Max’s Minute: Networks, Big Data and Wi-Fi in Higher Ed (Part 3 of 5)

MAX: I’m going to talk about the future of technology in higher education.

[TITLE: Max’s Minute: The Future of Technology in Higher Ed: Part 3: Networks, Big Data and Wi-Fi]

Hi, this is Max Davis-Johnson, Boise State University. When you start thinking enterprise applications, you start thinking of the Cloud. And, in general, higher ed is moving towards the cloud. Now, to accommodate this move to the cloud, especially with our large applications, we have to start thinking about our ability to grow our network. When I say grow our network, I mean the ability to have bigger pipes. In theory, the bigger the pipe, the more data you can get down the pipe. Soon, within the next 18 months, we will have the ability to have 100 gigabit pipes coming in to campus.

But it also means too that we have to start thinking about the pipes that connect our buildings too and we’re going to see a concerted effort here at Boise State over the next few years to be able to make those network pipes bigger. So we can take advantage of large connectivity that will be connecting to campus.

[TITLE: Big Data]

Another thing you’re going to see moving into the future, we’re now, we tend to move large data sets all over whether it’s here on campus between different servers, or maybe it’s that we’re moving a data set to INL to do some processing. But instead of us moving these large data sets all over the place, it’s going to be more the concept of the data will remain in one place, and because of our ability to connect to it with the high speeds, we will, the data will stay in place and we will just read or pull the data that we need, and we won’t pull the entire data sets.

So you’re going to see a lot of what are called data lakes, not only in higher ed, but also you will see that here at Boise State as we’re starting to move forward with some of that.

[TITLE: Wireless]

Wireless. You’re going to see wireless become even more ubiquitous. I.E., it will be everywhere for you. It might be a combination of what Boise State, what an institution is providing like Boise State. But also you’ll see more robust plans from your phone carrier. From Boise State’s perspective we focused on academic areas, we focus on where students gather. In the future we will be looking at expanding that to more of the public spaces all across campus. But again, you’ll see a lot, wireless will just become a fact of life.

Next time I’ll focus a little bit more on more consumer-based technology, more technology that you will have in your hands. Until next time, thank you.

[TITLE: Max’s Minute is produced by the Office of Information Technology at Boise State Univeristy. (208) 426-4357 (HELP) or helpdesk@boisestate.edu.]