Today, I received an enquiry from an instructor and student regarding cloud computing. The question was, “Our students are eager to experience cloud computing. When are we going to think about cloud computing?” This is an excellent question, and one that many of you may have, so I thought I would address it in the public forum of this blog.

We have a philosophy and process of constantly reviewing and changing the IT program to adapt to new industry trends. We are aware of the current trend of centralization of services and cloud computing and our current curriculum incorporates training to prepare students to learn these technologies. Five current courses are on server technologies:

IT255 Operating Systems II

NT272 Networking and Security

IT333 Network Application Services

DB321 Database Administration

WD350 Web Servers

IT moves very quickly, and new trends emerge faster than we can write and get new courses approved. However there is an existing mechanism in the IT curriculum to adapt even more quickly. Specific content of some courses can be adapted. For example, the IT capstone course, IT415, is an excellent course in which instructors and students can collaborate to ensure that the most recent trends are addressed. In this course, students work in teams to develop a solution. I believe that this would be an appropriate course for student teams to develop and implement their own cloud computing solutions.

Additional courses or changes to the existing courses may occur in the future, but regulations that bind us prevent us from disclosing details of our plans to students or the public until our plans are approved by our governing bodies.

Students and instructors are highly encouraged to always describe their needs and give their opinions on how they think we could improve the IT curriculum, since we use such statements as evidence when we seek to make changes.

Kindest regards,

Mark Renslow

Network Dean of IT

Are certain “kinds” of people right for IT jobs? In the US there is a strong IT stereotype. Can we explain this with a test? What are the effects of the stereotype? What benefit can be gained by understanding the link between personality and profession?

Recently an inquiry came to me from a graduate student at another institution. The student was asking for my help in gathering evidence to confirm his theory that certain personality “types” from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test may be better suited or more successful in an IT curriculum or in IT jobs. I rejected the request immediately.

At Globe schools, all of our students presently take an exam called Insights, which is similar in methodology to the MBTI. In fact both tests are based upon the personality theories of  Carl Gustav Jung. Insights is used in our curriculum to draw attention to different communication styles and provide students with a framework to use to adapt their communication to people who have various styles. Similarly the MBTI was created to classify personality types so that therapists could help their patients understand how to successfully interact with people, and do other things like select appropriate careers.

However, care should be taken to not over-estimate the importance or scope of the results of tests like Insights or the MBTI. Casually using these test results outside of a theraputic setting is pure hokum. Using such results to generalize human behavior or reach broad conclusions about people harms people and our society by creating social pressure to behave within the norm for your “type”. This pressure could  ”tell” some people to avoid IT professions, much like other stereotypes have done in the past and continue to do today.

Why do we have pressure for some folks to avoid IT jobs? There is a broad variety of well-paying IT jobs and these jobs are in high supply and come with opportunities for rapid advancement. Who benefits if some folks get the message that IT jobs are not for them?

Presently, IT suffers from a lack of diversity in the US. According to the National Center for Women in IT, women are greatly under-represented in IT professions. Although women comprise almost half of all professional workers in the US, they are only 25% of all IT workers. I believe that ethnic and racial minorties are similarly impacted in the US, but time constraints have prevented me from finding solid demographic evidence to support this claim. I welcome posts to prove or disprove this claim.

The opportunities in IT are real. IT includes but is not limited to network administrators, database administrators, database developers, desktop administrators, user support specialists, IT trainers, IT managers, software developers, web developers, content managers, software engineers, IT project managers, and business-to-business customer managers.

Sustained growth in IT is expected. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has consistently ranked jobs in IT as some of the most plentiful and well-paying for the past several years. In the 2010-11 Occupational Outlook Handbook the BLS reported that the demand for many jobs is expected to grow much faster than average over the next 10 years. Additionally, median salaries for these jobs are between $45,200 (computer support specialsts) and $81,780 (computer programmers).

The need to broaden our perception is real. Humans, including Ph.D. and masters students, have a tendency to try to find simple relationships or theories to describe not-so-simple phenomena. The myth that there is an IT “type” (read “stereotype”) is perpetuated by the media, including popular television shows. It is further perpetuated by the popular “Geek Squad” division of Best Buy (yes, shame on you, Best Buy). We must be skeptical of simple theories and marketing gimicks. When we passively pass on the notion of an IT stereotype to our children and others, we are providing the ingredients for prejudice and hurting our society. (Although some folks may benfit. Can you guess who?)

 Recall that the inquiry before me is whether or not I should support a research effort to correlate the MBTI results with success in IT. Although the motive behind the effort may be innocent, it is likely that the researcher has selected IT for this study precisely because he expects to find significant results. It is clear to anyone who takes a look that IT jobs are disproportionately filled by men and likely white men. An inquiry to claim that this is anything but the feedback caused by a strong self-fulfilling stereotype would obfuscate the real problem: negative stereotypes caused this. Searching for the IT “type” would only reinforce the harmful myth that there is some genetic, or natural right for certain kinds of people to hold these jobs.

IT jobs are for you and for everyone else too. I welcome your responese.

Are you graduating in the next year and don’t yet have an IT job lined up? It’s time to begin the work of making yourself attractive to prospective employers. Our career services folks can help by alerting you to job postings that come our way, and they have a whole list of things you can do to improve your chances of getting an IT job, but times are tough. I call for drastic measures. Here’s my checklist of drastic measures for you:
1. If you don’t have a job (any job) now–then get one. Employers are more interested in hiring people who have a record of showing up to work. Ideally this will be a part time or volunteer job that can be worked around your class schedule.
2. Clean yourself up. This one was hard for me so I understand if your reaction is “no way”. Change your mind and your language. Cut your hair. IT jobs and most entry level jobs you will apply for in (1) above require a certain amount of customer contact. Buy several pairs of Dockers and shirts with collars.
3. Quit World of Warcraft. Everyone played it, but no one wants to hire a WoW junkie. If you’re already too cool for WoW, quit whatever is your current addiction. Farmville? Smoking?
4. Make your boss happy. Now you should have a part time job (any job). Make your boss happy. Never be late. Never miss a day. Always cover shifts missed by others if you can. Learn and be an expert at your job. If asked, train others. This is a no-brainer that I have seen many young people not get. Imagine what she wants in a model employee and be that. The time will come when you are ready to move on and a letter of recommendation from your current boss is like a free ticket to your next job.

5. Be an excellent student. Not only does this have the obvious benefit of giving you the best return on investment in your time in school, but your instructors are like your current bosses. We can write letters of recommendation too. If you do well in a class, ask that instructor to write you one. Most instructors have done it before and if they think they can write you a strong recommendation, they will agree to do so.

6. Visit your campus career services department. Make an appointment and keep it. Bring your resume and portfolio. Be pleasant and professional. Follow their advice too.

This quarter I have been teaching Programming I. One thing I can confirm as a result of this experience is that games are great motivators for new programming students. They certainly are more relevant to the students than calculating interest rates or tax rates. The four programming examples that piqued my students interests more than any others included:

1. an implementation of the Caesar Cipher, which is a simple substitution cipher. Our text by D.S. Malik introduces reading and writing files early (in Chapter 3). The Caesar Cipher is a good way to get students to work with files. I introduced the cipher by giving the students a program, “DecoderRing.cpp” and  three text files  that contained these phrases:

message1.txt: “Tgcf{”kp”vjg”pqtvj0″

message2.txt:”Vjg”gcuv”ku”tgcf{0″

message3.txt:”Yg”ujcnn”cvvcem”cv”fcyp0″

Students were asked to run the DecoderRing.cpp program on each of these files and investigate the results. The program created three new files with these words:

Plain text 1: “Ready in the north.”

Plain text 2: “The east is ready.”

Plain text 3: “We shall attack at dawn.”

I was very pleased with the reaction of the students! This exercise demonstrated many important but tedious programming concepts: reading and writing files, integer arithmatic on character data types, and I think they got a glimpse of what power they would wield if they mastered programming.

2. An implementation of the XOR hashing algorithm. Granted, this required some time on my part to implement, but it provided my students with an example of a program that implements a very important error-detecting algorithm and gets them to think at the bit-level. Since the second quarter of programming will be going into objects, I figured this was my only chance to get them to look at integers as the 32 bits (on our machines) that they are. Students then used my program as a template to write their own hashing algorithm that has some of the features of the more cryptographically secure algorithms (like the MD5 checksum algorithm has). It will be my task (hopefully enjoyable!) to grade these this weekend.

3. An implementation of a tic-tac-toe game. I introduced this only after arrays and enumerated data types, but this was much more popular than either the XOR hash or the Caesar Cipher. Next time around, I think I can introduce tic-tac-toe even earlier–during the unit on functions. You don’t really need an array to represent nine squares on a board.

4. Rock-paper-scissors (lizard-Spock). This was a hoot. I provided the source code for the game Rock-Paper-Scissors (thank you D.S. Malik and Cengage Learning for this and other excellent programs with your text). Students were directed to modify it to accomodate Lizard and Spock as player actions (see these sites:http://www.samkass.com/theories/RPSSL.html and YouTube video of the Big Bang Theory). This was just a laboratory assignment this quarter. Next time, I will make it a homework assignment, and have the students add a computer player.

In summary, whenever possible I suggest that we design our programming examples and homework assignments around things that students may find interesting. Games top the list clearly in my experience–but be careful–many games and game features (such as an artificial intelligence) are very difficult to implement in code for first year programming students. I recommend that you try writing the game yourself before you recommend that your students attempt it.

Last week while at an event hosted by Pearson Publishing, I had the good fortune of listening to Allen H. Kupetz, who spoke about his vision for less, including less paper. He describes this and other visions for less in his book, “The Future of Less”.

Also last week, I sat in on a presentation of highly-charged publishing marketers who were describing to me their approach to this solution, a kind of electronic book. In this fantasy world, essentially print books are converted from *.pdf to a format that can be viewed in any recent version of the Internet Explorer browser only—won’t work in Safari, won’t work in Firefox, won’t work on your iPod, or on your iPad, and it won’t work with the Jaws reader, for those with visual impairments. Cost will go down, but not enough to pique my interest.

I envision less paper-based books for our IT program at some time in the future. But I also envision an improvement over paper-based books. This is my call to action for book publishers, instructors, and students. I ask publishers to change their business model:

Stop selling us heavy wasteful books we don’t want and start selling us web content made for the web. Hybrid solutions that rely on converting *.pdf to e-books don’t have all the advantages of the web that we demand.

Ideally, the revenues retained by publishers will increase to cover increases in web functionality and content I will describe below. Meanwhile, the costs to the student will decrease, as they no longer pay for paper, printing, or shipping. (Sorry Lumber, Pulp, Paper, Ink, and Shipping Barons—you’re out)

Student savings are an important part of this, since we would no longer be selling them a physical book. Students take the advantages of the web for granted and are used to it being free. Therefore, I suggest we pay publishers on a per-seat basis for each student and we would work the revenue into our course fees. The money GEN would save on the logistics of distributing books would also decrease costs.

For their part, publishers would need to change their business model significantly, rewording contracts with authors as new editions are published, and easing away from paper, printing, and shipping distribution models.

My vision is less paper, less cost, but more accessible quality content. If publishers wrote content specifically for the web rather than for books, we can see the following positive changes:

1.            Begin a new era of providing instructional content to students over the web, without the need for books. Students are used to web browsers and they will read the content if it is there.

2.            Teach green: These websites should specifically demonstrate to students that they need not print the entire website. Some critical chapter summary information should be printable on a single page or two, since the students may be anxious about losing access to the site eventually.

3.            Leverage all the advantages of the text-based web. The time of converting *.pdf files to the web are at an end. That was just publisher-denial based upon old-school production models. New content should be written specifically for the web platform, not adapted from book *.pdf.

4.            Increase the value of this content by making it viewable in a wide number of browsers on a wide number of platforms, including popular impairment compensation software such as the Jaws reader (http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp) .

5.            Web 2.0 features should also be realized. Students and instructors should be able to customize their view by adding and sharing notes, highlights, and so on.

6.            Incorporate media related to the book such as learning games, self-check quizzes, images, diagrams, and short movies. (try to avoid Flash though since the Mac iPad won’t play Flash)

7.            Decrease the cost to the students, by eliminating the cost of paper, printing, and shipping.

8.            Increase the publisher’s financial performance by paying for each student who takes a course. No more used book market. I understand that building and maintaining web content require costs. These costs should be lower than paper, printing, and shipping books, however. I believe students would welcome quality web content, with the overall costs still below what a print book costs.

9.            Organized content links to help our course developers integrate publisher content into our BlackBoard course shells in an efficient way. One way to do this is to have a secure log-in for developers to select and link to content, while making it difficult for hackers to find and make use of the content without paying for it.

10.          Every rule has exceptions: Granted we should still have a book purchase option for those students who really want or need a book, since progress is not worth losing customers over. The book purchased need not be exactly the same as the content we offer on the web, though, but it could be.

I call upon publishers, instructors and students to consider this the beginning of a conversation. The time is near to think no longer of books, but think to the future of less books.

I sincerely hope that marketing executives of our publishing partners read this and find this approach to be a viable model. I hope that instructors and students likewise see the value and the potential of this approach. Please join the conversation, by posting a response here. I look forward to your responses.

Thank you Allen H. Kupetz and Pearson Publishing for an excellent keynote speech last weekend.

The Minnesota State Science and Technology Fair will be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in St. Paul this year March 25 - 28. I have volunteered to judge junior high school student presentations in computer programming, artificial intelligence, algorithms and databases.

I would like to encourage other IT and science faculty to likewise volunteer if your schedule allows. You don’t have to be there all four days to be a judge. In fact, I’ll just be there just Friday because the Minnesota State Poker Tournament is held the same weekend and I have been invited to that tournament. Last year, I placed seventh at this state tournament. This year, I hope to make the final table again!

If you are interested in volunteering at the Minnesota State Science and Technology fair, you may do so here:
http://www.fair.mnas.org/sfHome.asp

Jerome Perelman poses several interesting questions in his response to my blog, “What’s the Difference Between Information Technology and Computer Science?”  In summary, the question posed is “Should there be another area, user-centered Communication Technology, that is distinguishable from organization-centered Information Technology?”

In this response, I will suggest an alternative term, social media, because I wish to reserve the term “user-centered” for other purposes. I offer some ideas of what we can expect from social media and businesses that attempt to have a social media presence.

Mr. Perelman, in his post, offers a possible distinction between the two: Communication Technology as “user-centered” and Information Technology as “organization-centered.” Blogs such as this one, social sites such as Facebook, email and instant messaging can all be considered to be part of the “user-centered” communication technologies.

I agree that there are differences between these user-centered technologies and those that IT folks have been mainly concerned with over the past few decades.

Social Media
However, “user-centeredness” is a term that I would like to reserve. I would prefer to call these technologies “social media.” This term has grown in use lately to describe the emerging new media technologies that include text blogging, video blogging, micro blogging (such as Twitter) social networking sites, and so on.

User-centeredness
For some time Information Technology professionals have been seen by others to be barriers to getting things done right. The reasons for this are too numerous to completely list here, but in brief these reasons include a growing communication gap between the IT pros and the users, limited budgets, numerous new technologies to understand, and an aversion to risk and change.

I propose that IT professionals actually want to be helpful to the user. User-centeredness is a practice of all good IT teams. However, the needs of each user cannot be completly met without an unlimited budget. Instead, IT and Information Systems professionals should collaborate with user representatives to understand the work of the user, and contrive ways to improve that work. These improvements can be in the selection of technologies available, the design of specific user interfaces and reports, and an overall information architecture plan.

Back to Social Media
These technologies, unlike databases for example, are new and have been developed more-or-less without any ideas about how they will be important in businesses and organizations. They are for the common use of everyone. This fact does not mean that businesses will find no use for them. Evidence is mounting that businesses, especially the marketing and promotions units within each business, are very interested in these media technologies. We have businesses experimenting with them, offering advertisements, coupons, special offers, and so on, on Twitter. It is no accident that FaceBook recently has modified its software to allow organizations to have a presence.

Because organizations are now keenly interested in this social media, it has emerged in responsive business schools, in the curriculum. Organizations wish to know “what can social media do for our business?”

Let’s not Forget History
The advent of social media may be much like the advent of the Internet itself.
The Internet was formed in a project (ARPANET) between the US Department of Defense and major US universities in the late 1960’s with the goal of accelerating the speed of scientific discoveries. It was meant to be a collaboration media to cut the time from discovery to the time of sharing that discovery with other researchers. By 1985, almost all university students had email accounts. Internet servers were established to allow folks from around the world to play chess and other games, share files with each other, and so on. The major use of the Internet in 1985 was not what it was “meant” to be by its founders. The internet is a commons; it is a public space much like a park in which you can do whatever you like, within the law.

Likewise, the World Wide Web, released to the public in 1991 by Tim Berners Lee and CERN, was developed to be an information-sharing technology. Certainly it still is used for that purpose, but it is also now a major marketplace.
The same can be said for the US highway system, which was developed in the mid-Twentieth century to facilitate troop transportation in case of invasion from the north, south, east or west. Certainly that is not what we use it for primarily. We use it to take vacations or relocate to our advantage. Businesses of course use the same highway systems to transport goods across the country, ultimately to make money.

Although developed for users, social media is a commons, available for any legal use. For better or worse, businesses will seek to discover how to leverage social media to make a buck.

What next?
Certainly social media is very new, and how it develops and unfolds is an interesting study. I believe businesses are scrambling to identify and employ experts, but what they really need are visionaries, because social media is so new and so quickly evolving, that no one can really know what the landscape will be like in two years.

Yesterday, I completed my preliminary work on my personal website. The purpose of this site is to help instructors and students at our schools get the information they need from me about the IT and Game and Application Development programs.

http://webspace.globeuniversity.edu/mrenslow/

All faculty members and every student in a web-related program at Globe University, Minnesota School of Business and Utah Career College has web space hosting available for free to use for professional and educational purposes.

It takes some work to make a website. I worked weekends, and this site took me three weekends to complete. If anyone is interested in making their own homepage and would like suggestions about how to proceed, I recommend a course in Basic Web Design to get started. If you prefer to be self-taught, you may begin by looking at my page on how to teach that course:

 http://webspace.globeuniversity.edu/mrenslow/WD130/

 The web began in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee at CERN created a markup language so he and his colleagues could easily share information with each other across computing platforms. Berners-Lee and CERN agreed that the technology was just too useful to keep to themselves and they released it to the public. Today he is still very active in the development of web standards in his role as Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). You can read more about Berners-Lee here:

 http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Terry White, an author who I have referenced in this blog recently wrote a web column entitled “What’s Your Case?” that resonated with me. This question is spot on. The answer to it has power–and according to Terry White, sometimes this power is lost to many in the IT profession.

When I was a computer science graduate student at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota, there was a professor who was well known for asking students, “What’s your problem?” He had a dry sense of humor and some students would be taken aback by this question, but he was actually a very friendly man. We learned that what our professor meant by this question was that if you are a computer scientist, you should have a problem that you are trying to solve. A computer scientist without a problem is a mere programmer.

Similarly in information technology, all too often we encounter otherwise talented individuals who cannot or will not do the work required to build a business case for their proposed work. According to Terry White, learning to build a business case, whether it is calculating a return on investment (ROI) or showing that a project is required for compliance or legal issues or showing that the project is required to avoid substantial operational risk is what differentiates a technician from an IT professional. IT professionals accept that they are operating in a business context and they adapt and integrate themselves into that culture.

Computer scientists need problems to solve. IT professionals need business cases to prove. Those who have neither will have little chance to get the sponsorship they need to get the work done and even less chance to advance in their careers.

At Globe Education Network colleges, we train IT professionals.

You can read Terry White’s article at: http://cxo-advisor.co.za/category/newsletter/-terry-white-column

Very good question, Ray. Thank you for that.

Certainly different businesses and authorities may define these two terms differently. When they are presented together in this question, I believe that our natural reaction is to say, “Yes, there is a difference.” This makes me think, “Okay, what’s the difference?”

First an illuminating digression: one interesting difference between the thinking of Information Systems (IS) professionals and Information Technology (IT) professionals is that IS professionals are interested in information before it enters the IT infrastructure and after it leaves the IT infrastructure. Employees carry information with them or become living archives of institutional knowledge. IS professionals may seek to transform that knowledge into electronic form in order to preserve it beyond the date of last employment of the actual employee (or beyond the date that the employee can remember it). IS professionals view people as (possibly fragile) parts of the information system.

Your question was about Information Security and Information System Security. Information Security would seem to be the broader of the two terms and may include the following concerns (and likely others), that I have orderd from “closer to the machine” to “closer to the user”:

(closer to the machine)

• security of the physical computing infrastructure
• security of the encryption algorithms and communication protocols that run on the networks
• security of the operating systems and applications that are hosted on the system hardware
• security related to user privileges
• security of the information stored or transmitted in the system
• training of employees
• preserving employee knowledge

(closer to the user)

Now since Information Systems is the discipline that emphasizes information, I would suggest that Information Systems is primarily about the last three concerns: security of the information stored or transmitted in the system, training of employees, and preserving employee knowledge.

Certainly, the other concerns are important to the IS-Security professional such as the security of the operating systems, applications, and user privileges, since these can have an impact on the security of the information. But as we move closer to the top of the list of concerns, they seem to me to be more IT-security related and less IS-Security related. It would make sense that the entire list should be the concern of the “Information Security” professional, but it is my belief that in practice when we say “information security” we are being ambiguous. Each computing discipling has it’s own approach to the topic of security. Computer science (CS) is concerned primarily with the algorithms and formal proof of the security of a system. IT is concerned primarily with the security of the physical infrastructure, the operating systems, and applications. Software Engineers (SE) are concerned primarily with the application of proven or best practices in the design of software, and computer engineers (CE) are concerned primarily with the design and fault-tolerance of the actual machines.