Monthly Archives: September 2005

Podcasting university lectures

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I guess I’m one of the late adopters of a number of technologies. I didn’t get my iPod until Christmas of 2004, though I did buy my oldest son one the year before, and #2 son is getting one from Santa this year. I’m intrigued by podcasting, though I’ll admit that I don’t listen to the ones that I subscribe to very often…I just like having them there. I’m quite intrigued by the idea of podcasting lectures. Not that from a conceptual standpoint this is new technology (folks have been doing casette recordings of lectures since the dark ages). However, now that Apple made podcasting easy by incorporating in iTunes (podcasting for dummies) even folks like me can easily subscribe.

A number of universities are experimenting with podcasting of lectures. Here’s a article from the Chronicle from March about Drexel, and a September Chronicle article about podcasting at Purdue.

The technology makes it much easier to contemplate doing this. Hey, maybe the folks at Duke were onto something when they distributed iPods to incoming students.

Those of us in IT who pooh-poohed Duke when this first came out need to remember that there are many ways technology development and adoption move forward, and we don’t have a corner on that understanding.

I’ll be interested to see how this all works out; here’s an article about the Duke experiment.

I’ve gotta say, though, that as an adjunct faculty member here at UNC (in the School of Information & Library Science), having all my lectures recorded would be a strange thing…I guess I’d get used to it, but I’m sure that I’ll sound like Gomer Pyle…well gollleee, y’all….

Flexible optical networks

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So one of the things that’s of growing importance in the networking community is creating an optical networking environment and an associated control plane that offers capacity-on-demand from authorized users/applications for usage that pushes beyond the capability afforded by even very fast packet-switched networks. For one perspective on this, and an idea of what sorts of usage might drive this need, there is a good paper from the folks working on the CHEETAH project. One of the pundits I follow very closely in the optical networking community is Bill St. Arnaud of the Canarie project. I get Bill’s newletters; he also maintains a column in LightReading. Earlier this month, Bill was at a NASA Research and Engineering Network meeting, and posted this very interesting perspective on the needs (or lack thereof) for such networking, as presented by a senior technologist at Level3.

Blogs & Wikis

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So, I’m sort of a latecomer to actually setting up and using blogs & wikis. I’ve done web stuff for a dozen years, literally…it was in November of 1993 when I said to myself, you know, this Web stuff is pretty cool, and might replace Gopher (anyone out there remember Gopher?). I downloaded and set up a simple web server on my department’s first unix server.

So much for history! I’ve been a fan of collaboration software and virtual communities for years, but somehow (probably too busy) had never sat down and set up a wiki or a blog. Well, in the last month, I’ve remedied both of those. You are reading the results of my blog experiments, and I’m using wikis quite a bit with my NCNI colleagues. I plan to post things here periodically as I explore how to use this stuff to better do my job.

Stay tuned…

Troop 449

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I’ve been involved in boy scouting since I was a scout as a kid. I was an eagle scout, helped as an assistant scoutmaster before I had kids, and then when my kids were ready for scouting, moved back into scouting full bore. I was a cubmaster for 5 years, and then became a scoutmaster (4 years now) and am currently the scoutmaster of Troop 449, in Chapel Hill, NC.

So what the heck do I do at UNC?

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Well, we’ve finally finished our reorg of the ITS department at UNC, and my title is Director of Networking Collaborations for Information Technology Services. So what does that mean? In this role, I work directly to foster collaborative projects with other campus schools and departments, and with local and national networking partners. Examples of external collaborations are involvement with NCNI and NCREN at the local and statewide level, and with Internet2 and National Lambda Rail at the national level.

Additionally, I’m still the Executive Director of the North Carolina Networking Initiative (NCNI). That site is really in need of maintenance, and that’s one thing that I’m working on now…

My flyfishing page

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My flyfishing page hasn’t had much maintenance in a long time. Seems like I don’t have a chance to update it often, but hey, with starting this blog, maybe I’ll put my trip reports here and this can subsume much of the point of my old site. However, for whatever it’s worth, here’s the link.