Vice Provost for Information Technology Ron Kraemer moving on

UW students are losing a friend in the administration this summer with the departure of Vice Provost for Information Technology Ron Kramer for a similar position at Notre Dame. Ron actually has three titles at UW: Vice Provost for Information Technology, Executive Director of DoIT, and campus Chief Information Officer.

Ron became CIO a few months into my tenure on the Information Technology Committee, and immediately made clear that he was going to consider student issues central to his approach to the job – both in shared governance and in the focus on the application and deployment of information technology across campus.

I’m not sure what Ron would consider his biggest accomplishment – certainly, the development of a campus IT strategic plan was important, and all in all there have been some great advances these past few years, but there are three important things for students I want to highlight.

First, early in his tenure were the RIAA lawsuit threats of a few years back. Ron was very supportive of developing an education campaign that was realisitic in its approach. It wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky “Drugs are bad, mmkay” approach to copyright infringement – it recognized that the RIAA was specifically targeting university students and UW students were at greater risk. He was a good leader on campus and nationally in the response to the RIAA.

Second, Ron has lead the fight to finally abolish the use of social security numbers on campus, and to continue to be vigilant on the protection of personal information. Not only will students individually be able to rest easier knowing that the likelihood of identity theft due to university data losses is greatly reduced, collectively we have saved considerable sums of money from having fewer data loss incidents. This is money that can be focused on the teaching and research mission of the University.

Finally, Ron was the driving force behind the SITIAC shared governance committee that finally brought student involvement to the distribution of student technology fees. As more and more of the educational experience becomes tightly coupled with technology, it will be vital for students to have a direct say in how the infrastructure evolves. Our seat at the table would absolutely not have happened had it not been for Ron fighting for us.

Ron will be difficult to replace, and it will be a national search process. There will be two students on the search committee – look for more information on that later.

Personally, I’m proud to consider Ron a friend, and will miss him when he leaves for his new post in August. Notre Dame has made a great hire, and I wish him all the best in his new job.

Erik Paulson

January 2010 Information Technology Committee Meeting

January ITC Meeting

The full meeting minutes are available here (at the moment, they’re still in draft format, so until mid-Feb please don’t quote from them)

Updates
- The MyWebSpace upgrade has happened. There was general agreement that the new interface for finding groups is pretty lame, hidden under the icon that’s supposed to be the Sun.
- The trickiest part of the cooling upgrade for the Computer Sciences building, which includes the DoIT machine room (ie, where www.wisc.edu, wiscmail, MyUW, Learn@UW, etc all live). The computers produce so much heat that they have to be air-conditioned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and the building gets chilled water to drive the A/C. The equipment that handled it was past its rated lifetime, and we were in danger of maxing out the cooling, so we upgraded the pipes to bring in more water, with bigger pipes.

In order to do this, we had to shut down the current cooling system so the steamfitters could cut out the old pipes and switch to the new ones. To puthis off, we shut off as much of the computing resources as possible, taking advantage of an early January lull, and with a huge collection of fans and temporary ductwork, used the outside air to cool the building. We were helped by outside air temperatures of -3 below, but even then we just barely made it. (The lack of humidity was problematic, but we apparently pulled it off.) The pictures tell some of the tale:
http://can.doit.wisc.edu/~bradshaw/cooling/ - one of the hardest things was having to switch the person on guard duty at the doors frequently given the extreme cold and the wind from the fans.

- A quick update on the “Hacker Within” student org ( http://groups.google.com/group/hacker-within ) This is a student-led group, that teaches other students who are mostly (all?) not computer science students, but still need programming in order to get their work done. Computing is becoming critical to more and more disciplines, so it’s good to see things like this springing up.

Our main agenda items were up next. We started out with an update from the library on the Hathi Trust – hathitrust.org (It’s the Hindi word for ‘Elephant’). This is related to the Google Book Scanning agreement. The HathiTrust is a collaboration between the University of California System and the CIC (The Committee on Institutional Cooperation – basically, the academic version of the Big Ten, but still with the University of Chicago). The trust serves as an insurance policy with the Google book scanning deal – they’re keeping digital copies of everything that Google scans. For now, we’re trying to stick with things that are out of copyright or were always public domain, but as much as possible, we want to make electronic access available to all of our collection, on demand. The powerpoint from the meeting has some interesting stats and facts about the Google book deal

Next we got a demo of the new Courseguide system enrollment management is developing. This is something that we should ask to have demoed in a Shared Gov meeting, and to get them to talk about some of their future plans, because some of it is pretty cool. One thing that I thought was really cool was the hope to sort of pre-create some common course plans.
Eventually, the course guide is going to get live data on what seats are open, and what sections are full versus what sections just aren’t open, and more information about the instructor. Right now it’s pretty bland, but eventually the hope is to get real professor information, a syllabus, research the professor is involved with, and hopefully some actual lectures and information about the teaching style of that class, so you can pick what class might be the best fit for your learning style.

The last thing we looked at was a report from the “Deans Working Group on Information Technology and Library Infrastructure”, but it’s still an early draft, so I’ll wait until we see a later version before going into it.

Erik Paulson

December 2009 ITC Meeting

The full minutes are online here, So I’ll just hit the highlights of the discussions.

ITC meetings always start off with a half hour of so of “roundups.”. In December, we talked about

-the search for a CALS CIO (Chief Information Officer) – mostly just that they were looking for someone, not much on what they’d do.

-The standard update on the lawsuit between Desire2Learn and Blackboard. The reason we care is that Desire2Learn makes the software behind Learn@UW, and if D2L lost that lawsuit the consequences could be that we’d have switch software behind Learn@UW. The lawsuit has been going on for a couple of years, and to be safe the UW developed contingency plans in case we had to switch. This wasn’t a complete waste of time – we’ve actually got a lot of colleges that prefer our backup option. Thankfully, we’re done getting these lawsuit updates as D2L and Blackboard announced a settlement.

- A cooling upgrade for the data center. More on that in the January report

- The ITC has a representative on the Campus Planning Committee, so we get standing updates from the CPC

- A security update. You may remember an incident earlier this year in Chemistry, in which social security numbers were inadvertently exposed (and likely weren’t exposed, the hackers were just using the computers to share movies, and probably never even knew there were SSNs on the machine. Still, the UW assumes that they were and acts accordingly). The concern is that we’re approaching having to spend upwards of a million dollars with software to try and defend against all of this, and it is only getting worse.

- The UW is looking at “Digital Measures” - http://www.digitalmeasures.com/ It is an online course evaluation system (ie replacing the scantron thing we fill out at the end of the semester) with some fancy reporting tools. We’re supposed to see it at a future ITC meeting, so I’m trying to keep an open mind. (There’s something to be said for better processing of this data, but once upon a time ASM managed to put it all on the web, so it can’t be that hard to do)

We then moved on to our big agenda items. The first topic was the start of reorganizing the libraries on campus, and reinterpreting the role of libraries. This might be something we’d like to discuss further, and other committees have mentioned, but the gist of it is that the libraries will be moving away from specialized libraries and collections, and towards a more centralized functional system.

Our next discussion item was titled “Reflections on a snow day” – this was about a week after the December campus closing. Some things we talked about:

- the University’s website was nearly crushed by the spike in load, as people were trying to get information about the closing. In the future, we’re going to go to a stripped-down version earlier.

- We need to clarify what it means for “campus to be closed”, particularly in regards to things that don’t physically need campus. For example, there was a lot of ambiguity for assignments that might have been due on that day. As much of the submission of homework/papers/projects is electronic, a snow day doesn’t matter. Similarly for virtual classes that meet electronically – there was no need for them to be cancelled, at at least some of them “met” as normally scheduled.

-Erik Paulson

ITC - November Meeting

Some interesting things were brought up in the November meeting that I had forgotten to report here, and some things you may have noticed going into effect.

Things the ITC could use input on:

• i-Clicker - We had a demo of i-Clicker. The idea is that everyone in a classroom has a device with 5 buttons, and when the instructor presents a question, everyone can answer. The bookstore showed 7 classes using clickers. i-Clicker also has a web interface. The clickers are $35, but do not have a recurring fee, so you could use the same one forever. Should these be used in class? Keep in mind that they could be anonymous or for a grade.
  
• Moodle - You may have noticed some classes using Moodle as a course website. It's kind of like Learn@UW but more customizable and community oriented. If you have used Moodle in a class of yours, what are your thoughts? Do instructors use it effectively? Does it help your learning? There is a Moodle council in ComETS that helps define best practices for Moodle's use in the university and acts as a common ground for those in the UW-Madison community who are using Moodle. http://comets.wisc.edu/groups/61/moodle-council
• Learning Spaces - We had a demo on Smartboards and Promethean whiteboards. They are basically whiteboards with a projector on them and some sort of way for the person writing on the whiteboard to interact with the computer. There was some concern about the support needed to keep a system like this running in classrooms. The question is whether these interactive whiteboards improve learning. If one of your classes uses one, we could use some input.
  

General updates:

• New Wiscmail - the new web-client for Wiscmail has been in testing since September, and more people were invited week by week. The process of inviting people was due to be completed in December. You can permanently switch by going to http://admin.wiscmail.wisc.edu. The old client is scheduled to be retired this February.
• Google - Yes, there is work in progress to make Google apps available to UW-Madison students. At this point, Google Docs, Spreadsheet and Sites will be available. All will be authenticated with your NetID. While the services are free, DoIT had to invest in legal research and technical integration in order to get us Google stuff. Google basically provides the service, but we need to make sure it is legally and technologically feasible ourselves.
• Adobe Connect - Adobe connect is kind of a remote meeting solution that may work as a remote classroom setup. DoIT has purchased some licenses and will be selling them at a discount, for $100 until June 2010. Only the presenter/organizer needs a license.

Comments and questions are definitely welcome.

Information Technology Committee Sept and October Meetings

The Information Technology Committee (ITC) has met twice so far this academic year. The ITC advises the Vice Provost for Information Technology, who is also the Campus Chief Information Officer (CIO) and executive director of DoIT. The ITC also advises and has a role in approving policies for IT in the broader university community – 70% of IT on this campus is not done by DoIT! The ITC has three student members, currently one undergraduate and two graduate students. It’s worth noting that the ITC is not an entirely technical committee. While certainly the ITC does have technically capable members, most of the technical decisions are left to campus professional staff. The ITC does not dictate that we buy Cisco routers instead of Juniper routers, for example, but focuses more in saying that we need a high speed network available everyone on campus and this is the way we’ll fund it. However, we can and sometimes do ask pointed questions about why one particular technology was chosen, or provide guidance in how to evaluate purchasing options.

The first ITC meeting was in September, and focused largely on just orientating new members to the committee. As part of the process, each member was asked to give a list of “pet projects” they’d like to see the committee or campus take up. The full list is in our minutes, which are online here: http://itc.wisc.edu/minutes/minutes.asp?min_id=522

One thing I am very interested in pushing this year is lecture capture, i.e. recording audio and video of lectures and posting it online. I think it is a terrible waste that so few lectures are recorded on this campus – to use a bad analogy, they’re like an inefficient power plant, and capturing these lectures could produce a lot more value for students, faculty, and the public. I think an ambitious but attainable goal would have 100% of lectures captured in five years.

In a related issue from the first meeting, a member of the committee mentioned “clickers”, which are the devices that a professor can use to have students vote or answer questions during lectures. Clickers are unpopular with students, right? Please let me know if I’m way off base here.

Another issue that we’ve spent a lot of time discussing on the ITC is Moodle, which is a software package that does the same thing as the software behind Learn@UW. If you’re in the business school or college of engineering, you’ve probably used Moodle. I will write more about Moodle in the future, but campus and the ITC is paying careful attention to Moodle as a potential replacement for the current Learn@UW. It’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, and certainly not until next fall, which would only happen in the very worst-case scenario.

The ITC website is http://itc.wisc.edu/, and our meetings are the 3rd Friday of every month at 10am. We have many visitors who attend the meetings, and any interested student should absolutely attend – the chair is very good about allowing guests to participate in the discussion!

Recent WiscMail Outage

The CIO/Vice Provost for Information Technology sent a detailed message to the Information Technology Committee about Wednesday's WiscMail outage. We will, I'm sure, be getting another update at our next ITC meeting.

Just to quick translate a few things in the message. First, a "memory leak" basically means that the longer the program runs, the slower it becomes. They are bugs and are occasionally encountered in new versions of software, and in general the right thing to do is to go back to the old version. Second, to understand "rebuild the message storage index database", just focus on "rebuild index." If you rip the index out of the back of a book, to replace it you have to start at the beginning of the book and re-read the whole thing. Without the index, the mail server can't find someone's email messages without searching through all of the messages. You can imagine that building an index for 60,000 inboxes takes a little bit of time.

All

Now that WiscMail service is restored, I want to give you an update on what happened.

First, let me apologize for the inconveniences this caused you. I am certain that we all count on e-mail for much of what we do every day and having these services unavailable is a significant disruption for us.

Tuesday morning, the WiscMail team installed an update to the Sun software we use to process mail. It was believed to be a fairly modest upgrade. By noon Tuesday, a few of our mail servers were experiencing a "memory leak," which degraded from poor to no performance rather quickly. The mail team worked with the vendor to address the problems and decided to roll back the upgrade to the previous version of software. The team worked around the clock to restore service for our
users. Wednesday morning we experienced performance problems that resulted from the rollback, which required the mail team to rebuild the message store index databases. Full IMAP, POP, and webmail email delivery services were restored early afternoon Wednesday.

It is extremely rare that our WiscMail service experiences an outage. I want to assure you that steps are being taken to make sure every future upgrade does not bring this effect. The mail team is working with Sun Microsystems to fully diagnose the error(s), fix the upgrade and reapply it when we have full assurance it will work under current loads. We will also hold a post-incident review to learn from this event and adjust our strategies as appropriate.

Thank you for your patience and trust.


--
Ron Kraemer
Vice Provost for Information Technology
Chief Information Officer (CIO)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
ron.kraemer@cio.wisc.edu

I'm sure that this will bring up some discussions about the future of WiscMail as well. Here are some things to think about.

• First, WiscMail is not designed to have "no downtime." To truly take it to the next level, we would need to have multiple active data centers. At present, there is an emergency plan, and all data continuously stored at multiple locations. If something catastrophic were to happen to the Computer Sciences building, not a single email would be lost. However, if the Computer Sciences building can't recover, it would take a few days to totally restore email service from the backup site. It would be VERY expensive to both fully equip the additional data centers and more importantly, modify our email system (and the additional software that is necessary to run the email system) to automatically fail over and have just a few minutes at most of downtime. I don't know if there's something to be found in the middle of these two extremes, where we could restore email within say a few hours of a catastrophe at Computer Sciences. Clearly, there was no catastrophe at Computer Sciences Wednesday, so there is a lot of work to do with the current system so it can recover quickly even with one active data center.
• Second, switching to GMail or some other outsourced email provider is not a "no-brainer" in terms of cost. GMail would reduce some costs, and will increase others. We don't know entirely know how those balance out. In addition, there are a whole host of new legal issues related to data ownership, privacy, and state records requirements that would need to be identified as part of any move. GMail does have multiple data centers, but they too have had the occasional multi-hour outage and are much less forthcoming about those outages.

The big questions will be How much does Email cost?, and How much is Email worth to us? I don't know how much of this we'll get to discuss at the last ITC meeting of the year, but these issues will certainly be on people's minds, and hopefully we'll be able to have a good discussion on May 16th.

Information Technology Committee February Meeting

The ITC started our meeting off with receiving an update on the Learn@UW outage. The start of the semester is one of the busiest times for Learn@UW, as everyone checks out their course webpage. Unfortunately, on the first day of classes this semester, the extra load exposed a problem with Learn@UW, and in order to fix the system it had to be shut down. Service was restored that day, but Learn@UW serves the entire UW system, not just the Madison campus, so any outage affects a lot of students and faculty. The committee had to resist the urge to try and design a “fix” for the system during the meeting, and let the staff that supports Learn@UW work on a solution. It is well-known that the other busy time of the semester is the end of the semester. I think this outage affected the faculty more than the students. Personally, it didn’t bother me at all that I couldn’t look at the course webpage on the first day of classes. I’m far more concerned about it being available at the end of the semester, when there is a final coming up and last bits of homework to turn in.

The UW is finalizing a contract for a mass text messaging system. This was already in the works before yesterday’s senselessness at NIU. This will add one more tool that the UW can use to get the word out to the UW community. A campaign to get people signed up for the service is being developed, and it’s something that ASM could get involved with. Other campuses that have text messaging systems don’t have a very high percentage of their students signed up – no campus is over 50%, and even Virginia Tech is only at about 35%. There is also an effort to look at the cellular infrastructure on campus, and how much load could it handle. At the Obama rally, some people could get through, and others couldn’t. Yesterday, cell call volume at NIU was 12 times greater than normal, which made a lot of cell phones useless. This summer the phone lines for the Twin Cities were jammed the night of the bridge collapse. I think part of any campaign should be getting people to think about how to shift the notification load to outside the immediate area. Instead of calling everyone in your family all across the country, can you get a hold of one person and ask them to call around for you?

The committee talked about information safeguarding. Recently, some UW IDs were exposed on the web, and some of those IDs were still based on social security numbers. Several years ago, all students were forced to switch to a non-SSN based ID number, but faculty and staff were not required to switch. The UW has done an inventory, and there are about 8,000 SSN-based ID numbers still active. (A few students still have SSN-based ID numbers, if they were previously a student and subsequently returned.) The UW is moving to finally force the elimination of SSN-based ID numbers once and for all.

In other ID card news, the current UW ID card is about to get an upgrade. The “One Card” will consolidate a number of existing UW ID cards into one. For example, many people carry a card for building access in addition to their UW ID. The “One Card” will be able to do both. The goal is to start issuing them by June 1st, so all incoming SOAR students will have the new card. Housing wants to start using the One Card for access to their buildings, instead of the current key frobs. This is going to present a challenge. I’m hoping that the new cards will be available this semester, so upperclassmen that live in the dorms won’t all have to get new cards on their first day back on campus next fall, but it doesn’t sound likely they’ll be ready before finals.

The agenda and supporting documents, along with past meeting minutes, are on the ITC website: itc.wisc.edu

Information Technology Committee: Students and the RIAA

One of the issues that we’re constantly discussing on the Information Technology Committee is the attack on students by the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA. The RIAA employs a small army to search the large public file sharing networks to find people sharing music which the RIAA claims a copyright. For many years, the RIAA would send a “Cease and Desist” letter to the people it believed to be violating their copyright, or if it could not identify the person directly it would send the letter to the ISP that person used to connect to the Internet, such as Charter, TDS, or for many students, the UW. A new twist emerged this past spring, with the deliberate targeting of file sharers on college campuses and a significant upping of the ante. The Cease and Desist letters became “Pre-settlement notices,” threatening the student with a lawsuit unless they accepted an offer to settle before the lawsuit was filed. For most people, this offer was between $3000 and $4000 dollars. These “Pre-settlement notices” have, as far as anyone can tell, only gone to people using college networks, and have completely ignored people on commercial networks, such as home cable modem or DSL users. The RIAA has had a pattern of sending notices to about 20 universities a month, to about 500 students in each batch. 16 UW-Madison students received letters in March of 2007, and another 28 in September. No UW student was included in the October, November, or December batch. The UW believes most students who receive the letters settle, rather than go through the time and expense of a court battle.

As students at a research institution, we are acutely aware of the need for respect of the intellectual and artistic creations of others. We want to have a larger conversation about copyrights. It is especially important now to all students. A generation ago, the best a senior thesis could hope for was actually getting on a library shelf, and not just in the bottom of a pile in a professor’s office. Now our creations have the ability to be made available and locatable to the entire world with ease. The RIAA’s insistence on discussing copyright only as “stealing music” has made an education campaign about copyright more difficult, and drowns out many of the other important topics we need to discuss. We are going to have that conversation, and we’re going to do it on our terms, not the RIAA’s.

Our main goal right now is increase student awareness about the RIAA’s targeting of students. The message is going to be kept simple:

The RIAA is out to get you, if you’re not sure if you’ve placed yourself at risk, here’s who can answer your questions.

That’s it. We’ll have a larger conversation about copyrights later. We want students to understand the risk they’re placing themselves under, and let them make their own decisions. We are convinced that some of the people who have received pre-settlement notices had no idea they were doing anything that could get them involved in a lawsuit.

On Friday, December 14^th at 9AM we’ll be meeting in room 3207 of Computer Sciences to hash out the exact wording of the message. The meeting will be majority students, along with a few members of DoIT staff and maybe a representative from the Dean of Students office. We hope that we can craft an effective message for students. ResNet users will all see the message when they return from winter break, possibly along with the wider campus. We do not expect our message will magically convince all students to stop infringing on copyrighted music, but we hope that we get to a point where no student is surprised if they get a pre-settlement notice.

Ron Kraemer, the Vice Provost for Information Technology and Campus Chief Information Officer, and his staff have put together a good page about the RIAA response on campus here. You may also be interested in this article from the Badger Herald about a student who settled with the RIAA.

If you have suggestions for the message, please comment, or come to our Friday morning meeting. (Yes, it’s early, and the last day of classes, but we’re trying to get this done before break)