Cirrus 110527

I have liked cirrus clouds for as long as I can remember.
I noticed in Wikipedia that:

The random, isolated cirrus cloud does not have any particular significance. A cirrus castellanus cloud indicates that there is instability at the cirrus level.However, a large number of cirrus clouds may be a sign of an approaching frontal system or upper air disturbance. This usually signals a change in weather in the near future, usually becoming increasingly stormy.

This is a great way of thinking about my engagement with cloud computing too.
Each week I find and am alerted to remarkable resources and people who move my thinking on.
I have a good non-paper filing system for these but I have been thinking about a weekly aide memoir on line. So I am starting a Friday post that gathers the isolated cirrus of cloud conversations.
I hope some of them are of interest to you too. Many of the starts of my searches are prompted by Stephen Downes’ OLDaily. In the last few weeks I have found more and more links through Diigo and LinkedIn too. Twitter runs in the background and I am finding Gist helpful in following some conversations.
Cirrus this week included:
News of an Australian Industry Task Force on Cloud Computing (26 May)
Report of a Virtual Visiting project (26 May) involving Aged Care eConnect
A SoundCloud recording What Should Be taught In Our Schools? (26 May)
Phenomenography (25 May)
Adventures in Radical Learning website (25 May)
Chris Betcher’s post You Don’t Have To Like It (24 May)
I just cannot accept excuses about technology being optional, whether it’s from someone who is new to teaching or others who are close to retirement. There are children in those classrooms every day who deserve the best education we can offer them, and it is completely unfair if that education is less than it should be because someone wants to pick and choose which aspects of their job they feel are important.  No child should have to put up with out of date learning experience just because their close-to-retirement teacher is “taxiing to the hangar”.
News of the review of government schools in the ACT. (24 May)
Notes from the CHI 2011 Workshop on Personal Informatics and HCI (24 May)
Sydney Quantified Self Meet Up (24 May)
Chris Betcher’s post on The Cloud (23 May)
Discussion about Thought Technology (23 May)
Report of an Inquiry into School Libraries and Teacher Librarians in Australia (23 May)
Visualisation blogs (22 May)
I signed up for Change, Education, Learning and Technology (22 May).
Being connected changes learning. When those connections are global, the experience of knowledge development is dramatically altered as well. Over the past four years, a growing number of educators have started experimenting with the teaching and learning process in order to answer critical questions: “How does learning change when formal boundaries are reduced? What is the future of learning? What role with educators play in this future? What types of institutions does society need to respond to hyper-growth of knowledge and rapid dissemination of information? How do the roles of learners and educators change when knowledge is ubiquitous?”
I posted about other things I had heard or read this week (Curation, River Water and Observation, Openness and Curiosity).
Photo Credit
Cirrus clouds horsetails over the Illinois River, view north from Grand View 3

4 COMMENTS

  1. Hi Keith,
    you know the thing about cloud that doesn’t get enough air-time is how in many cases it’s just another commercial and delivery model for pre-existing technology. Often, the cloud service itself is nothing new, it’s just billed in a utility fashion and provided remotely.
    That said, it’s still an important shift, but I make the distinction that in many cases the service itself is not something new per se.
    I like those cirrus clouds, though.

    • Giri
      Thank you for finding this post. I take your point.
      I think it is possibly because I am an agnostic optimist … keen to explore open access spaces that support the risk management of storing and using ‘cloud’ resources … that I am so interested in this issue. Earlier in the week I wrote about curation as part of this shared responsibility for discoverable resources.
      Your vast experience of the industry is a most welcome addition to this discussion.
      Trust you are having a delightful day.
      Keith

  2. The risk management is a huge issue, you’re right. In fact not so long ago Google lost 40000 consumers’ email accounts’ contents. Would you risk your commercial or business email to even a 0.5% of permanent loss of everything? Probably not.
    Whether a cloud service includes backup is crucial.

    • I agree, Giri.
      I liked Morten Myrstad’s extensive post Content Curation – Growing Up and Coming of Age. It is a treasure trove of links and ideas that explores some of the business issues surrounding curation.
      Keith

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