It has certainly been a while since my musings have graced the canvas of this entry editor. In that time much has happened in the world. People have died, babies have been born, Star Trek Online moved ever closer to its release date…whenever that is.
I am sad, however, to report that not much has gone on in my world. Apart from going to work, working out, working, and coming home from work, my activities have included the random street basketball game, enjoying my recently downloaded 1980′s anime, and creating more culinary concoctions.
I did read an interesting article on Maclean’s online today about webcasting convocations (aka graduations).
I think webcasts of events such as graduations (or convocations for those so inclined) are a great idea. Face it, one way or another it will make its way on the information super-tube. If you go to YouTube and just search for ‘graduation’ you get a lot of hits…but nothing from a school (I didn’t go past the first page so I may be wrong). Put your school’s name in the search and if you’re lucky it will come up (I wasn’t a lucky one, big surprise). Putting them online through webcasts will definitely increase the availability and archiveability (yeah so maybe it’s not a word, big whoop) of the one moment you wait for while writing that stupid EE2CJ4 first test for the third time…graduation.
I can’t speak for other schools, but I foresee HUGE problems if McMaster ever joins everyone else in the new millennium and decides that maybe, just maybe an investment in making university more fun rather than a construction site would be worthwhile. Here’s the biggest reason it won’t work for Mac:
SERVER CRASHES – IF McMaster University decides to webcast graduations, we’ll run into the MUGSI Effect. For those of you not familiar with it, here’s a brief description of what it is:
McMaster University releases its students’ marks online. MUGSI (McMaster University Gateway to Student Information – or something like that) is the location where these marks are posted as they are available. The university had a great system: post the marks and let the students fight over the bandwidth to get at them. So every year up until I believe 2006, we would try to find that one special time of day, when the sun beam hit the mirrors just right to illuminate a path to our elusive marks. In short: the servers went down faster than an apple on Isaac Newton’s head.
If the university decides to broadcast online, it would not surprise me one bit to hear that people missed parts because they could not connect or that the “Network is currently experiencing a higher than normal load. Please try connecting later, after your son/daughter/etc. has walked across the stage.”
Yeah … Mac won’t be able to pull it off. If they do I’ll be impressed…for once.
