Cloud Computing

Cloud computing services have the potential to help educators and researchers obtain access to software and computing power at a fraction of the cost for purchasing software outright or purchasing, installing and maintaining servers.  Services like Google Docs can provide students with access to word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software without the need to purchase licenses from Microsoft, which will save students and schools money in a time of financial uncertainties.  Beyond the ability to create documents in the Cloud, services like Google Docs allow for sharing and collaboration which has been difficult to accomplish with traditional desktop computing models; essentially you had to email files to your collaborators, use a shared drive on a private network or transfer the file onto a storage device.  With cloud computing, the documents you work on in collaboration with fellow researchers are stored in the Cloud (the internet) and accessible to everyone who has access to the shared space.  I saw a very interesting use of Google Docs a couple of months ago when reviewing a session from a Canadian e-Learning conference.  The presenter was Michael Wesch, a professor at Kansas State University, you probably know his work from various YouTube videos.  This being one of his more famous videos: 

Professor Wesch attended the conference as a virtual keynote speaker using cloud-based web conferencing tools and at the end of his keynote session he polled the conference attendees for ideas, he called it a virtual sharing session.  Attendees could ask him questions and he jotted down answers in Google Docs and then shared the link with everyone to access and this created an ongoing discussion in the Cloud.  Using a service like Google Docs could be beneficial in the classroom where students work together on group projects and having access to a shared document that all team members can access on-demand can be very convenient for all learners.  Potentially a class could have a shared doc where they can share and reflect upon what they are learning throughout the semester or school year.  The Chromebook is very interesting as it is Google's ecosystem and cloud computing platform available as a desktop operating system with access to cloud services.  What will be interesting to watch overtime is how Google manages this operating system and its mobile operating system, Android which also utilizes cloud services.  Overtime will these operating system merge?  

Another use for cloud-based services is for shared storage.  Schools and universities may not be able to offer their students access to dedicated storage for various reasons, possibly due to budgetary restrictions where it is not possible to offer every student X amount of storage for their use or they do not want students to turn the school provided storage into a music or video sharing site.  Luckily students have more choices today for using 3rd party cloud computing services if their school or university does not provide these services internally.  Hence students working together collaboratively can still utilize cloud services.   Services like Dropbox, Sugarsync and Box.net provide students with the ability to easily share files for their course related projects.

Another interesting cloud service is offered through Amazon Web Services.  There are various components to Amazon's offering, but one component that has great educational and research potential is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also referred to as Amazon EC2.  Amazon's service allows individuals to purchase server capacity on-demand and resize the service as you need more or less capacity.  Amazon prices its services by the hour and can provide pre-configured servers with your desired operating system, database, memory and processing power.  Amazon's service would provide access to servers and potential cost savings for academic departments who may not be able to utilize a central computing service or the chargeback to the department would be too great.  

Amazon's service could have significant benefits for researchers who need computing power and may have to deal with IT departments on campus who for whatever reason may not provide the server capacity needed.   I have worked with many universities that can provide servers immediately, but placing software on the campus network, especially experimental software would require review by various IT and security committees on campus.  These reviews can slow down timelines for researchers or put their project in jeopardy as they wait on IT resources.  These delays may not be acceptable as research grants have deadlines and results or findings must be made available, or penalties can be levied against the researchers.  Using a service like Amazon EC2 would allow researchers to bypass the university bureaucracy and begin their research projects.  If during the project they needed additional computing power or more servers, the EC2 service would allow researchers to add-on more capacity almost instantaneously and the capacity would be available in minutes rather than days. If the research project only requires a small amount of computational power at the beginning of the project researchers can purchase a small amount of cloud-based server capacity.  But as the project scales up over the lifespan of the research, with the EC2 service researchers have the flexibility to add cloud-based computing power to their project when they need it.