mpasiewicz's blog

During my time with EDUCAUSE, I’ve learned about a range of techniques for getting faculty to use technology in the classroom, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone combine the use of liquid nitrogen and a laptop.  This professor was truly trying to shatter expectations about digital distractions in the classroom. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5w-7IpI0fI&feature=player_embedded

Here’s a brief overview from OU’s Student Newspaper …
http://www.oudaily.com/news/2010/feb/18/professor-shatters-distracting-laptop/

Heh, I know I should have done more to increase visibility of Diane Sieber’s approach to curbing the rate of virtual absenteeism  described here … we could have saved that poor laptop ;)
http://66.162.107.141:8787/comatters/20090324_01.mp3

Google recently announced plans to pursue a trial that would bring 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connectivity to select communities.  They appear to be targeting municipalities, but seem to be open to a range of considerations. 

I haven’t blogged in a while, but news of this really captured my attention, so I thought I’d do my part to try and raise visibility of the effort.  I’ve spent the better part of the morning reading their literature and thinking about the prospects for the ripple effects of a project like this and what it could mean for higher education to be deeply integrated into the effort.  Google even hinted at the potential for education prompting visitors to imagine “collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3D video of a university lecture.” They also list a question about the number of educational service jobs in their RFI.

Big schools have long been compared to small cities and the relationship between educational institutions and their municipal counterparts is well understood.  Knowing Google’s affinity for higher education, it is no great leap to consider that cities that serve as hosts to a mix of universities, community colleges and K12 schools could be very attractive.   

I can envision a plan that would start with fiber-to-the-dorm and surrounding student housing and then cascading forward into the broader community.  Imagine the demand that would be created by the students living with these types of speeds and the impact that it could have over time on National Broadband Policy efforts as geographic sprawl begins after graduation.  I expect that once someone lives with those types of speeds for any amount of time, going back to the type of speeds that we have today would be tough to accept.  Imagine the impact on the local community when they realize the magnetic properties associated with equipping both small businesses and a local citizenry with next generation internet services. 

I would guess that cities close to gigapops and those with Internet2 and NLR connected schools could be likely to attract special attention, but who knows …. perhaps those regions that have experimented with municipal networks could also be candidates as a result of their institutional fluency with deployments of similar ilk.   Given what I’ve read of what about the impact of local governments on the move to fiber, I could see that being a factor.  It could be that Google is primed to work municipalities that could influence utility companies to integrate their energy services into the equation.  Perhaps those with government agencies on site could also garner special attention. 

The deadline for the RFI is March 26, 2010 … so higher-ed CIOs, it could be time to put in a call to your university president and get the ball rolling.  It’s also time to start firing up emails to your colleagues abroad who are working with comparable bandwidth in countries that have it … perhaps a connection made at a prior annual conference?  You could also check out our Member Directory and Affinity Finder, of course ;)

While browsing around ReadWriteWeb’s site, I discovered this news.  Interestingly, I could also see it tying very closely to an initiative aimed at addressing their rather complementary article,  How Colleges Can Better Nurture Startups.

Whoever lands this deal should be primed to become a telecommuter’s dream and I can imagine that co-working facilities will crop up around the area as well …. which could provide an interesting compliment to a university’s ability to incubate start-ups. 

It will be really interesting to see where this goes.  What do you think?  Good/bad/ugly?  Should education be agnostic about this type of activity or should it be working aggressively to incorporate itself into these types of initiatives?   What are the risks associated with these types of efforts?  Are we on the cusp of a broadband-industrial complex that will threaten the very fiber of society?  LOL, I doubt it, but seriously, what are the risks?  Would participation be a massive distraction and costly investment that yields no meaningful impact on the outcomes associated with research and education, or is there some transformational capacity that has yet to be realized?  I’m looking forward to your comments; in the meantime, I’ve embedded a video about this activity below.

Over the last couple of years, I've filled my commute with lots of great information from a range of podcasts often tailored to my own personal interests ... that is until recently ... when my list of feeds somehow got corrupted (or otherwise disappeared). As a result, I've rediscovered public radio and have been tuning into my local station. One of these days I want to spend some time thinking about the pros and cons of my consumption habits, but for now, I thought I'd pass along a little gem that I recently discovered.

Colorado Public Radio's Ryan Waner recently sat down with University of Colorado at Boulder professor Diane Sieber to talk about how's she's working with students to manage digital distractions. In their interview, Dr. Sieber shared some thoughts on the results of an informal study about students who were "virtually absent" during one of her classes. Interestingly she established a feedback loop aimed at developing self-awareness about managing attention and the negative effects of being digitally distracted. She also shared some interesting thoughts about establishing social norms that helped students create a climate aimed at policing distractions born of peers using digital devices.

You can listen to the interview here
http://66.162.107.141:8787/comatters/20090324_01.mp3

I've been sitting on this blog entry for a while now as I've other priorities to manage, but this is one of the most interesting interviews that I've heard in quite sometime and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the topic. Frankly, I guess I'm glad this post was delayed, because Google just upgraded my GrandCentral account and I thought this would be a great time to see what it would mean to use Google Voice to collect some comments. Use the widget below, leave me a voice mail, and I'll try to post your comments (and the transcript) as soon as possible. 'Should make for an interesting experiment.

The folks at Opera have created a new search engine, the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA). This tool has produced some interesting stats about the structure of the web and is somewhat akin to the pet project I've been working on ... not just akin to it, but might outright put it to shame. I'd encourage you take a peak at Brain Wilson's early findings ... and I LOVE the following note from his introduction.

What follows is not as informal and witty as a blog nor as dry and formal as a research paper - it lies somewhere in between. Those expecting rigorous academia will forgive the occasional humorous turns of phrase or moments where personal observations and experience intrude - I try to limit it to places where they seem useful or interesting. For blog junkies, this will grow into a long, multi-part saga (hopefully) worthy of a company from Scandinavia.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/

I just ran across an interesting article about Abilene Christian University's iPhone Program. 650 freshmen with GPS devices. Interesting. See also this story about a university requiring GPS support of all students.

I was carousing around the site earlier today and ran across a really fun job posting. Check it out!
http://www.educause.edu/JobOpportunities/UniversityEthicalHackerPenetra/126930

We quitely relaunched a new version of our old Peer Directory Service earlier this year and exteneded it an a variety of different ways. Several weeks ago, we added another new feature ... the ability to browse by events you've attended. If you haven't stumbled across it recently, you might consider giving it a whirl. Just before I started this message, there were almost 3,000 people that opted to make their profile available in the new system. The annual conference is a big event, but hopefully this will prove an interesting way to get a jump start on the face-to-face networking you'll be doing in Orlando. Now, we just need to get more folks tagging themselves! Common now ... aren't there more people interested in open source?

http://www.educause.edu/Community/Browse/People/575

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a great, but a regrettably very short podcast about a new book from Hal Abelson and Harry Lewis. Highly recommended, but left me wanting for more.

http://chronicle.com/media/audio/v54/i49/abelson_lewis/

It seems the authors are also operating a blog about topics relevant to the book :)
http://www.bitsbook.com/blog/

No, this article isn't about SMS or cloud computing ... its about text, curiosity and tag clouds. On some level that seems a bit passé ... tag clouds again? Isn't that old news? Yes, sure, but Catherine Howell's recent commentary on my little home page experiment left me wondering what else might be gleaned from more experimentation on tag clouds as a means of visualizing bodies of text (as compared to tags about text). So, once again, I decided to invest some more time on a not so little side project. I'm not sure if its as interesting this time around, but I thought I'd go ahead and share my results (and highlight the process that went into creating them).

The university home page search I created over the weekend was interesting from a number of perspectives, but perhaps one of the most interesting insights to be gleaned from it involves the depth to with Google has entangled itself with higher education's use of the web. Almost 70% of those sites I captured data from mention Google somewhere in the source of their home page. Meanwhile, more than half of them appear to use Google Analytics. Of course, this is just home page data ... a whole range of sub sites exist within the context of a university's web presence and their authorship, governance and oversight are often highly distributed. One might imagine many more touchpoints interspersed throughout the vast spectrum of web pages hosted by a university. I'd love to get empirical data on this (and other use cases) from a broader, deeper sample ... and who knows, maybe I'll find the time.