Instruction technology  - notes on the blunt edge ;)

Bill Colucci's notes on technologies that might be useful for instructors, including speculation, personal experience, hearsay and readings in the research literature.

Current hot topics in IT and some tips on getting hands on experience

Virtual machines

This is software installed on a computer that simulates a physical computer.  You would install this software, create a “virtual machine” (how much memory, hard disk space, CPU resources would be used) and then install an operating system within that software.  For example, some students have a MacBook computer with MacIntosh operating system, which is incompatible with Office 2007 (it’s made for the Windows XP operating system).  You can purchase software called “Fusion” from VMWare, which will allow you to install Windows XP as it were just another program running on the Mac.  So, you would start up Fusion, choose to load XP and the whole Windows operating system would run under a window on your Mac.  You would then put CD’s into your MacBook, which will be recognized also by your Windows XP operating system, and install software like Office XP on your virtual Windows computer. 

In business, this is used for at least three major reasons.  One is the ability to run programs on one computer that can only be run on completely different operating systems, like the Office 2007 on a Mac example above.  Another is disaster recovery – a virtual machine with all the same programs and data of a real machine can be started when a real machine crashes.  Finally, many businesses use this as a tool to go ‘green’ – save money on electricity costs by running multiple operating systems on one physical box.  For personal use, you can run a virtual machine to do things that you don’t want to impact your host computer – install or try things that might crash your computer.  Also, people use it to install older operating systems required for older games.

You can easily try it out for free by downloading one of several flavors of virtual machines.  Here are two links – one for Microsoft Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=04D26402-3199-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en) and another for VMWare.   (http://vmware.com/download/server/). 

Students in any School of Business course have access to free Microsoft server and PC operating systems for purposes of learning about them (you should have received an email with information about signing up for that - look for something about the "MSDN" program.  If you are interested in trying out running a virtual machine, you have to have a licensed copy of Windows, or you can use Linux, which is free (e.g., Ubuntu).

Virtual reality, e.g., Second Life

There are services on the web that host a ‘virtual’ world that people can participate in with an ‘avatar’ – a constructed computer or ‘virtual’ person.  Through the use of a graphic interface much like computer games, users control a character that interacts with an environment and other computer user’s avatars.  One example is Second Life, which allows you to sign up for free, create a character, explore the virtual world and start interacting with other user’s avatars.  In fact, users have the option to invest money into virtual currency which then can be exchanged in Second Life, leading to real bank transactions.  Many name businesses have virtual storefronts and allow real financial transactions to take place.  To try Second Life, the link is http://secondlife.com/.  This was actually the subject of a recent Law and Order TV episode where the criminal was killing people to control their avatars that had access to real bank accounts (if I recall correctly).

Software as a Service (SAAS)

A good example of a free software as a service is Google Docs – http://docs.google.com.  You can sign up and create spreadsheets, word processing or other types of documents, save them on Google, or download them.  So, the software is actually used across a web browser, and the data and programs are on a remote computer.  While Google is free, businesses are increasingly using SAAS rather than purchasing and installing software on their own computers.  A business would lease the use of software giving them access to its functionality, and storing data on the remote computer.  This saves the cost of internal IT expertise, and investment in software and hardware.  Another term you can examine is ‘cloud computing’, There are lots of free services that can be examined in this category, including Amazon’s Elastic Cloud (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/), which allows you to lease cpu time and storage, so you can run computer programs and offer services without a computer!   There are also lots of services, like mozy.com, associated with AOL, which will give you free storage space, and lease storage space and backup capability.  Lots of businesses are using remote storage over the internet to back up critical data, so if the building burns down, the data is still safe off site.

Citris Xen virtualization and Microsoft Terminal Services Server can provide users with 'virtual' applications - applications that appear to be running on the user workstation, but which are actually running on a server.  So, users see another icon for another program on their desktop, click that and run the program as usual - the only difference is that the program is not installed on that computer but streams to the computer over the network from the server.  That avoids having to install the program, configure it, troubleshoot it and modify settings - for example, security settings locking down features.

Knowledge base (or Knowledgebase)

This is sort of a way of facilitating organizational memory.  Workers might need to find and access documents or information created by other workers in the past or at present.  A knowledge base is simply any of a number of computer programs that allow workers to share and search for material produced.   Here’s one way it’s described (Wikipedia):

  • Machine-readable knowledge bases store knowledge in a computer-readable form, usually for the purpose of having automated deductive reasoning applied to them. They contain a set of data, often in the form of rules that describe the knowledge in a logically consistent manner. Logical operators, such as And (conjunction), Or (disjunction), material implication and negation may be used to build it up from the atomic knowledge. Consequently, classical deduction can be used to reason about the knowledge in the knowledge base.
  • Human-readable knowledge bases are designed to allow people to retrieve and use the knowledge they contain, primarily for training purposes. They are commonly used to capture explicit knowledge of an organization, including troubleshooting, articles, white papers, user manuals and others. A primary benefit of such a knowledge base is that it can help a user to find an existing solution to his or her current problem (thus avoiding having to 're-invent the wheel').