huge changes happening in our society. In the 90's ubiquitous portable phones came into reality. Now 50% of those phones have cameras. According to a story I read in this morning's paper those in-phone cameras will soon be as good as regular cameras. What will this mean for news coverage? What will this mean for politics? What will this mean for education? What will this mean for the world?

Imagine if folks on the top of the world trade center on 9/11 had such phones. I remember the chant during the 68 democratic convention in Chicago. The crowd chanted, "the whole world is watching." Soon it will be, "the whole world is broadcasting." When that happens there will be no keeping secrets anywhere.

On redefining the university

The Internet allows, in fact I believe someday will force, universities to do what we do not do well, listen to our students and the people who work for us. Our university is likely a very typical confusing maze of little fiefdoms where students as well as employees struggle to get through their academic day and yet they are seldom consulted about how to improve it. We waste taxpayers dollars on redundant resources. We have frustrating problems that go unsolved and our customers have been virtually powerless to do anything about it.

All that is changing and changing thanks to the Internet. By empowering students, faculty, staff and the public through emerging technology tools like weblogs, podcasts and RSS; the students, faculty and staff are quietly taking back the university. This mirrors the kind of societal changes slowly happening in business and government. If business is a conversation can education not also be one?

The old top-down principles of handing down decrees from the ivory towers are changing. This vertical method of controlling the message where the administration is on top and the students and employees are on bottom and the information flow from the campus community to the world is tightly controlled is gone. Now everybody has an equal voice on the Internet and we can all participate in how to make the university, and all the universities of the world, better places to learn, collaborate and exchange ideas. This is the global conversation for academia and it is very, very long overdue!

If leaders in education don't see that, perhaps that is because they just don't get it. At least not yet.