Alberta’s ShareIT procurement service has successfully entered its second year, marking $3.38 million in savings thus far for participating members. Now, the catalogue of end-user computing and networking hardware that can be purchased through ShareIT has expanded to include more products (under the categories of laptops, desktops, tablets, and wireless access points) from additional manufacturers. […]
ShareIT expands its catalogue offerings Read More »
This past August, myself and fellow Cybera data sciencer Byron Chu, as well as some colleagues from the Pacific Institute of Mathematics (PIMS), travelled to New York to attend JupyterCon. JupyterCon is an annual event for both users and developers of Jupyter notebooks to come together to discuss how they are using or improving this
JupyterCon: (Some of) The Callysto Team Goes Global! Read More »
Cybera’s Barb Carra is one of 16 Albertans selected to form the province’s Talent Advisory Council on Technology. Together, they will provide advice and input to the Government of Alberta on strategies, investments and outcomes on tech-related training programs. The council – a mix of leaders from the tech industry and post-secondary institutions, along with student and labour
By Cybera’s Data Science Team Key Blockchain Terms Smart contract: A programming technology that validates a transaction automatically. It can authorize or decline a transaction, based on whether it meets pre-existing conditions. The smart contract could be compared to a banking program that immediately declines your debit card payment when you have insufficient funds. Open
The Ins and Outs of Blockchain — What Alberta Organizations Need to Know Read More »
Callysto training workshops empower teachers to lead digital literacy programs in the classroom Teachers from across Western Canada are embracing their technological curiosity and learning to navigate a new educational platform that will build the computational skills of their students. Callysto integrates research and analytics capabilities, along with other computing functions such as coding, interactive
Western Canadian teachers trial new technology to build computational thinking Read More »
Something interesting is happening in Fort McMurray’s Westwood Community High School. If you scan the news section on the school’s website, you’ll see references to: A grade 12 student winning a medal at the 2018 Canada Wide Science Fair for his project using AI and RFID for medical smart technologies. Students creating a group called
Forging computational superstars: the Fort McMurray success story Read More »
An online platform that helps staff and students at K-12 schools to safely and easily access third-party learning services is now available to Alberta education authorities. Pika is the first Alberta-based “federated identity management” solution to be dedicated to educators, and the only one in Canada that is offered to K-12 school districts. As well
Securing Alberta Students’ Online Identities Read More »
(PIMS) are proud to be participating in the new national CanCode program, announced today. This two-year program supports initiatives that aid coding and digital skills development among Canadian youth, from kindergarten to grade 12 (K-12). Over the next two years, Cybera and PIMS will trial new tools and frameworks that help teachers bring computational thinking into their
Building Canada’s Digital Generation Read More »
While Cybera continues to expand its role in the public sector as Alberta’s not-for-profit technology accelerator, its newest board members promise to reinforce efforts to improve internet connectivity and the reach of data science in the province. At its November AGM, Cybera elected two new board members: Brenda MacDonald, Deputy Superintendent of Clearview Public Schools,
New Board Members Bring K-12 Education, Business Analytics Experience to Cybera Read More »
Two new cloud-based systems from Cybera and CIRA are giving educators “defence in depth”, while improving the cost and flexibility of their online systems The rise and increasing pervasiveness of the internet in our work, education, and play has also led to the rise of malware, spam, and harmful websites. Firewalls are a necessary tool
Six months into the launch of Cybera’s ShareIT procurement service, Alberta’s education institutions have already saved nearly $1.7 million. ShareIT began in June 2017 as a collaboration between 19 post-secondary institutions who were looking to reduce the cost of their IT hardware and service purchases. Facilitated by Cybera (Alberta’s not-for-profit technology accelerator), the program has leveraged
Alberta Educators Save Nearly $1.7 Million in IT Procurement in 2017 Read More »
This month’s Convergence Conference in Calgary will feature a pre-conference workshop on Making the Most of Cybera: Alberta’s Public, Digital Resource on Wednesday, October 25. This half-day session will provide an overview of the many services Cybera members have access to, including: Internet Buying Group (the internet bulk buying program) Shared firewall pilot High-speed National Research and
By Andrew Klaus, former security advisor, Cybera In part two, I explained how to create the repository for configuration management, and deploy infrastructure to support the OpenConext platform. In this part, I’ll be covering how to prepare the Ansible environment, install OpenConext, and test if the installation was successful. Prerequisites Ansible and other dependencies need
OpenConext Deployment: Part #3 Read More »
By Andrew Klaus, former security advisor, Cybera In part one, I talked about what myUnifiED is and the various tools Cybera has used to deploy it. In this post, I’ll be covering how to create the repository for configuration management, and deploy infrastructure to support the OpenConext platform. To keep things simple, I’ll only create
OpenConext Deployment: Part #2 Read More »
By Andrew Klaus, former security advisor, Cybera Cybera is working on a two year pilot to create an Identity Federation for K-12 schools in Alberta, called myUnifiED. This Identity Federation will use OpenConext, an open source hub and spoke federation platform, as the technical solution. In this three part blog series, I will detail the
OpenConext Deployment: Part #1 Read More »
On June 1 2016, Cybera officially transferred the operations of the Learning Management Cloud (LMC) to the University of Alberta. This was a bittersweet moment for us. We were sad to say goodbye to something that we had grown and developed since its inception in 2012. In a way, it was like sending our child
Reflections on Learning Management Cloud Read More »