Christopher Kelty

Here's one way to understand what has happened to the public university in the last 5 years:

My bookmarks used to look like this: library.ucla.edu, it.ucla.edu, hr.ucla.edu, etc.

Now they all look like this: ucla.zoom.com, ucla.app.box.com, ucla.healthnet.com, ucla.salesforce.com etc.

Jan 9, 2023 at 6:12pmWeb
Show threadninteggeJan 10, 2023
@ckelty same here and I am both disturbed and sad 😔
Show threadmilktoastJan 10, 2023
@ckelty there's been a lot of ransomware attacks to universities / schools in general. I think using SaaS providers isn't perfectly safe, but in-house systems for everything definitely isn't safe either.
Show threadAdrianJan 10, 2023
@ckelty "public university in the US"
Show threadMolly BJan 10, 2023
@ckelty Mainly, I find it very hard to find information on higher ed websites anymore (even at the institution where I work). Search breaks down completely when some information is on our domain and some is on hosted.[institution_name].[service].com, etc. We aren’t *allowed* to put docs on the official domain, so our knowledge base lives on our help desk software provider’s site. 🙄
Show thread🌲Jan 10, 2023
@ckelty mail.uni.edu redirects to gmail.com 
Login - CAS – Central Authentication Service

Show threadFoolishOwlOct 29, 2023

@ckelty I've been on the IT committees for small activist groups where we try to convince folks that self-hosting the tools we depend on would mean greater independence, and it's usually a tough sell.

Obviously, there are scaling issues, but universities ought to have the resources to build their own tools. So this is discouraging.

In the 90s, when I was a student, universities were where digital tools were invented.