I would like to first say that on second thought, the live meeting on Thursday did have its benefits. At the time I was asked if the breakout was beneficial, I had been shuffled to three different rooms. The last room I ended up in was actually productive. I do think in the future one might assign a leader to each group so poles can be deployed to get faster responses to the group's decisions. Also, remember that as a teacher, one is much more savvy with these operations and that possibly more time and less tasks would enable the students to enjoy more successful experiences.
Now, I head to the clouds. What a wonderful place. I love the idea of cloud computing and am thrilled with the amount of "green cred" they earn. Clouds are much more clear to me after this week. Basically, a cloud is a server managed by another company. Choosing cloud computing saves time, energy and money. Let's take the Amazon's EC2 and S3 for example. The New York Times wanted to archive 150 years of newspapers online, searchable. This would have taken more computing power than they had available. The team, instead, began uploading massive amounts of data to Amazon's servers. Viola! 24 hours and 100 servers later, all of the history was available via Amazon's S3. This job would have taken The New York Times' IT staff over a month and who knows how much money.
One might think that clouds are costing us jobs but in fact, with a little flexibility, a company can not only save money it can also free up the IT team to create new business. IBM is a great example of a company that is moving with the times. Cloud computing offers hardware services and software support. These are two of the many new opportunities businesses have with the use of clouds.
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