This year, Swarthmore College ITS and the Libraries asked the campus community to provide feedback via the MISO Survey, “a web-based quantitative survey designed to measure how faculty, students, and staff view library and computing services in higher education.” We … Continue reading How are we doing? 2019 MISO Survey Results
For much of this spring semester ITS staff have been chasing down several issues causing network instability. One of the causes was failing fiber optic cable which has been located and replaced. We also identified a bug in the network operating system running on some of our core network switches. We have been working with Juniper engineers (Juniper is the company that manufactures our networking equipment) for several weeks to identify and fix the problem. This may sound like a lot of time but this is a complicated issue and had to be escalated through Juniper technical support. Last Friday … Continue reading Status Report on Friday’s Campus Network Outage
What ITS services are people using? I looked at the activity on a few commonly used campus systems to see what was popular. Moodle Moodle is Swarthmore’s learning management system, used to share course content and allow students to upload … Continue reading ITS Statistics
Google is rolling out a new User Interface for Calendar that you will be able to experience here on campus as of November 14th. So what does this mean for your Calendar? It means you are going to get a … Continue reading Google Calendar Gets A New Look!
Several academic technology projects were highlighted in this month’s Swarthmore College’ Bulletin article on the evolution of Swarthmore’s curriculum Gayle Barton, the College’s chief information technology officer was quoted on the issue of “Educating the “Net” Generation”: “The pace of change will continue to increase—as will the volume of information and number of options—so we’ll need to have technologists who can help people choose solutions that fit their needs,” she says. “New tools for communication and self-publishing are becoming increasingly important in the academic arena. Scientists have had literature and data available online for years, but scholars in the humanities … Continue reading ITS and Academic Technology Highlighted in the Current Swarthmore College’ Bulletin
With the launch of data.worldbank.org, the World Bank Group is now offering more than 2,000 statistics, which were previously only available to paid subscribers. Experts say the Bank’s open data initiative has the potential to stimulate more evidence-based policy making in developing countries by bringing more researchers and innovative analysis into the development process. The move is also likely to stimulate demand for data and increase countries’ capacity to produce it, they say. The site also aims to share information by breaking down language barriers. The launch will include 330 indicators that, for the first time, will be available in … Continue reading Over 2,000 World Bank Statistics Now Available at data.worldbank.org
