Blogs
November, 2021 A few years into my career at Unicon, I attended an LMS conference and found myself to be one of the few vendors in the room amongst faculty and staff. I sat in a session about LMS administration, a fairly benign topic, that turned into a lively debate about how and where to use vendors to help get LMS work done.
November, 2021 In his 2017 book “The Inevitable,” Kevin Kelly states that technology is in a perpetual state of “becoming.” That is, technology is never finished or done - it is just a series of changes. I see this concept of “becoming” in the current data landscape.
October, 2021 After what has seemed like an eternity, it feels great to be planning to attend EDUCAUSE in person! While we have managed to stay current with colleagues through virtual gatherings over the past 2 years, nothing beats being in the same room (with masks on, of course!) ;-)The agenda this year is filled with relevant and timely topics ranging from Cybersecurity and Privacy to Innovation and Emerging Technology. The conference is hybrid, meaning there will be sessions available for virtual attendees as well as in-person ones. The conference web site seems well designed, and there are lots of opportunities to interact online, including a trivia game over zoom!
October, 2021 Unicon and Instructure are close partners. We work together with the Instructure team to offer support services, participate in joint projects, and collaborate in support of offering the best services to our clients. It is refreshing to work with the Instructure team where our professional relationship revolves around providing the best service to our clients.
September, 2021 IMS held its quarterly meeting last month focused on updating the membership on many of its initiatives. IMS members can access recordings and presentation materials from the day long virtual session here.Here are some of the notable updates presented at the meetings:
September, 2021 Even though it’s been several weeks since I returned from ASU-GSV, I’m still watching back the recordings from the session. It’s wonderful that the amazing panels and content presented have been made available publicly. As someone who considers myself an extrovert, the prospect of attending my first in-person conference was exhilarating. Kudos to the whole ASU-GSV team for reacting quickly to the changing conditions surrounding the delta variant: they were able to shift conference protocol to allow attendance in a safe manner. Of course, it was also helpful that San Diego’s weather made outdoor gatherings very pleasant indeed. I made it a goal to attend or watch every session that had...
September, 2021 Unicon had the unique opportunity to collaborate with Indiana University in support of their Terracotta Project effort, and I had the privilege to be a part of this project. Per their website, “Terracotta is an innovative experimental research platform that supports teachers’ and researchers’ abilities to easily run experiments in live classes.”
September, 2021 We are about a month in from the start of school for my kids here in Texas. Everyone has a renewed energy and is happy to be in person and engaging with their friends. I have two in high school and one that is a freshman in college. With the first month under our belt, I have reflected on some of the changes our local school district and university have implemented. I believe these are positive changes, made in response to the global health crisis, that will greatly benefit our kids in the long run.Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is at the forefront and attention of both school districts, as well as universities. SEL in schools helps educators reach out and help students both inside and...
August, 2021 I like to think of myself as a technology geek. I marvel at futuristic technology in science fiction shows like Star Trek and think - someday this will be our reality. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a machine that materializes fully cooked food, non-invasively scans your body for disease, and allows one to be transported instantly across space? It is with this curiosity that I tend to regard AI as an advancement that should be allowed to grow and mature.
June, 2021 CAS server has provided several distributed Ticket Registry implementations out of the box for a long time now, the most popular being Hazelcast. With many of our clients using that ticket registry with at least two CAS nodes, we get asked questions like this all the time: “How do you verify that Hazelcast ticket registry is functioning properly once we have all the nodes configured and running?”