C4T #3

Post 1

Miguel Guhlin wrote in his blog post, The Lure of Glamornormous Projects - 5 Tips, about enormous projects schools undertake that are glamorous, usually involving expensive technology, and disregards the price-tag and common sense. Such as replacing textbooks with ipads. To help discriminate between "Glamornormous" projects and projects that aren't, he created a guideline of five questions to be answered about the projects to determine which category it falls under. He also had five tips handy, to help overcome the sensation for these "Glamornormous" projects (adapted from five tips for dealing with "buck fever" funnily enough).

Reading Guhlin's post reminded me greatly of a video we've had to watch for a previous blog post--The iSchool Initiative. I made sure to mention this in my comments. In case you forgot, The iSchool Initiative was a video arguing in favor of using an iTouch as a basis for education, replacing textbooks, calculators, paper, pencil, and what have you. I asked if he thought it was Glamornormous, because I thought it fit the bill. Though it's argued in the video that it will save money on buying textbooks, those costs will be immediately replaced by maintenance/repair costs and replacements costs for broken, lost, and stolen ones.


Post 2

The next post, Desktop Virtualization - One CTO's Response, was actually a letter from Don Hindsley (a technology director at a Texas school) in response to the question, "We're ready to try our hand at desktop virtualization and would appreciate your advice on how to achieve the greatest results with minimum expense. VMWare?" He explained about the Virtual Desktop system his own school system installed in 2006. It worked well for a few years, and the total cost was $136,406.14. When the user-limit was reached and started slowing the system down, they decided to add another system in 2011. The total cost of that ended up being $255,872.24. The two systems work well, but they like VMware the best. He ends his letter with some advice on not to skimp when buying hardware.


I'd never heard of Desktop Virtualization before I read this, but it's basically a virtual desktop that you can access from any computer, and pick up from right where you left off. I didn't understand a lot of the technical stuff he mention (and I skipped over in my summary of his letter), but I thought it was interesting to read his account of the advance in technology over the years they had this system. I asked Mr. Guhlin if he thought that the advantages of the Desktop Virtualization made up for the expenses of buying and upgrading them, since I have no idea if those numbers up there are considered exorbitant or not, or how much schools are allotted to spend on certain things.