Fall 2011 - Touro College

From the Desk of the
Director of Instructional Technology
Phil Charach
Director of Instructional Technology
Dear Colleague:
Students have often referred to their instructor
as the “sage on the stage.” With the rampant
advent of “cloud computing”, we could jokingly modify
that euphemism to “sage on the cloud”. The hottest
thing now in Information Technology and Educational
Technology is the call for “cloud computing.”
“The cloud is here already!” writes Nabil
Sultan in International Journal of Information
Management, under the heading “Cloud
Computing for Education: A New Dawn?” Cloud
computing is likely to be an attractive proposition
to startup and small to medium enterprises and
educational establishments. 1
What exactly is cloud computing?
“A study by McKinsey (the global management
consulting firm) found that there are 22 possible
separate definitions of cloud computing,” 2 but in
its simplest form, cloud computing is the ability to
run your information technology infrastructure and
applications on the internet. The concept of a cloud
service can be best illustrated with an example: If
you need electricity, do you go out and build your own
generator? Not at all; instead, you tap into the power
grid, and pay as you are using it. In cloud computing,
instead of building and maintaining the technology
infrastructure at your organization, you outsource
that to a third party provider, located on the internet,
or cloud. You then pay only for usage, in the same
way that you pay for a utility, like your electricity bill.
Pay when using, don’t pay when not using.
This way of thinking is gaining ground all
around us. This past summer, Google released
the “Chrome Notebook,” which has no hard
drive, advertised as “Nothing but the web.”
Chromebooks are built and optimized for the
web 3 , where you already spend most of your
computing time. So you get a faster, simpler
and more secure experience without all the
headaches of ordinary computers.
The “Google Docs/Google Apps” momentum is
yet another example of how things are moving
towards the cloud. You no longer need to consume
local hard drive storage, but your data resides
somewhere out there on the cloud, so you can
share it, not just within your local area network,
but across the globe.
Google Docs/Google Apps are just one of the
many technologies you will be able to learn
and experience at our FREE Faculty Workshops
offered this Fall. We are offering workshops on
a wide variety of topics, with a major emphasis
on Microsoft Office 2010: Word, Excel and
PowerPoint, as well as Blackboard, Promoting
Academic Integrity, Social Networking, Using Web
2.0/BB Wikis and Blogs, and more.
Looking forward to greeting you
at our workshops,
Phil Charach
Director of Instructional Technology
1. http://oldwww.just.edu.jo/~amerb/teaching/1-10-11/cs728/8.pdf
2. Ibid .
3. http://www.google.com/chromebook/
4
Faculty Technology Guide - Fall ‘11 | Blackboard Questions? 212.463.04000 x 5467