Posts Tagged ‘cloud’

Machine Learning and the Cloud Rescue IT

How Machine Learning and the Cloud Can Rescue IT From the Plumbing Business


By Andrew Barbour     Feb 19, 2019

Many educational institutions maintain their own data centers.  “We need to minimize the amount of work we do to keep systems up and running, and spend more energy innovating on things that matter to people.”

what’s the difference between machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI)?

Jeff Olson: That’s actually the setup for a joke going around the data science community. The punchline? If it’s written in Python or R, it’s machine learning. If it’s written in PowerPoint, it’s AI.
machine learning is in practical use in a lot of places, whereas AI conjures up all these fantastic thoughts in people.

What is serverless architecture, and why are you excited about it?

Instead of having a machine running all the time, you just run the code necessary to do what you want—there is no persisting server or container. There is only this fleeting moment when the code is being executed. It’s called Function as a Service, and AWS pioneered it with a service called AWS Lambda. It allows an organization to scale up without planning ahead.

How do you think machine learning and Function as a Service will impact higher education in general?

The radical nature of this innovation will make a lot of systems that were built five or 10 years ago obsolete. Once an organization comes to grips with Function as a Service (FaaS) as a concept, it’s a pretty simple step for that institution to stop doing its own plumbing. FaaS will help accelerate innovation in education because of the API economy.

If the campus IT department will no longer be taking care of the plumbing, what will its role be?

I think IT will be curating the inter-operation of services, some developed locally but most purchased from the API economy.

As a result, you write far less code and have fewer security risks, so you can innovate faster. A succinct machine-learning algorithm with fewer than 500 lines of code can now replace an application that might have required millions of lines of code. Second, it scales. If you happen to have a gigantic spike in traffic, it deals with it effortlessly. If you have very little traffic, you incur a negligible cost.

more on machine learning in this IMS blog

digital literacy

digital literacy planning tool


Digital literacy = technology use + critical thinking + social awareness

7 characteristics of a digital mindset


Abundance Mindset
Growth Mindset
Agile Approach
Comfort with Ambiguity
Explorer’s Mind
Collaborative Approach
Embracing Diversity

Scientific Studies on Literacy and Digital Literacy Indexed in Scopus: A Literature Review (2000-2013)
the study of digital tools linked to these new literacies is absolutely necessary, particularly because Web 2.0 allow users to interact and cooperate together as content creators in a virtual community. Although this concept may suggest a new version of the World Wide Web (WWW), it really does not refer to an update of the technical features, but rather to the changes concerning the use and  interaction through the Web.


More on digital literacy in this blog:





More on gaming at IMS blog

more on gamification at IMS blog


iTunes in decline

With Downloads In Decline, Can iTunes Adapt?

Spotify is simpler. It’s all about music. Mosley has switched over, saying he’s willing to pay the $10 monthly subscription fee for the premium, ad-free version of the service because it’s so much easier to use.


Shift in the technology market

Coln, A. (2012, Sept. 13). Is the Cloud Killing IT Jobs? Retrieved from

Linthicum, D. (2013, April 23). The Cloud is Killing Traditional Hardware and Software. Retrieved from http://www.infoworld/com/d/cloud-computing/the-cloud-killing-traditional-hardware-and-software-216963

O’Dowd, P. (n.d.). As PC Sales Drop, Intel Delays A Plant Opening And Cuts Jobs. Retrieved January 30, 2014, from