For the past few years we have provided Mambo based sites for the over 600 recognized student organizations at UNC Chapel Hill. In a month or so we will migrate to Joomla and convert existing sites on a by-request basis. Managing these sites hasn’t really turned out to be that much of an issue, although we do struggle with the scale sometimes. To support the new sites, we’re moving the file storage to XSAN and the hosting to XServe, which certainly ups the technical complexity a bit. We will also be hosting the PHP portion of Joomla ourselves, instead of using the central IT group’s web servers. There are several reasons behind the change, but they are primarily technical and it just makes things simpler for us to run some in-house developed site management tools on our own hardware.
The same server will also be hosting the Carolina Wiki, a student-run information site. This comes from our continued partnership and working relationship with student government and is going to be a first for this campus and probably one of the few officially sanctioned student driven Wikis at a major University. There are a whole bunch of unanswered questions with this initiative, but we are committed to seeing how it works and to sorting out the issues as they arise.
Should be an interesting next couple of months.
September 15th, 2008
Techcrunch has an interesting post about an apparently upcoming iPhone social network app. I agree with much of what he is saying, but I think the real killer app here will be someone combining the rich connected experience of the iPhone with the user capital of facebook, myspace, etc. Although people seem to be willing to re-create their identities on new platforms as they arise (friendster anyone?), the mobile app that can leverage the relationships that people already have and enhance that with location-based services and other mobile add-ons could really be on to something.
Dodgeball was supposed to do this to some degree, although they had the same problem of making me add all my friends again, but Google really hasn’t done much publicly with them since the acquisition. Facebook mobile is handy, but it’s basically just a reformatted facebook page and doesn’t derive any extra value from the device it is running on. Gypsii seems to be onto this sort of thing, but I haven’t heard of tons of users on that service yet.
The challenge behind a lot of what people try to do in the mobile space is the carriers and their desire to lock users into contracts or the services they will or will not make available to others (and location is a key one they are struggling with exposing).
June 3rd, 2008
Not really a huge surprise, but it seems that Facebook applications are not very well contained by their security model. Given the history of Facebook and data privacy (see news feed, beacon) I don’t think there is anything really surprising here. There has always been a certain amount of naiveté on the part of the Facebook management team and it’s not a big wonder that this extends to the security model for applications. The part that is disturbing is that data from your friends would also be mined even if they had not installed the application in question. That is a fundamental flaw.
If I want to opt-in to an application accessing my profile, that’s fine and I have control over it. However, that does not give an app the right to discover information about my friends who have not opted in.
Facebook’s response is that they have a team of people constantly looking for applications that violate the terms of service. If they actually had sandboxes and partitions in place to prevent the violations in the first place, they could use these people for something much more useful for growing their company. I find it hard to conceive of how a human monitoring team can track down and extinguish an app like this before it had already collected a lot of data. Facebook really needs to fundamentally rethink their approach to privacy, particularly when it comes to 3rd party applications.
Even if it is not of much use for identity theft (unless you’ve really been stupid about what you put in your profile), it does expose the key asset that Facebook owns - the information about their users.
May 1st, 2008
This solid article in the NY Times really does a nice job of encapsulating a lot of the challenges coming for higher ed. We constantly seem to be struggling with communicating with our students. Mass e-mail is fairly ineffective, at UNC we really have no functional portal (and in the age of search, I’m not truly convinced portals are going to be all that useful). This quote really sums up the issue nicely
Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.”
When our students bring a network of reliable sources to campus with them, it is a real challenge to get them to add the University in as one of those sources. We struggle to get information like cell phone numbers for emergency messaging, local address, current e-mail addresses, etc. all of which our students are freely divulging to Facebook. At times we resort to looking up personal information for our students on Facebook because the University systems don’t contain the data we need.
If you look at a simple cost / benefit perspective, this makes little sense. Students and their families are paying significant sums of money to the University and you would think we would be seen as adding value to the data they provide us. However, quite the opposite seems to be taking place where students divulge lots of very valuable information to private companies for free. The issue obviously isn’t cost, it’s benefit.
Given the expansive networks of trust that students are coming to campus with, this challenge is likely going to get more difficult. We need to focus more on the benefit side of the equation, freeing our useful content from the boxes it currently resides in and plugging feeds of information into the streams of data being processed by our students. This means taking risks, trying new things and not waiting for commercial products to be developed and supported by large companies. We need to be on the forefront of things like OpenSocial, and the Facebook Platform, leveraging these services for all their are worth (and they are worth quite a lot to our students).
I’ve got some ideas kicking around for this summer and I think I have a good student coder who will help translate some of those into functional tools. We’ll be looking to build on these foundations, take some risks and push things a bit in order to move closer to our students.
March 28th, 2008
In my inbox just now:
Dear Friends,
I would be very glad if you accept to be appointed as my business associatein your country and earn 17% as commission.
If interested,get back to me.
Note this is not a SCAM.
Yours truly,Dr.Geets
March 12th, 2008
Students shun cell phone alerts
COLUMBIA, MO. - The massacre at Virginia Tech last year sent colleges nationwide scrambling to improve how they get alerts to students during crises on campus. One solution: text messages sent to cell phones.
But while hundreds of campuses have adopted text alerts, most students are not embracing them, even when they consider their mobile phones indispensable.
Omnilert, a Northern Virginia company that provides an emergency alert system called e2Campus to more than 500 campuses, reports an average enrollment rate among students, faculty and staff of just 39 percent.
At UNC Chapel Hill we are struggling with this as well. I am becoming increasingly convinced it is because we are going at this the wrong way. Opt-in systems, even mandatory systems (where students are likely to simply give false information to get past the prompts), are simply not going to solve this problem. What we have to do instead is become much more engaged with mobile technology and integrate it into our student’s lives both in and out of the classroom. We have to deliver value added services to students that we can then leverage for emergency notification when the need arises. If students are using cell phones for in class response systems instead of proprietary, closed loop clicker systems; if they are connecting with their organizations and IM teams via text message; if they can get directions and valuable information regardless of their physical location and without having to find a wifi hotspot; we then have the kind of saturation and penetration we need to make emergency alerting on these devices a viable tool. This is a much more substantial undertaking than simply buying a sign-up alert service and begging people to sign up. It requires a fundamental shift in much of the way the Universities tend to approach IT.
We need to admit that we no longer control the playing field. We have to become more flexible, building interfaces to systems that flow from (and even mimic) the systems our students are using in their day to day lives. We need to give up the “we must control the platform” mindset and pay much more attention to trends in the consumer space. We need to seamlessly integrate ourselves into the places where students live (and that no longer means posting flyers in residence halls). We are long past the days where a student’s first experience with computing was likely to occur in college, but we still seem to largely operate in that mindset. We simply can’t continue to think this way and expect our students to do what we want them to do. We have to pay a lot more attention to what they are telling us by their actions and inactions what they want to do.
February 29th, 2008
Abilene Christian University is giving an iPhone or iPod touch to incoming students. It’s good to be a small school sometimes, so much flexibility. Although it remains to be seen if this is truly implemented and picked up. Duke made a lot of noise with its iPod initiative, but the program was scaled back quite a bit from its initial scope after the first year or so.
As the 0.5 people who read this know, I have been thinking about mobile for some time. There are a lot of challenges, but Apple really did solve a major one with the interface and full Safari version on these devices. They have a well documented set of interface standards and tools for building very functional versions of sites to take advantage of the available screen real estate and the multi-touch interface.
Developing cross device mobile apps like we have been trying to do is much harder and to really drive adoption you almost need to do this sort of large scale deployment where you know what the end device is going to be. Having a trendy desired end device also makes it that much easier.
Universities have to get better at working consumer space technologies into their IT systems. The price points and media efforts of devices like the iPhone are driving these into the hands of our future students sooner and sooner in their lives. By the time they get to us, there is an expectation that they can continue to interact with the University as they have been with facebook, myspace, etc. We are not currently even close to meeting that expectation.
February 28th, 2008
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