http://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-06-19T10:35:00ZSocial collaboration platform steps into WebEx and GoTo Meeting's turf with affordable video chat option.http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/workgrouping_team_collaboration_workspaces/teambox-adds-free-video-chat/240156918?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- Image Aligning right --> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/statestreet_tn.png" alt="10 Social Business Leaders for 2013" title="10 Social Business Leaders for 2013" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">10 Social Business Leaders for 2013</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934">read about them all</a>)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- / Image Aligning right --> The Teambox collaboration tool is adding a video-chat service at no additional charge. <P> <a href="http://teambox.com" target="_blank">Teambox</a> is known as one of the social collaboration tools that emphasizes <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/project_management/social-task-management-tools-gain-clout/240008230">project coordination and task management</a>. Stronger in markets like <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/higher-education-taps-teambox-for-social/240153396">higher education</a>, Teambox is affordable for small businesses and starting to gain a foothold in larger enterprises, adding customers like US Airways and Toyota. <P> On Wednesday, Teambox announced it is incorporating the <a href="http://zoom.us/" target="_blank">Zoom video and screen sharing</a> service, including the ability to schedule and launch video calls that can include up to 25 participants from within Teambox. "We're offering this at a price that we think is disruptive, well below the entrenched players," Teambox CEO Dan Schoenbaum said in an interview prior to the announcement. "A lot of our customers are paying hundreds of dollars per month for GoToMeeting or WebEx." The introduction to Zoom came through a common investor, he said. <P> For an initial two-month promotional period, even users of the free accounts Teambox offers will get unlimited use of the video service. Thereafter, Teambox's paying customers will get up to 100 hours of video calling at no additional charge. New Teambox users who sign up for a free account will probably also be offered a free trial of the video component, although the details haven't been worked out yet. <P> <strong>[ What should you do when you get a LinkedIn request from someone you don't know? <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_consumer/linkedin-when-to-say-no-to-connecting/240156227?itc=edit_in_body_cross">LinkedIn: When To Say No To Connecting</a>. ]</strong> <P> "Having video chat integrated with the project management system is something that's really attractive," said Adam Lieb, CEO of Duxter, a social network for gamers and a Teambox customer. His group got early access to the video service and has just started using it. Project teams often wind up with a bunch of disparate technologies for different types of collaboration, "and that causes its own problems," he said. "With this, there's one less login, one less website, one less client to deal with." <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/teamboxvideo.png" alt="Teambox video" title="Teambox video" height="331" width="590"><br />A videoconference launched from Teambox.</div> <P> The initial level of integration allows Teambox users to schedule and launch video calls from within the collaboration tool, but the video app launches in a separate window. Schoenbaum said the next step will be to integrate video within the navigation scheme of the Web app. Similarly, Teambox is promising to build video into future versions of its mobile app. Currently, Teambox users can participate in calls using the Zoom app. <P> A basic version of Teambox is free for teams of up to five people. Paid accounts are $5 per user per month in the cloud. Teambox also offers an <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/teambox-brings-collaboration-behind-the/240153818">on-premises deployment option</a> for organizations that want to keep collaboration within the firewall. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-06-13T12:13:00ZSocial business leaders: Help me help you. Connect with me at E2 or online.http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/social-collaboration-for-smarties/240156627?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- Image Aligning right --><!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/statestreet_tn.png" alt="10 Social Business Leaders for 2013" title="10 Social Business Leaders for 2013" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">10 Social Business Leaders for 2013</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934">read about them all</a>)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --><!-- / Image Aligning right -->"Help me help you." If you saw the 1996 movie <em>Jerry Maguire</em>, you remember the scene where Tom Cruise's sports agent delivers that line, repeatedly and as forcefully as he can, to one of the star athletes he represents. <P> The jock, Cuba Gooding Jr., just laughs: "You ... are hanging on by a very thin thread and ..." (smacking his fist into his hand) "... I <em>dig</em> that about you!" He knows -- or thinks he knows -- that Jerry needs him more than he needs Jerry. <P> With the <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">E2 Conference</a> coming up next week, my plea to social collaboration initiatives is also: "Help me, help you." I'm looking for your insight and expertise, not only to improve the reporting on this site but for my <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/111865854X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=111865854X&linkCode=as2&tag=carrcomminc-20">Social Collaboration For Dummies</a> book project. <P> We are also looking to add more "thought leader" contributors to this section: Social business practitioners who are not necessarily professional writers but can speak from experience and have strong opinions to express. <P> <strong>[ What does social business need to succeed? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/social-collaboration-a-work-in-progress/240000626?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Social Collaboration: A Work In Progress</a>. ]</strong> <P> Now, I know that longtime E2 attendees (the ones who remember when it was called the "Enterprise 2.0" conference) probably consider themselves beyond the "dummies" phase, but that's all the more reason for you to pre-order a few hundred copies of <em>Social Collaboration For Dummies</em> to give out to all your colleagues who don't quite get the concept of social collaboration as a business tool. <P> <div style="width: 127px; margin-left: 5px; float: right;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/111865854X/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=111865854X&linkCode=as2&tag=carrcomminc-20"><img border="0" src="http://ws.assoc-amazon.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=111865854X&Format=_SL160_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=carrcomminc-20" ></a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=carrcomminc-20&l=as2&o=1&a=111865854X" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /></div> <P> Here's the beauty part: because the book is not finished yet, there is still an opportunity for you to explain to me all those things that people seem to have a hard time understanding about how to use social effectively. I can then put those tips in the book. Then, when you hand it to people, you can say, "Look at this chapter on 'Succeeding With Social Collaboration' -- isn't that just what I keep telling you? That's the right way to go; it says so right in the book." <P> Corner me in the hallway at E2, write me at <a href="mailto:david.carr@ubm.com?subject=socbiz-contact">david.carr@ubm.com</a>, ping me at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a>, send carrier pigeons if that's easier, but help me help you. I'm currently looking for help with chapters on social collaboration strategies for sales leaders and for human resources, training and organizational development. <P> The social business leaders we will be <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/schedule-builder/session-id/15">honoring at E2</a> have already been a great help, as have many others I've spoken with for stories and columns on social technologies over the past couple of years. I'm delighted to be chairing the <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/schedule-builder/track/social-and-collaboration" target="_blank">social and collaboration track</a> at E2 and moderating a <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/keynotes-speakers/" target="_blank">keynote panel</a> featuring Matt Tucker of Jive Software, Sameer Patel of SAP, and Alistair Rennie of IBM. <P> I'm counting on Patel to challenge some of our assumptions about the wonders of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, which we've been hearing about since Andrew McAfee coined the term in 2006. Patel argues that, if we're honest with ourselves, Enterprise 2.0 really hasn't been working. He cites studies saying that 77% of employees never log onto their enterprise social network and only 3% use it once a day. I'm pulling that from his <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/SAPcloud/rethinking-work-the-next-chapter-in-social-collaboration" target="_blank">presentation at CeBiT 2013</a> earlier this year (<a href=" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOi0Ry5-3A0&feature=youtu.be">see video</a>). <P> Patel doesn't deny that there are some remarkable success stories, but given that they seem to be the exception to the rule, he says we need to rethink our approach. (And yes, of course, he thinks SAP has some of the answers with the SAP JAM product derived from its acquisition of SuccessFactors.) <P> Matt Tucker co-founded Jive back when it was a little company in Portland, Ore., that made discussion board software. In a rehearsal call, he said the success stories of large organizations using social collaboration internally and externally are accumulating to the point where the momentum is palpable. The existence of some flops only underlines the importance of treating social business as worthy of a serious, strategic approach, rather than just installing software or signing up for a cloud service and hoping for the best. <P> His argument that the time has come to achieve breakout success reminded me of what science fiction writers call <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=steam%20engine%20time" target="_blank">steam engine time</a>, a reference to that period in the history of engineering when many inventors around the world were tinkering with ideas related to steam power. In other words, even though James Watt got the patent and most of the credit, it was really just an idea whose time had come. When it's steam engine time for interplanetary travel and all the prerequisites are in place, you won't be able to stop it from happening. Try to make it happen too soon, and you'll probably fail. <P> Is it steam engine time for social collaboration? Think you have the answers? Help me help you. <P> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AGt5f70K02Q" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>.</em>2013-06-12T13:10:00ZCopSync911 app lets teachers and other workers bypass dispatchers and access first responders more quickly in emergency situations.http://www.informationweek.com/education/k-12/teachers-get-digital-hotline-to-police/240156521?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->In a nightmare scenario like the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, would it help to shave minutes or even seconds off police response time to the emergency? <P> A computerized emergency system from <a href="http://www.copsync.com/" target="_blank">CopSync</a> lets teachers or administrators alert police and other emergency responders to a crisis immediately, without waiting to go through a dispatch center. Arriving as an instant message to the dashboard computer system now common in police and emergency vehicles, a CopSync911 alert carries with it contextual information like the school room number (displayed on a school map) and the teacher assigned to that room -- eliminating the need to dictate these details over the phone. <P> The software doesn't cut the dispatchers out of the process -- they get the alert at the same time and will still help coordinate a response, said Brian Frieda, chief of police in Sweetwater, Texas, who is among the first to partner with local schools to implement the software. "What we're bypassing is the phone system," he explained. The teacher or administrator doesn't need to be on 911 answering questions, he said, because many of the basic details can be pre-programmed into the system. An officer who gets the alert can then head for the school directly, alerting dispatchers that he is on his way. <P> <strong>[ Cruel deception: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_consumer/newtown-hoaxes-mar-heartfelt-social-medi/240144575?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Newtown Hoaxes Mar Heartfelt Social Media Posts</a>.]</strong> <P> "At Sandy Hook, it took six minutes before the first officer was even in route," CopSync CEO Ron Woessner said. His goal is to eliminate the gap between sending the alert and dispatching help. <P> Actually, the emergency response time to the Sandy Hook shootings is the subject of <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/02/05/the-nra-and-the-myth-of-the-20-minute-police-re/192528" target="_blank">controversy</a>, with the <a href="http://www.ctpost.com/newtownshooting/article/Sandy-Hook-investigative-report-delayed-4559341.php" target="_blank">state's official report delayed</a> and some unofficial <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/updated-sandy-hook-school-massacre-timeline/5324851" target="_blank">timelines</a> saying emergency responders arrived almost instantly -- perhaps upon hearing the shooting and before they were officially dispatched. <P> However long it took, everyone wishes the response could have been faster and stopped the killing sooner. The attack on the school in Newtown, Conn., took the lives of 20 children and six adult staff members. The attacker, Adam Lanza, committed suicide as first responders arrived. <P> CopSync's base product is a digital communication and data sharing system designed to improve coordination between emergency agencies. Sweetwater had already been using that system, to which CopSync911 is an add-on. "In talking with the schools, we thought this was very viable and had a definite place," Chief Frieda said. "The school board jumped on it." <P> In Sweetwater, the plan is to put a desktop shortcut icon for the Web-based app on the computer of every teacher, school office worker and administrator. Following a round of testing and evaluation that started in May, the software has already been deployed at several schools and will be in place across the entire district when students return in the fall. <P> Frieda is pushing CopSync to have a planned mobile app ready by fall as well. The mobile app, which will allow teachers to send an alert from an iOS or Android device, is particularly relevant as the schools are planning to introduce more iPads. "I told them I wanted to have it available for my schools for the start of the school year," Frieda said. <P> In an active shooter situation, teachers are more likely to be hiding behind a desk than sitting at it typing on a computer, so a mobile device would be a better way to signal for help. Frieda considers the plight of the teachers in Sandy Hook who were hiding in closets and trying to protect their students while the gunman roamed the halls. In a situation like that, he said, an iPad app could allow teachers to silently send an alert to police without giving away their position. <P> While extreme situations like the Sandy Hook shooting are on everyone's mind, Frieda expects that in practice the system will be used for many more common emergencies -- essentially, any situation where it would be appropriate to call 911. Different icons on the screen make it possible to quickly classify the type of emergency. "If you have an accident in the chemistry lab where something went awry and you need fire and EMS, you can tap the icons saying fire and EMS, and that's what the dispatcher is going to send," Frieda said. <P> CopSync CEO Woessner said the app for schools was already under development prior to the Newtown shooting, although the tragedy created a surge of interest in better ways of protecting schools. He is also seeing interest from other types of government and community institutions, such as courthouses where judges and staff might need to summon help in a hurry. <P> Although giving every teacher and worker in a school access to the police dispatch system might seem to require an extraordinary level of trust, Frieda said, "There is no time for a pecking order when making notifications for law enforcement." The risk of a false alarm or overuse of the system is no greater than with 911 calls, he said. <P> Frieda continued, "We are never going to not respond. We'll respond just like we would with a bank alarm or a 911 hang-up call." Sweetwater has already experienced one false alarm, but the principal called within moments to say the alert had been triggered by accident. Frieda said, "It was no big deal." <P> <div style="width: 420px; padding: 5px; background-color:#eee;"><script type='text/javascript' src='http://CBSDAL.images.worldnow.com/interface/js/WNVideo.js?rnd=142983;hostDomain=video.dallas.cbslocal.com;playerWidth=420;playerHeight=278;isShowIcon=true;clipId=8934134;flvUri=;partnerclipid=;adTag=News;advertisingZone=CBS.DALLAS%252Fworldnowplayer;enableAds=true;landingPage=;islandingPageoverride=false;playerType=STANDARD_EMBEDDEDscript;controlsType=fixed'></script><a href="http://video.dallas.cbslocal.com" title=""></a><br />Local news coverage of a CopSync911 deployment in Paradise, Texas.</div> <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-06-11T09:06:00ZSDN originated from university research, spread through Internet2, and should eventually make life easier for small college network managers.http://www.informationweek.com/education/campus-infrastructure/why-campus-networks-need-software-define/240156354?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Software-defined networking (SDN) is destined to tame campus networks at large universities and small colleges alike, even if it is a little bleeding edge now. <P> SDN was one of the main topics of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/interop-cloud-experts-debate-sdns-future/240154473">discussion at May's Interop conference</a>, as it has been for several years. More network devices are shipping with support of the OpenFlow protocol promoted by the <a href="https://www.opennetworking.org/" target="_blank">Open Networking Foundation</a> as a standard for interacting with SDN controllers. The concept is to break control over networking out of black box network switches, making it possible to write routing and switching rules in any programming language and run them on an ordinary server, the SDN controller. <P> So far, large-scale SDN implementations are limited to operations like <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/quickview/googles-software-defined-network-take-a/3326">Google's data center networks</a> and the Internet2 high-speed network that connects educational and research institutions. However, OpenFlow and many of the basic SDN concepts were born out of university research, and universities may ultimately be some of the biggest users of SDN because of the complexity of their networks. <P> The first pioneers of SDN as a practical technology have really been the multitenant cloud data center operators like Amazon, said Steven Wallace, executive director of <a href="http://incntre.iu.edu" target="_blank">InCNTRE</a>, an advanced networking research center at Indiana University (IU) focused on the development of OpenFlow and software defined networking. They developed proprietary methods for rewriting the rules of networking because they needed to achieve extreme performance and keep different data types separate. As the complexity of large research university networks grows, "you start to have something that looks like the multitenant data centers," he said. <P> <strong>[ Tough battle: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/campus-infrastructure/can-colleges-tame-the-bandwidth-monster/240150686?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Can Colleges Tame The Bandwidth Monster?</a>]</strong> <P> For example, the university has provided 10 megabits for every dorm student for years, so it's essentially functioning as a broadband Internet service provider, but it also needs to manage administrative networks, credit card network connections to vending machines, hospital networks carrying healthcare data, and scientific research networks with extreme data transmission needs, Wallace said. The university needs to segment these streams for reasons of privacy and performance, much as a multitenant data center needs to segment the network capacity it delivers to different customers, he said. <P> By making the network programmable, SDN makes it possible to break the standard rules of networking, where appropriate. For example, an ordinary Ethernet network allows any node to talk to any other. But in an SDN network, security cameras might be limited to communicating only with the campus police monitoring station, improving the performance of transmissions while preventing unauthorized access to the camera feeds. <P> IU manages the core Internet2 network and is one of the leading research centers on networking technology, but Wallace acknowledges even his institution is only getting started with practical applications of OpenFlow at the campus level. <P> One serious early application is a custom Internet security solution for the university's main Internet connection, which at more than 10 gigabits per second, exceeds the capacity of any single intrusion prevention system (IPS) device. The workaround is to do load balancing in such a way that each IPS device gets "a coherent view" of a subset of the traffic to analyze. A suitable commercial load balancer would have cost about $200,000, Wallace said. "We have a roughly $40,000 solution that consists of an Ethernet switch, plus some software a grad student wrote." Subsequently released as open source software, this <a href="https://github.com/InCNTRE/FlowScale" target="_blank">FlowScale</a> solution "solved a pretty specific problem and was inexpensive to develop," he said. <P> But wait, isn't Internet routing and traffic optimization an exotic discipline? Isn't that why it has to be proprietary, with the software locked away inside a device and presumably written by people who think in binary code? <P> Wallace thinks not. "The kinds of things we're doing with software are not particularly exotic, and neither is Internet routing," he said. An SDN controller can also be more intimately connected with applications on the network, applying more specific optimizations, he said. "None of that stuff is really rocket science. There may be a perception that it is, but it's not." <P> Dan Pitt, executive director at the Open Networking Foundation, said part of the reason interest in SDN started in universities is because of "student frustration that they couldn't program the network like they program everything else in their lives." Also, for the professor of computer science, "it's harder to do research in networking when everything is locked away in closed boxes. You can't experiment and do research at scale," he said. <P> Wallace and Pitt both mentioned network access control as another important application of SDN for the university campus. The need to control the network access of guests on campus, while providing different levels of access to students and faculty, has created a market for specialized access control devices. There are lots of specialized network devices deployed around campus these days, but SDN "reduces many of those to a software routine or subroutine" on the controller, Wallace said.I wondered how soon this technology will trickle down to the smaller liberal arts colleges, thinking of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/leadership/cio-profiles-ellen-borkowski-of-union-co/240153482">Union College CIO Ellen Borkowski</a>, who told me in a recent interview that bringing order to her campus network (on a limited budget) was one of her greatest challenges. <P> "Those places are going to win the biggest from this -- no question in my mind whatsoever," Wallace said. The promise of SDN is to make advanced networking techniques available to smaller institutions, allowing them to get the most value out of whatever network infrastructure they have available. <P> Indiana University has hundreds of people on its IT staff, many devoted specifically to networking, so it "has the horsepower to do things the hard way," Wallace said. The university used to have to do wireless networking the hard way, with a staff of people who would run around configuring and tuning access points, he noted. That's no longer necessary because wireless access points can now be programmed and reprogrammed over the network. "Now, you can go install an access point -- it doesn't really matter where -- and there's no configuration required" because a centralized controller can enforce policies across thousands of those devices, he said. <P> With SDN, wired network management will move closer to what's been achieved in wireless networks, Wallace said. <P> Not all SDN is based on OpenFlow and not all network equipment makers agree OpenFlow will be central to the future of SDN. <a href="http://www.networkcomputing.com/next-gen-network-tech-center/junipers-sdn-strategy-looks-beyond-openf/240146312">Juniper Networks promotes an SDN strategy</a> that treats OpenFlow as just a starting point. Other network equipment makers are shipping equipment that supports OpenFlow or can add support for it as a software upgrade. Wallace said one thing many network managers are waiting for is support for OpenFlow 1.3, which includes some significant improvements. <P> The push to develop SDN coincides with the emergence of white box networking hardware, which runs on Linux and can be programmed however you like. The <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/interop-open-compute-project-to-tackle/240154452">Open Compute Project's network switch design initiative</a>, part of the larger open source data center software and hardware project initiated by Facebook, aims to accelerate that trend. <P> "At least initially, if you're planning to deploy OpenFlow on a production network, you need to be a relatively sophisticated consumer," Wallace said. The big research universities that are used to buying technologies like supercomputers are up to the challenge, while a lot of others should probably watch and wait, he said. <P> "If you're the CIO of a university, you need to ensure your networking folks are being exposed to SDN and OpenFlow and starting to evaluate it as a technology that will find its way into your networks in a not-too-distant time frame," Wallace said.2013-06-03T10:10:00ZState Street, Unisys, GE Capital, KPMG and Leaseplan lead list of companies recognized as E2 Social Business Leaders.http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- Image Aligning right --> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/slideshows/view/240005778/enterprise-social-networks-musthave-features-guide"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/853/Chatter-Influence-_tn.png" alt="Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide" title="Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span> </div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- / Image Aligning right --> The companies at the top of our E2 Social Business Leaders list for 2013 are putting social technologies to work on a global scale. <P> Drum roll, please. <P> On Friday, I announced <a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street Corp.</a> as our E2 Social Business of the Year for 2013. I'm pleased that Kristin Z. Waryas, VP of enterprise social collaboration will be joining me for an <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/schedule-builder/session-id/15">onstage interview</a> at the <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston">E2 Conference in Boston, June 17-19</a>. <P> Here is the rest of the top 10 list, with details about each honoree on the pages that follow. <P> 1. State Street Corp. (see my feature <a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">interview with Kristin Z. Waryas</a>.) <P> 2. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a>, Gloria Burke, director of knowledge and collaboration strategy and governance. <P> 3. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a>, Ian Forrest, VP global marketing. <P> 4. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a>, Vishal Agnihotri, associate director, global knowledge services. <P> 5. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a>, Wim de Gier, senior global project manager. <P> 6. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a>, Jonathan Green, VP of IT. <P> 7. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a>, Ralf Larsson, director, employee engagement. <P> 8. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a>, Silu Modi, VP, digital marketing. <P> 9. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a>, CIO Harry Van Drunen. <P> 10. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a>, Kirsten Culbertson, interactive intranet producer. <P> These are enterprise social networking stories, with the exception of GE's Access GE customer community and Macquarie Group's social media participation program for financial advisers. GE is pursuing the broader vision of social business that spans both internal and external collaboration, working with Salesforce.com to enhance its Chatter tool to be able to address customer communities as well as internal collaboration. <P> In addition to Kristin Z. Waryas, two other honorees, Gloria Burke of Unisys and Vishal Agnihotri, will be on hand for the Q&A portion of the <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/schedule-builder/session-id/15">social business leaders session at E2</a>. This is your chance to learn from their experience. Burke and Agnihotri will also participate in another panel discussion on <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/schedule-builder/session-id/2">Enterprise Social Networking Across Channels, Devices and Languages</a>. <P> In addition, an E2 session <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/schedule-builder/session-id/46">featuring Macquarie's Silu Modi</a> will address social media challenges for financial services firms</a>. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/statestreet.png" alt="Kristin Waryas' profile on State Street Collaborate" title="Kristin Waryas' profile on State Street Collaborate" height="370" width="590"><br />Kristin Waryas' profile on State Street Collaborate</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> These are really my picks, as the social business chair for E2, since I didn't enlist anyone to help with the judging this time. However, I had some serious debates with myself over the ranking and consider State Street and Unisys essentially tied, each with a great story to tell. The decision came down to a prejudice: I always think technology companies like Unisys <em>ought</em> to make effective use of technology, more so than the rest of us, and so I gave the edge to State Street as a company not in the technology business, but seeking to use it effectively. <P> We published a call for nominations in February and extended the deadline for nominations into May in search of more and better entries. I also invited entries from some of the organizations, such as Mercer, which I connected with through research for my <em>Social Collaboration for Dummies</em> book, which will be coming out later this year. <P> By the way, this wasn't supposed to be a contest for vendors, but NewsGator deserves some sort of prize for motivating and mobilizing the members of its community to submit nominations. State Street, Unisys, Mercer and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia all use the combination of Microsoft SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites to power social collaboration networks for their employees. They also had good stories to tell about translating social business theory into practice. <P> Besides, the ability to coordinate action as a community is part of what makes a social business, so I couldn't hold that against them. If you want to be recognized, it helps to speak up. Social business leaders can't be shy. <P> Read on for more about organizations and their leaders who have something to boast about.<strong>Unisys</strong> <P> Unisys was also ranked among our <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/the-brainyards-7-social-business-leaders/240062675">Social Business Leaders Of 2012</a> and featured last year in a related story, "<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/unisys-lets-employees-drive-face-of-soci/240044430">Unisys Lets Employees Drive Face Of Social Business</a>." <P> Unisys is taking full advantage of the social capabilities of its platform, but within a wider context. "We want to make sure we don't take such a myopic view of social that we don't see how it touches knowledge management and collaboration," said Gloria Burke, director of knowledge and collaboration strategy and governance. <P> In other words, even as social networking exposes what otherwise might be tacit knowledge (not written down anywhere), part of the goal should be to capture that knowledge in an organized way. Meanwhile, social connections are most valuable when they lead to more intensive collaboration on projects and innovation. <P> Enterprise social networking adds a dimension beyond what previous knowledge management and collaboration initiatives were able to accomplish at Unisys by providing access to people, not just documents. Previously, "one of the things we struggled with was we weren't able to find subject matter experts easily, and our sales people can't be experts on everything we sell," Burke said. Now, employees are encouraged to tag their profiles with areas of expertise so they will get an automatic notification when someone posts a query about that topic. <P> Unisys actually has two social collaboration platforms in play: Chatter for the sales teams, in addition to the NewsGator / SharePoint combination as a company-wide platform. One of the goals for this year is to achieve integration between the two platforms' social streams, so employees on each get the notifications they need to see. <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/Burke-Unisys-590.jpg" width="590" height="460" alt="Unisys" title="Unisys"><br />Gloria Burke of Unisys</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> As I mentioned <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/explore-frontiers-of-social-business-at/240153749">in an earlier E2 preview</a>, Unisys is also pushing for truly global social collaboration, investing in making translation technology available to allow its professionals around the world to express themselves in their own language and consume content in their own language. Spanish and Portuguese are the priorities. <P> "It's really an all-in proposition -- you can't be just a little social," Burke said. "[Otherwise,] all you're really doing is exchanging content silos for social silos." Each nation's organization will still have its own view of the collaboration system, along with nation-specific news feeds, but the content needs to be managed through a common system, or "you lose that transparency social was supposed to bring to the enterprise," Burke explained.<strong>GE Capital</strong> <P> To support a vision of building a community connection with its customers, GE Capital took Salesforce.com's Chatter social collaboration tool and turned it inside out. <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width:150px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; float: right;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/ian_forrest.jpg" width="150" height="215" title="Ian Forrest" alt="Ian Forrest"><br />GE's Ian Forrest</div> <P> The Access GE community was <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17MAqR-M1cI">featured at Salesforce's Dreamforce user conference</a> last year as an example of the potential for extending collaboration to customers and partners. GE was also among the customers cited for <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/social_networking_private_platforms/chatter-in-the-air-everywhere/240007663">bleeding-edge applications of Chatter</a>, such as piping telemetry from its jet engines into the social stream. <P> GE Capital actually built its customer community before the advent of the Chatter Communities, the product Salesforce.com now promotes for that purpose. "By setting our customers up as internal users, for lack of a better way of doing it, we were able to replicate that functionally before it really existed in what is now the Communities product," said Ian Forrest, VP of global marketing for GE Capital. In the process, GE Capital was able to influence the product development process at Salesforce, and elements of the standardized product were introduced into Access GE in May, a little over a year after the community site went live. The May release also featured other enhancements, such as the introduction of natural language search. <P> Access GE is more than a Chatter implementation, also tapping into other Salesforce products for marketing and customer support as well as custom and content hosted in the Salesforce cloud. The development project was led by GE Capital CIO Sigal Zarmi. <P> Building a social community was central to the project. <P> "Essentially, what differentiates GE Capital from other banks is we're connected to this industrial parent with really great, global expertise," Forrest said. Access GE allows customers to get better access to that expertise, where they can pose questions and get answers from either GE employees or other members of the community. The goal: better business performance for all GE Capital's customers. "If a company is performing better, the odds that we get repaid go up and lowers our risk," Forrest said. <P> <div style="background-color: #DDF; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/AccessGE364.png" width="590" height="364" title="Access GE" alt="Access GE"><br />The Access GE customer portal.</div> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> The concept for Access GE predated Salesforce's involvement. It started with an engagement with innovation and design consulting firm IDEO, Forrest said. "The first version was a bunch of pink and yellow Post-It notes, where we started to describe through pictures how certain features would work. The end design was a template or framework, on paper, of how the experience should be developed." <P> Why not use one of the social platforms that already targeted external communities, from a vendor like Lithium Technologies or Jive Software? Partly, it was a factor of GE already having a strong partnership with Salesforce.com for other products and internal use of Chatter. Also, the process for provisioning new users can be "an awful process" in other products, while Chatter "just made it turnkey," he said. <P> Access GE is now used by about 3,800 companies globally, and growth in the user base tends to expand as customers tell others about the service. For example, one cohort consists of Wendy's restaurant franchisees. "They will be on there asking, 'can someone share with me their food cost breakdown?' or 'can you send me a spreadsheet on labor costs' -- all to improve the effectiveness of a single store," Forrest said. <P> Meanwhile, as a result of connections made through the social portal "we just have a much deeper relationship with the customer as a result of understanding their business issues," Forrest said. That understanding goes beyond recognizing that customers need financing, to understanding why they need it, he said. <P><strong>KPMG</strong> <P> Part of the reason social business collaboration has taken off within KPMG is because of a few attention-getting examples of <em>how</em> it has paid off. <P> Within the first few months that the Australian member firm of the global accounting and consulting organization introduced Tibco's Tibbr, the social tool enjoyed phenomenally rapid uptake and adoption from employees looking for better ways to connect and collaborate. What really won attention for the platform during that period was its role in securing a major new client engagement, partly because the sales and consulting teams were able to pull together a proposal quickly, connecting with people and expertise they would have been unlikely to (or less easily) find otherwise. <P> "Would we have won that deal anyway? Who knows," KPMG's Vishal Agnihotri acknowledged in an interview. Yet those involved had few doubts that social networking had played a role in allowing them to work more effectively, and the connection with winning a big deal also got management's attention. <P> "Bringing people together in such a large machine is not easy," she said. But by making connections across the personal social networks of many individuals, the online tool "allowed a lot of people to come together and put their expertise together. It's very rare that one service line can answer all the questions a client has," she said. <P> Tibbr has been boasting about the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnr2Djtt_xE">KPMG Australia success story</a> for a while, but that's not Agnihotri's part of the story. Her job is to take social collaboration global at KPMG -- a big challenge for a decentralized organization made up of member firms in countries around the world. KPMG's global headquarters is in the Netherlands. <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/vishal.jpg" width="590" height="308" title="KPMG" alt="KPMG"><br />KPMG's Vishal Agnihotri</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> "I work in a group called global knowledge," explained Agnihotri, who is based in the U.S. "For anything we roll out, we roll it out for every single member firm in the world. We want to do that for all kinds of reasons, including reducing infrastructure costs and improving knowledge sharing across cross-border boundaries." <P> The fact that Tibbr had been used successfully in Australia probably won it some points, but the global organization made its decision independently. The original implementation in Australia was actually different, in that it was hosted on premises, inside the firewall, whereas for the global implementation KPMG is using the cloud-hosted version of the software. <P> Making social collaboration available globally does not mean every member company will take advantage of it, and it's "virtually impossible" to dictate technology choices worldwide, Agnihotri said. In the case of social collaboration, different member organizations have to address different laws related to privacy and security. Those that do join also tend to set different ground rules for employee use of the network -- with one firm imposing a firm approval process for the creation of discussion and interest groups on the network, while the next takes a more free-wheeling approach, she said. <P> KPMG's global knowledge organization also piloted one of the other leading enterprise social networking products, a broader platform for many forms of collaboration and content sharing in addition to social networking. Ultimately, KPMG decided not to pick a social tool that would compete with other collaboration products in use within the company, such as Microsoft SharePoint. Tibbr is more similar to social tools like Chatter and Socialcast, tightly focused on the social activity stream and conversations, with the ability to link to or embed other intranet content. <P> "As a professional services firm, our biggest asset actually lies in our people's heads, their knowledge accumulated from multiple client engagements," Agnihotri said. Although KPMG tries to codify some of that through formal knowledge management processes, "it's absolutely impossible to capture every single thing," she said. While there are other ways of calling around or emailing around to get answers, finding the right person to ask is half the battle and "the social network takes care of some of that process." <P> While the global program may not result in universal adoption, Agnihotri said she does expect the great majority of member firms to participate. That includes Australia, which is in the process of making the switch, she said. "They realized as wonderful as it was to have, if rest of the world was not on it, it wasn't as useful" without having the rest of the organization in the same environment, she said. <P> KPMG's enterprise social network, internally branded The Hub, is already up and running in the U.S. and a few European firms. "They are finding it increasingly necessary to collaborate under the pressures of the marketplace. The level of sophistication, the level of knowledge that spans multiple countries, that we need requires us to work together." When that doesn't happen, KPMG misses opportunities, she said.<strong>Leaseplan</strong> <P> When Leaseplan first introduced social collaboration in 2009, senior project manager Wim de Gier must have been asking himself "What would Google do?" <P> That early pilot was global and cross-functional, but it only included 170 people, all told. De Gier compared the effect to the way Google initially introduced Gmail, as an invitation-only service where early users were allowed to invite just three other friends. "That creates a big demand," he said in an interview. "It made people very curious to see what's going on." Very soon, he had other employees asking to join the pilot, and he would tell them, "sorry, not allowed." In the process, he accumulated what became a list of "1,000 wannabes" who saw the potential. <P> "I was able to go to corporate with this list of 1,000 people, so they had no reason not to approve it," he recalled. <P> Officially launched in 2010, the LinkedPeople enterprise social network based on IBM Connections now helps connect 6,000 employees across 40 subsidiaries in 30 countries. Based in the Netherlands, LeasePlan is one of the leading vehicle leasing and fleet management companies in the world, with more than 1.4 million cars worldwide. <P> LinkedPeople hosts more than 1,100 communities, 500 blogs and 1,100 forums. It is considered an integral part of business operations, although de Gier conceded it's easier to track social network usage statistics than a direct impact on business productivity. He believes its most significant impact is the creation of a "corporate brain." Without a global collaboration system, finding an expert on a given topic who might be in another country in another business unit would be "pretty much impossible," he said. <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/leaseplan.gif" width="590" height="364" alt="Leaseplan" title="Leaseplan"><br />Leaseplan's Wim de Gier</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> "By creating global project communities where people can share ideas, there is a big chance to help people stop reinventing the wheel," de Gier said. One current initiative where it is helping is the creation of a single invoice that can be presented to multinational companies that do business with Leaseplan in multiple countries. With better information sharing, that's the sort of thing "that will be adopted by other entities much more easily than it was in the past," he said. <P> De Gier said he still runs into resistance from executives who say they "don't want Facebook" inside the company. "I have to explain, it's not about Facebook, it's about the corporate brain." <P> Winning adoption is particularly tough in regions like Eastern Europe where open social collaboration feels foreign to those who grew up fearing a surveillance state, he said. Those employees are coming from a culture where people feared speaking openly to a neighbor or a spouse, he added, "and now 30 years later they're able to be put something into a system where they can blog and read everyone up to the CEO's mind." <P> That's why it's so important to market social collaboration from the top down, using tools like a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SOPoKStGACI#!">video</a> in which CEO Vahid Daemi endorsed LinkedPeople and encouraged open discussion. <P> The message is to "share your feelings, even if they are bad," de Gier said. "When it's in the open, you are able to change. When it's hidden, you're not able to change it."<strong>DenMat Holdings</strong> <P> DenMat was one of the first companies to explore the value of Chatter as a social collaboration extension to the Salesforce.com platform, and continues to use it to connect both employees and the dentists and dental labs that are its channel to market. <P> I had interviewed DenMat VP of IT Jonathan Green in 2010 for a <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/19/salesforce-microsoft-internet-technology-chatter.html"><em>Forbes</em>.com article</a> on DenMat as an early adopter of Chatter. <P> "We were one of the beta sites, and it's been a wild ride," Green said in an interview earlier this month. <P> Founded in 1974, DenMat makes restorative dental and cosmetic products. Green embraced Salesforce.com's CRM platform partly to move away from green-screen terminal software running on an old AS / 400 midrange computer, which was what DenMat used to run manufacturing and sales. Through custom integration with the Force.com platform, he was able to synchronize data between the legacy system and the cloud. However, some users continue to fall back on the old terminal interface because it's what they are used to -- and, honestly, because the shortcut key combinations they have memorized can make it faster for routine tasks than working with a Web-based user interface. <P> In that environment, "the initial adoption of Chatter was very slow, for fear that it could be used against them," Green said. "But then we would hire new people, and they post everything because they're used to working that way. It takes seeing someone do it and not get in trouble" for others to start to change their minds, he said. <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/jonathan-denmat-590.png" width="590" height="475" alt="DenMat" title="DenMat"><br />Jonathan Green of DenMat</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> Minds are changing, Green said. An executive who previously was "one of my biggest holdouts" has started posting several times a day after recognizing Chatter as a tool for motivating his team. <P> DenMat was acquired in late 2011 by a new investment firm, and the new management was initially "very skeptical of Salesforce.com in general," Green said. However, the new leaders couldn't help being impressed by the way Chatter helped them connect with employees across the organization, he said. "Now, they want every customer-facing touchpoint to be through Salesforce."<strong>Electrolux</strong> <P> When Electrolux surveyed users about the value of its enterprise social network, director of employee engagement Ralf Larsson admits he was initially disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm. <P> Yet as he dug further into the results he found reasons for optimism. "About 29% of the employees gave a totally different rating -- they were so much more positive about everything," he said in an interview. "We need to get that 29% to become 100%, once they've seen the value of collaborating in new ways," he added. "That doesn't happen by default." <P> Electrolux makes consumer and professional appliances, including the Frigidaire line of refrigerators. The company is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with operations worldwide. Its social collaboration platform, based on IBM Connections but with Electrolux branding, attracted more than 17,000 visitors in 2012, an increase of more than 300% from 2011, with an increasing share of that traffic coming from mobile devices. The number of employees with a device who actively visit a social space every month increased from 5% in 2011 to 55% in 2013. The target audience includes 61,000 employees in 60 countries. <P> "My title is engagement," noted Larsson, who reports up through corporate communications. "My job is finding new ways for Electrolux to connect to more employees in more ways -- find them, connect them, get to do something. That something might be crowdsourcing or idea generation. The point is to connect more and better with employees and get them to do the right things." <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/electrolux.jpg" width="590" height="430"><br />Electrolux's Ralf Larsson, director, employee engagement</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> IBM Connections was chosen partly to replace a Lotus Notes database "with something more modern," Larsson said. "We wanted to support more conversational interactions with other parts of the business, and we also had a group of top 20 leaders who wanted a place to discuss sustainability issues within the organization." <P> Electrolux also uses SharePoint, typically for "larger projects where there are a lot of documents," Larsson said. Meanwhile, IBM Connections "is the more people-centric social layer." <P> One challenge of working with the IBM platform is its breadth and depth, which employees sometimes find overwhelming, Larsson said. To make it more approachable, one of the things he has been working on is a "five things you need to know" training program that dispenses discrete tips like how to share files, or how to get the Connections app set up on an Android phone. <P> "If we can provide a few tips and tricks on our side, then they can expand from there," he said.<strong>Macquarie Group</strong> <P> Most of the social business leaders profiled here are pushing hard to get more people on their platforms. <P> Not so for Silu Modi, VP of digital marketing for Macquarie Group, who oversees a social media marketing and prospecting program for financial advisers seeking customers for the firm's private wealth management services. "I'm looking at total audience of 40, at tops 50, advisers -- but every single one of them using it well." <P> Modi works for the Canadian subsidiary of Macquarie, which is based in Australia. Until 2011, company policy prohibited advisers from practicing their profession in social media for regulatory reasons. That policy has been relaxed somewhat with the use of Actiance Socialite, a social media management tool designed for use in regulated industries where communications with customers and potential customers must be monitored and archived. Still, the advisers who use the tool are operating out in public where they can potentially get themselves -- and the company -- in a lot of trouble by saying the wrong thing. <P> The program that allows supervised access to Twitter, LinkedIn and other social sites started with just four advisers and has been expanding at the rate of another four every six months or so. Modi said he may pick up the pace to add five or six advisers every six months, but probably won't go beyond that. <P> "I don't believe in social for every one of our advisers, just like seminars are not for every one of [our] advisers," he said. "If you want to be part of [the] social program, you have to have had a blog going for a while. You need some digital savvy and you need to be able to write something for yourself -- where you don't need someone else writing your tweets for you. You're going to be a spokesperson for the brand, so you have to be able to complete a well-formed, well-written sentence." <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/silu_modi.png" width="590" height="509"><br />Silu Modi of Macquarie</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> Ghostwriting social content doesn't work, especially for financial professionals. If a potential client likes what the adviser posted, the failure to be able to discuss that topic on follow-up leads to "cognitive dissonance" that kills sales, Modi said. "The person writing this stuff has to be the person you're going to meet in real life." <P> The most talented investment advisers tend to have their own strong opinions in any case and not want to merely distribute press releases. Those selected for the social media program are given a tutorial on the relevant regulations and what they can and can't say. For the first six months of the program, everything they post has to be pre-approved for compliance before it goes live. If they get through six months of the program with no more than three rejections, they graduate to "post moderation," meaning they are trusted to post their own content, subject to spot checking after the fact. <P> While there is a pent-up demand from advisers who want to get into the program, particularly after hearing tales of how it brought in big contracts, the role of social needs to be kept in perspective, Modi said. "I don't think anybody in their right mind is going to invest a half million with an adviser because of a pithy tweet." Instead, the smart adviser who goes prospecting works all the online and offline channels available "until somewhere on the path they hit a tipping point -- after four, five, six, eight, nine touchpoints, you hit on something that takes them over the edge."<strong>Mercer</strong> <P> The impetus for Mercer's enterprise social network came from the very top of the company -- although the CEO didn't ask for social collaboration in so many words, CIO Harry Van Drunen said. <P> The mandate from president and CEO Julio A. Portalatin was "a little broader than that," Van Drunen said. "He was looking for employee engagement and innovation within the organization and better ways to foster innovation." <P> Mercer is a global management consulting firm that helps other companies design benefits plans and employee programs. While its social collaboration initiative is still young, "among Fortune 500 companies, we've got a story that is as good or better than most," Van Drunen said. <P> This executive push for engagement and innovation came in early 2012, shortly after Van Drunen had shelved a planned SharePoint upgrade for budgetary reasons. Now, he dusted off those plans and took a closer look at how NewsGator's social platform in combination with SharePoint could accelerate progress toward Portalatin's business goal. <P> "I bundled together a business case, got approval in April and went live the first week in November," Van Drunen said. That was a "real burn" from an IT perspective, he added. "You only get that stuff done in a hurry if you have executive sponsorship," both because of the technology work required and the "work within the business." <P> Since then, Portalatin has become probably the most active user of the platform's social capabilities, blogging about strategy and inviting employees to comment back, Van Drunen said. "He's embracing the opportunity." <P> Getting the rest of the company to mirror that enthusiasm is more challenging, Van Drunen said. "What we've learned through the process is it does not magically happen." For social collaboration to be productive, people have to come back on a regular basis, and they won't do that if things get stale, he said. That requires not only adoption but active participation and productive use, he said. <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/mercer.jpg" width="590" height="372"><br />Mercer CIO Harry Van Drunen</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> Part of the process of winning active employee participation has been making sure everyone understands the ground rules. Early on, employees were presented with a series of "quick guide" documents on what was and was not appropriate behavior on the social network. <P> Marcia Robinson, leader of Mercer's Global Knowledge Management team, said Facebook and Twitter users took to the collaboration network more easily, but they still needed guidance on what was and was not appropriate. Her short version: "You should not be microblogging that you had Corn Flakes for breakfast, but you could post that you had Corn Flakes for breakfast with the CEO and here is what he said." <P> At the same time, other employees were afraid to post, partly because they were not clear where their posts would show up or who would see them, said Barbara Fiorillo, the enterprise content management leader on Robinson's team. Posting to the main corporate feed "can be scary for people, putting yourself out there like that -- knowing your boss sees it. <P> In Mercer's social collaboration setup, based on SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites, all employees are automatically assigned followers including their primary supervisor and departmental coworkers. <P> "I think we've been really good about creating a culture that says it's okay to post -- and don't worry if there's a typo," she said. Still, employees needed guidance about what to post where -- whether in the company-wide stream or a group for a particular professional interest -- and who would see it. So her team created a "Who Sees My Post" infographic showing how widely visible a post will be, depending on where it is posted and how it is tagged. <P> In addition to calming fears about broadcasting too widely, this summary helped employees understand how to tag their posts to get them seen by the right people. <P> That seems to be happening, as employees report making productive connections they would not have made otherwise, Van Drunen said. Although formal measurement of the program's success will be important going forward, for now he asks employees to think of how many people they would have had to contact to get the answer to a question a few years ago, versus today.<strong>Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</strong> <P> Prior to adding a social element, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia already had a collaboration system in place in SharePoint. The only problem: few people knew about it. <P> Meanwhile, email was a much more inefficient way of doing group collaboration, but it was the tool everybody knew about and knew how to use. That's the basic thing the hospital decided to change by implementing the combination of NewsGator and SharePoint. <P> Yes, this is one last NewsGator story. True, the deficiencies the hospital saw in SharePoint dated back to its SharePoint 2007 implementation, and the SharePoint 2013 edition includes more out-of-the-box social functionality. <P> Yet selecting NewsGator as a layer on top of SharePoint proved to be a good decision, said Kirsten Culbertson, interactive intranet producer at the hospital and leader of the project. "NewsGator has faster cycles -- they're improving every three months -- whereas it takes I don't know how many years before SharePoint provides a new version. NewsGator also comes with more tools than SharePoint [alone] can offer us right now," she said. <P> After implementing NewsGator atop SharePoint 2010 last year, the hospital is in the process of upgrading to SharePoint 2013 and the latest version of NewsGator, she said. <P> "What we're finding is younger employees are getting in there right away, and within a day they'll have 400 connections," Culbertson said. "For the rest of us, it's going to take additional encouragement." That means end-user training, as well as discussions with the management and directors of the hospital about the significance of social collaboration. "A lot of the work we've been doing is kind of political in nature," she added. <P> <div style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/culbertsonk-profile.jpg" width="590" height="417"><br />Kirsten Culbertson's CHOP profile</div> <P> <!-- TOC --> <div style="width: 200px; float: right; padding: 5px; margin-left: 5px; background-color: #eee;"><strong>Social Business Leaders 2013</strong><br /><a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834" target="_blank">State Street</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=2">Unisys</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=3">GE Capital</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=4">KPMG</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=5">Leaseplan</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=6">DenMat</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=7">Electrolux</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=8">Macquarie Group</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=9">Mercer</a><br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934?pgno=10">Children's Hospital of Philadelphia</a></div> <P> Examples of successful uses include: <P> -- A CIO Blog, run by information services employees, which invites comments. <P> -- New Employee Orientation Community, a place for new employees to network and find answers. <P> -- Faculty Development Community, an asynchronous learning environment. <P> -- Nursing Wiki, providing support and information for employee development. <P> -- SafeKeeping Community, a forum on enhancing patient safety. <P> One of the drawbacks of the way SharePoint was used in the past was that collaboration was limited to tight-knit teams and "did not allow for users to see what any other groups were doing," Culbertson said. At the same time, SharePoint previously had been approved for applications including those involving storing sensitive patient data -- which made sense as long as those collaboration sites were isolated. That all needs to be rethought in the social environment, she said, although she believes it ultimately should be possible to manage patient health information through more tightly secured communities on the platform. <P> Culbertson works in internal communications, although she has also been working with other departments such as human resources on initiatives such as using the social network as part of employee training. Employee profiles are being enriched with data pulled from a Lawson human resources information system and a likely next step will be integrating with a performance management system. <P> The goal is to "create a clear picture of each employee and their skill set and what their accomplishments are," Culbertson said. "What we're doing right now is a lot bigger than just improving communications across the organization."2013-05-31T09:06:00ZLearn lessons from the global financial company, which will be honored at the E2 Conference for social collaboration on a large scale.http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/state-street-social-business-leader-of-2/240155834?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/statestreet_tn.png" alt="10 Social Business Leaders for 2013" title="10 Social Business Leaders for 2013" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">10 Social Business Leaders for 2013</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(<a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934">read about them all</a>)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- / Image Aligning right --> In June 2012, the global financial firm State Street Corp. introduced an "innovation rally" on its enterprise social network, and the response proved explosive. <P> "That was really the catalyst -- the thing that got people to say, ah, I understand what this is, I understand it," said Kristin Z. Waryas, VP of enterprise social collaboration at the firm. The open brainstorming session was held over 72 hours with employees from around the world participating in eight online forums on ways for State Street to improve its business. The rally attracted 12,000 postings, which the coordinators filtered down to about 400 worthy of further investigation. "That's where the collaboration really came into play -- we took the best ideas and built communities around them so the people who had participated in the discussion could build a business case for executive management," she said. Of those, right now it looks like there are 16 ideas with a reasonable expectation of return on investment that will get a closer look. "A lot of those ideas were for things that already existed, but people didn't know about them," she added. <P> Making an organization smarter about new ideas, as well as the assets it already has, is what social collaboration is all about. For what she and others at State Street have already accomplished, as well as her ambitions for what comes next, Waryas is our Social Business Leader of the Year for 2013 and will <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/schedule-builder/session-id/15">join me onstage at the E2 Conference</a> in Boston to talk about her work and answer questions. <strong>Update:</strong> See the rest of our <a href="https://www.informationweek.com/social-business/strategy/10-social-business-leaders-for-2013/240155934">10 Social Business Leaders For 2013</a> list. <P> Social collaboration is important to support State Street's global operating model. Previously, Global Operations and Client Service teams used mass email distributions for what were essentially crowdsourcing activities -- trying to find the right person to answer a question. But email tends to drive either one-way responses, not shared with the group, or messy reply-to-all email threads. That translated into workplace inefficiencies, limited knowledge sharing, duplicate efforts, unfiltered information and untapped expertise, Waryas said. <P> The State Street Collaborate internal social network launched in April 2012, following a year-long pilot. The pilot involved more than 1,500 employees who helped define business-driven use cases for the technology. The enterprise social network is now available to a global workforce of 30,000 employees in 29 different countries, with more than 10,000 active users and more than 600 communities. Although the current collaboration network, based on SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator Social Sites, is relatively new, that's not where the story begins, and the network that exists today is only the first chunk of the complete social intranet State Street is preparing to introduce later this year. <P> Disclaimer: State Street does not endorse technology products. However, NewsGator made sense as an integrated SharePoint application because SharePoint was already so widely used at the firm, Waryas said. <P> Founded in 1792, State Street is a global financial services firm based in Boston. It serves institutional investors through State Street Bank and Trust Company and provides registered adviser services through State Street Global Advisors. State Street is known for staking ambitious IT goals, such as a plan to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/platform/state-street-private-cloud-600-million-s/240002596">save $600 million with a private cloud implementation</a>. CIO Christopher Perretta <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cio-christopher-perretta-mixes-new-tech/226500119">briefly mentioned</a> employee social networking in a 2010 <em>InformationWeek</em> interview on new initiatives. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/davidfcarr/statestreet.png" alt="Kristin Waryas profile on State Street Collaborate" title="Kristin Waryas profile on State Street Collaborate" height="370" width="590"><br />Kristin Waryas' profile on State Street Collaborate</div> <P> Employed by State Street for 22 years, Waryas started in a "very entry level job" in fund accounting before moving up the ladder to supporting clients of the fund group and eventually transitioning to an IT liaison role developing business requirements for technology programs. <P> When State Street first began offering online services to clients in the late 1990s, Waryas became a product manager for those tools. State Street was an innovator in introducing online banking services, Waryas said, but eventually the proliferation of those services became a problem of its own. "What customers were looking for was one State Street," she said. <P> Yet even after the bank's Web developers consolidated the platform, she thought it wasn't getting enough love. To turn that around, she developed a network of champions -- employees with in-depth knowledge of the tools who would take the lead on promoting them, both internally and externally. "For our customers to use the tools, our employees had to use the tools," she said. That is, they needed to take advantage of the Web-based tools where possible, rather than falling back on internal, proprietary tools. They needed to know the ins and outs of the customer Web portal so they could introduce it in all its glory to State Street clients. <P> The 200 employees selected for that global team of champions needed a way to collaborate, and an IT architecture group suggested an enterprise social collaboration product called Lotus Connections (now IBM Connections). "That proved very valuable for what we were trying to achieve and gave us a use case to take to executive management" about the value of social collaboration, Waryas said.That was in 2009. What followed in 2010 was a broader business and IT transformation initiative, and the team driving that also required a collaboration environment to work with. This prompted a more formal "bake-off" analysis of the major players in enterprise social networking, including IBM, Jive Software and others. "When it comes down to technology, they all had about the same thing," Waryas said. <P> However, State Street had become a "SharePoint shop" ever since adopting SharePoint 2007. Although there was a need to consolidate sites and institute better governance, SharePoint was so established as a standard for document sharing and other forms of collaboration that "we realized we weren't going to be able to fight the SharePoint beast," Waryas said. The recommendation to the executive team was "we're not going to fight this, and we're not going to stand up two separate platforms," she said. <P> Although SharePoint itself wasn't a complete social solution at that time, Microsoft made an introduction to NewsGator, which has made a business of filling in the gaps in SharePoint as a social platform. Even with the enhancements in SharePoint 2013, NewsGator continues to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/social_networking_private_platforms/newsgator-prepares-to-leapfrog-sharepoin/240005075">leapfrog SharePoint</a> while aiming to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/social_networking_private_platforms/newsgators-new-ceo-plots-social-software/240005679">steer its own course</a>. <P> The collaboration team Waryas established also recognized that it had been a mistake to deliver SharePoint as an IT initiative divorced from a broader corporate strategy on information management. By establishing many pockets of collaboration activity, State Street had denied itself the possibilities of global collaboration across the organization. So part of the project became chasing down the many separate SharePoint sites that had been established and folding them into one social collaboration network. Since SharePoint can be used for things other than straight collaboration -- for example, as a platform for application development -- there are still SharePoint instances that will escape this dragnet. As a rule, however, the firm has ruled that teams should collaborate in groups within the enterprise social network, rather than on separate SharePoint sites. <P> To rationalize the SharePoint network, her team has been checking the activity logs for each site to see if it is being used and checking that there is a site administrator actively managing it. If not, they shut it down. They are applying the same sort of discipline to community management on the social platform, sunsetting communities that aren't being used. "I'm ... watching over what communities get stood up and facilitate weekly calls" with community managers, Waryas said. <P> To make social collaboration fit the security concerns of a regulated industry, State Street applied an existing information-classification policy to communities, with tightest restrictions on those who work with highly confidential or sensitive information. <P> As she did with the customer platform, Waryas established a champions program to promote the use of the social intranet, which has about 1,000 people signed up and 400 actively engaged. They also serve as an advisory body to discuss concerns about governance and community management. <P> The next phase of the project is to pull all intranet content into the social network. At the same time that the social collaboration project was moving forward, a marketing-led brand alignment initiative had been aggressively consolidating Web portals, including those used for internal communication. Unfortunately, they had been doing it on a different technical foundation, IBM WebSphere. Now that content needed to be migrated once more, to SharePoint. <P> "We decided we needed to rationalize what we had, in terms of content management, for the sake of making things readily accessible," Waryas said. To be effective at boosting productivity, the network needed to make content easier to find in a search. <P> Longer term, she "absolutely" sees potential for integrating business applications with the social network. For example, as part of its transformation program, State Street is creating operational dashboards to help fund accountants track trades, and there ought to be ways of integrating those dashboards into the social network or adding social functionality to the dashboards, she said. "If your fund has an alert on it, we'd like you to be able to click on it and see what's going on with that fund -- and then have a person picker, where you could have a subject matter expert pop up as a contact." However, such enhancements won't get past the strategic planning stage this year -- what's funded for now is getting the basics of social communication and collaboration right, she said. <P> The social intranet is also focused on boosting adoption. State Street Collaborate will be welcoming users who had been excluded in the past, such as investment advisers who initially couldn't be supported on the platform for lack of a way to archive their social communications, as required under financial industry regulations. Including those people should make a big difference because many of their coworkers were reluctant to invest time in an employee social network if it didn't include everyone.The innovation rally was an important turning point, an initiative conducted on the social platform that was led by management and included participation from top executives, including State Street chairman, president and CEO Jay Hooley. To help maximize that executive participation, the social collaboration champions who had the most experience with the platform offered "reverse mentoring" to company leaders, Waryas said. "Having that framework and network in place helped us to be successful in the rally." <P> The volume of response the rally generated turned out to be a challenge all its own. "That's where the collaboration really came into play -- we took the best ideas and built communities around them so the people who had participated in the discussion could build a business case for executive management," Waryas said. Of those, right now it looks like there are 16 ideas with a reasonable expectation of return on investment that will get a closer look. "A lot of those ideas were for things that already existed, but people didn't know about them," she added. <P> The rally was conducted using the basic discussion tools of the social platform, which meant when the rally was concluded her team had to manually sift through the 12,000 posts to find the best ideas. "We didn't realize all the work involved," she said. Since then, State Street has taken advantage of NewsGator's ideation module for similar projects, using peer voting on ideas to make it easier to summarize the results of these internal crowdsourcing projects. <P> Although all employees have a login that allows them to participate on the social platform, they have to go to the effort of creating a SharePoint MySite profile to become an active participant. <P> With the launch of the social intranet, the company will probably push harder to get employees to set up social profiles, or at "at a minimum provide corporate directory information," Waryas said. At "lunch and learn" training sessions, there is usually a photo table to make it easier for people to get a profile photo they can use. <P> Profiles are important because if people tag themselves correctly, according to area of expertise -- say, <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/otc.asp">OTC derivatives</a> -- they will automatically be notified when someone posts a question on that topic and will also be featured prominently in an expertise search. "It's just the power of crowdsourcing -- if you hashtag a particular topic in a post, you'll reach any person who has that topic in their expertise, so you can start to crowdsource to get the right answer," Waryas said. <P> Some of the greatest potential lies with the delivery of better service to clients, for example by global asset managers who may not know everyone on their team. By bringing them together in a single community, they can "find someone else around the company who had to answer the same question for another customer. The challenge now is to capture those things and put them into a knowledge repository of frequently asked questions," she said. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>.</em>2013-05-30T11:00:00ZState programs will tailor Coursera resources to their own needs, blending its content with their own.http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/coursera-mooc-embraced-by-10-state-unive/240155745?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Public university leaders in 10 states will work with Coursera to adapt aspects of the massive open online course platform to their needs through a partnership announced Thursday. <P> <a href="http://www.coursera.org" target="_blank">Coursera</a>, a for-profit MOOC best known for offering courses from elite private universities, will provide access to its platform and an a la carte menu of course modules such as videos, allowing partner universities to use the content in blended learning scenarios with on-campus students or create their own online offerings. <P> The partners comprise a mix of university systems and flagship universities: State University of New York (SUNY), the Tennessee Board of Regents and University of Tennessee Systems, University of Colorado System, University of Houston System, University of Kentucky, University of Nebraska, University of New Mexico, University System of Georgia and West Virginia University. <P> <strong>[ Textbooks that talk back? Read more at <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/coursesmart-recognized-for-e-textbook-an/240155591?itc=edit_in_body_cross">CourseSmart Recognized For E-Textbook Analytics</a>.]</strong> <P> "We've looked at our student population, and most of our students taking courses are the ones who already have degrees," Coursera's Daphne Koller said in an interview. Koller shares CEO duties with her co-founder Andrew Ng, and both are computer science professors at Stanford University. While it's great to be promoting lifelong learning, Koller said, "We realized in order to address the fundamental problems in higher education, we needed to work with the students who needed it the most." In other words, the company needed to be working with the state university systems that serve about 70 percent of the students in higher education. <P> These new partners will not be offering MOOCs in the same mode as others in the Coursera catalog. They will have the option of publishing either publicly or through a private section of the website reserved for their own students. An instructor could decide to use selected videos from a Coursera course, and then add in a few of his own plus some additional quizzes, according to Koller. <P> While the partnership is official, some of the universities are just starting to develop plans for putting it into practice, and their approaches will vary. The University of Kentucky plans to create two different introductory chemistry courses, designed by its faculty but possibly including some MOOC content and other open educational resources, senior vice provost and CIO Vincent Kellen said in an interview. The target is to have those offerings ready to go for January 2014. <P> "Our initial thought: Could this be a good platform for reaching high school students and early college students? We thought it could, particularly for chemistry," Kellen said. That audience includes those high school students preparing to take the AP Chemistry test -- knowing that if they earn a high enough score they won't need to take the course in college -- as well as under-prepared freshmen and students preparing to transfer from community college. With some advance online preparation, Kellen explained, these students will likely be better prepared to pass the required college science course. <P> Although the University of Kentucky offers some of its own online courses, the Coursera platform is designed to address larger audiences, something that will be needed to serve high school students from around the state and beyond, Kellen said. <P> While the University of Kentucky is developing online courses, the University System of Georgia is thinking primarily in terms of incorporating existing MOOC content into instruction, chief academic officer Houston Davis said. "In all the excitement generated by MOOCs, there has been a lot of emphasis placed on the development of courses, as opposed to how it can or should be used," he said. "Utilization -- that's where the interest of our system, or several of the institutions within our systems, lies." <P> By working with Coursera, Davis hopes to advance the goals of the <a href="http://www.usg.edu/educational_access/complete_college_georgia">Complete College Georgia</a> program aimed at improving affordability and access to college instruction, as well as student retention and success. That means a particular focus on using online and blended learning for core courses every student must take. Pure online courses might be offered in combination with proctored exams that would justify giving credit for the course. Each university within the Georgia system will have the freedom to make its own plans for how to use Coursera resources, although they negotiated terms on a system level and will be comparing notes as they go along, according to Davis. <P> The Georgia Institute of Technology, which is part of the state system, has already created Coursera courses. Some of the <a href="https://www.coursera.org/gatech" target="_blank">Georgia Tech MOOCs</a> could tie in with the state's core courses strategy, Davis said. They include introductory topics such as Introductory Physics I with Laboratory and First-Year Composition 2.0, along with more advanced ones like Software Defined Networking.A backlash against the MOOC phenomenon has been building for months, particularly among faculty members who are suspicious that they will become tools for <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/ed-tech-privatization-and-plunder/240155089">political agenda</a> that seeks to undermine public education and replace it with commodity online resources. Even at elite institutions such as Harvard, which partnered with MIT to create the edX MOOC platform, <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/harvard-professors-call-for-greater-oversight-of-moocs/43953">liberal arts professors are protesting</a> the rush to embrace MOOCs, which they worry will undermine the personal, intellectual connection inherent to a liberal arts education. <P> University of Kentucky's Kellen said he has his share of MOOC skeptics on campus, but the approach his institution is taking to partnering with Coursera has helped mollify them. "In this particular case, we're all agreed it's very important to improve the readiness of students who enter college and the success of their first years here -- at least we have a common cause, in that sense," he said. <P> Kellen added that the Coursera partnership also provides an opportunity to prove how combining online content with face-to-face learning provides a better result. Besides, he pointed out, in the introductory courses where MOOCs will be applied first, students rarely get an intimate personal experience as it is. <P> "We've been growing our own version of the MOOC for years -- it's called the large lecture hall," Kellen said. The MOOC approach could be the key to managing high-volume course requirements more effectively. "If everybody focuses hard on how to make students successful, that's the right angle." <P> This new group of partners will not be on quite the same footing as the universities Coursera has worked with in the past, meaning they haven't necessarily been invited to publish the courses they create to the MOOC platform's main catalog. They have the option of making their courses public, but those courses will appear in a separate section of the website. <P> According to Koller, that division is being justified for a mix of "capacity and quality" reasons. "Coursera's initial focus on elite institutions, whose courses were offered under the brand of the institution, helped ensure that they have a strong motivation -- as strong as or stronger than ours -- for providing high-quality courses to maintain their reputation." She added that Coursera wants to maintain a reputation for quality but doesn't have time to scrutinize every course. <P> "Right now, we're not opening the doors to everyone because we just don't have the resources to do that quality control." <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-29T10:25:00ZConfidential two-way texting service will be offered to all U.S. K-12 schools, will cost only the price of a phone line.http://www.informationweek.com/education/mobility/texting-tool-helps-kids-fight-bullying/240155682?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/12-open-educational-resources-shaking-up/240150477"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/961/creative-commons_tn.jpg" alt="12 Open Educational Resources: From Khan to MIT" title="12 Open Educational Resources: From Khan to MIT" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">12 Open Educational Resources: From Khan to MIT</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for slideshow)</span> </div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Students who are bullied or witness bullying will be able to report the incidents by text message using a free service Blackboard is offering to K-12 schools. <P> The <a href="http://connect.blackboard.com/tiptxt" target="_blank">TipTxt</a> service, to be promoted with the help of the National PTA, is an extension of the Blackboard Connect product for emergency notifications and routine text, email and robocall alerts to parents, but school systems do not need to be customers to take advantage of the anti-bullying product. <P> Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt said the company decided to offer the product as a public service after discussions with its customers in K-12 who recognize bullying as a pervasive problem but acknowledge that most incidents never get reported. Telling kids to go to the guidance office or to visit a website to register their concerns is a real deterrent to reporting bullying, he said, whereas about 75% of kids are carrying a cell phone and most of the rest can easily get access to one. Research also shows that kids in poverty areas have more access to mobile devices than any other communications tool. <P> <strong>[ Innovation or right-wing plot? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/ed-tech-privatization-and-plunder/240155089?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Ed Tech, Privatization And Plunder</a>. ]</strong> <P> Blackboard is offering TipTxt at no charge to every public, private and parochial K-12 school in the U.S. Participating schools will receive access to the service, a TipTxt mailbox and an assigned support staffer. The only cost is to schools that Blackboard is not absorbing is for a dedicated phone line to support the system, which can be purchased at the district level for about $125 per year. <P> "Some students tend to not be as comfortable with face-to-face and text is how they communicate," said Dr. Lisa Andrejko, Superintendent of Schools for Quakertown Community School District, one of the first districts to pilot the service, in a statement for the press release. "Using technology to report situations and alert school officials without having to be in their presence or be seen is a very effective means of communication and helpful in anti-bullying efforts. With TipTxt, we can help students report bullying without fear of retaliation." <P> The TipTxt service is meant to be confidential but not anonymous, Bhatt said. The system will track the number a message originated from so schools can follow up to ask for more details. Keyword-based filters can also trigger an automatic response, and school systems will be able to configure the rules and workflow according to their own policies. <P> The system is confidential in the sense that the data will not be attached to any other student record and is meant to be seen only by those responsible for enforcing anti-bullying policy, Bhatt explained. However, the tracking is in place to allow follow up on abuse of the system, such as false reports. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-28T15:00:00ZLearning consortium names CourseSmart Analytics most innovative product for tracking students' use of e-textbooks.http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/coursesmart-recognized-for-e-textbook-an/240155591?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->CourseSmart Analytics, a software program that creates a picture of student engagement based on metrics gathered from access to electronic textbooks, was named the most innovative new product by IMS Global Learning Consortium earlier this month. <P> CourseSmart offers a catalog of e-textbooks and other digital learning materials, which it estimates covers 90% of the available titles. With the analytics module, currently in pilot at nine institutions and scheduled for launch in late 2013, CourseSmart is tracking students' use of those materials to give teachers and publishers an idea of how engaged with courses the students are. <P> IMS Global is a technology standards organization that promotes applications of the <a href="http://www.imsglobal.org/lti/" target="_blank">Learning Tools Interoperability</a> specification. LTI serves to "negotiate the handshake between our system and the learning management system -- that's what makes it such an interesting tool," CourseSmart CEO Sean Devine said in an interview."That's how we get class-specific information, so we know if a particular book is being used in a specific class, and that is how we report back the analytics information to the faculty members." <P> <strong>[ What if you could get class recommendations a la Netflix? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/desire2learn-predicts-students-best-clas/240154683?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Desire2Learn Predicts Students' Best Classes</a>. ]</strong> <P> CourseSmart Analytics won IMS's top award for new products, while a Korean e-textbook initiative won recognition as an ongoing initiative producing results. See the <a href="http://www.imsglobal.org/pressreleases/pr130516.html" target="_blank">IMS Global press release for all the winners</a>. <P> CourseSmart Analytics previously attracted some notoriety for a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html" target="_blank">Teacher Knows if You've Done the E-Reading</a> feature in the <em>New York Times</em>. <P> The story cited Adrian Guardia, a Texas A&M instructor in management, who noticed a student who otherwise seemed to be doing well had a low CourseSmart "engagement index" -- a symptom of having only opened his textbook once. <P> "It was one of those aha moments," Guardia told the <em>Times</em>. "Are you really learning if you only open the book the night before the test? I knew I had to reach out to him to discuss his studying habits." <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/education/2013Q1/csanalytics.jpg" alt="CourseSmart Analytics" title="CourseSmart Analytics" height="500" width="590"><br />The CourseSmart Analytics dashboard tracks learning engagement.</div> <P> In that case, the student acknowledged that the professor had found him out and resolved to change his ways. But the story also quoted critics who worried that the system could be gamed or buggy or present an inaccurate picture of student performance.Divine said the analytics are not intended to grade performance but to alert faculty members when a student needs some help, or a nudge. The analytics dashboard, based on the GoodData business intelligence platform, is intended as a tool to help faculty and administrators improve retention, learning outcomes and other measures of a university's success. <P> According to CourseSmart's own survey: <P> -- 75% of students agree/strongly agree that they are comfortable with the tool. <P> -- 70% of students believe CourseSmart Analytics will help improve engagement and student success. <P> -- 83% of faculty agree/strongly agree that CourseSmart Analytics will help them make more informed decisions about course materials. <P> -- 100% of administrators agree or strongly agree that CourseSmart Analytics will inform digital textbook platform use. <P> IMS Global said its judges were also impressed with CourseSmart Analytics, picking it from a field of about 50 entrants. "This is a very difficult competition to win -- and has a reputation as such -- because evidence of educational improvement is required," IMS CEO Rob Abel said in an email, adding that it was different from something like a Codie Award where "cool products" can win. "We've had several cases where products that won major other prizes did not even make finalist." <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-23T13:00:00ZMicrosoft's cloud data centers get direct peering with Internet2, the high-speed network for education and research. This gives schools faster access to data.http://www.informationweek.com/education/campus-infrastructure/microsoft-cloud-gets-internet2-expresswa/240155475?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Students, staff and researchers at campuses taking advantage of Microsoft cloud services will see better performance and lower costs because of direct "peering" between Microsoft data centers and Internet2. <P> <a href="http://www.internet2.edu/">Internet2</a> is a high-speed network operated by a consortium of universities, which also makes services available to some other educational institutions including some K-12 school systems. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering">Peering</a> is an agreement between network operators to exchange traffic directly and without exacting tolls. This agreement will allow Internet2 to provide its members with expedited access to Microsoft cloud services, bypassing the public Internet. The deal also could give Microsoft an edge over Google, it's biggest rival in offering cloud services to higher education. <P> "Number one, it's a performance advantage because we'll be connecting on arguably the highest-performing network around," said Khalil Yazdi, program developer for cloud service partnerships at Internet2. For example, universities that are accustomed to operating their own Exchange servers for email also want to make sure they can get comparable performance from Microsoft's cloud service. Second, institutions that make routine use of Office 365 for email and collaboration applications will get access to bandwidth-hungry applications at the best pricing, he said. <P> <strong>[ Is it easier to cheat online? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/security/when-education-gets-too-virtual/240153557?itc=edit_in_body_cross">When Education Gets Too Virtual</a>. ]</strong> <P> Meanwhile, researchers who are interested in taking advantage of Microsoft's Azure infrastructure as a service product for storage and processing on large amounts of data need to be able to move data in and out of the service as efficiently and economically as possible, Yazdi said. "Now is the time to make sure the network connections are up to carrying the load of expected activity," he said. <P> Through its <a href="http://www.internet2.edu/netplus/">Net+</a> program, Internet2 has been developing a catalog of cloud service offerings available on favorable terms negotiated by the consortium on behalf of educational institutions. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/vidyo-videoconferencing-coming-to-intern/240153355">Vidyo videoconferencing</a> was one recent addition. Azure and Office 365, Microsoft's <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/productivity-applications/microsoft-office-365-steps-on-google-ent/240154836">most successful cloud offerings</a>, are also part of the program. Microsoft proved willing to negotiate many of the same compliance-related terms and conditions for Azure that it agreed to for Office 365, Yazdi said. <P> University of Washington CIO Kelli Trosvig said that the Internet2 negotiations with Microsoft have paid off in many ways, starting with the aggregation of demand for services from many institutions that allows access to services at the best possible pricing. Also, because hers is a major research institution with a need to handle medical research data and other sensitive information, she wouldn't have been able to take advantage of Microsoft cloud services at scale without the Internet2 deal, she said, both for compliance reasons and because the pricing wouldn't have paid off. <P> Although the peering deal will have a positive impact on University of Washington's access to email and collaborative applications, Trosvig said improving access to Azure storage, processing and SQL Server instances is more significant. "I have literally hundreds of researchers who want access to quick, scalable research infrastructure in a HIPPA-certified cloud," she said, referring to the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Scientists doing big-data analysis in fields such as molecular physics and astronomy will get a particular benefit from the ability to create more sophisticated models and "not have to be slowed down by commercial packets and network traffic," she said. <P> Of the Net+ services, a few others like Box file sharing also have direct peering with Internet2. Google does not. There is an existing peering relationship with Amazon Web Services, "but not at the level we'd like," meaning it's not equally available to all members, Yazdi said. "With all the cloud services, we have made it part of our expectations for the Net+ offerings that we'll route traffic wherever and whenever we can through the network." <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-21T16:40:00ZExamSoft app not only makes the Web off limits, it creates new possibilities, such as med school tests in the morgue.http://www.informationweek.com/education/mobility/ipad-exam-app-takes-testing-offline/240155320?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->The Ohio State University College of Medicine has been doing computerized testing since 2002, but this year an iPad app is allowing the technology to go where it's never gone before: into a room full of dead people. <P> Eric Ermie, program manager for assessment and evaluation at the Ohio State University College of Medicine, said the <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/softest-m/id630498475?mt=8" target="_blank">SofTest-M</a> app from <a href="http://learn.examsoft.com/" target="_blank">ExamSoft</a> worked well enough in testing this year that next year it will be employed much more extensively. "Next year, we will be giving an iPad to every single student when they walk in door," he said, partly so they can be tested this way. The devices will be purchased for first-year students and second-year students who don't already have one. The plan is that as students move into the third and fourth years of the program, they will swap their full-size iPads out for iPad Minis, which have been deemed more appropriate for their use once they move out of the classroom into hospital-based training. <P> The SofTest-M iPad app is designed to provide the security and reliability required for high-stakes exams, operating offline so that it is not dependent on a network connection, while blocking access to the Web and to reference materials or notes on the device for the duration of a test. The recently released iPad app joins ExamSoft clients for Windows and Macs, all of which work with a common Web-based administration system for test setup and analytics. Medical schools are a strong market for the company, along with law schools and some professional testing programs. <P> <strong>[ Take a tour of education technology from its humble beginnings to electronic tablets: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/leadership/tablets-rock-on-education-tech-through-t/240149241?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Tablets Rock On: Education Tech Through The Ages</a>. ]</strong> <P> Ohio State University College of Medicine switched to using ExamSoft on laptops about four years ago, replacing another computerized testing program that proved unreliable, sometimes failing just as the testing was completed, Ermie said. Although he can't endorse products, he said having the software available on the iPad made a significant difference. Over the course of this year, the medical school has experimented with using the iPads for testing, originally using a pre-release version of the software and only for relatively low-stakes quizzes. By the end of the year, the iPad app was judged trustworthy enough to be used for 150-question final exams. <P> Then the program started branching out, exploring scenarios that only make sense with the greater mobility of an iPad, such as practical anatomy exams carried out in a room full of cadavers. In this mode of testing, students walk from station to station around the room examining bodies, where the challenge is to identify the particular organ marked with a pin or answer questions about it. Medical students traditionally have provided paper-and-pencil answers to these questions, which sometimes turned grading into a handwriting analysis exercise -- perhaps proving what they say about doctor's handwriting. <P> With an iPad in hand, students were able to provide more precise answers to each prompt, Ermie said. The iPad also could be used to present information such as X-ray images to go along with the in-person examination of a cadaver. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 590px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/education/2013Q1/examsoft.png" alt="SofTest-M iPad app" title="SofTest-M iPad app" height="442" width="590"><br />SofTest-M exams can include videos to illustrate a question or concept.</div> <P> What the iPad adds is "flexibility and versatility," Ermie said. "The anatomy example is a huge one, but it's kind of the tip of the iceberg. This opens up possibilities for doing vetted, solid high-stakes assessment in a multitude of arenas where we weren't able to before."Another important element of the ExamSoft platform is the analytics it provides to make it easier for instructors to see patterns in the topics individual students are struggling with, Ermie said. "That's kind of amped up our usage and changed our intentions for what the software was good for," leading to an increased emphasis on measuring student performance "in more different ways, more frequently" to help them develop into competent physicians, he said. <P> Although the cadaver exam is a colorful example, the more typical scenario for ExamSoft testing, whether on the iPad or a laptop, is for proctored testing in a classroom or at a test center. Students are often encouraged to download the exam in advance, so as to avoid overloading the network with everyone downloading it at once. The file is encrypted, preventing them from starting or viewing an exam until the proctor gives the code to unlock it. In the case of a timed test, unlocking the test also starts the timer. When the test is complete, the app packages up the student's answers and sends them back to the test server. <P> This mode of delivery means the computerized tests are not "online" in the sense of requiring continuous network access and won't be interrupted by a glitch in a school building's Internet access. ExamSoft VP of business development Jason Gad said that's often the hardest part of his sales pitch, given that people have become so used to thinking of all interactive applications being Web-based. Skeptics are often halfway through explaining that Web-based testing won't work for their purposes when he finally gets his point across. "You can almost hear the sigh," he said, when they realize network access won't be an obstacle after all. <P> In fact, it's possible to give these examinations in locations with no wireless network access as long as students remember to download the exam in advance and upload the results afterward from home or the nearest Starbucks. <P> Instructors create tests through the ExamSoft Web application, which lets them enter a "question bank" of questions they can assemble and reorder for each test they give. Questions can include images, such as diagnostic imagery for medical students to evaluate; video; or PDFs. Including a lot of multimedia will also include the size of the download file for an exam. The ExamSoft software also helps instructors balance out their tests using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_Taxonomy" target="_blank">Bloom's Taxonomy</a> to determine whether they have the right mix of different types of questions, such as those requiring straight recall of facts versus others requiring synthesis of information. <P> Simply by checking a box, an instructor can require that the test be delivered in secure mode, which locks down the iPad or laptop to display just the testing application, with network access and access to other applications disabled. It's also possible to use the software for an open-book test, which might still be timed but allow students to search the Web and other resources to their heart's content. About 96% of the time, instructors choose the locked-down mode, Gad said, although that's starting to change as more instructors begin to use the software for early, proactive assessments rather than only for exams. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-21T11:13:00ZSocial task management tool Jive acquired last year becomes free as a standalone app. Integration with the Jive platform to follow.http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/project_management/jive-scales-producteev-app-now-free/240155274?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/software/10-must-have-wordpress-plugins-for-busin/240153363"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/982/WordPress_01_tn.jpg" alt="10 Must-Have WordPress Plugins For Businesses" title="10 Must-Have WordPress Plugins For Businesses" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">10 Must-Have WordPress Plugins For Businesses</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> Jive Software is launching a revamped, and free, version of Producteev, the social task management tool it acquired in November. <P> After 11 months of work, Producteev "has been rebuilt from scratch using a lot of scalable technology, so it is really a brand new product," said Ilan Abehassera, founder of Producteev and now a senior director of product management at Jive. "We're trying to change the way work gets done, and we've decided tasks are the best route into the enterprise," he said. <P> Producteev was originally designed for use by relatively small teams, but the new version makes it possible to break a large organization into smaller networks of employees who collaborate on tasks, Abehassera said. Producteev always had a free version for individuals, which remained free if you introduced a single collaborator (perfect for mom-and-pop businesses) but charged a per-user fee for any organization with more than three users. With Jive's backing, Producteev will now be free for organizations of any size. <P> Tuesday's announcement of a free standalone version of Producteev came as Jive continues to work on a new task- and project-management module that will be integrated with its enterprise social networking platform. Abehassera said he has been working on that integrated task-management capability in parallel with the retooling of Producteev. While there is already a Producteev app in the Jive Apps Market, it's only a first step, he said. <P> <strong>[ Want to know where enterprise collaboration is heading? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/industry_analysis/social-business-not-dead-just-business-a/240154840?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Social Business Not Dead, Just Business As Usual</a>. ]</strong> <P> Jive currently provides a basic task-management capability as part of its core social software platform, but it's not as slick as some others on the market. Better task management will help Jive align its sales pitch with the message that social collaboration is good for helping companies get work done, not just for fostering discussion. <P> When Producteev becomes more deeply integrated, Jive's task management features should be "more on par with those available in collaboration platforms like IBM Connections, Traction Teampage and Podio," said Alan Lepofsky, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research, who has a put a particular spotlight on the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/project_management/social-task-management-tools-gain-clout/240008230">rise of social task management</a>. <P> In an email, he highlighted two important aspects of the announcement. "First, they put a great deal of engineering into making the code more scalable for enterprise size deployments, thus laying the foundation for the future Jive/Producteev combo, but I believe that is still a few releases away. Second, by offering Producteev for free, Jive is hoping to create an additional onramp into Jive while at the same time keeping customers away from competitive vendors like Asana, Do, Mindjet and Wrike. That's a smart move, but I'd like to see more details around what an upgrade from a standalone use of Producteev to the full Jive infrastructure will be like." <P> In addition to updating its Web app, Producteev is introducing updated apps for iOS and Android, while providing an application programming interface that should allow third parties to create apps for BlackBerry and Windows phones. Meanwhile, Producteev also provides a desktop software app for Mac computers. It used to have desktop app for Windows, too, and it will again, once the developers finish rewriting it to work with the latest version of the cloud service, Abehassera said. <P> I can't help seeing some irony in the Producteev giveaway, given that Jive CEO Tony Zingale once told me Yammer's freemium business model amounted to a strategy to "hand out a bunch of drugs at the schoolyard, and we'll come back and charge you for them later." Since then, Jive has introduced free trials of the cloud version of its social collaboration platform, but there is still no version of the core product that you can use indefinitely for free. <P> The Jive folks insist offering Producteev for free isn't the same sort of thing at all, given that it is a narrowly focused app rather than a broad collaboration platform. As a promotional tool, the free Producteev app is supposed to generate interest in social software and Jive as a company, eventually bringing in some new customers for the social platform. Jive does plan to charge for the forthcoming integrated task management module for its enterprise social network, which will be based on Producteev, according to spokeswoman Amanda Pires. <P> Social task management products provide a lightweight form of project management based on task assignments made through the employee social network, with progress tracking accomplished through social status posts. In Producteev, tasks can be categorized using hashtag-style labels included in the task description. Users who need to monitor a project for which they have not been assigned specific tasks can follow the project rather than joining it. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 356px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/education/2013Q1/Producteev.png" alt="" title="" height="230" width="356"><br />A task in Producteev shows assignments, followers, deadline.</div> <P> For organizations that use Jive, the virtue of an integrated version of Producteev is that it could take advantage of the Jive social graph and user profiles rather than establishing its own parallel system of employee profiles. Abehassera said the demand for the integrated project is coming both from Jive users who want better task management and Producteev users who would like access to a broader social collaboration platform.Although Producteev offers a more complete task management system than Jive currently provides, it does not aim to support the kind of formal project management that might be required for a major engineering project such as building a bridge. For example, Producteev is good for representing deadlines and schedules of tasks, but it does not attempt to model dependency relationships where one step must be completed before the next can begin. <P> "The only level of dependency we have is subtasks," Abehassera said. "That's done on purpose because we don't want to add more complexity." <P> One potential complexity Abehassera seemed not to have thought through is the potential that the free service will prove more wildly successful than anticipated, leading to adoption by employees in large companies and conflict with company leaders. Part of Yammer's story, at least in the days before its acquisition by Microsoft, was that employees or individual departments would use it to start collaborating right away, without waiting for approval from IT. <P> Once Yammer usage took hold, the use of the cloud application would come to the attention of IT. In conservative organizations, this sometimes provoked a backlash once company leaders realized employees had been discussing company business on an unsanctioned cloud service. A CIO would then find himself in the position of either paying a per-user fee for the Yammer service to get administrative control or seeking to get the unauthorized company network shot down. Although the nature of the Producteev app is different, exposure of the details and schedules of company projects could provoke just as big of a reaction, it seems to me. <P> Abehassera said he doesn't see the parallel. "Until we have that issue, I don't think we will have it as an issue," he said. Producteev will be taking a grassroots approach rather than marketing to CIOs at large companies, he said. "At the beginning, we won't be targeting companies with thousands of employees." <P> Some of those larger companies might start experimenting with the free version of Producteev, which is now capable of managing tasks across larger organizations, but Jive won't start seriously courting those larger companies until the integration between Producteev and the Jive platform is ready, Abehassera said. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>.2013-05-17T14:59:00ZSchools CTO who picked iPad in his last job says things have changed.http://www.informationweek.com/education/mobility/texas-school-district-picks-dell-windows/240155158?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/k-12/learning-from-robots/240152041"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/971/FIRST_Robotics_Competition_01_tn.jpg" alt="Learning From Robots" title="Learning From Robots" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Learning From Robots</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> The Clear Creek Independent School District in Texas has chosen Dell Latitude tablets running Windows 8 as the basis for a one-to-one student technology program that will begin in the fall. <P> Clear Creek ISD, located near Houston, plans to eventually provide the tablets to 30,000 students, teachers and staff members. "We'll do the first large wave of 5,000 devices to staff and administration over the summer," school district CTO Kevin Schwartz said in an interview. The rest of the implementation will be phased in over two years, starting with a couple of model schools, then all of 9th and 10th grade, then the rest of the system. "We also have a couple of campuses that will be undergoing major renovation, so we'll probably roll out a little faster there. The construction will knock out walls, so mobility will be an absolute bonus to the schools," he said. <P> In a previous role as technology director for the Eanes ISD in Austin, Texas, he led the choice of iPads for a similar one-to-one technology initiative, where every student would get access to a device. That was the right choice at the time, but things have changed since he moved to the job at Clear Creek in 2012. "At the time, there were really only a few Android devices out there, and the iPad. It wasn't a difficult decision to see the iPad as the best device out there," he said. <P> As Schwartz arrived in the Clear Creek schools, the system was "addressing lingering technology issues under a budget crunch," he said. "The district wanted to strive toward a one-to-one program, not so much for the devices as for the access to personalized learning" they would enable. <P> <strong>[ Not so sure about Windows 8? Reac <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/windows/operating-systems/8-things-microsoft-should-fix-in-windows/240154570?itc=edit_in_body_cross">8 Things Microsoft Should Fix In Windows Blue</a>. ]</strong> <P> In the technology bakeoff competition he ran this time, which included student representatives as well as faculty and staff, the Dell devices emerged as the favorite because of the availability of software like Microsoft Office, he said. The students were probably biased toward the iPad at the beginning of the process. <P> When the students first saw Windows 8, they were disoriented by the new user interface, but "it took them about five minutes to get past that," Schwartz said. Then they started asking questions about things like warranties ("these are smart kids: they were using terms like total cost of ownership") because if they were going to be responsible for a school-owned device, they wanted to know it would be durable, he said. <P> Meanwhile, Schwartz saw the potential for the devices to also function as the desktop machine for many teachers, with the addition of a docking station. The Dell tablets also had clear advantages in terms of manageability because they ran standard Windows software, he said. "We got to do all those things directly on the Latitudes that were workarounds on the iPad." <P> This is one of several recent educational deployment wins for the Windows platform. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/mobility/siu-freshmen-will-get-dell-windows-8-tab/240151183">Southern Illinois University</a> will also be giving out Dell tablets to the freshman class this fall. The State of <a href="https://www.informationweek.com/windows/microsoft-news/windows-8-wins-maine-schools/240154021">Maine recently switched to Windows 8 on HP laptops</a> as its preferred technology standard for students in place of Apple products. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-17T09:44:00ZAll the reasons to be suspicious of the political-industrial conspiracy against public education and public universities.http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/ed-tech-privatization-and-plunder/240155089?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> As much as I love the revolutionary potential of technology in education, I understand why some of those who care about public education and public universities worry about privatization and plunder. <P> Where I want to see the potential for <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/hope-battles-fear-over-student-data-inte/240151687">intelligent use of data to drive better student outcomes</a>, others see <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/data-management/education-data-privacy-backlash-begins/240153668">an unnecessary invasion of student privacy</a> driven more by profit motives than quality concerns. I listen to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/bill-gates-to-sxswedu-education-change-i/240150249">Bill Gates speak about productive uses of educational technology</a> and can't help but be impressed by his turn to philanthropy, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Others seem to see the foundation as a front for corporate and political interests determined to undermine public education and steer profits to private entities, including Microsoft. <P> It would be easier for me to maintain my optimism if not for some ugly facts, like the recent cynical moves from the Florida legislature. "In 2011, the Legislature made it a requirement for all high school students to complete at least one course online, creating a guaranteed market for online learning services," <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/10/3391244_p2/bill-would-allow-online-vendors.html" target="_blank">explains the <em>Miami Herald</em></a>, and now the other shoe is dropping as the state cuts back per-pupil funding for the publicly operated Florida Virtual School while <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/13/3395730/fred-grimm-boondoggle-hey-its.html" target="_blank">creating opportunities for private businesses</a>. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 497px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/education/2013Q1/gates.jpg" width="497" height="375"><br />Bill Gates speaks about technology and education reform at SXSWEdu.</div> <P> I've written before about putting my younger kids in a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/the-education-lab-inside-my-house/240148305">virtual school program</a> run by the Broward County public school system. The Broward Virtual School operates as a franchise of the Florida Virtual School but also offers some programs through K12.com, a private firm. One of the things disturbing things we've noticed about K12.com is that it seems to invest more in marketing and lobbying than in the actual delivery of educational services. For example, the online tools it offers for taking tests and quizzes don't work properly with modern browsers, and rather than fix the problem they direct parents and students to downgrade their software. On the other hand, the public marketing site looks bright and shiny in any browser. What does that tell you about their priorities? <P> Political disclosure: For the past several years, I've been active in Democratic politics, which is rarely a conflict with technology reporting per se but does mean you're entitled to take my views about the Florida Legislature with a grain of salt. For the record, I do think Gov. Rick Scott bears an uncanny resemblance to Voldemort. I wasn't a big fan of former Gov. Jeb Bush, either, but count the creation of Florida Virtual School as one of the positive things he did. On the other hand, I recognize that some of the motivation for this came from the same place as his promotion of charter schools and various voucher programs aimed at distributing public money to private and religious schools. Bill Gates also tends to be a fan of charter schools, which is one of the reasons some educators distrust him. <P> Did I mention we also had our kids in a charter school at one point? See, I'm not necessarily a <em>good</em> Democrat, according to the teachers union wing of the party. My wife and I made a date night out of seeing the <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/waiting_for_superman/" target="_blank">"Waiting for Superman"</a> movie a couple of years ago and got all riled up over its depiction of public school dysfunction, union protection of incompetents and the cruelty of those lottery systems used to decide which students will be allowed to escape from a crappy regular public school to a superior charter one. <P> One of the criticisms of the movie was that it depicted charter schools in a way that might lead you to believe all charter schools are superior, led by enlightened principals who succeed because they are freed from bureaucracy and the interference of teachers unions. Unfortunately, while those schools exist (we saw them in the movie!), charter schools are just as likely to be uninspired operations operated by corporations who see siphoning off tax dollars as an easy way to make a buck. Some of them eventually mismanage themselves out of existence, like one local charter school that evaporated mid-year, leaving parents scrambling.The relationship between education companies and politicians is a bit like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-industrial_complex" target="_blank">military-industrial complex</a> President Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 goodbye address, "the acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the business interests with something to sell over those setting policies that shape the market for that product. <P> There is a conservative <a href="http://jonathanturley.org/2013/03/03/a-look-at-some-of-the-driving-forces-behind-the-school-reform-movement-and-the-effort-to-privatize-public-education/" target="_blank">agenda that consistently favors charter schools and other privatization measures</a>. Much of this is guided by <a href="http://www.alec.org/">ALEC</a>, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful non-profit also known for promoting conservative model legislation such as voter ID laws and pro-gun "stand your ground" laws. Education blogger Audrey Watters connects the dots by pointing to <a href="http://hackeducation.com/2012/10/08/alec-and-ed-tech/" target="_blank">ALEC's funding from education technology companies and other firms</a> that stand to benefit from privatization-powered reforms. <P> For some, that same suspicion <a href="http://eduoptimists.blogspot.com/2013/02/predatory-privatization-exploiting.html" target="_blank">extends to the rise of the MOOCs</a>, the massively open online course platforms that have recently become such a sensation in higher education. <P> As someone who once worked for <em>Internet World</em>, a magazine that cheered on the disruptive innovations brought on by the Web right up until they helped drive the magazine out of business, I have no words of comfort for those who worry about the commoditization of education. In other words, get ready for the <a href="http://moocthulhu.com" target="_blank">MOOCpocalypse</a>. <P> Salon staff writer Andrew Leonard was initially inclined to <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/02/08/the_internet_will_not_ruin_college/">defend the role of MOOCs</a>, drawing the same parallel to media and music and concluding universities ought to get ahead of the wave of change rather than pretending they can ignore it. But he was subsequently inspired to worry about <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/02/22/conservatives_declare_war_on_college/" target="_blank">conservative governors declaring war on college</a>, particularly public higher education and funding of anything in the humanities lacking an immediate ROI. In MOOCs, some politicians see a tool to replace college classes with a mass-market alternative. Leonard writes: <P> <em>"After some reflection, it's become clear to me that there is a crucial difference in how the Internet's remaking of higher education is qualitatively different than what we've seen with recorded music and newspapers. <em>There's a political context to the transformation</em>. Higher education is in crisis because costs are rising at the same time that public funding support is falling. That decline in public support <em>is no accident</em>. Conservatives don't like big government and they don't like taxes, and increasingly, they don't even like the entire way that the humanities are taught in the United States. <P> It's absolutely no accident that in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, three of the most conservative governors in the country are leading the push to incorporate MOOCs in university curricula. And it seems well worth asking whether the apostles of disruption who have been warning academics that everything is about to change have paid enough attention to how the intersection of politics and MOOCs is affecting the speed and intensity of that change. Imagine if Napster had had the backing of the Heritage Foundation and House Republicans? It's hard enough to survive chaotic disruption when it is a pure consequence of technological change. But when technological change suits the purposes of enemies looking to put a knife in your back, it's almost impossible.</em> <P> Despite all of this, I still believe most of the people working in education technology and online education are inspired by the vision of making a positive difference in the quality and availability of education. They may also be inspired by the vision of making a buck, and that is okay. Yet when their companies try to engineer success through political influence, they undermine the credibility of the whole enterprise, as do the influence-peddling politicians trumpeting a message of reform. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-15T15:25:00ZDuring a life-changing year in the Arctic, former enterprise software CTO created a life-changing mobile app for disabled users.http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/voice-dream-reader-affordable-tts-for-di/240154944?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/12-open-educational-resources-shaking-up/240150477"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/961/creative-commons_tn.jpg" alt="12 Open Educational Resources: From Khan to MIT" title="12 Open Educational Resources: From Khan to MIT" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">12 Open Educational Resources: From Khan to MIT</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for slideshow)</span> </div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->In the Arctic darkness, during a transformative year away from his work as an enterprise technology executive, Winston Chen began coding what became an empowering educational app for students with learning disabilities. <P> His <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/voice-dream-reader-text-to/id496177674?mt=8">Voice Dream Reader app</a> for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch reads books aloud, while simultaneously highlighting each word on the device's screen. <P> As a former CTO of the enterprise data management firm Kalido, Chen originally envisioned it as a tool for busy executives to read books and reports while driving or otherwise engaged. Instead, it has turned into one of the most popular assistive technology apps for the blind and partially blind and for students with many other disabilities that affect their ability to read independently. <P> "There is a large group of people out there for whom text-to-speech is life-changing," Chen said in an interview. "The quality has gotten really good over the last five years, but it's still not perfect. It turns out busy executives are far less tolerant of text-to-speech than someone who depends on it." <P> "For students who really need it, it is a game-changer," agreed <a href="http://www.voicedream.com/?page_id=730">Karen Janowski</a>, an assistive technology specialist with a private practice in the Greater Boston area who works with the Newton Public Schools, and serves as an adjunct faculty member at Simmons College. "It highlights every word, so you can read it as well as get audio input, and you can change the font size, font choices, and color choices." <P> On an iPad, she explained, the app can go up to 70-point type fonts, which is enough to allow some students with low vision or visual processing difficulties to follow along with better reading comprehension. <P> <strong>[ Can predictive analytics help make better learners? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/desire2learn-predicts-students-best-clas/240154683?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Desire2Learn Predicts Students' Best Classes</a>. ]</strong> <P> Most importantly, the app has allowed students to read independently and take grade-level tests that require reading without being dependent on someone reading the material to them. For example, a 4th grader with cerebral palsy and other learning disabilities who previously couldn't read independently has been able to work his way up to reading a book or two a week, Janowski said. "He's so excited to be reading books that his friends are reading, and reading them on his own. That is empowering." Another student, an 18-year-old who was essentially a non-reader, was able to begin reading by making the text as large as the app would allow on an iPad screen and displaying only one line at a time to avoid distractions. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 270px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; float: right; margin-left: 5px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/education/2013Q1/voicedream.jpg" alt="" title="" height="480" width="270"><br />Voice Dream Reader highlights words as it reads them.</div> <P> "Also, it's only $9.99, compared to some very expensive software programs that do similar things," Janowski said. "Can you tell I'm excited about this?" <P> The Voice Dream app is the byproduct of a sabbatical adventure Chen and his family took on an island north of Greenland and Iceland. As chronicled in a recent feature from <a href="http://www.wbur.org/2013/03/11/arctic-app-adventure">Boston NPR station WBUR</a> and on Chen's own <a href="http://arcticdream.me/">Arctic Dream blog</a>, the idea was to spend a year doing something completely different. While his wife, who is from Norway, taught school to the children of the island, Chen amused himself by blogging, painting, reading -- and coding. <P> "In the winter when it was dark outside, I needed something to do to keep myself occupied, so I decided I would go back to programming and write an app," Chen said. At first, teaching himself iOS programming was just a hobby, like learning oil painting. But once Dream Voice Reader made it into the iTunes App Store and began to garner strong positive feedback from people with disabilities, he got hooked on developing it to its true potential. <P> Running as a one-man operation for coding, product development, and customer support, Chen said he has translated the app into enough money to live off. "Plus, it's extremely gratifying work to know my product does something positive in people's lives rather than helping my company sell a few more widgets," he said. <P> Text-to-voice technology has a long history. The famed technologist Ray Kurzweil created an early reading software product in 1976, which in 1996 led to the founding of <a href="http://www.kurzweiledu.com">Kurzweil Educational Systems</a>, a leading maker of reading software for PCs and Macs. <P> However, the Kurzweil software costs as much as $1,500 a seat, while some of the other PC-based text-to-speech products cost $50 to $70, Chen said. "We charge $10 for the app, plus $2 or $3 for a voice," he pointed out. He hasn't actually written his own text-to-speech software, instead taking advantage of commercially available software for mobile devices that is approaching commodity pricing, combined with his own user interface. Alternate voices for the app are sold separately."It helps that nearly everything on an iPad is available through voice and touch," Chen said. To make the app more usable for the blind, he said, "I literally had to blindfold myself and learn to navigate through it." <P> The app is also designed to read from common text formats such as PDFs and pull content from widely used iOS apps such as Dropbox. Visually disabled readers can also take advantage of the <a href="https://www.bookshare.org/">Bookshare</a> program supported by the U.S. Department of Education that makes copyright-free ebooks available to people with disabilities. <P> Voice Dream Reader has become well-known throughout the community of assistive technology specialists. Janowski said in addition to recommending the app to parents, in some cases she can get the school system to provide an iPad with the app installed as part of a student's federally mandated Individualized Education Program. <P> Chen said he sees school systems ordering licenses in blocks of 20 in order to get the 50% discount Apple provides for volume purchases. "I'm always thinking about an Android version, but I'll probably wait a bit," he said. "The iPad pretty much dominates in education." <P> Voice Dream Reader has also attracted some users who are not disabled -- such as busy college students who have it read to them while they walk between classes -- and from users who may never have been formally diagnosed with a disability but still find reading difficult, such as those with attention deficit disorders or dyslexia, Chen said. <P> His original target audience of busy executives may come later. "I use this occasionally when I'm in the car. The sound quality is tolerable; I can tolerate it. From a company standpoint, I'm reluctant to openly market this as a product for the general population. A year or two from now, that may be different -- I'm finding some fantastic text-to-speech voices." <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-15T09:57:00ZSalesforce.com's new Chatter mobile app makes browsing and searching files easier on phones and tablets.http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/file_sharing/salesforce-improves-mobile-access-to-cha/240154925?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- Image Aligning right --> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/slideshows/view/240005778/enterprise-social-networks-musthave-features-guide"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/853/Chatter-Influence-_tn.png" alt="Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide" title="Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span> </div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- / Image Aligning right --> Users of the Salesforce.com Chatter mobile app will find it easier to search and share files using an update coming to market Wednesday. <P> Chatter is the enterprise social network for the Salesforce platform, which provides a global activity stream as well as social style discussion group capabilities, often used side-by-side with Salesforce CRM and other business applications. Previous versions of the Chatter mobile client let users view and participate in the stream of social posts, which can be used as a way of sharing file attachments. The latest version adds a files tab to the mobile user interface, making it easier to browse and search files independently of the stream. <P> "You can find any file in Salesforce and share it. You can also easily connect files to any sales opportunity or marketing campaign," Michael Peachey, senior director of product marketing, said in an interview. By default, the files tab shows the most recent files accessed, shared or shared with the user. The search capability finds files according to file name, file content and metadata. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 118px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; float: right;"><a href="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/brainyard/news/iPhonefile.png" target="_blank"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/brainyard/news/iPhonefile.png" alt="Chatter mobile file access" title="Chatter mobile file access" height="248" width="118"></a><br />Chatter mobile file access</div> <P> Users still have the option of searching the stream as an alternate way of finding files; keywords might occur in the comments about the file rather than the file itself, Peachey said. However, in general the mobile file search should be a faster way to find needed content in the "micro-moments" workers spend on their phones, trying to accomplish a task while in the coffee line or at the airport, he said. <P> The Chatter mobile files capability is separate from ChatterBox, a file sharing and cross-platform file synchronization product <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/social_networking_private_platforms/chatter-in-the-air-everywhere/240007663">announced at Dreamforce</a> last September and expected to be <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/smb/services/salesforce-chatterbox-4-facts-smbs-shoul/240007872">roughly competitive with products like Box and Dropbox</a>. <P> On a tablet such as the iPad, files can be listed on the left hand side of the screen with a file preview shown on the right. On a phone, the file listing is more compressed. <P> ChatterBox is supposed to be generally available in the <del>second</del> first half of 2013. The upgraded version of Chatter with mobile file access is available now <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/salesforce-chatter/id404249815?mt=8">in the Apple App Store</a> for iPhone and iPad, and will be available soon on the Google Play store for Android. Peachey said Salesforce's strategy for making Chatter files and ChatterBox work together will be revealed later. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>.</em>2013-05-13T08:55:00ZLatest edition of learning management system makes educational recommendations "like Netflix," while giving early warning on struggling students.http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/desire2learn-predicts-students-best-clas/240154683?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->What do you get when you cross learning software with predictive analysis more often seen in movie rental sites? You might get something like the latest release of learning management system (LMS) Desire2Learn. <P> The upgrade, released last week, brings predictive analytics to both students and instructors, says <a href="http://www.desire2learn.com/">Desire2Learn</a>. For students, it offers Amazon.com-style "if you liked that course, you'll probably like this course" recommendations to help them choose classes they are most likely to succeed in. For instructors, it offers feedback on which students are in trouble. <P> One of the leading vendors of LMS software, Desire2Learn has been one of the beneficiaries of the <a href="https://www.informationweek.com/education/education-tech-investments-surpassed-1/240147042">surge in investment in educational technologies</a>, picking up $80 million in funding in September. It also has been one of the pioneers in <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/can-big-data-analytics-boost-graduation/240147807">using analytics to improve educational outcomes</a>. <P> <strong>[ Business data coming out your ears? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/big-data-analytics/big-data-professors-want-your-data-sets/240153785?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Big Data Professors Want Your Data Sets</a>. ]</strong> <P> Desire2Learn also has been focusing attention on the analytic needs of school administrators. For example, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/daytona-state-college-adapts-lms-to-impr/240152718">Daytona State College's performance improvement program</a> is using Desire2Learn analytics partly to help it maintain its accreditation. <P> In January, <a href="http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/desire2learn-acquires-course-suggestion-software-inspired-by-netflix-and-amazon/41831">Desire2Learn acquired Degree Compass</a>, a program designed by Tristan Denley, provost of Austin Peay State University (APSU), in Tennessee, with the goal of improving graduation rates and improving retention by helping students choose courses. The software has proven 90% accurate in predicting whether students will pass a course, according to Desire2Learn. <P> APSU, which has been using the system the longest, has been able to show that students who use the software when picking classes saw a statistically significant 1.4% performance improvement. Subpopulations such as African-American students and Pell Grant recipients showed a larger effect, 2.1% and 3.9%, respectively. <P> This shows that "creating an online component of a brick-and-mortar course is very important -- it gives us the data to analyze and allows them to get the data back," Desire2Learn VP of marketing and business development Jeff McDowell said in an interview. The result is "almost a Netflix experience" where the software knows enough about you to make intelligent recommendations, he said. <P> Although the original Degree Compass application focused on guiding students, Desire2Learn is extending it with a module for instructors called the Student Success System, which provides predictive data visualizations that compare and contrast at-risk learners with their peers. Here, the goal is to allow the instructor to intervene early and change the predicted outcome. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 500px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/education/2013Q1/d2l.jpg" alt="Desire2Learn's analytic dashboard for students" title="Desire2Learn's analytic dashboard for students" height="355" width="500"><br />Desire2Learn's analytic dashboard for student performance.</div> <P> "We're providing teachers with tools that allow them to look at students in their courses individually," McDowell said. "In a large class, it's really tough to manage the individual needs of all the different students. This will allow an instructor to really work closely to the people who might be at risk of failing a course. At the same time, there might be three or four people in the course who should be accelerated because you want to keep them challenged, keep them engaged." <P> Then there are all the people in the middle who shouldn't be ignored. "This lets you have a personal, individualized teaching plan for everyone in the course -- not just selected individuals, but the whole class," said McDowell. <P> Some of the excitement about applying analytics to education focuses on adaptive learning software that autonomously adjusts to each student in the most effective way. Desire2Learn's approach is different: it provides the analytics to a teacher, who can then make informed decisions about how to alter a student's learning plan, McDowell said. "D2L's position is that if you remove the human element, you're missing out on a lot of the experiential element of learning." <P> In addition to the new analytics, the platform update also includes improvements to the mobile client. In addition, Desire2Learn is expanding its ePortfolio solution, which lets students create an online, interactive resume showcasing their educational achievements and archiving digital work products. The new version, which works with the myDesire2Learn portal, will be an "ePortfolio for Life" that students retain access to after graduation, including 2 gigabytes of free storage. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-13T08:00:00ZStudents can use technology to undermine the integrity of education.http://www.informationweek.com/education/security/when-education-gets-too-virtual/240153557?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- May 2013 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313edu?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/edu/002/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Mar. 4, 2013" title="InformationWeek Green - Mar. 4, 2013" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313edu?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a><br /> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313edu?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire May 2013 issue of <em> InformationWeek Education</em></a>, distributed in an all-digital format (registration required).</strong><br /><br /> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / May 2013 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/edu/002/002Coverart4_110.jpg" width="110" height="110" alt="Hacking Higher Education" title="Hacking Higher Education" width="110" height="110" class="artInlineTopImage" /> <P> The visions of how technology can help students learn are promising. The reality of how students can use technology to undermine the integrity of education is already here.</p> <P> The <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313edu?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">cover story of the new issue of <i>InformationWeek Education</i></a> begins with a recent news item about two students at Ohio's Miami University who used keylogger devices to capture professor passwords and gain access to an online grade book. They were arrested and expelled after admitting to changing grades for themselves and others. </p> <P> In a similar case at California's Palos Verdes High School in January 2012, three students were charged with first breaking into the janitor's office to steal a classroom master key. They reportedly planted keylogging devices on multiple computers, mined passwords, and used them to alter scores on tests and homework just enough to bump grades up a bracket. The three students set up a commercial operation, charging $300 to boost a grade from a B to an A, according to the Los Angeles Times. They were charged with burglary and conspiracy to commit burglary.</p> <P> My 12-year-old son has been known to do a little shoulder surfing to capture the "learning coach" password his mom and I use on the online educational website K12.com. He and his sister are in a virtual school, so getting the password let him grade some of his own schoolwork. The good news is that he isn't as clever as he thinks he is and routinely gets stopped when he tries a tactic like this one. My hope is that as he matures, he'll learn the lesson that it's more rewarding to actually do the work.</p> <P> The Palos Verdes High School students were apparently smart kids, taking honors and AP classes. It's unclear whether they needed to inflate their own grades. None of the news stories I've read reports how they were caught, but it seems likely that news of their "enterprise" got back to school officials. At Miami University, a professor noticed that the grades in the online system didn't match her paper notes. To make such exploits easier to detect, the university's technology team is modifying its grade book software to send an email notification to instructors whenever grades are changed so they can confirm the legitimacy of those changes.</p> <P> Academic cheating is nothing new. Like many of the ills associated with unauthorized use of computer systems, digitization just provides new techniques and temptations.</p> <P> Do online education tools make cheating easier? Maybe, but in all of the examples cited above, cheating was thwarted by people who care about education and were paying attention. Should my son's grades get an inexplicable boost, or his latest essay show better spelling, grammar and vocabulary than he has produced before, his mom will know and have a talk with him. The Miami University students apparently tried to cover their tracks by changing grades for other students in addition to themselves. However, once investigators started looking at the pattern of grade changes across multiple courses, it wasn't hard to see a couple of students turning up as the common denominator.</p> <P> As the digitization of education continues, "auditing a course" may take on a whole new meaning, as educators seek better ways to verify that grades reflect actual learning.</p>2013-05-13T08:00:00ZThe cybersecurity challenge on college campuses lies as much with the students as with malicious outsiders.http://www.informationweek.com/education/security/hacking-higher-education/240153558?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- May 2013 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313edu?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/edu/002/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Mar. 4, 2013" title="InformationWeek Green - Mar. 4, 2013" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313edu?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a><br /> <div class="greenPromoText"> <strong><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313edu?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire May 2013 issue of <em> InformationWeek Education</em></a>, distributed in an all-digital format (registration required).</strong><br /><br /> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div> <!-- / May 2013 InformationWeek Digital Issue--> <br /><!-- leave as a br to not interfere w/ the insights boxes --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/edu/002/002Coverart4_110.jpg" width="110" height="110" alt="Hacking Higher Education" title="Hacking Higher Education" width="110" height="110" class="artInlineTopImage" /> When a faculty member at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, logged in to the university's grade book last fall, she realized something was wrong: The grades in the online system didn't match her paper records. She was alert enough to see this was no mere glitch.</p> <P> In March, after months of investigation, police charged two students with hacking the system to inflate grades. Police maintain that Beckley Parker, 21, of Weston, Conn., had changed his own grades for 17 classes since the spring of 2011, and also changed grades for 50 other students, according to the Dayton Daily News. David Callahan, 22, of Cambridge, Mass., reportedly changed his own grade once and two other students' grades. Although the facts are subject to interpretation, it seems the two were either trying to help fraternity brothers or other friends at the same time they were improving their own grades, or they may have been trying to cover their tracks by changing more than one grade in each case.</p> <P> All it took for them to make the changes was an inexpensive keylogger device, inserted between the keyboard and the computer it was attached to, which allowed them to record the actions of teachers entering their passwords for the grading system. They were then able to access the system at will.</p> <P> After cooperating with investigators, the students avoided being charged with a felony, instead accepting dismissal from the university and pleading guilty to multiple counts of "attempted unauthorized use of property," a misdemeanor.</p> <P> Miami University's information security officer, Joe Bazeley, says an attack on the university's learning and grading systems is actually worse than the sort of attacks, namely information theft and exposure, that used to keep him up at night before the keylogger incident. "We produce knowledge and identify that via grades and a diploma," Bazeley says. The grade book hack "challenges the integrity of those grades and diplomas," he says.</p> <P> <strong>Learn From The Hacks</strong></p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <!-- inline Report Promo --> <div class="inlineReportPromo right"> <div class="reportHeader"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/104/8608/Government/strategy-education-s-technology-dilemma.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130613" target="_blank">Strategy: Education's Technology Dilemma</a> </div> <img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/edu/002/002ED_CSreportcover.jpg" width="175" height="111" alt="Report Cover" title="Report Cover" class="reportCover" /> <div class="reportInfo"><center><strong> Schools Do More With Less</strong></center><br />Technology advances are providing new tools for learning. The challenge is how to take advantage of the opportunities when resources are stretched thin. <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/104/8608/Government/strategy-education-s-technology-dilemma.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130613" target="_blank">Our report</a> is free with registration. <center><strong><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/104/8608/Government/strategy-education-s-technology-dilemma.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe?cid=pub_analyt__iwk_20130613" target="_blank">Get This</a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></strong></center> </div> </div> <!-- / inline Report Promo --> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P> Unfortunately, examples abound in higher education of the other kind of security breach.</p> <P> An undergraduate at the University of Nebraska last year was able to break into a database associated with the university's PeopleSoft system, exposing Social Security numbers and other sensitive information on about 654,000 students, alumni and employees. According to our sister website Dark Reading, the university was lucky enough to detect the breach and shut it down quickly. An IT staffer picked up on an error message that seemed like evidence of something amiss, and a recently installed security information and event management system helped network managers sort through system logs and collect enough evidence to allow police to get a warrant to confiscate the computer of the student believed to have been behind the attack.</p> <P> In March, Salem State University in Massachusetts alerted 25,000 current and former students and staff that their Social Security numbers may have been compromised in a database breach. If the pattern of the last few years repeats itself, expect higher education institutions to experience another half dozen major security breaches by the end of 2013.</p> <P> <!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <center><strong>To read the rest of the article,<br /><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/051313edu?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">download the May 2013 issue of <em>InformationWeek Education</em>. </a></strong></center><br clear="all" /></p> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <P>2013-05-09T09:06:00ZSDN aims to make networks easy to configure in software rather than hardware. The goal is to provide data centers with added flexibility.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/interop-cloud-experts-debate-sdns-future/240154473?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/smb/network/9-bandwidth-hogs-reality-vs-myth/240147041"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/941/01_Intro_tn.jpg" alt="9 Bandwidth Hogs: Reality Vs. Myth" title="9 Bandwidth Hogs: Reality Vs. Myth" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">9 Bandwidth Hogs: Reality Vs. Myth</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Software-defined networking (SDN) has been in the "coming soon" category for many years, but an Interop keynote panel discussion on the topic showed room for debate over what it ought to look like when it finally gets here. <P> SDN is too often spoken of as a single event that will wipe away all current networking technologies, when in fact "the underpinnings are already in place," said moderator Eric Hanselman, chief analyst at 451 Research. <P> The point of SDN is to make networks easy to configure and reconfigure in software rather than hardware, with many more networking functions migrating from being embedded capabilities of a network appliance to being defined in software. Network systems are migrating incrementally in that direction as networks follow the same path toward virtualization as servers and storage, he said. Ultimately, the goal is to provide every data center with the flexibility associated with cloud computing. <P> <strong>[ Open-source network switches? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/interop-open-compute-project-to-tackle-network-switching/240154452">Interop: Open Compute Project To Tackle Network Switching</a>.]</strong> <P> Huge data centers operated by the likes of Google and Facebook "already look like what we attribute to SDN," agreed Martin Casado, chief architect for networking at VMware. "The big guys did it first because they're big," he said, not because they're the only ones who would value the flexibility promised by SDN. <P> Microsoft has been learning the same lessons through cloud services such as Azure, said Rajeev Nagar, group program manager for Windows core networking. "Scale changes everything," he said, adding that "when you're provisioning and de-provisioning thousands of networks a day," it's impossible to do that all manually, making automation essential. <P> The third member of the panel, Rajiv Ramaswami, executive VP and general manager of infrastructure and networking at Broadcom, sees a need for "faster and flatter networks" to support the fast-growing demand for machine-to-machine communications. Networking chip designers like his firm are at "the bottom of the food chain" in an ecosystem that will be increasingly stratified, with more hardware capabilities made accessible for manipulation through software, he said. <P> Just how much access software applications should have to basic network functions proved to be one area for debate, with Casado arguing, "the less the application has to know about the network, the better it is for everyone." Although system software for networking can make networks more flexible, application design is simpler when it is protected from the complexities of the network, he said. <P> Microsoft's Nagar said that might be true in general but applications such as Lync can get real performance benefits from the ability to dynamically reconfigure the network. Big-data analytics applications also could benefit, given their requirements for large-scale data movement, he said. For that reason, he argued in favor of providing "deep visibility" into the network infrastructure where needed. <P> Of the three, Casado was most willing to admit he is uncertain how SDNs will develop and how they will affect the IT organizations that must support them. He believes the decoupling of logical switching functions from hardware is inevitable, following a pervasive pattern in IT of systems architectures becoming less monolithic so that individual elements can evolve independently. "Anything after that is anybody's guess," he said. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>.</em>2013-05-08T15:10:00ZOpen Compute Project initiated by Facebook sets its sights on network switching as the next target for open innovation.http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/hardware-architectures/interop-open-compute-project-to-tackle-network-switching/240154452?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/data-centers/a-visit-to-facebooks-desert-data-center/240149810"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/957/21_tn.jpg" alt=" Facebook's Futuristic Data Center: Inside Tour" title=" Facebook's Futuristic Data Center: Inside Tour" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle"> Facebook's Futuristic Data Center: Inside Tour</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Since Facebook kicked off the Open Compute Project by donating its overall data center design, the OCP Foundation has been chipping away at open sourcing designs for all of the critical components that go into the data center. Next up: network switches. <P> In a keynote speech at <a href="http://www.interop.com" >Interop</a>, Facebook VP of hardware design and supply chain Frank Frankovsky reviewed <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/data-centers/facebooks-frank-frankovsky-open-compute/240154184" >two years of progress at expanding the scope of the project</a>, which now includes open designs for server racks and cold storage designs based on how Facebook handles your old photos. <P> These designs are geared for very high performance and scalability, but also for energy efficiency. The industry average is that a data center will consume about 1.9 times as much electrical power as actually makes it to a server delivering compute services because of waste in the process, including electrical conversions and air conditioning demands. By minimizing the need for conversions and eliminating air conditioning, Facebook has been able to reduce that factor to about 1.07, Frankovsky said, which translates into an operational cost savings of about 38 percent. The design also reduced the capital expense budget by 24 percent. <P> <strong>[ For more on Frankovsky's Interop keynote, see <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/data-centers/facebooks-frank-frankovsky-open-compute/240154184?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Facebook's Frank Frankovsky: Open Compute Debate</a>. ]</strong> <P> In addition to sharing its plans for how to build a cloud data center from scratch, Facebook has published optimizations from an earlier stage in its growth when it was doing "everything the landlord allowed" to maximize its use of colocation data center facilities. OCP has also come up with a rack design for colocation spaces. Those colocation designs have become some of the most popular OCP assets because they can be applied by many more companies, Frankovsky said. <P> As a company that has been heavily involved in using and contributing to open source software projects, Facebook wanted to see the same principles applied to hardware, Frankovsky said, as a way to "move forward the pace of innovation as fast as we can." Many other sorts of companies, such as financial services firms, have joined with the effort out of their own frustration that vendor product roadmaps don't always match their requirements as well as they could. <P> Hardware vendors who are beginning to see it's in their best interest to participate are starting to become some of the project's best contributors, Frankovsky said. <P> The networking layer of a data center operation has been the last on the list for OCP to tackle. That's starting to change, with Intel recently contributing an optical interconnect design for server racks and taking some preliminary steps toward open designs for software-defined networking. The last big empty spot on the architecture slide Frankovsky shared was an <a href="http://www.opencompute.org/2013/05/08/up-next-for-the-open-compute-project-the-network/">open design for network switches</a>, which today are uniformly delivered as appliances with proprietary hardware and software. <P> You should be able to buy bare metal and program the switch to operate according to your specifications. Work on that next phase of the project will begin at an <a href="http://www.opencompute.org/events/ocp-engineering-summit-mit/">OCP engineering summit</a> scheduled for May 16 at MIT. <P> Frankovsky invited members of the Interop crowd to contribute their own knowledge and requirements to making it a success. "The more people we get to work on these really hard problems, the better," he said. "Openness always wins." <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>.</em> <P> <i>E2 is the only event of its kind, bringing together business and technology leaders across IT, marketing, and other lines of business looking for new ways to evolve their enterprise applications strategy and transform their organizations to achieve business value. Join us June 17-19 for three days of 40+ conference sessions and workshops across eight tracks and discover the latest insights in enterprise social software, big data and analytics, mobility, cloud, SaaS and APIs, UI/UX and more. <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register for E2 Conference Boston today</a> and save $200 off Full Event Passes, $100 off Conference, or get a FREE Keynote + Expo Pass! </i>2013-05-08T12:20:00ZAt Interop Las Vegas 2013, University of New Hampshire CIO Joanna Young and Seton Hill University's Phil Komarny discuss blossoming wireless bandwidth demands.http://www.informationweek.com/interop-higher-ed-cios-focus-on-bandwidt/240154454?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/mobility/muni-wireless/new-england-patriots-winning-technology/240146529"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/940/01_GilletteStadium_tn.jpg" alt="New England Patriots' Winning Technology Plan" title="New England Patriots' Winning Technology Plan" class="img175" /></a><br /> <div class="storyImageTitle">New England Patriots' Winning Technology Plan</div> <span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->A university might be judged by the strength of its faculty and the accomplishments of its graduates, but these days it is also increasingly judged by its network, particularly its wireless network. <P> That was the message I heard after meeting CIOs from two very different schools at <a href="http://www.interop.com" target="_blank">Interop</a>, a UBM conference focused on networking, infrastructure, and technological innovation. As University of New Hampshire CIO Joanna Young put it, ubiquitous wireless access has become a universal expectation. "It's not just students, either," Young said. "When parents come on campus, if they can't get on the Wi-Fi for the mobile app for the campus tour, they're highly annoyed." <P> Young and Phil Komarny, CIO at Seton Hill University, came to Interop as guests of <a href="http://www.enterasys.com">Enterasys Networks</a>, which has them speaking in a series of <a href="http://pages.enterasys.com/Interop2013_CIO-Innovations-Sessions.html">education sessions</a> on the expo floor. I connected with them for lunch thanks to a Twitter introduction by Vala Afshar, the Enterasys chief marketing officer I know as a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/strategy/in-search-of-social-business-excellence/240144543">social business enthusiast</a>. <P> UNH is a public university with about 15,000 students. Seton Hill is a Catholic university in Greensburg, Pa., with only 2,500 students, but both spoke highly of Enterasys as a technology "partner" as well as a vendor. <P> <strong>[ Sketchy Internet access plagues more campuses than you might think. Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/campus-infrastructure/can-colleges-tame-the-bandwidth-monster/240150686?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Can Colleges Tame The Bandwidth Monster?</a> ]</strong> <P> A university campus that covers a large geographical area and includes a lot of old buildings is a challenging environment for networking in general, Young said, much less reliable, high-density wireless coverage. It helps that Enterasys also provides technology for other demanding venues such as the New England Patriots stadium, she said. <P> The overall demands on the campus network are on a "hockey stick" curve, Young said. "Bandwidth had been doubling every year, but now it's tripling or quadrupling." As more educational content is delivered online, "I've got to make the network a positive differentiator," she said. <P> In addition to supporting its own campus, UNH is now delivering digital learning content -- often with a heavy dose of video and interactivity -- to community colleges around the state, she said. So far, UNH has steered clear of involvement in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, typically offered for free but produced by elite private institutions. However, this summer UNH will offer what it calls a <a href="http://www.unh.edu/news/releases/2013/mar/lw25potter.cfm">MOCK -- Massive Online Course for Kids -- on Harry Potter</a>, with English professor and Potter devotee James Krasner. Although not free, the $200 course is intended to help students entering grades 4 to 8 maintain or sharpen their language skills over the summer. <P> Another model UNH is exploring would provide the first course in a certificate program for free, but charge for the remainder of the courses required to earn that credential, Young said. An introductory course in geographic information systems would be one candidate for that treatment, she said. <P> Komarny runs a much smaller operation, but one that has distinguished itself by providing iPads and Apple laptops for students, faculty and staff. Full-time undergraduates entering the school in 2013-2014 will receive an iPad Mini, as well as a 13" MacBook Air. Because some faculty didn't want to switch to the Mini, Komarny plans to offer faculty who are due to receive a new tablet the option of choosing a 10" iPad instead. As a result of this wholesale move to mobile devices, 98% of the traffic on the campus network is mobile traffic. <P> The mobile device program, which dates to 2010, got off to a rocky start because initially the university "didn't consumerize the network completely," Komarny said. Early on, mobile devices were forced to authenticate to a different Windows domain depending on where they were on campus, he said. Now, students authenticate through a mobile Web portal connected to the university's LDAP directory for a unified directory that follows them around campus, he said. <P> Before joining Seton Hill in 2009, Komarny had run his own Web design firm designing websites for entertainment firms and sports teams, so he is particularly proud of the design of the university portal. Although it's essentially the latest implementation of a Web portal he previously had implemented for several other universities, it comes to life when users can "touch the data" on a tablet, he said. <P> The portal is continually refined with new features for students and faculty alike. One recent addition makes it simple for a professor to look up a student who might be failing to attend classes or turn in assignments and raise an alert with other faculty members who have that student in their classes. The idea is to get the faculty collaborating to intervene early if a student is at risk of dropping out, Komarny said. <P> Komarny has also been serving as a university design partner for the development of <a href="http://www.openclass.com">OpenClass</a>, the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/cloud-based-lms-wins-over-abilene-christ/240151876">cloud-based learning management system offered for free by Pearson</a>, and he is enthusiastic about its approach to offering a built-in market for educational apps. OpenClass is tightly integrated with Google Apps, which dovetails with another technology Komarny has been promoting, the use of Google+ Communities for student and faculty collaboration. <P> Standardizing on Apple mobile technology to support access to all these online resources has greatly simplified technical support, Komarny said. Although the mobile device program for students is a good recruiting tool, "the reason we do this is for faculty," he said. Because the instructors all have the same familiar setup, they can help each other, he said. "And that's priceless." <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>2013-05-08T09:06:00ZProliferation of commodity IT services makes it ever more important to rigorously account for the costs and value of internal IT.http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/interop-expert-advice-on-it-roi-chargeba/240154399?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --> <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --> With commodity IT services proliferating in the cloud, IT organizations are under more pressure than ever to prove their value. <P> While their peers were off studying the latest trends in wireless and software-defined networking, one group of <a href="http://www.interop.com" target="_blank">Interop</a> attendees was exploring the challenging art of budgeting for technology and accounting for its value. <P> "If you're doing things well, you should be able to compare your costs to outsourcing," said John Custy, principal consultant of the JCP Group, as part of his lecture for a class originally developed for the <a href="http://www.thinkhdi.com/" target="_blank">Help Desk Institute</a>. Often, the comparison will show that internal IT services are more economical and effective -- but only if you have a good cost model, he said. "Shame on you if someone says they want to do comparison of costs and you can't pull out the last cost comparison that was done." <P> <strong>[ See our related Interop story: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/data-centers/interop-las-vegas-10-cool-products/240154110">Interop Las Vegas: 10 Cool Products</a>. ]</strong> <P> Custy's two-day class on "Financial Management Skills for the Technical Manager" was offered as part of the workshop program leading up to Tuesday night's opening ceremonies and Wednesday's first keynotes for the Interop conference. Many technology leaders still budget on the basis of their experience -- their best guess of what their real costs are and will be, Custy said. The problem with that approach is your superiors can guess just as well as you can. The only way to make your case for an appropriate level of funding is to have a more rigorous approach to costing and funding IT services. <P> Attended by a couple of CIOs as well as network managers, project managers and people from technology services firms, the class addressed the need to come up with more complete cost models that go beyond the original hardware and software purchase costs to long-term maintenance and support. On the other hand, it's important to provide a complete picture of the services provided, particularly when company leaders are tempted to compare IT services to cloud services that are free or close to it, Custy said. An example would be corporate versus cloud email, and all the help desk, archiving and e-discovery services IT provides to make email reliable and meet regulatory requirements, he said. "You're doing a whole lot more than that free service, but who knows that?" <P> Although it's possible to use this accounting to charge departments for the services they get from central IT, it's better to "stop pretending" that everything can be handled as a chargeback, Custy agreed. The point of tracking the cost of technology services implemented on the behalf of the business, as well as the value of basic services delivered by IT, is to ensure they are funded appropriately to allow IT to continue delivering quality service, he said. Meanwhile, the goal of providing the organization with a complete catalog of IT services can only be achieved if the organization has a firm grasp of the real cost of those services. <P> Jim Smith, senior VP of innovation and trends at PDX Incorporated, said his organization is currently pushing for greater internal accountability. PDX makes pharmacy management software used in retail stores. Smith said one thing he took away from the class was that PDX should be careful about how far it pushes its efforts at financial accounting for technology services because "it's very possible to overdo it -- the killer is the billing process," he said. <P> To show the value of IT, Custy recommended a variety of approaches including looking at the cost to the organization of a service not being available -- for example, dollars lost for each hour that the checkout function on an e-commerce site is offline. When valuing productivity, it's good to translate hours of labor saved into dollar savings -- good, but not always necessary. <P> "In a lot of cases, you don't have to go there," Custy said. If you can show that an improvement to company systems is saving the sales team 400 hours per month, the executive overseeing that function can probably translate that into a dollar value more quickly than you could "and will probably give it a much higher dollar value than you would ever equate to that," he said. <P> In other cases, the business side of the organization may provide the metrics. For example, one university participant mentioned the organization had calculated the cost of losing a student, making it easier to put a value on technology initiatives aimed at boosting retention. <P> Bill Hrabik of State Farm Insurance said he sat in on the session to learn alternate ways of approaching this sort of analysis, although it's nothing new to him. "Budgeting is something we do every day," he said. However, in his organization Custy's suggestion about valuing IT improvements in terms of hours doesn't work, he said. "Our business partners don't care about hours," he said, but they do care about dollars. <P> State Farm has experimented off and on with different methods of charging departments back for their access to IT services, but lately has concluded that it's more trouble than it's worth, Hrabik said. The overhead of implementing a comprehensive system of chargebacks defeats the purpose, he said. <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>.</em>2013-05-02T16:05:00ZCitrix's task-focused social business tool adds real-time collaboration to online workspaces.http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/social_networking_private_platforms/podio-adds-im-video-chat-coming-soon/240154099?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- Image Aligning right --><!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/slideshows/view/240005778/enterprise-social-networks-musthave-features-guide"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/853/Chatter-Influence-_tn.png" alt="Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide" title="Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Enterprise Social Networks: Must-Have Features Guide</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div><!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE --><!-- / Image Aligning right -->The Podio social collaboration platform from Citrix is adding real-time collaboration for the first time, with a Podio Chat feature that launched Thursday and video chat to follow soon. <P> "At the end of the day, Podio is a collaborative workspace, and we're adding a more real-time aspect to how you'll be able to collaborate there," said Bernardo de Albergaria, vice president and general manager of software-as-a-service products at Citrix. <P> Last year, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/social_networking_private_platforms/citrix-buys-podio-for-go-to-social-colla/232900167">Citrix bought Podio</a>, a startup from Denmark, adding it to the family of online applications that includes GoToMeeting. The video chat feature will be based on a browser plugin derived from GoToMeeting technology and should be available by the end of May, de Albergaria said. The press release says it will be available this summer. <P> <strong>[ What should you look for in a collaboration tech developer? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/social-business/news/social_networking_private_platforms/8-ways-to-judge-collaboration-technology/240148272?itc=edit_in_body_cross">8 Ways To Judge Collaboration Technology Vendors</a>. ]</strong> <P> The goal is to add support for synchronous communications to Podio, which until now has supported asynchronous communications in the form of social posting and commenting on items. Otherwise, Podio distinguishes itself with an emphasis on task management and the ability for users to create simple "apps" for structured collaboration. The Podio visual app builder aims to make the creation of form-driven Web applications as easy as working with a spreadsheet -- which for decades has served as the lowest-common-denominator tool for organizing information when more sophisticated applications aren't available or aren't flexible enough to the demands of the moment. <P> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" style="background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; width: 160px; font-style: italic; margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 15px; float: right;"><img itemprop="image" src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/education/2013Q1/podioch.png" alt="Podio chat for iPhone" title="Podio chat for iPhone" height="284" width="160"><br />Podio chat for iPhone.</div> <P> Although some other social collaboration tools, such as Yammer, also provide an integrated Web-based chat tool, de Albergaria said Podio's version is different because it makes chat available within a specific workspace associated with a set of tasks, making it more valuable for getting work done. <P> One limitation of this form of instant messaging is that a user must have the social application running in a Web browser in order to get alerts, unlike IM through a desktop tool such as Microsoft Lync that can be left running in the background all the time. However, Podio Chat will send the same message as an email alert if the other recipient is not online, de Albergaria said. The Podio mobile client for iPhone, iPad and Android also supports the chat feature. <P> The Podio video chat option is intended for quick face-to-face conversations. Customers who also subscribe to GoToMeeting can already schedule meetings through Podio, which can include video as well as screen sharing. <P> <div style="width: 560px; padding: 15px; background-color: #eee; "><iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1fXXI8Da8tw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />A Podio chat tutorial</div> <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr on <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/davidfcarr">Twitter @davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>.</em> <P> <i>E2 is the only event of its kind, bringing together business and technology leaders across IT, marketing, and other lines of business looking for new ways to evolve their enterprise applications strategy and transform their organizations to achieve business value. Join us June 17-19 for three days of 40+ conference sessions and workshops across eight tracks and discover the latest insights in enterprise social software, big data and analytics, mobility, cloud, SaaS and APIs, UI/UX and more. <a href="http://www.e2conf.com/boston/?_mc=MP_BTMEDIWKAXE">Register for E2 Conference Boston today</a> and save $200 off Full Event Passes, $100 off Conference, or get a FREE Keynote + Expo Pass! </i>2013-05-02T14:05:00ZWhy Wesleyan embraced Coursera, Amherst rejected edX, and Rollins is going its own way.http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/moocs-what-university-cios-really-think/240154120?cid=SBX_iwk_related_news_Instructional_IT_education<!-- KINDLE EXCLUDE --><div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/inside-eight-game-changing-moocs/240152508"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/976/MOOC_canvas_01_tn.jpg" alt="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" title="Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs" class="img175" /></a><br /><div class="storyImageTitle">Inside Eight Game-changing MOOCs</div><span class="inlinelargerView">(click image for larger view and for slideshow)</span></div> <!-- /KINDLE EXCLUDE -->Can a university dependent on convincing students and their parents to part with tuition dollars afford to participate in a movement that says online education should be free? On the other hand, can a university that wants to stay relevant afford not to? <P> Those were the questions in the air when CIOs representing about 40 institutions gathered to discuss massive open online courses, or MOOCs, at the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/leadership/higher-ed-cios-cant-ignore-moocs-or-poli/240153841">The Higher Education Technology Forum</a> in San Diego, an invitation-only event organized by <a href="http://www.consero.com">Consero</a>. <P> The panel on MOOCs included three CIOs: David Baird of Wesleyan University, Gayle Barton of Amherst College, and Patricia Schoknecht of Rollins College. Each school has a different approach to MOOCs. Wesleyan is active in Coursera, the for-profit MOOC that has so far accumulated the longest list of university partners. Amherst was recently in the news after <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/19/despite-courtship-amherst-decides-shy-away-star-mooc-provider">faculty shot down a proposed partnership with edX</a>. Rollins will offer a MOOC-style course, but do it independently. <P> <strong>[ Source of friction: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/distance-learning-regulation-needs-simpl/240152835?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Distance Learning Regulation Needs Simplification, Officials Say</a>.]</strong> <P> "When I started last July, online education was the last thing on my mind," Barton said. Amherst is a small liberal arts college in Amherst, Mass., known for small class sizes and faculty-student research collaboration. Yet after Amherst was approached first by 2U (formerly 2tor) and then Coursera, she felt responsible to investigate other options. She approached edX, the non-profit started by MIT and Harvard, that so far supports a relatively exclusive club of a dozen universities, as well as Udacity, which like Coursera is a for-profit company. 2U offers a cloud-based online education platform that allows schools to charge tuition. <P> "Those of us working on it felt that edX was the best fit because of their focus on very high quality courses and helping people do that," Barton said. She figured Amherst needed the help coming up to speed on online education. In addition, she thought it would be valuable to get access to the assessment and analytics tools built into the edX platform. <P> As negotiations continued, Amherst president Carolyn Martin publicly supported a partnership with edX but left the final decision of whether to participate to a faculty committee, which in April rejected the plan. Barton said she was disappointed but takes heart from the fact that about 40% of the faculty voted "yes" and many of the others agreed the college should do more to experiment with online education -- just not with edX. Although some press accounts made it sound like they feared online education would be a threat to their jobs, faculty concerns had more to do with surrendering control to a consortium with an undefined business model, she said. The discussion about what Amherst should do instead is continuing, she said. <P> Other CIOs at the forum wondered aloud whether those pursuing MOOC partnerships had really thought things through, particularly the potential damage to the brand of a "high touch" school that charges $50,000 a year or more based on the value of the on-campus experience. As one man put it, how can a small liberal arts school like Amherst make the case that it is worth the money while at the same time saying, "Oh, by the way, you can also get this Amherst lite experience for free?" <P> On the other hand, those who refuse to become involved "may come to regret it" as larger players shape the MOOC movement, another participant said. "If these courses wind up having the same weight as brick-and-mortar classes, then we have problem to contend with." <P> Yet Wesleyan, a private university in Middletown, Conn., is willing to take the risk, Baird said. "We decided we'd be better able to position ourselves if we're involved than if we're standing on the sidelines." <P> Wesleyan president Michael S. Roth was in the process of closing a deal with Coursera when Baird joined the university in August. Although Wesleyan also consulted with faculty as part of the decision-making process, the deal was cut over the summer when many professors were away, Baird said. A six-week course on <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/hollywood">The Language of Hollywood</a> recently wrapped up, and the film studies professor who offered it is so enthusiastic he plans to do it again in the fall. <P> Wesleyan president Roth personally taught a philosophy and great books course on <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpostmodern">The Modern and the Postmodern</a>. Wesleyan's Coursera offerings have been averaging an enrollment of about 30,000, although a <a href="https://www.coursera.org/course/socialpsychology">Social Psychology</a> course to be offered this summer has attracted more than 100,000 signups and counting. <P> The professors who have tried the MOOC course format tend to be "flattered by the idea that students in (pick your country) would meet in a coffee shop to talk about Nietzsche," Baird said. Others are inspired by the vision articulated in <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html">Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller's TED talk</a> about making high-quality education available in places around the world and to people who would never be able to access it face-to-face. <P> In addition, distribution through Coursera gives Wesleyan alumni an opportunity to take classes they weren't able to get into during their time on campus, Baird said. There is also the recruiting value of reaching "students around the world who we want to give an inkling of what a Wesleyan education is like," he said.Schoknecht said Rollins College will offer its first MOOC-style course this summer, but on its own terms. Rather than partnering with a MOOC company or consortium, Rollins plans to host the course on Blackboard, without quite the same emphasis on the "massive" part. Based in Winter Park, Fla., Rollins is a liberal arts college much like Amherst and wanted to operate under its own brand, she said. "We're going to advertise this first to our students, our parents, and our alumni," Schoknecht said. <P> Although the course will be open to anyone who wants to register, Rollins will promote it primarily through the Associated Colleges of the South, a consortium of 16 institutions whose members will also be encouraged to make it available to their students, parents and alumni. <P> Most of the other schools represented in the room were still evaluating what, if anything, they will do with MOOCs. On the other hand, Rice University is working with both Coursera and edX, largely because of strong faculty interest in innovating with online education. Rice is also a hotbed of activity in the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/open-education-take-back-the-curriculum/240150758">open educational resources</a> movement, with its <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/instructional-it/wiley-openstax-team-on-college-biology-t/240150451">OpenStax textbook initiative</a> and other projects. <P> Because both Coursera and edX have branded themselves as offering access to courses from elite universities, not everyone has even been invited to join. <P> Many of the university technology leaders mentioned 2U as the company most aggressively beating down their doors, offering a platform that would allow them to charge tuition for online courses -- although some CIOs who had investigated it as an option complained that it takes too big a cut of the profits. 2U has mostly focused on supporting <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/education/online-learning/2u-helps-masters-degree-programs-go-onli/240151164" >graduate school programs</a>, although just this week it opened registration on a <a href="http://www.semesteronline.org">semester online</a> program it is offering in partnership with Boston College, Brandeis University, Emory University, Northwestern University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis. Modeled on semester-abroad programs, it allows students to take a semester away from the on-campus experience, but not for free. <P> Justin Sipher, VP of libraries and information technology at St. Lawrence University, said the liberal arts colleges who have so far been lukewarm to the MOOC phenomenon might be making a mistake by "sheltering students from an experience of lifelong learning" that they ought to be exposed to. Even if an institution is concerned about diluting its brand with online offerings, students probably ought to be required to learn how to learn in an online course "just like you must learn a lot of other things as part of a liberal arts education," he said. <P> At the same time, Sipher said the MOOCs getting all the press now are probably "at the peak of inflated expectations" -- a term from the technology advisor firm Gartner's "hype cycle" model of the technology boom-and-bust cycle. Some of these enthusiasms turn out to be fads, he noted, like the idea of creating learning experiences in the virtual world Second Life, which was popular a few years ago. <P> Former Massachusetts Institute of Technology CIO Marilyn Smith said there is a bigger issue of meeting the expectations of "students who have been brought up in a different world," accustomed to highly interactive experiences such as gaming that have their own learning value. Universities should embrace the opportunity to discover new ways of learning and measuring learning, both online and off, she said. <P> "This is also about blended learning and how to enhance the residential experience, not so much just the MOOCs. Capturing data we've never captured before through assessment is a really critical part of this," Smith said. One way or the other, "the undergraduate experience is going to change." <P> <em>Follow David F. Carr at <a href="http://twitter.com/davidfcarr">@davidfcarr</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/113166369746212246457/?rel=author">Google+</a>, along with <a href="http://twitter.com/IWKEducation">@IWKEducation</a>.</em>