Following the enormous destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina and other disasters over the past decade, institutions have placed higher emphasis on disaster recovery and business continuity planning, testing, and execution. Business continuity plans are built on a foundation of processes, people, information, technology — and perhaps most importantly, assumptions. Whatever the level of careful planning now in place, we must continue to reassess all of these elements. And whatever was in place before November 2012, Superstorm Sandy forces a careful, objective, and immediate reconsideration.
As each year passes and a fresh year begins, I like to think through some of the lessons I learned (or re-learned) as a personal and professional growth exercise. I think the theme for 2012 was that those lessons that stick with you are the most painful lessons to learn.
A Building Automation System (BAS) is what makes an intelligent building intelligent in terms of energy usage. From basic to sophisticated, there's clearly a lot that administrators can do to take advantage of building intelligence to transform their environment.
Whatever the grade level or supplier, safety for budding dancers' joints and durability is paramount. Add affordability and versatility -- that is, a system that accommodates a range of movements, routines and dance genres -- and the right floor.
As the second term of Barack Obama’s Presidency begins and the 113th Congress convenes, most Americans wonder whether the two parties and the two branches of government can work together to find common ground and address the numerous critical, salient and important issues facing the nation.
Naturally, when education leaders learn that they have significant gaps in their organization's crisis plans, they want them to be corrected immediately. The problem here is that it can often take six to 18 months to do this in a cost-effective way.
With the importance of higher education on the rise and enrollment continuing to climb, we will continue to need new and upgraded spaces. We will also need to set aside dollars to maintain the new facilities that we build, otherwise our investments will be squandered. Then there are all of those “other” buildings… the ones originally built in the 1920s, added on to in the ’50s, ’70s, ’90s, and so on. The truth is that a majority of our educational facilities in this country are approaching the half-century mark and are in major need of maintenance and repair!
Why the AV industry and not one of the other building systems trades, such as HVAC or electrical integrators? For one reason, AV professionals are widely recognized as early adopters of new technologies. In recent years, there has been a considerable emphasis on ease-of-use and ease-of-operation. In response, AV programmers, consultants, and integrators have developed unique skills for creating intuitive, user-friendly tools and control interfaces. What users and building managers often do not see is that behind the scenes, to create those seamless interfaces, AV professionals must often corral complex systems that don’t normally communicate with one another — and that’s the crux of the challenge when it comes to integrating disparate building systems.
Armstrong Atlantic State University's lab facility gets high marks for a VAV remedy, which provided much-needed quiet and significant energy savings.
Being energy efficient has a lot going for it. Students and faculty appreciate the comfortable environments. Staff members enjoy maintaining and servicing an intelligently controlled building. And everyone can feel good about contributing to a healthy, green future. But at what cost? There is plenty of whizz-bang technology that looks great… until you crunch the numbers. Is a 20-year return on investment too long to wait? Or is the alternative too expensive?
There are many options and factors to consider when selecting the right flooring for dance and performance spaces. For example, what material is best for the types of dance your program teaches, or could teach in order to grow the program in the future? Also, is your structural subfloor sealed, and above, at, or below grade? That matters because an unsealed, below-grade slab can swell or warp your dance floor by drawing up moisture from the ground.
Can security people on an open college campus ensure that a visitor — someone from outside the campus community — doesn’t walk onto campus and begin stealing laptops or, worse, start shooting people? Of course they can’t. Then again, it probably is possible to discourage crime at all levels by presenting a friendly and welcoming yet security-conscious face to visitors.
A plan for maintenance and repair should be an integral part of every school budget, and must not be the item to be cut when money is tight. Not performing routine maintenance costs districts many times over.
K-12 schools have been facing major budget constraints. At the same time, they're tasked with finding new ways to engage students -- AV technology would be one of those ways.
For better accountability, some school systems are avidly embracing biometrics as means of identification and authentication to address this concern and to use for many other applications within a school environment.
It should be clear by now that there is absolutely nothing new about MOOCs. So why the concern now that MOOCs may pose a special risk of encouraging patent infringement litigation? The answer, of course, lies in the numbers. The MOOC phenomenon has resulted in hundreds of thousands of individuals signing on to take part in this "new" education sensation. It is not at all far-fetched to expect that a single MOOC may register well over a million persons at a time. And in patent litigation, these numbers can mean money, big money.
No one knows what tomorrow may bring, but the experts
consulted by College Planning & Management offer up a few educated guesses. We asked experts to spot trends and get a jumpstart
on the issues higher education will face in 2013.
Paul Elementary is the first public school in Idaho to have one-to-one technology, providing each of the school's 455 students and every teacher with his/her own iPad. "The iSchool partnership offers our students much more than just access to iPads," stat
What happens when school roofing challenges are caused by an act of Mother Nature? Well, because her fickle mood ranges anywhere from slightly irritated to downright angry, the best way to protect a roof is to maintain the upper hand.
How do you build your team within a culture that the existing senior administrative staff has embraced and protected, and significantly, that may well have defined the senior team more than the team has defined the culture? What happens in those first months when you are the outsider on your own team?
Carrying on our beginning-of-the-year tradition, here is what we can look forward to during 2013, from the viewpoint of several people who dedicate their time and talents for the purpose of improving our education system in a variety of ways -- energy and