Goodbye Campus Network Storage?

With a one-two-three the need for network storage may have just become a thing of the past.

• Dropbox, the market mindshare leader, released and announced a series of updates.
• Microsoft sneakily beat Google to the punch by announcing an update to their Skydrive.
• And lastly, Google finally announced their fabled G: Drive.

Here is the quick

• Dropbox now makes it easier than ever to use their website and to share files with anyone. Their free limit is still 2 GB though .edu email addresses provide 500 MB of free storage for each referral.
• Microsoft’s Skydrive provides 7 GB of storage space and is incorporated into Office which means it’s easier than ever to have access to your documents. But take note, their Skydrive app is only available on OS X 10.7.
• Google Drive provides 5 GB of storage space for free and syncs with a Google Account. A quick thought, .edu’s using Google Apps, this is for you.

The Questions

How much network storage is needed on-campus, especially at small colleges/universities, when products that provide more and more storage for free?

Of course, this approach puts data off-site but isn’t most of it already not on a campus network drive when it comes to students and faculty?

Students have trouble when a machine dies because their work is on their personal computer and faculty often has trouble when a laptop, that has been provided to them by the school, dies. Faculty using desktops in their office often don’t use the network drive and lose their data because it’s not on the network.

Would it be easier for support staff on the client side and the network side to say, “Install this and save all your documents in X folder. If anything goes wrong with the computer or if you work on another computer, tablet, or smartphone you will have access to the most recent version of your files.”

Schools cannot compete with the development cycle of large companies like Dropbox, Microsoft, and Google and yet the people they need to support are using tools built by these companies more and more.

Bandwidth? It is mostly eaten up by video not documents so there should be little issue there.

Your Take

• Has your school moved to an off-site solution for document storage for a small/medium/large school?
• Which service(s) were considered?
• What reasons would keep your institution from moving to this type of model?

The Sarah Lawrence College Technology Survey 2009-2010 Response Numbers and Chart

A 29.97% response rate from the Sarah Lawrence Community without any incentives… Fantastic!

Below is the response chart for the tech survey. As you can see the response rate jumps significantly after a reminder is sent. Below the chart are the numbers used to create the graph.

Additional data will be posted soon. The survey close at midnight last night.

Click to view complete graph

Date    Total Responses    Complete Responses    Incomplete Responses    Remaining        Time
4/13/2010*    0    0    0    2161    launch    12:00
4/14/2010    161    136    25    2025        9:00
4/15/2010    179    152    27    2009        9:00
4/16/2010*    186    159    27    2002    reminder
4/17/2010
4/18/2010
4/19/2010    285    240    45    1921        9:15
4/20/2010*    295    251    44    1910    reminder    9:53
4/21/2010    359    304    55    1857        10:00
4/22/2010    369    313    56    1848        12:00
4/23/2010*    372    316    56    1845    reminder    9:00
4/24/2010
4/25/2010
4/26/2010*    432    368    64    1793    reminder    9:54
4/27/2010    557    467    90    1558    closed    9:13

* = reminder sent

The Sarah Lawrence College Technology Survey 2009-2010

After some tweaks based on feedback after last year’s initial technology survey I launched, what is now, the 2nd Annual Technology Survey at The Sarah Lawrence College using LimeSurvey. If you are in academia and use LimeSurvey please contact me if you are interested in using our survey at your campus.

This year we released the survey to the entire campus in one fell swoop – last year we released it in two phases: students then faculty and staff.

I will be tracking the daily numbers and will post response rates as I did last year.

The important changes/additions include:

• iPad interest and purchase plans
• eBook interest
• eReader interest and purchase plans
• Microsoft Office ownership, use, and interest in purchasing a discounted copy
• Open text field asking for suggested uses of any technology for use on- and off-campus. We asked them to think big!
• Due to the financial standing of the institution no incentive was made available.

Stay tuned.

Students go ga-ga for ‘Undo Send’

Every time I tell students about the lab feature Undo Send within seconds they are giddy with excitement about how much this is going to save them. That’s right – going to. Inevitably their thoughts go back to an email they wish they could have unsent but the possibility of never having that worry again is mesmerizing.

At a student club leader presentation two weeks ago I reviewed a number of labs and explained Undo Send. Note – I had approximatley 5-10 minutes to review the entire Google Apps suite so I was going quickly. About 3 seconds after I explained Undo Send and had paused for effect one student literally gasped with jaw agape! You could see the “OMG HFCIT FTW” look across her face. She was elated.

Though not at profound a reaction, possibly because of the brain melt that has affected them, students also smile a the fact that they can change the undo time from 5 seconds to 10 seconds.

Tasks has graduated to become an official part of GMail, when will Undo Send.

Nobody has snubbed the lab feature. Yet. Will someone? I’d be amazed.

Syncing a GMail Calendar with Entourage and iCal w/Calgoo

I have read blogs and forums on how to do this but ran into troubles or became frustrated by the instructions.

Background – My primarily calendar is in GMail. All my calendars are caldev’d in iCal. Entourage was recently installed on my work machine meaning I had zero events in its calendar.

Without noting clicks for ‘next’ or other similar buttons Here is the ultra streamlined version…

1. Open Entourage
   1. in Preferences, Sync Services, click Synchronize events and tasks with iCal and MobileMe
2. Open iCal and verify that a new calendar called ‘Exchange’ has been created
3. Open Calgoo
   1. create a new connection,
   2. use the Sync an Apple iCal Calendar with a Google Calendar option,
   3. name the connection — I used: ical 2 gmail,
   4. click iCal, click the box next to Entourage,
   5. enter your GMail user|pass,
   6. select a GMail calendar,
   7. and finish up
4. Optional – In the Calgoo settings change the Synchronization frequency; it is set to 1 hour by default.
5. In iCal, un-check the Entourage calendar so it is not displayed

If you run into any troubles with these steps please post a comment below.

Voila. Your GMail, caldev’d iCal, and Entourage calendars will sync every xx minutes. Add events in any of the three calendars noted (GMail, caldev’d iCal, Entourage) and you’ll see the new event in all three applications (web, iCal, Entourage) pending the Calgoo Synchronization frequency – I set mine to 10 minutes.

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Naming a Department with Library and Technical Staff Members

Recently I wrote to the NITLE Instructional Technologist listserv about naming a department with library and technical staff members. I have received a number of replies and want to share the results and elicit additional contributions. Below is the original email sent along with a link to the open spreadsheet.

Please pass along this blog or the link.

Good day all.

This email is geared toward understanding the naming conventions of groups/departments that consist of reference librarians, instructional technologists, and/or other technical or library staff. Here at Sarah Lawrence we have recently begun the process of merging reference librarians, instructional technologists, and a web developer into a group called – Research Instructional Group.

Previously Academic Computing was the name of the department for our instructional technologists and the web developer.

I have made a Google Spreadsheet editable by anyone with the hope that I, and others in process or interested in this concept, can see what type of name standardization has, is, or is not happening within academe.

Naming a Department with Library and Technical Staff Members

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlmkSVh2igkIdExtM2M3c1pSQkRoRlE0QUs5VzZTdVE&hl=en

Thanks to any and all that are able to contribute.

When will my Gryphon Mail account be deleted?

As graduation approaches Sarah Lawrence students begin asking the question “When will my Gryphon Mail account be deleted?” There are two ways to answer this question.

The short answer is…

Never.

The long answer is…

Sarah Lawrence College students (undergraduate and graduate) that complete their degree keep their SLC @gm.slc.edu email for life. There is no need to use it every week, month, year to keep it active as was necessary in the past. Remember, the address is a great tool to use when applying to jobs, sending out your work (writing, music, etc.), reaching out to SLC alum, etc.

Alums that graduated before Gryphon Mail was implemented can claim their Gryphon Mail account here: https://my.slc.edu/emailforlife/
Your account is waiting for you.

Please refer to the Help Desk page to read the Gryphon Mail FAQs if you have questions.

Tech Survey Response Graph

While the student body was taking the Tech Survey I noted the response rates daily. Below is the end result.

Of significance is the dates where the data takes a significant upswing. Dates in the graph marked with *’s indicate that the invitation or a reminder was sent to those that had not completed the survey. The graph was created using Gryphon Mail Docs. The spreadsheet can be viewed here.

RSS SucceSS?

Techies try to teach friends and family about the simplicity of RSS. More sites than ever before offer access to RSS feeds for, well, name it. Now, 10 years after the first version of the concept was developed (March 1999) one of the greatest technologies on the inter-tubes is used by a small percentage of people.

Why?

I have presented workshops on how RSS can save time and consolidate information someone is interested in. I have set-up friends and family to use a number of RSS applications (on- and off-line) but to this day I am still one of the only people in my circle of friends and family that use an RSS reader. I’m baffled.

Things take time but… 10+ years?

I can only feel that the implementation simply has not found the proper niche yet. Very few people hesitate to log-on to a web based system to check their email or their social network updates. How is it that UI developers have not considered this type of ‘feed’ into their own systems? If I were able to log-on to Facebook and could see my friends news updates and news updates from my favorite sources… Well, I just might spend more time on Facebook learning about something in the news and then share it with my friends, colleagues, and/or everyone else I’m ‘friends’ with on the site.

Maybe this is the way RSS will work. Maybe it isn’t.

Do you have thoughts on how to make RSS more accessible to the masses? Have you found the ‘key’ to inspire someone to use RSS? If you have, please comment below.

Too many calendars… Not anymore!

This is great news. Instead of posting multiple calendars for others to keep track of you or events it is possible to gathering everything together and post one, that’s right, one calendar with everything in it. Voila! Brilliant.

Displaying Events from Multiple Google Calendars in a Single Embedded Calendar View
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/displaying-events-from-multiple-google-calendars-in-a-single-embedded-calendar-view/