Cloud computing is not exclusive to higher education, but its advantages could help colleges and universities save space and money and operate more efficiently as budgets stagnate in a down economy. Cloud computing–expected to take hold on college campuses in the next year–refers to a network of computers that distributes software and applications instead of having them reside on a single computer or platform.
One cloud-computing project has helped scientific researchers in recent months. Science Clouds is a project launched in early 2008 that provides resources for researchers on a limited basis. The best known example of cloud computing is YouTube, which is used by Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, N.Y. to “host media that cannot be hosted using resources on campus,” according to the Horizon Report. Media Culture professors at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., use YouTube to track the latest in cultural trends by viewing up-to-the-minute news clips from around the world.
“We are just beginning to see direct applications for teaching and learning other than the simple availability of platform-independent tools and scalable data storage,” the report says. “This set of technologies has clear potential to … greatly reduce the overall cost of computing.”
Tools that make “connections between concepts or people”–known as semantic-aware applications–are also outlined in the Horizon Report. These tools are in very early stages and are projected to impact higher education in four to five years, according to the report.
This technology eventually could aid campus-based research by using keywords on web sites to suggest what researchers should link to. A list of “highly relevant” results displayed on a researcher’s computer screen could speed research by limiting the number of irrelevant links that steer a project off-course, even if it’s for a few minutes.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of several schools studying semantic-aware technologies, and researchers there have created prototypes that, for example, assembles contextual information for web-based photographs “based on text that appears near similar photographs,” streamlining the research of such images.
Links:
- Lawmakers to colleges: No more social media prying - April 25, 2013
- Number of college applications affected by social media triples - October 9, 2012
- Gates Foundation supports college readiness apps - September 28, 2012