I deal with many things. I have the primary focus is computer applications, systems and networks development that support research in and delivery of education. Education informatics is based upon information science, computer science and education but particularly addresses the intersection of these broad areas. Note that it is distinct from Informatics Education, a term that relates more to the practice of teaching/learning about informatics, rather than the use of information science and technology in the support of teaching and learning. My interests include Operating Systems, log Analysis, and Network Security, in Computer Information Systems and Security from Our in Networking and System Administration. Digital collections, Information inquiry and instructional design, Educational technology and Education Informatics. Learning Community development of the learning community is based on the principle of generating and sharing knowledge in order to generate interaction and collaboration networks between teachers and students. The work of teachers, students, collaborators, etc., is developed based on achievements and development of the learning results. I have support learning with ICT and with the relationship between teachers and students. I have proposal of new designs for learning guides, apply new ways of teaching, examine, review the developments of the competences of the students, generate new ways of evaluation, and collaborative work among internal groups of the school. Each group generates a network that allows the management of schemes, one is based on personal learning environment the other is based in personal learning network or social net of educational integration and collaboration concerning the subjects they are teaching. I have can use ICT, as virtual classrooms, chat rooms, generation of surveys, shared documents, and module assignment of activities. On the other hand, students can also use a platform for community groups to develop the process of teaching and learning, is for example the Moodle. History has a funny way of repeating itself, or so they say. But it may come as some surprise to find this old cliché applies just as much to the history of computers. I deal with cloud solutions a lot.
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing means that instead of all the computer hardware and software you're using sitting on your desktop, or somewhere inside your company's network, it's provided for you as a service by another company and accessed over the Internet, usually in a completely seamless way. Exactly where the hardware and software is located and how it all works doesn't matter to you, the user—it's just somewhere up in the nebulous "cloud" that the Internet represents.
Cloud computing is a buzzword that means different things to different people. For some, it's just another way of describing IT (information technology) "outsourcing"; others use it to mean any computing service provided over the Internet or a similar network; and some define it as any bought-in computer service you use that sits outside your firewall. However we define cloud computing, there's no doubt it makes most sense when we stop talking about abstract definitions and look at some simple, real examples—so let's do just that.
Most of us use cloud computing all day long without realizing it. When you sit at your PC and type a query into Google, the computer on your desk isn't playing much part in finding the answers you need: it's no more than a messenger. The words you type are swiftly shuttled over the Net to one of Google's hundreds of thousands of clustered PCs, which dig out your results and send them promptly back to you. When you do a Google search, the real work in finding your answers might be done by a computer sitting in California, Dublin, Tokyo, or Beijing; you don't know—and most likely you don't care!
The same applies to Web-based email. Once upon a time, email was something you could only send and receive using a program running on your PC (sometimes called a mail client). But then Web-based services such as Hotmail came along and carried email off into the cloud. Now we're all used to the idea that emails can be stored and processed through a server in some remote part of the world, easily accessible from a Web browser, wherever we happen to be. Pushing email off into the cloud makes it supremely convenient for busy people, constantly on the move.
Preparing documents over the Net is a newer example of cloud computing. Simply log on to a web-based service such as Google Documents and you can create a document, spreadsheet, presentation, or whatever you like using Web-based software. Instead of typing your words into a program like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, running on your computer, you're using similar software running on a PC at one of Google's world-wide data centers. Like an email drafted on Hotmail, the document you produce is stored remotely, on a Web server, so you can access it from any Internet-connected computer, anywhere in the world, any time you like. Do you know where it's stored? No! Do you care where it's stored? Again, no! Using a Web-based service like this means you're "contracting out" or "outsourcing" some of your computing needs to a company such as Google: they pay the cost of developing the software and keeping it up-to-date and they earn back the money to do this through advertising and other paid-for services.
What makes cloud computing different?
Most importantly, the service you use is provided by someone else and managed on your behalf. If you're using Google Documents, you don't have to worry about buying umpteen licenses for word-processing software or keeping them up-to-date. Nor do you have to worry about viruses that might affect your computer or about backing up the files you create. Google does all that for you. One basic principle of cloud computing is that you no longer need to worry how the service you're buying is provided: with Web-based services, you simply concentrate on whatever your job is and leave the problem of providing dependable computing to someone else.
It's "on-demand"
Cloud services are available on-demand and often bought on a "pay-as-you go" or subscription basis. So you typically buy cloud computing the same way you'd buy electricity, telephone services, or Internet access from a utility company. Sometimes cloud computing is free or paid-for in other ways (Hotmail is subsidized by advertising, for example). Just like electricity, you can buy as much or as little of a cloud computing service as you need from one day to the next. That's great if your needs vary unpredictably: it means you don't have to buy your own gigantic computer system and risk have it sitting there doing nothing.
It's public or private
Now we all have PCs on our desks, we're used to having complete control over our computer systems—and complete responsibility for them as well. Cloud computing changes all that. It comes in two basic flavors, public and private, which are the cloud equivalents of the Internet and Intranets. Web-based email and free services like the ones Google provides are the most familiar examples of public clouds. The world's biggest online retailer, Amazon, became the world's largest provider of public cloud computing in early 2006. When it found it was using only a fraction of its huge, global, computing power, it started renting out its spare capacity over the Net through a new entity called Amazon Web Services (AWS). Private cloud computing works in much the same way but you access the resources you use through secure network connections, much like an Intranet. Companies such as Amazon also let you use their publicly accessible cloud to make your own secure private cloud, known as a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), using virtual private network (VPN) connections.
Types of cloud computing
IT people talk about three different kinds of cloud computing, where different services are being provided for you. Note that there's a certain amount of vagueness about how these things are defined and some overlap between them.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) means you're buying access to raw computing hardware over the Net, such as servers or storage. Since you buy what you need and pay-as-you-go, this is often referred to as utility computing. Ordinary web hosting is a simple example of IaaS: you pay a monthly subscription or a per-megabyte/gigabyte fee to have a hosting company serve up files for your website from their servers.
Software as a Service (SaaS) means you use a complete application running on someone else's system. Web-based email and Google Documents are perhaps the best-known examples. Zoho is another well-known SaaS provider offering a variety of office applications online.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) means you develop applications using Web-based tools so they run on systems software and hardware provided by another company. So, for example, you might develop your own ecommerce website but have the whole thing, including the shopping cart, checkout, and payment mechanism running on a merchant's server.
Advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing
What's good and bad about cloud computing?
Advantages
The pros of cloud computing are obvious and compelling. If your business is selling books or repairing shoes, why get involved in the nitty gritty of buying and maintaining a complex computer system? If you run an insurance office, do you really want your sales agents wasting time running anti-virus software, upgrading word-processors, or worrying about hard-drive crashes? Do you really want them cluttering your expensive computers with their personal emails, illegally shared MP3 files, and naughty YouTube videos—when you could leave that responsibility to someone else? Cloud computing allows you to buy in only the services you want, when you want them, cutting the upfront capital costs of computers and peripherals. You avoid equipment going out of date and other familiar IT problems like ensuring system security and reliability. You can add extra services (or take them away) at a moment's notice as your business needs change. It's really quick and easy to add new applications or services to your business without waiting weeks or months for the new computer (and its software) to arrive.
Drawbacks
Cloud computing: forward to the future... or back to the past? In the 1970s, the Apple ][ became the world's first, bestselling small business computer thanks to a killer-application called VisiCalc, the first widely available computer spreadsheet. It revolutionized business computing, giving middle managers the power to crunch business data on their desktops, all by themselves, without relying on slow, centralized computer departments or bought-in data processing. Critics are concerned that cloud computing could be disempowering—a throwback to the 1970s world of centralized, proprietary computing.
Instant convenience comes at a price. Instead of purchasing computers and software, cloud computing means you buy services, so one-off, upfront capital costs become ongoing operating costs instead. That might work out much more expensive in the long-term.
If you're using software as a service (for example, writing a report using an online word processor or sending emails through webmail), you need a reliable, high-speed, broadband Internet connection functioning the whole time you're working. That's something we take for granted in countries such as the United States, but it's much more of an issue in developing countries or rural areas where broadband is unavailable.
If you're buying in services, you can buy only what people are providing, so you may be restricted to off-the-peg solutions rather than ones that precisely meet your needs. Not only that, but you're completely at the mercy of your suppliers if they suddenly decide to stop supporting a product you've come to depend on. (Google, for example, upset many users when it announced in September 2012 that its cloud-based Google Docs would drop support for old but de facto standard Microsoft Office file formats such as .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT, giving a mere one week's notice of the change—although, after public pressure, it later extended the deadline by three months.) Critics charge that cloud-computing is a return to the bad-old days of mainframes and proprietary systems, where businesses are locked into unsuitable, long-term arrangements with big, inflexible companies. Instead of using "generative" systems (ones that can be added to and extended in exciting ways the developers never envisaged), you're effectively using "dumb terminals" whose uses are severely limited by the supplier. Good for convenience and security, perhaps, but what will you lose in flexibility? And is such a restrained approach good for the future of the Internet as a whole? (To see why it may not be, take a look at Jonathan Zittrain's eloquent book The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It.)
Think of cloud computing as renting a fully serviced flat instead of buying a home of your own. Clearly there are advantages in terms of convenience, but there are huge restrictions on how you can live and what you can alter. Will it automatically work out better and cheaper for you in the long term.
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing means that instead of all the computer hardware and software you're using sitting on your desktop, or somewhere inside your company's network, it's provided for you as a service by another company and accessed over the Internet, usually in a completely seamless way. Exactly where the hardware and software is located and how it all works doesn't matter to you, the user—it's just somewhere up in the nebulous "cloud" that the Internet represents.
Cloud computing is a buzzword that means different things to different people. For some, it's just another way of describing IT (information technology) "outsourcing"; others use it to mean any computing service provided over the Internet or a similar network; and some define it as any bought-in computer service you use that sits outside your firewall. However we define cloud computing, there's no doubt it makes most sense when we stop talking about abstract definitions and look at some simple, real examples—so let's do just that.
Most of us use cloud computing all day long without realizing it. When you sit at your PC and type a query into Google, the computer on your desk isn't playing much part in finding the answers you need: it's no more than a messenger. The words you type are swiftly shuttled over the Net to one of Google's hundreds of thousands of clustered PCs, which dig out your results and send them promptly back to you. When you do a Google search, the real work in finding your answers might be done by a computer sitting in California, Dublin, Tokyo, or Beijing; you don't know—and most likely you don't care!
The same applies to Web-based email. Once upon a time, email was something you could only send and receive using a program running on your PC (sometimes called a mail client). But then Web-based services such as Hotmail came along and carried email off into the cloud. Now we're all used to the idea that emails can be stored and processed through a server in some remote part of the world, easily accessible from a Web browser, wherever we happen to be. Pushing email off into the cloud makes it supremely convenient for busy people, constantly on the move.
Preparing documents over the Net is a newer example of cloud computing. Simply log on to a web-based service such as Google Documents and you can create a document, spreadsheet, presentation, or whatever you like using Web-based software. Instead of typing your words into a program like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, running on your computer, you're using similar software running on a PC at one of Google's world-wide data centers. Like an email drafted on Hotmail, the document you produce is stored remotely, on a Web server, so you can access it from any Internet-connected computer, anywhere in the world, any time you like. Do you know where it's stored? No! Do you care where it's stored? Again, no! Using a Web-based service like this means you're "contracting out" or "outsourcing" some of your computing needs to a company such as Google: they pay the cost of developing the software and keeping it up-to-date and they earn back the money to do this through advertising and other paid-for services.
What makes cloud computing different?
Most importantly, the service you use is provided by someone else and managed on your behalf. If you're using Google Documents, you don't have to worry about buying umpteen licenses for word-processing software or keeping them up-to-date. Nor do you have to worry about viruses that might affect your computer or about backing up the files you create. Google does all that for you. One basic principle of cloud computing is that you no longer need to worry how the service you're buying is provided: with Web-based services, you simply concentrate on whatever your job is and leave the problem of providing dependable computing to someone else.
It's "on-demand"
Cloud services are available on-demand and often bought on a "pay-as-you go" or subscription basis. So you typically buy cloud computing the same way you'd buy electricity, telephone services, or Internet access from a utility company. Sometimes cloud computing is free or paid-for in other ways (Hotmail is subsidized by advertising, for example). Just like electricity, you can buy as much or as little of a cloud computing service as you need from one day to the next. That's great if your needs vary unpredictably: it means you don't have to buy your own gigantic computer system and risk have it sitting there doing nothing.
It's public or private
Now we all have PCs on our desks, we're used to having complete control over our computer systems—and complete responsibility for them as well. Cloud computing changes all that. It comes in two basic flavors, public and private, which are the cloud equivalents of the Internet and Intranets. Web-based email and free services like the ones Google provides are the most familiar examples of public clouds. The world's biggest online retailer, Amazon, became the world's largest provider of public cloud computing in early 2006. When it found it was using only a fraction of its huge, global, computing power, it started renting out its spare capacity over the Net through a new entity called Amazon Web Services (AWS). Private cloud computing works in much the same way but you access the resources you use through secure network connections, much like an Intranet. Companies such as Amazon also let you use their publicly accessible cloud to make your own secure private cloud, known as a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), using virtual private network (VPN) connections.
Types of cloud computing
IT people talk about three different kinds of cloud computing, where different services are being provided for you. Note that there's a certain amount of vagueness about how these things are defined and some overlap between them.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) means you're buying access to raw computing hardware over the Net, such as servers or storage. Since you buy what you need and pay-as-you-go, this is often referred to as utility computing. Ordinary web hosting is a simple example of IaaS: you pay a monthly subscription or a per-megabyte/gigabyte fee to have a hosting company serve up files for your website from their servers.
Software as a Service (SaaS) means you use a complete application running on someone else's system. Web-based email and Google Documents are perhaps the best-known examples. Zoho is another well-known SaaS provider offering a variety of office applications online.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) means you develop applications using Web-based tools so they run on systems software and hardware provided by another company. So, for example, you might develop your own ecommerce website but have the whole thing, including the shopping cart, checkout, and payment mechanism running on a merchant's server.
Advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing
What's good and bad about cloud computing?
Advantages
The pros of cloud computing are obvious and compelling. If your business is selling books or repairing shoes, why get involved in the nitty gritty of buying and maintaining a complex computer system? If you run an insurance office, do you really want your sales agents wasting time running anti-virus software, upgrading word-processors, or worrying about hard-drive crashes? Do you really want them cluttering your expensive computers with their personal emails, illegally shared MP3 files, and naughty YouTube videos—when you could leave that responsibility to someone else? Cloud computing allows you to buy in only the services you want, when you want them, cutting the upfront capital costs of computers and peripherals. You avoid equipment going out of date and other familiar IT problems like ensuring system security and reliability. You can add extra services (or take them away) at a moment's notice as your business needs change. It's really quick and easy to add new applications or services to your business without waiting weeks or months for the new computer (and its software) to arrive.
Drawbacks
Cloud computing: forward to the future... or back to the past? In the 1970s, the Apple ][ became the world's first, bestselling small business computer thanks to a killer-application called VisiCalc, the first widely available computer spreadsheet. It revolutionized business computing, giving middle managers the power to crunch business data on their desktops, all by themselves, without relying on slow, centralized computer departments or bought-in data processing. Critics are concerned that cloud computing could be disempowering—a throwback to the 1970s world of centralized, proprietary computing.
Instant convenience comes at a price. Instead of purchasing computers and software, cloud computing means you buy services, so one-off, upfront capital costs become ongoing operating costs instead. That might work out much more expensive in the long-term.
If you're using software as a service (for example, writing a report using an online word processor or sending emails through webmail), you need a reliable, high-speed, broadband Internet connection functioning the whole time you're working. That's something we take for granted in countries such as the United States, but it's much more of an issue in developing countries or rural areas where broadband is unavailable.
If you're buying in services, you can buy only what people are providing, so you may be restricted to off-the-peg solutions rather than ones that precisely meet your needs. Not only that, but you're completely at the mercy of your suppliers if they suddenly decide to stop supporting a product you've come to depend on. (Google, for example, upset many users when it announced in September 2012 that its cloud-based Google Docs would drop support for old but de facto standard Microsoft Office file formats such as .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT, giving a mere one week's notice of the change—although, after public pressure, it later extended the deadline by three months.) Critics charge that cloud-computing is a return to the bad-old days of mainframes and proprietary systems, where businesses are locked into unsuitable, long-term arrangements with big, inflexible companies. Instead of using "generative" systems (ones that can be added to and extended in exciting ways the developers never envisaged), you're effectively using "dumb terminals" whose uses are severely limited by the supplier. Good for convenience and security, perhaps, but what will you lose in flexibility? And is such a restrained approach good for the future of the Internet as a whole? (To see why it may not be, take a look at Jonathan Zittrain's eloquent book The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It.)
Think of cloud computing as renting a fully serviced flat instead of buying a home of your own. Clearly there are advantages in terms of convenience, but there are huge restrictions on how you can live and what you can alter. Will it automatically work out better and cheaper for you in the long term.
Cloud computing trends
We've just had a quick and simple sketch of cloud computing—and if that's all you need, you can stop reading now. This section fills in some of the details, asks some deeper questions, looks at current trends, such as the shift to mobile devices, and explores challenging issues like privacy and security.
Growth
The figures speak for themselves: in every IT survey, news report, and pundit's op-ed, cloud computing seems the only show in town. Back in 2008, almost a decade ago, the Pew Internet project reported that 69 percent of all Internet users had "either stored data online or used a web-based software application" (in other words, by their definition, used some form of cloud computing). In 2009, Gartner priced the value of cloud computing at $58.6 billion, in 2010 at $68.3 billion, in 2012 at over $102 billion, and in 2017 at $260 billion. In 2013, management consultants McKinsey and Company forecast cloud computing (and related trends like big data, growing mobilization, and the Internet of Things) could have a "collective economic impact" of between $10–20 trillion by 2025. In 2016, Amazon revealed that its AWS offshoot, the world's biggest provider of cloud computing, is now a $10 billion-a-year business; the Microsoft Cloud isn't far behind.
A matter of definitions
So the numbers keep on creeping up and it's an exciting trend, to be sure. But there's one important word of caution: how you measure and forecast something as vague as "the cloud" depends on how you define it: if the definition keeps expanding, perhaps that's one reason why the market keeps expanding too? Way back in the 1990s, no-one described Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail as examples of cloud computing, Geocities was simply a community of amateur websites, and Amazon and eBay were just new ways of finding and buying old stuff. In 2010, in its breathless eagerness to talk up cloud computing, the Pew Internet project had rounded up every web-based service and application it could think of and fired it to the sky. Wordpress and Twitter were examples of cloud blogging, Google Docs and Gmail were cloud-based, and suddenly so too were Yahoo! Mail, buying things from eBay and Amazon, and even (bizarrely) RSS feeds (which date back to the late 1990s). Using "the cloud" as a loose synonym for "the Web," then expressing astonishment that it's growing so fast seems tautologous at best, since we know the Internet and Web have grown simply by virtue of having more connected users and more (especially more mobile) devices. According to Pew, what these users prized were things like easy access to services from absolutely anywhere and simple data storing or sharing. This is a circular argument as well: one reason we like "the cloud" is because we've defined it as a bunch of likeable websites—Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and all the rest.
Business benefits
Businesses have shrewder and more interesting reasons for liking the cloud. Instead of depending on Microsoft Office, to give one very concrete example, they can use free, cloud-based open-source alternatives such as Google Docs. So there are obvious cost and practical advantages: you don't have to worry about expensive software licenses or security updates, and your staff can simply and securely share documents across business locations (and work on them just as easily from home). Using cloud computing to run applications has a similarly compelling business case: you can buy in as much (or little) computing resource as you need at any given moment, so there's no problem of having to fund expensive infrastructure upfront. If you run something like an ecommerce website on cloud hosting, you can scale it up or down for the holiday season or the sales, just as you need to. Best of all, you don't need a geeky IT department because—beyond commodity computers running open-source web browsers—you don't need IT.
Spot the difference
When we say cloud computing is growing, do we simply mean that more people (and more businesses) are using the Web (and using it to do more) than they used to? Actually we do—and that's why it's important not to be too loose with our definitions. Cloud web hosting is much more sophisticated than ordinary web-hosting, for example, even though—from the viewpoint of the webmaster and the person accessing a website—both work in almost exactly the same way.
We've just had a quick and simple sketch of cloud computing—and if that's all you need, you can stop reading now. This section fills in some of the details, asks some deeper questions, looks at current trends, such as the shift to mobile devices, and explores challenging issues like privacy and security.
Growth
The figures speak for themselves: in every IT survey, news report, and pundit's op-ed, cloud computing seems the only show in town. Back in 2008, almost a decade ago, the Pew Internet project reported that 69 percent of all Internet users had "either stored data online or used a web-based software application" (in other words, by their definition, used some form of cloud computing). In 2009, Gartner priced the value of cloud computing at $58.6 billion, in 2010 at $68.3 billion, in 2012 at over $102 billion, and in 2017 at $260 billion. In 2013, management consultants McKinsey and Company forecast cloud computing (and related trends like big data, growing mobilization, and the Internet of Things) could have a "collective economic impact" of between $10–20 trillion by 2025. In 2016, Amazon revealed that its AWS offshoot, the world's biggest provider of cloud computing, is now a $10 billion-a-year business; the Microsoft Cloud isn't far behind.
A matter of definitions
So the numbers keep on creeping up and it's an exciting trend, to be sure. But there's one important word of caution: how you measure and forecast something as vague as "the cloud" depends on how you define it: if the definition keeps expanding, perhaps that's one reason why the market keeps expanding too? Way back in the 1990s, no-one described Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail as examples of cloud computing, Geocities was simply a community of amateur websites, and Amazon and eBay were just new ways of finding and buying old stuff. In 2010, in its breathless eagerness to talk up cloud computing, the Pew Internet project had rounded up every web-based service and application it could think of and fired it to the sky. Wordpress and Twitter were examples of cloud blogging, Google Docs and Gmail were cloud-based, and suddenly so too were Yahoo! Mail, buying things from eBay and Amazon, and even (bizarrely) RSS feeds (which date back to the late 1990s). Using "the cloud" as a loose synonym for "the Web," then expressing astonishment that it's growing so fast seems tautologous at best, since we know the Internet and Web have grown simply by virtue of having more connected users and more (especially more mobile) devices. According to Pew, what these users prized were things like easy access to services from absolutely anywhere and simple data storing or sharing. This is a circular argument as well: one reason we like "the cloud" is because we've defined it as a bunch of likeable websites—Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and all the rest.
Business benefits
Businesses have shrewder and more interesting reasons for liking the cloud. Instead of depending on Microsoft Office, to give one very concrete example, they can use free, cloud-based open-source alternatives such as Google Docs. So there are obvious cost and practical advantages: you don't have to worry about expensive software licenses or security updates, and your staff can simply and securely share documents across business locations (and work on them just as easily from home). Using cloud computing to run applications has a similarly compelling business case: you can buy in as much (or little) computing resource as you need at any given moment, so there's no problem of having to fund expensive infrastructure upfront. If you run something like an ecommerce website on cloud hosting, you can scale it up or down for the holiday season or the sales, just as you need to. Best of all, you don't need a geeky IT department because—beyond commodity computers running open-source web browsers—you don't need IT.
Spot the difference
When we say cloud computing is growing, do we simply mean that more people (and more businesses) are using the Web (and using it to do more) than they used to? Actually we do—and that's why it's important not to be too loose with our definitions. Cloud web hosting is much more sophisticated than ordinary web-hosting, for example, even though—from the viewpoint of the webmaster and the person accessing a website—both work in almost exactly the same way.
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