Articles

September, 2022 In the previous article in this series, I wrote about the key pillars of an information security program and the types of controls that support them. In this article, I want to speak to the way that information security leadership thinks about those central supporting ideas, and what that means for decision-making. (We will explore the actual controls, their relationship to risk, and ways they can reduce that risk in another article).

July, 2022 Learning eXperience Design (LXD) is a new approach to instructional design that incorporates human-centered design principles to put the learner at the center of the learning experience.

July, 2022 In the previous article in this series, I wrote about beginning the journey to an information security program and outlined some key concepts to think about. In this article, I want to expand on the steps in that journey through an understanding of the key parts, or pillars, of an information security program. We all know the old adage that a house is only as strong as the elements of its foundation. In this article, we will learn a bit more about those elements.

May, 2022 When Unicon was founded almost 30 years ago, information security wasn’t as serious an issue. Hackers existed, but were more curious than malevolent and caused mischief more than damage. Unicon was a pure Unix consultancy then so we understood computer security very clearly, but there just wasn’t a compelling need for a company security program.

March, 2022 React vs Angular, here’s what I learned and want to share about two popular framework options and the value they brought to our project.

September, 2021 LTI 1.3 has greatly advanced the integration of edtech applications. It offers improvements in security with the use of OIDC, Oauth2, and JWT tokens, and flexibility with the use of the LTI Advantages Services such Deep Linking, Grades and Assignments, and Membership.

June, 2021 You're starting a new software project, or you’re concerned that your current solutions may have significant limitations that you’d like to remove. You've heard about some dev teams choosing a "serverless" architecture, you've heard lots of talk about "cloud native", and every third article on Hacker News seems to be about Kubernetes. You begin to wonder if and how any of these new or established solutions can help alleviate your project’s pain points.

March, 2021 You’re an Instructional Designer or another flavor of content creator. You’ve attended a few meetings recently, big meetings that all the “technical folks” and your authoring team have been a part of. The topic was “DevOps” as a practice, how it’s going to speed up your ability to produce content, and allow your team to release your product more frequently.

January, 2021 Over the past few months, I have been working on a project to build an Alexa skill that could utilize PDF files that instructors already have to generate quizzes. First, I built the Alexa skill based off of a Lex chatbot that a previous group had created, using the Canvas API to retrieve a PDF test bank or glossary file that would get converted into a quiz database.

October, 2020 Machine learning allows us to consume large quantities of data in order to bring new life to expansive corpuses in a variety of industries, such as education. The sheer quantity of digitizable educational materials, including textbooks, lecture notes, class notes, and academic publications is astounding, not to mention all of the hobbyists and creators who have started making educational content specifically for the Internet via blog posts, videos, and games. With the growing plethora of information available at the fingertips of artificial intelligence (AI), it feels like it is only a matter of time before AI can generate highly coherent materials to present to a learner on a topic, providing invaluable assistance to teachers.