Video: Doing business in India (and why it matters for students and educators)

For many US students and educators, India is just where they call to get tech support. But our students need to understand that India is much more than a billion-person call center, says Christopher Dawson for ZDNet Education. Recently, I had the chance to participate in a webcast with Farzin Arsanjani, CEO of HyperOffice. HyperOffice competes with Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint and, while the company is based in the US, it has deals in place with some of the biggest firms in India (most notably Tata, a large conglomerate that owns everything from Tata Motors in India to Land Rover and Jaguar to the Taj brand of hotels). We talked about the challenges and rewards of doing business in India and the role of Indian businesses as both competitors and partners to those in the U.S. In high school, I took three years of Japanese. While most of my ability to speak, write, or read the language is long gone, what has stuck with me are the insights into Asian cultures, many of which are intimately tied to and reflected in language. My own experiences with WizIQ, a company based in northern India, have also given me some interesting perspectives on cultures in a country so remarkably heterogeneous that it makes the United States look like Finland…

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Go mobile or go home

Last week, I spent a day at the Blackboard World Developers’ Conference (BBWorld DevCon). There was plenty of attention paid to Blackboard’s purchase of Moodlerooms and Netspot and the possible implications for developers, says Christopher Dawson for ZDNet Education. There was lots of talk about LTI (more on that later). But more than anything, developers were talking mobile. This isn’t unique to BBWorld, either – like consumer and enterprise customers, educators and students are going mobile in big ways, and companies need to keep up. Blackboard has their Mobile Learn product which, beginning this fall, will allow students to purchase the app on iOS or Android, even if their institution chooses not to support Blackboard’s full-blown Mobile Central platform. Developers were particularly giving kudos at DevCon for Blackboard’s augmented reality component in Mobile Central, which allows schools to create interactive, 3D overlays for school campuses that students and visitors can access via their iPhones (the app works on iPads and the company is looking at Android support, but Blackboard focused on the iPhone for a standardized device to explore this very new technology)…

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Wired vs. Wireless…which way to go when it’s time to refresh?

One of the schools I work with is looking at a major infrastructure refresh, explains Christopher Dawson of ZDNet. The hundred odd switches that were state of the art when the school was built 13 years ago are rapidly failing and, combined with thousands of meters of Cat 5 cabling, are too slow to handle drastically increased utilization over that time frame. So the question is, should the school replace all of the hardware and cabling or go wireless? It’s easy and not terribly expensive to achieve at least gigabit speeds with wired connections and off the shelf components. This school even has fiber connecting a head end room to each floor. Each room in the school is wired with at least 4 drops, if not 6 or 8, though, all of which run off of the Cat 5 cable which would prevent actual gigabit throughput. While replacing the switches isn’t a big deal since every floor has a wiring closet and all of the switches are centralized, one has to wonder if this is really the best choice…

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Review: Adobe Connect 8 is the cure for Wall-o’-laptop woes and distance ed

Adobe Connect 8 is the gold standard for digitally-enhanced, multimodal instruction. And distance ed or virtual classrooms? Piece of cake, says Christopher Dawson, blogger for ZDNet Education. I reviewed Adobe Connect 7.5 last year from a higher education perspective, calling out its ability to co-opt and utilize that wall of laptops that greets too many professors. Monday, I looked at the next version of Connect more generally over on Between the Lines and was blown away by the revamped interface and utter ease with which Connect 8 could be applied in K12, higher education, and professional development. Adobe’s latest iteration of its interactive conference and meeting software is so good, I couldn’t help but imagine how it could drastically change a classroom as much as it could change a company’s business travel or conferencing solution. As with most Adobe solutions, cost will probably be the biggest issue. Connect can run as a hosted or on-premise application and is licensed in several different ways, most of which key to the number of concurrent users accessing Connect. Very large institutions could spend upwards of $50,000 on a solution with multiple servers, several concurrent hosts, and as many as 2000 concurrent student participants (business pricing is handled on a case-by-case basis; in general, educational institutions should also contact Adobe or a reseller to ensure that they buy an appropriately designed system). Obviously, smaller implementations will cost less and a school district could easily access hosted instances of Connect for under $2000 a year…

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