March is women’s month in the United States, and I am happy to see consistent messaging and support for it in the professional AV industry. AVIXA has regular posts on social media highlighting women in AV, and many other industry publications, including this one, do the same. A couple of months ago, a group of […]

In January I wrote about the emergence of ChatGPT and how it is causing waves across the country. I wrote about my belief that ChatGPT, in particular, was going to have a major effect on how we teach students. ChatGPT has allowed people to expand their thinking of what computing can actually do. Previously, we […]

Over the past several weeks, people much smarter and more creative than I have made predictions on what 2023 will bring to the AV world. These are always fun to read and keep score of throughout the year. Rather than make predictions, I tend to think about what the important issues will be throughout the […]

For years, I have been the poster child for standards in classrooms. I have made this argument for a very long time at my school and through talks and at conferences. The arguments for standardization are powerful and plentiful. The ability for staff to only need to be focused on a certain family of products […]

Over the past several months, ChatGPT has taken the techie world by storm. We have all seen bits on social media of “I asked ChatGPT to tell me about XYZ, And here is what it said.”  This is followed by the amazingly accurate and human responses they get. If you have not tried it yet, […]

Tis the season and technology managers are seeing green. They are dreaming of purchases arriving in boxes. Red lights are everywhere! Yes, it is the holiday season, but that is not what I am referencing. In higher education, it is also budget season. The vast majority of higher education institutions have a fiscal year that […]

Perhaps it is due to the recent mid-term elections in the United States, but it seems to me that political discussion, references and opinions have entered more and more into our professional lives. A Fortune magazine article recently detailed the ban that Meta has put in place on the discussion of “sensitive” topics at work. […]

A recent online discussion hit a familiar theme in AV. How do we attract people to this field? Many of the same questions and suggestions that have been discussed over the years came back up. Do credentials matter? Does credentialing help attract people? Should there be a track in a community college or trade school […]

In higher education, we spend a lot of time thinking about the technology that goes into classrooms. In my blog from last month, I wrote about what the perfect classroom would look like. I focused on technology and how technology can make our classrooms work better. Yet — everyone who works as a technology manager […]

I recently had a position open on my team, and decided that we were going to make recruiting a diverse talent pool a priority. As many have discussed over the years, IT tends to be a very homogenous area (high percentage of white men). This homogeneity leads to groupthink, customers not feeling like they are […]

I was recently recording a podcast with a group of fellow technology managers in higher ed. A question came up that I have not thought of in quite a while: What does the ideal classroom look like? Often when we ask questions like this we limit ourselves to the current technology that we know exists, […]

It is no secret to the AV world that most companies have dealt with incredible supply chain issues in the past 18 months. We hear horror stories of companies changing ship dates from weeks, to months to even years. It is not uncommon today to hear of 18 -24-month ship dates. For some reason, much […]

In mid-August, Gary Kayye shared an advertisement from Aurora on his LinkedIn page. In the advertisement, Aurora took on Crestron’s well-known stock issue directly. You can read more about the various reactions in Steph Beckett’s blog post here. The comments are interesting as a real-life experiment regarding what works with advertising — or what doesn’t. […]

In technology, we often use terms like innovation and disruption. Yet, in our industry, I have been thinking lately about the lack of true innovation over the past few years. I have to think that some of this has to do with the pandemic, after all it is hard to innovate when you are simply […]

Last month I wrote about cybersecurity in schools and what steps we can take to prevent attacks from happening. I wrote in the blog that there are many things we can do to harden our security and to make our institutions less of a soft target. Yet, as I pointed out in that piece, chances […]

I love it when I read something that really gets me thinking. This is what happened with Mark Coxon’s recent article “Saving the Office Park.” It is a short but worthwhile read. In it, Mark suggests that instead of finding circumstantial reasons (to keep the cafeteria employed) to have people back in the office, or […]

In December 2021, Lincoln College in rural Illinois suffered a devastating ransomware attack. The attack shut down all systems, including those for recruitment, retention and fundraising. While the college had preexisting fiscal problems due to the pandemic, this ransomware attack proved to be too much for the college to navigate. In the spring of 2022, […]

rAVe [PUBS] and many other industry publications have written recently about the great work of the AVIXA Women’s Council and its partnership with Rosie Riveters. Since this has been written about in many places, I won’t rewrite everything here. There are a few points I would like to make, however. First, it is fantastic to […]

I wrote an entire article for this month about security and severe consequences of not following security protocols and keeping up to date on security. The blog was about cybersecurity, and then the heartbreaking events of Robb Elementary School forced me to put that blog aside and write about a different type of security. In […]

It’s good to be back to having conferences, trade shows and events in person again. They started out with lower attendance numbers, but seem to be bouncing back. Over the past few weeks, and every time trade show season rolls around, there’s a lot of discussion about paying for training, particularly in-person training. In fact, […]

Those of us who spend time thinking about the future, whether that’s technology, people or culture, are often taking educated guesses at what the future will look like. The only way we know whether we were right or wrong, is by waiting and seeing. That is where we are now with educational opportunities. Clearly during […]

Over the past two months, I have written about the metaverse and cryptocurrency. The next logical topic of this new digital world is the NFT. What is an NFT, and will you as an AV professional ever have to deal with them? Let’s get started with the first question. NFT stands for non-fungible token. That […]

I was recently attending a conference of higher ed technology support people and was enlightened by a discussion that occurred. Several of the people in the meeting discussed some changes they had made in their classrooms over the past several years. In particular, many of them had eliminated the “dedicated computer” from their classroom designs. […]

Last month, I wrote about the metaverse. As I mentioned in the article, I am not an expert in the metaverse, but I need to better understand it as we hear more and more about it in our industry. The same is true about cryptocurrency. There is a general assumption that the way things will […]

At InfoComm 21, the Higher Education Technology Manager’s Alliance (HETMA) joined with AVIXA to announce the PRISM Scholarship. According to HETMA, “The Prism Scholarship was founded by HETMA in partnership with AVIXA to encourage women, LGBTQIA+, Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, disabled persons, and anyone who identifies as being underrepresented in the AV industry, to become […]

If you have read my blogs in the past, you know that I work in higher ed, and it has hopefully come out that I am passionate about education. In fact, my career was supposed to be in education. I went to college to be a teacher, did my student teaching in a high school […]

In IT (and therefore AV as well), we certainly don’t have a shortage of our acronyms and buzzwords. When Meta, formerly known as Facebook, changed its name in October, the newest buzzword, “metaverse,” exploded into our feeds. We have heard the word countless times, but what the heck does it really mean? What, after all, […]

One thing I truly love about writing a blog for rAVe is when I get a reaction from my peers about what I wrote. These responses always help me further think through what I originally wrote, and I always learn from others in these scenarios. In my December blog, I wrote about the supply chain […]

In late December, a flaw in software that is ubiquitous around the world was reported, and it sent cybersecurity pros into a frenzy and turned the hairs of technology pros gray. There are countless articles about this vulnerability, so I am not going to go deep into the technology of what occurs. Here is what […]

Sometimes it seems like the topic of every conversation has changed from “COVID, COVID, COVID” to “supply chain, supply chain, supply chain.” This is for good reason. Just about everything is in short supply, and prices are rising everywhere. The good news from this — the news that people are still spending money — gets […]

In November, Gary Kayye interviewed Crestron’s new president and CEO, Dan Feldstein. The interview was very interesting, especially since Dan is a new public face to Crestron, even though he has “been working there since he was 5.” Take some time over your next lunch break to listen to the interview and get to know […]

After all the guessing, prognostication and assumptions, it actually happened. InfoComm 2021 took place in Orlando the last week in October. What surprised me most during the event was the social media banter that went back and forth between the “should” and “should not” crowds. That is those who thought that AVIXA “should have” InfoComm […]