Tag: Education

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Business Life Technology

Saying Goodbye

Everyone seems to want to say goodbye to IT, but I have some things I would like to say “goodbye” to in the technology world.

  • Optical drives. They take up an insane amount of space for something that I use maybe once a year … if that much anymore. Disk space is limited. They are noisy. They have moving parts. Just get rid of the things once and for all.
  • I might be alone in this, but I would love to do away with hinges on technology items. Laptops. Convertible tablets. Game Boy Advanced SPs. Just get rid of the things. Almost no company can make a good one (some ThinkPads get really close) and they are the weakest point of almost any device. I would love it if we could just do away with hinges. This is a major reason I would love to go iPad + desktops only in the future.
  • Can we finally do away with printers? I know some people still swear by them, and I am fully aware we are not going to get rid of them, but they are really annoying and a major cause of headaches. Their drivers are flaky, at best. They are loud. They are noisy. They have MANY moving parts. They break … all of the time. Can we finally do away with these things!?
  • The phrase “I’m not very good with computers” should be retired. I understand that you might not be comfortable with everything involved with computers and modern technology, but pulling out this excuse everything time something doesn’t go exactly the way you expected it is more annoying than endearing. There are plenty of times things go wrong for me … that’s part of the business. Just ask for your help and we’ll get through it together.
  • All current, standard USB cables. The whole lot of them are terrible. Having the Lightning connector on my iPad mini and iPhone 5 has seriously spoiled me … when it comes to good cables. Reversible. Solid-feeling. All USB cables are a sham. There is hope since the future of USB looks to be reversible but … we have yet to see what that will look like. Even the Thunderbolt port and cables are light years ahead of USB. Shameful, really.
  • Websites trying to sell something without clearly listing a price. Usually they are something like “Request a Quote” or “Call for Pricing” instead of clearly listing a pricing. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the final pricing … but I want to know what I am getting into so that I don’t have to waste my time. The likelihood of me leaving your site if you don’t list pricing increases almost ten-fold.
  • Websites trying to sell a software product without good, and representative, screen shots. Every operating system comes with some way to take screen shots. DO. IT. I understand that design is not only what it looks like, but I want to know what it looks like. If your product pages are huge blocks of marketing text … I’m going elsewhere. Immediately.

This is not a complete list, but you get the idea.

Categories
Business Technology

A Collegiate Opportunity

I wanted a good title, so this is what I came up with.

The rise of Apple, mobile devices, and the quandary Microsoft currently finds itself in with the uncertainty at CEO along with product issues (Windows Phone, Windows 8, etc.) is providing a unique opportunity for 3rd party software providers to get into colleges and universities by providing a better experience than Microsoft can offer with the influx of non-Microsoft devices.

Providing services for all platforms is where these 3rd parties need to be headed. While the “cloud” might sound all fluffy, there are concerns about security and control which need to be addressed but they need to be addressed in such a way that there is still flexibility as to what devices can be used and where. That is a weak point right now.

Apple isn’t going to provide it, and Google is going to keep it to themselves s (on their own servers and services) so it leaves an opening. Companies who have been pushed into the background would do well to take advantage of this unique opportunity.

I added Collegiate to the title because I see it where I work. Students no longer use the file server space we provision for them and even many faculty and staff members have gone outside to find the flexibility they crave. Providing a solution to provide flexibility along with appropriate amounts of control would go a long way to solving many issues.

When I entered college in 2005 it was still relatively rare for an undergraduate to have a laptop (at least where I went, a small private college in the midwest). Now, however, a single student will have three or four distinct devices attached to their name … and that doesn’t even count the ride of Xbox and Playstation as not just a staple for gaming entertainment, but entertainment in general. I spent the better part of a couple of days figuring out which headers our firewall was stripping from just the Playstation 3’s Netflix application because it was affecting enough students on campus for someone to finally contact me.

Those are huge changes and more are on the way. Just today a student showed up with a 7″ ASUS Windows tablet and was having issues connecting to WiFi on campus. Besides being an abysmal experience (I’m sorry, it just is for me), it is ANOTHER new type of device to try to take account of.

The pace of change means that IT departments are looking for ways to continue to provide tools to students and faculty. 3rd parties have a great opportunity right now to provide something, anything, to make this easier and/or better.

It won’t be there forever.

Categories
Business Technology

How I Use Request Tracker

We just went public with our Request Tracker (RT) instance here at Martin Luther College this past week and so I thought I’d do a little post on how I am currently using it to try to help me get stuff done … and more importantly, make sure I get the right stuff done.

We have a support email address which feeds directly into Request Tracker every five minutes and I’m trying to get into the habit of asking people to submit requests themselves so that I can better track what is getting done and what needs to be completed.

From there, a ticket is automatically created in the General queue and then an email is sent off to myself and our support supervisor so that we can triage and assign the tickets to whomever it might need to be. We keep a number of other queues for internal purposes and to easily see where our time is needed.

I then use RT to handle almost all communication between myself and the requestor so that I can easily look into the history to find what has been said. I have custom searches organizing my tickets first by status (open on top), then priority (higher number higher up), and then finally by most recently updated (via a reply). This gives me, at a glade, a look at what I am working on, which are the most important, and then which have been replied to most recently as well. It works for now but there will be tweaks.

I use one queue, Server, to keep track of the changes needed at the next maintenance period. Right now I have seven updates queued up which range from updating our XenServer stack to replacing the batteries in our network rack UPS. I can then pull those tickets together to plan for what we are going to try to accomplish at the next maintenance period. It also lightens my cognitive load by allowing me to dump things into RT where I can refer back when there is a need.

I also just setup an Outage queue where our intense of Icinga will dump its emails and then RT will create a ticket for each outage. Then I can track what was done to fix the issue and refer back if there is a question in the future. I need to look into automatically closing tickets or not sending the final online notice so that there isn’t TOO much noise in the queue.

The next issue will be reporting, but that is for another time. For now, it is “good enough” to have a place to put down our needs and keep track of what is being done. Having that has been a huge help and allowing people to send in their support requests and have a ticket automatically generated has been good PR for the department too.

There is always room for tweaking, and I’ll report on that in the future as well.

Categories
Technology

Reinventing Education

Please watch this video about Kahn Academy. This might not be the future of education, but it is at least someone trying to push some traditional boundaries.

For me, the most eye-opening thing was the data that was available for people to look at (at this point, teachers), and how amazing it was to see how students varied in how quickly they moved through material not just in general, but each individual student hitting some bumps but then accelerating.

It was just really impressive.

Categories
Life Technology

Classroom Seating for Today

Thanks to Nate Beran for pointing me at this video.

It is node by Steelcase and it is just about exactly what I would wish for seating in a classroom today. Flexible, designed with technology in mind, it moves, and you can store stuff below the seat and it comes with you. SUCH A GREAT IDEA!