communicate + collaborate + innovate

Session Details

Wednesday, June 13th

Thursday, June 14th

Wednesday, June 13th

What Should We Do About Internet “Cruft”?

Larry Sanger, Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium

Some people—especially educators, librarians, and journalists—complain a lot about the vast quantities of garbage online. As the traditional gatekeepers of information, many of them are dismayed that so much biased, misleading, and outright wrong information is available. Many also are troubled by the amount of “junk information”: they find too much that is trifling, unimportant, and insubstantial, the mental equivalent of junk food. In this talk, I want to answer a series of questions. Is there really a problem about Internet “cruft”? What, exactly, is the problem? What are some possible solutions? What principles should we bear in mind in choosing among them? And, given those principles, which of the solutions is best? I will announce a modest new initiative that addresses these issues.

Larry Sanger is Editor-in-Chief of Citizendium. He was co-founder of Wikipedia. After being introduced to the concept of a wiki, he proposed applying it to an encyclopedia. He managed the website in its first year and was responsible for many of the policies that made the website the success it is today. Since his departure in 2002, he has written a number of articles about Wikipedia, collaborative projects, and related subjects. He also was a philosophy instructor at Ohio State University and a Director at the Digital Universe Foundation. Dr. Sanger grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, received his B.A. in philosophy from Reed College in 1991 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Ohio State in 2000. He is also a player of Irish traditional music on the fiddle.

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Related Colleges and Their Different Paths to Website Redesign

Eric Behrens, Associate Director for Academic Computing, Swarthmore College
Robert Kieft, Director of College Information Resources, Haverford College
Janet Scannell, Director of Computing Services, Bryn Mawr College

The Pennsylvania “Tri-College” consortium of Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore will share our recent experiences with our respective website redesigns. We’ll discuss issues of who controls the web; how we made technology and policy decisions; what we learned and where we are headed.

An Ounce of Prevention: Strategies to Counter the RIAA’s “Spring Offensive”

Guest Speaker: Kenneth C. Green, Director of The Campus Computing Project
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Ample evidence confirms that college students are a small portion of a large, consumer-market, P2P problem that affects the music and movie industries. Nonetheless, the RIAA continues to focus its PR efforts on college students and colleges and universities as ISPs. In an opinion piece published by INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION on March 8th, Green described the current round of RIAA initiatives – letters to presidents, warning notices to students and institutions – as a “Spring Offensive.” The RIAA’s proposed remedies, said Green, “smack of extortion... an easily inferred threat to campus officials.”

Green’s presentation will rebut the key points in the RIAA’s arguments about digital piracy on college networks, and also outline practical and realistic campus strategies to address P2P piracy on campus networks.

Kenneth C. Green is the founding director of The Campus Computing Project (www.campuscomputing.net), the largest continuing study of the role of computing, eLearning, and information technology in American higher education. The project is widely cited as a definitive source for data, information, and insight about IT planning and policy issues affecting U.S. colleges and universities. A visiting scholar at the Claremont Graduate University and co-founder and co-producer of the award-winning Ready2Net series at CSU-Monterey Bay (www.csumb.edu/ready2net), Green is the author/editor of more than a dozen books and research monographs and more than three dozen articles published in various academic journals and professional publications. In October 2002, Green received the first EDUCAUSE Award for Leadership in Public Policy and Practice. The award cites his work in creating The Campus Computing Project and recognizes his “prominence in the arena of national and international technology agendas, and the linking of higher education to those agendas.” A graduate of New College (“a great liberal arts college!”), Green earned his Ph.D. at UCLA.

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Is iTunes U or Web Streaming Right for You?

Kenny Freundlich, Director of Instructional Technology, Wellesley College
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Steve Hirby, Chief Information Officer, Lawrence University
Jason LaMar, Director of Information Services, Ohio Wesleyan University
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We’ll clear away the hype around podcasting in general and iTunes U in particular, and help you determine what’s steak and what’s sizzle. What problems does iTunes U solve for liberal arts colleges? Who’s the real audience for mobile content—students, alums, propspectives, and/or the general public? When might your school be better off streaming your content—and if so, should you do it in-house or outsource it? What kind of resources (especially staff hours) do you need for either solution?

What Makes Collaboration Work?

Roberta Lembke, Director of Information and Instructional Technology, St. Olaf College
Jerry Sanders, Associate Vice President for Information Technology Services, Macalester College
Scott Siddall, Assistant Provost, Denison University
link to the web site

The need for collaboration continues to grow: sharing costs and expertise, not reinventing the wheel, improving projects because they are inclusive. The opportunity for collaboration continues to grow: immersion in communication with email, text, voice, video, social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies. The scope of collaboration continues to grow: curricular collaboration, inter-institutional and consortial collaboration, community source software and resources, benchmarking and surveys, and on and on...

Yet collaboration takes time, money, effort, and more, and sometimes is more expensive than doing it alone. So what makes collaborations work? What makes them fail? Why is collaboration so important?

Please join us for a thought provoking (and honest, and possibly politically incorrect!) discussion about collaboration.

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Responding to the EDUCAUSE Grand Challenges Initiative

Kris Jones, Director of Information Technology Services, Colorado College
Randy Stiles, Vice President for Information Management, Colorado College

At the last annual meeting, EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins announced the “Grand Challenges” initiative and suggested that IT organizations should not only focus on managing IT infrastructure, services, and costs, but that they should also do more to bring data, information, and insights to the planning and policy discussions of our institutions. In this panel presentation, we will describe recent organizational changes and collaborative projects at Colorado College that are responsive to the Grand Challenges objectives.

We Encourage Others to Communicate, Collaborate and Innovate. Can We?

Mary Backus, Area Director – Operations, Library & Information Services, Middlebury College
Barbara Doyle-Wilch, Dean of Library & Information Services, Middlebury College
Margaret Stancer, Director of Desktop Computing Services, Amherst College

Hear from Barbara and Mary about how Library and Information Services (LIS) at Middlebury has changed their help desk model to address problems pointed out by end users that arise because of the interconnectedness of technology and the need to navigate the LIS organization to get help. They will present their vision for simplifying and improving the user experience at Middlebury and next steps in integration and collaboration within LIS and the College. Margaret will share her experiences with the use of wikis in IT at Amherst, the broad, and surprising, adoption of new help desk software within IT, and some technology-enabled collaborative work with colleagues at other institutions.

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Thursday, June 15th

Identity Management: One Dimension of a More Secure and Private IT Future

George Strawn, Chief Information Officer, National Science Foundation

The time-honored approach of “account name and password” to provide identity management for IT systems is showing its age. This talk will motivate and outline the newer approach to identity management which will aid our efforts to provide more secure and private IT systems.

As the National Science Foundation’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), Dr. George O. Strawn guides the agency in the development and design of innovative information technology—working to enable NSF staff and the international community of scientists, engineers and educators to improve business practices and pursue new methods of scientific communication, collaboration and decision-making. Since joining the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1991, Dr. Strawn has served NSF in various roles. For the past four years (1999-2002), prior to his appointment as CIO, Dr. Strawn worked in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), serving three years as the Executive Officer and one year as the Acting Assistant Director. From 1995 through 1998 he was Director of the CISE Division of Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research where, among other things, he led NSF’s efforts in the Presidential Next Generation Internet Initiative, an initiative that created the first national high performance network testbed.

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Moodle and the First Year Experience

Greg Diment, Director of Computing, Kalamazoo College Information Services
Carolyn Zinn, Associate Director of Web Services, Kalamazoo College Information Services
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When Kalamazoo College’s First Year Experience program sought a way to build connections with and among the incoming class even before they stepped foot on campus, they turned to Moodle. Moodle is our standard learning management system, used increasingly for our non-academic community activities as well. We will demonstrate some of the Moodle features that the FYE program used to build their online community and discuss how IS needed to change some procedures to allow this to happen.

The Potential, Promise and Pitfalls of Virtual Worlds: a Behind the Scenes Look at Second Life

Bret Ingerman, Vice President for Computing and Information Services, Vassar College

The popular press has begun to write extensively about virtual worlds software in general, and Second Life (from Linden Labs) in particular. Indeed, many schools have begun to establish outposts in these virtual worlds to see just how these environments can support their educational mission.

This session will provide you with an in-depth look at what it takes to use Second Life and how easy it is to create and manipulate the virtual environment. We explore the good and bad of what Second Life has to offer, compare and contrast it to other present and emerging technologies, and discuss the opportunities tools such as Second Life present to us. We will also spend some time discussing the legitimate concerns that some have expressed about virtual worlds, from their “adult” or “commercial” nature to the real-world potential for social isolation that it can lead to, and see how or if those concerns are different in virtual worlds as compared to other internet based tools.

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Adventures in Outsourcing

John Bucher, Chief Technology Officer, Oberlin College
Robin Jacobsen, Associate Director for Client Services, Swarthmore College
Rebecca Sandlin, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Bowdoin College

This will be a panel discussion of various experiences with outsourced services, both successful and unsuccessful. The participants will each provide a brief description of their outsourced projects/systems, then follow with audience discussion.

Building a Roadmap for Emergency Communications

James Mattice, Director of Network Technologies, St. Lawrence University
Ganesan Ravishanker, Associate Vice President for Information Technology, Wesleyan University
Martin Ringle, Chief Technolgy Officer, Reed College
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Events in recent years—ranging from Virginia Tech to Katrina to 9/11—have underscored the need for colleges to provide reliable communication strategies during emergencies. The purpose of this session will be to explore the different types of communication challenges faced by small liberal arts colleges and to identify a “roadmap” of good practices designed to meet these challenges. After brief remarks by the panelists, attendees will take part in an open discussion to share their ideas on strategies that liberal arts colleges should pursue as well as those they should eschew.

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Preparing your Network for Mixed Media and VOIP

Mark Berman, Director for Networks and Systems, Williams College

Networks don’t just carry “data” anymore. More and more they’re being used as replacements for older, dedicated-purpose infrastructures such as CATV (coax video); PBX (telephone over dedicated copper pairs); Point-Of-Sale (more dedicated copper); Security Cameras (even more copper, sometimes fiber); Card-swipe entry; HVAC controls; etc., etc.

Now we need to think about things like five nines reliability, quality of service, and deterministic response. What do we need to do to our networks to make them ready? This session will go over the basics of what can (or should) be done and what options we have. People who have started down this road will be encouraged to share their experiences.

Outside the Box, But With a Friend: Collaborating on the LMS and Beyond

Ethan Benatan, Director of Computer User Services, Reed College
Juliet Habjan Boisselle, Instructional Services Coordinator, Mount Holyoke College
Mary McMahon, Director of Instructional Services, Pomona College
download the Powerpoint

Panelists from three schools share very different stories and lessons from recent LMS and social software rollouts, all involving stories of collaboration. At Mt. Holyoke, changing LMS platforms from WebCT to Sakai included partnering with a vendor to jumpstart the project and then intensive collaboration between departments for implementation. Reed just released their first-ever LMS (Moodle) and is active in the NITLE Moodle Exchange, a liberal arts Moodle collaborative. Pomona, primarily a Windows shop, is offering faculty flexible access to open source Linux-based social software tools Wordpress and Drupal thanks to third-party hosting.

 

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