I’m just back from the 4th Minnesota Instructional Technologists (MinIT) symposium this time hosted by Carleton College at the Weitz Center for Creativity. My excellent colleague Barron Koralesky from Macalester College and myself started this group in 2009 (though we had been talking about the idea for two years before that). It is a gathering of instructional technology professionals from regional Colleges and Universities. We’ve done various formats over the years and keep on trying new formats — we’re an experimental group!
This year Carleton organized a large group discussion that was centered around topics submitted by the attendees during registration. The majority of the schools are on moodle so we had much talk about transition to version 2.x. Hopefully the few that weren’t on moodle yet will join the fun soon – <wink>. Most of us are opening up our beta sites to faculty before fall so they can get used to the changes. Early feedback from faculty generally has been good. Even though moodle 2 has “moved the cheese” faculty are adapting and liking the new features and new user interface standards.
I am recently back from the Educause Security conference 2012 — my first time going to that conference. I should note that I am the security officer for the campus so this was a great opportunity to connect with folks who have been doing this for a long time.
It was quite a good conference and, based on a few discussions with other attendees, one role of the conference is to leave you unsettled due to how many security threats there are. I mean, there are a lot. And hearing from large Universities (that have security departments of 3-5 staff) about how they need to manage multiple data breaches of personally identifiable information (PII) leaves one restless at night. The challenge with large Universities is how distributed information and systems can be. At a small College with a single central IT department there is more control over the systems housing institutional data (and clear accountability).
REN-ISAC (Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center) kept coming up and it clearly brings much value to its members. First thing when I’m back in the office, join REN-ISAC. One product I was very interested in was Cloudlock — enterprise control over your google docs domain. You can retain docs after someone leaves, retain documents for legal discovery, audit access rights to comply with FERPA, HIPAA, PCI — just pick your abbreviation. Of course it costs per user so this could offset any licensing savings you might be recouping with moving to google apps but it provides enterprise management tools that would make me rest easier at night.
This year at the Educause annual conference several of my Frye colleagues gave a panel presentation on their experiences post-Frye with attaining leadership positions (look in Resources tab for the PPT). It was very informative and hopefully the video will be available online for all to see. I jotted down many notes and had these take-aways for those looking to move into leadership positions:
Candidate searches in an IT environment often ask the question “What will the IT environment be like in 5 years?” Looking ahead in IT is nearly impossible, even 1 year is a challenge. I enjoy listening to the end-of-the-year radio shows where the tech commentators listen to their predictions from 12 months prior and comment on them. Most are quite funny. Could I have predicted the iPad or ubiquitous mobility 5 years ago? Let’s see what I was blogging about 5 years ago.
Turn on the WABAC machine and let’s see. It’s 2006. Pluto was demoted. iTunes store had sold 1.5 billion songs in 3 years (it was only 3 year sold). It’s up to 10 billion now. Daniel Powter was topping the charts with “Bad Day.” My blog posts were few but I was working on adding functionality to our moodle install as well as going to Educause nationals. My focus at Educause 2006 was an interplanetary Internet (a very good keynote), learning spaces were still hot, outsourcing resnet, posting more materials online causing an increase in printing volume, web 2.0 and CMS 2.0.
One of the enjoyable aspects of this blog is using it to gather and process topics I’m involved in at work. On my front burner right now: PCI-DSS. One of my colleagues has been working on this mostly and now I’m joining in.
What is it you ask? I’m sure you’re dying to know. It’s a set of requirements that anyone who processes credit cards must adhere to so that personal information and card information is protected. It was started in 2001 by Visa and Mastercard, then called Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP). It’s since expanded and became PCI-DSS and in 2010 PCI-DSS v 2.0 came out. One result of PCI-DSS is that receipts only should be showing the last 4 digits of your card number.