Compare the predictions of two experts in their fields, extrapolating their personal visions forward a few decades:
“I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers.” – Thomas Watson, 1943
“In 50 years, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education.” – Sebastian Thrun, 2012
I’m carrying 2 computers with me right now, and each one would have been considered high-end workstation-class devices only a few years go. I use several more, as does everyone else. Watson wasn’t wrong - his vision clearly led to giant computers run by governments and giant corporations. Time sharing systems meant monstrous computers would be tasked with jobs from many client organizations. In 1943, he couldn’t have possibly seen microprocessors and coprocessors and GPU-offloading and miniaturization of devices. Or the internet.
I checked the Activity Monitor page1 for UCalgaryBlogs this morning, and noticed that there had been several thousand attempts by people (or “people”) to login using the usernames “admin” (the default WordPress admin account, which isn’t what’s used on UCalgaryBlogs) and “siteadmin” (which is the username for our server - scripts must have sniffed it from blog posts on the main site…)
Curious. I’d installed the fantastic Limit Login Attempts plugin to prevent people from brute-forcing logins, but that plugin only kicks in if the same IP address hits the login form repeatedly. This botnet attack was different - each request had a different IP address, and a different user-agent string. So Limit Login Attempts wasn’t blocking them, and my htaccess user-agent filter wasn’t catching them because they were either valid user-agents, or close enough to get through.
We’re now in the third week of the Fall 2013 Desire2Learn pilot, and I find myself using the Users > Statistics page to monitor the status of the environment. It’s an extremely coarse way to see if people are having problems (if there’s a problem, I’d assume the user count drops to near 0).
It’s not exactly ideal, though. What I’d love is something closer to what WordPress gives for recent activity, but for active users in the environment. Something kind of like:
Evan and I headed downtown for the finish of Stage 5 of the Tour of Alberta (along with several thousand others). What an amazing event, and a fantastic finish. Hopefully this isn’t just a one-off - it would be incredible to see it come back next year, with some mountain stages (the 1 mountain stage that had been planned was rerouted because of the June flooding in Alberta - hopefully next year’s route would include a stage over Highwood Pass and maybe through the Rockies).
We’re about to launch a “small scale pilot” in Desire2Learn, for the semester that starts Monday. The goal was to keep it small and manageable, because we don’t have integration with PeopleSoft for managing enrolment data yet.
28 registrar-provided courses, with many sections. 5,181 enrolments for 4,069 participating students (and growing). Small scale… The largest course is just shy of 1,000 students.
I managed to stay (mostly) offline for (most of) the last week. Didn’t even check RSS feeds. Here’s some tabs that caught my attention while checking in over high-test caffeine this morning (in roughly-chronological order of tab-opening)…
OMNI Reboot: Edible Memories (potentially interesting overlap with Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312 and the ingestion of non-terrestrial microbes…)
Flickr is upgrading the crap out of its iOS app, after a few acquisitions. Just in time for iOS7 to include the same functionality but without tying people to a third party hosting service…
This comes in handy, and I have to google it every time I need it12. So, here’s a copy for reference later…
mysqlcheck --repair --use-frm --all-databases
Run it as root, with MySQL running. It’ll repair every table in every database. Give it time to chew for awhile. It spews out the status of every table as it works. Here’s what it found with my FeverËš database tables (which now work just fine):
But napster didn’t disrupt music. It disrupted the previous business model for distributing recorded music content. Musicians still exist. People still write/play/perform/record/buy/download music. The workflow has changed. The people who control the pipelines have changed.
Digital technologies are disrupting the current business model(s) for distributing educational content. And that’s a great thing. $500 worth of required textbooks for a single course is just plain messed up. Academic journals charging researchers hundreds or thousands of dollars to gain access to research funded by public institutions, also messed up.
The University of Calgary invites applications for a full-time tenure track academic position at the Director rank, commencing October 1, 2013 (or as soon as possible). The successful candidate will be appointed Director of the Educational Development Unit (EDU) of the Institute for Teaching and Learning. This position presents an exciting opportunity to take a leadership role in shaping a core element in a uniquely integrated approach to building teaching and learning capacity in an innovative and forward looking institution.
From the posting: