The Federal Government will transform its Information Technology Infrastructure by virtualizing data centers, consolidating data centers and operations, and ultimately adopting a cloud-computing business model.

This article reports a Booz Allen Hamilton report on the cost model being used to drive US Govt data policies towards the adoption of “cloud computing” platforms. They offer three scenarios: Public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud and Private Cloud (as the US military is doing, see (http://rworld2.brookesblogs.net/2009/10/07/us-military-cloud-computing-platform-via-rww). Where is the UK is this respect? More locally, where is the UK HE sector?

Wi-Fi Direct will connect at existing Wi-Fi speeds– up to 250 mbps. Wi-Fi Direct devices will also be able to broadcast their availability and seek out other Wi-Fi Direct devices.

Some of you might have heard me witter on about widely distributed databases (e.g. bit torrent) and mesh networks (e.g. OLPC). I made a few comments here: http://my-world.typepad.com/rworld/2007/10/more-on-the-mes.html

This post suggests that developments facilitating such a network are continuing. Yes, it may be a long way off but eventually there will be no telcos as we know them: no ISPs. We need to be thinking past the centralised data centres to the far edge: you and me and our various devices. Security will be a big problem: identity, access, spam and fraud. Curation will be a problem. But, if we don’t get washed away in a big glacial melt down (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-coming-of-a-new-climate), one day there will be one big network.

European survey data on how young people are using social media.

Either they use it or they don’t. Not much middle ground. 25% use the Internet more than 20 hours a week; 30% less than 5 hours. Well, it is more complex than that, of course, but even stronger bimodality is showm with IM. Not sure about the typology of users, but the implications for teaching are challenging. Who do you teach to? Should teachers and institutions adopt one modality? Or, the other? Aim for the middle and hit no-one?

Traditional media campaigns have a beginning and end. Social technology fuels conversation. One, five, ten or ten thousand people could all be stirring up and participating in conversations using social media tools. The conversation has a time dimension that just runs on and on. … this is why social tools adopt a river-of-news style. With such an activity stream, the conversation is endless.

A propos of the need for the JISC Institutional Innovation programme to develop a “benefits realisation community”, we need to build a social front end to http://inin.jisc-ssbr.net, displaying the Planet Inin feeds as a “river of news” and allowing comment on the site

ShopSavvy uses a phone’s camera to scan an item’s bar code and look up prices for it online and at nearby stores.

Now that is the kind of mobile, location aware service that might be useful; but in the end I guess the whole world will be shopping for everything at Confused.com: the internet crushed by the weight of price comparison sites for a limited range of branded consumer – (what’s the opposite of durables?).

Just because computing is done in the cloud, that doesn’t mean it has to be insecure and subject to outages. Or so says the U.S. Defense Department who just put into operation their cloud computing services for military personnel.

Admittedly the missions are different, but higher education really should be looking harder at “the cloud”.

More digital literacies at Brookes

One of the key messages arising from national research is that although technology is pervasive in many learners’ lives, learners entering higher eduation lack basic information literacies skills and have little idea of how they can use technology to support their study (see for example JISC Google Generation, Great Expectations and Learner Experience Phase 2 programmes)

In recent months there has been much discussion at Brookes of the role of digital literacies in our curriculum. There has been acceptance of the need to specify and develop digital literacies as part of the Academic Progression Initiative and the 2020 Green paper.

The task now is to agree on the literacies we expect of Brookes students and present them in a coherent way to course teams so they they can be mapped and developed across the curriculum.

It took us digilit people a while to find this (where did I put this?). This is to help me make it easier next time

Collaborative annotation of the physical world?

GPS means the iPhone knows where it is. An internal compass means it knows where it is pointing. Any GIS tagged data in Wikipedia in the iPhone’s line of sight can be overlaid on the camera image. The Wikitude app then has a service that lets users annotate their current location.

RWW thinks “it doesn’t get much cooler than that”.

Having emerged from the worst period of its history, the genocide of 1994, Rwanda has placed its faith in IT with some big promises – mobile phone use should double from just 20% to up to 40% by next year. The government is giving away 35,000 handsets to help that happen.

It wants a PC in every home within 10 years.

Good brief case-study overview of one small country, with a lot of challenges, reaching out to the Web. Techno-determinism? Technology is deterministic, or at least an actor in the network. But, how far up or down the hierarchy of needs does IT come? Can it be a symbolic actor? Something to aspire to representing those bright sunlit uplands where life is sweet? The picture does seem to be mixed.