Paula’s E-Musings

I spent most of last week on the Cornell University campus with about 75 campus IT leaders and university legal counselors at the EDUCAUSE/Cornell Institute for Computing Policy and Law. The Institute was a four-day seminar which examined the impact that widespread use of the Internet has on college university policies, procedures, and judicial systems. 

Speakers addressed issues of Internet law, FERPA, privacy, intellectual property ownership and copyright, and social computing and file sharing. I participated in many rich and stimulating discussions and have gained a broader perspective and a renewed awareness of the importance of having up-to-date policies and a university-wide program to educate the campus community..

I learned about Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society whose mission is “to explore and understand cybersapace, its development, dynamics, norms, standards and the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.” I discovered Standford University’s Center for Internet and Society (CIS) comprising scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists  who study “the interaction of new technologies and the law and examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry.” Larry Lessig, who is involved with CIS and teaches Law at Stanford, has a website devoted to cyberspace policy and law. Larry Lessig has written a downloadable book Codev2 which was created through a wiki by readers of his earlier book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

We spent a lot of time talking about FERPA and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) as they relate to privacy. We discussed the implications for college and universities of E-Discovery legislation. And of course there was animated conversation about peer-to-peer file sharing, the RIAA and MPAA and the Reid Amendment that was recently defeated by a Senate vote but is open for debate and possible vote in the House.

I came away from the Institute with new insights and a renewed appreciation of the complexity and nuances related to policy and law in our evolving electronic information environment.  

Here at Cortland, Memorial Library is part of the central IT organization. As such the library is involved in all major IT initiatives. Last year we opened our Learning Commons which is a single point of contact for information and technology inquiries. The library circulates laptops and digital cameras along with books. There are two multimedia studios where students and faculty produce electronic materials and preview their presentations. At Cortland there is a Computer Applications Program where technology instruction is integrated into majors. Students can choose a CAP minor and the three CAP faculty are library faculty. The Technology Training Center is one of the library’s services as are web development, instructional design and digital imaging. The photo below is one of the librarian who coordinates instruction assisting a student with an electronic presentation project. It illustrates the types of services offered in Memorial Library. 

 With the strong partnerships among Memorial Library, Classroom Media Services and Academic and Administrative Computing, the Information Resources organization offers the campus community a full complement of integrated information and technology services. The Campus Computing Project, which supports a continuing study of the role of information and technology in higher education, indicates that only 11.3% of the colleges and universities responding to their survey report that the library reports to a CIO position. The majority of libraries reporting to a CIO are in private four-year colleges (15.6%) followed by community colleges (13.3%) and public four-year colleges (10.2%). Although several high-profile research universities such as Columbia and Indiana University have merged organizations, only 2.7% of public and 5.9% of private research universities have libraries reporting to a CIO.  EDUCAUSE has a Library/IT Partnership Consitutent Group with regular online discussions.

Just who are these students that roam our campus, enroll in our classes and visit (or don’t) our libraries? On our campus the majority are Millennials or Net Genners who were born between 1982 and 1994, who are digital natives, growing up with technology and expecting its immediacy, and who are confident, determined, achieving and view themselves as special and expect others to treat them as such. 

Their values and life experience are so very different than many of us baby boomers who are digital immigrants, learning to use technology in our adult years, and who teach classes, work with students in the library, and provide their technical support. Weren’t we the generation who changed the world and always thought we were ahead of the curve? Weren’t we the leaders and trend setters who didn’t “need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows?” How do we deal with the net genners, many of whom are more tech savvy than us, but don’t necessarily have the depth of what lies beneath the technology? 

As I began to think about the differences between us and our students, I referred to Neil Howe and William Strauss, who have co-written books and articles about generations, and in particular the generation of students who are attending our colleges and universities. Check out their website and read more about them in Wikipedia. I recommend reading their Millennials Go to College  along with Jean M. Twenge’s Generation Me for some excellent insights. 

The EDUCAUSE website has a lot of good information about creating learning environments for our students. I have found Educating the Net Generation, a compendium of essays edited by Diana and James Oblinger, particularly useful.

Together the “Me” generation of Baby Boomers, and the “Net Generation” of Millennial Students, along with the Generation Xers, will transform the educational culture that we seem to be shaping. “The Times They are e-Changing.”

Everybody seems to be blogging. A Wikipedia entry tells us that the blogosphere currently has about 7 million blogs. There are even blogs devoted to blogging in educational settings .  For the past year or so we have been informally supporting faculty and staff blogs. Up until now there have been fewer than a dozen faculty and staff who have campus hosted blogs, and they have been self-sufficient for the most part.

In June  we hosted an Institute on Teaching Strategies where faculty discussed their most challenging courses and to how to develop strategies to effectively teach today’s students. Our guest facilitators presented some philosophical underpinnings of various technologies that can be effectively used in learning environments to encourage student participation. These technologies included blogs, wikis and visual technologies, and several faculty are eager to begin using blogs in their courses.

At Cortland, eLearning initiatives are managed by a team of librarians, instructional designers, and electronic imaging and Web specialists in the library. They receive lots of behind-the-scenes support from Administrative and Academic computing technologists. I’m usually included in the planning since I administer budgets and am usually a good “canary” to fly into any e-mine. The planning has begun and there are many decisions to be made.

Here are some of the questions we’re dealing with early on:

What about faculty who want their blogs to be limited to enrolled students? We’ve decided that those blogs should be embedded in our course management system, Blackboard’s WebCT but we will encourage faculty to have open blogs.

Should the blogs be hosted on or off site? Until it becomes unwieldy we will host blogs on campus using Wordpress. Read an interesting discussion on the topic.

Should there be a disclaimer about the content of blogs? We’re relying on our network use policy.

Should all campus blogs have a standard template? We’re currently undecided.

What about student blogs? We currently allow students to create their own web pages, so why not blogs?

Who will support the blog service? Currently two librarians, our Coordinator of Instruction and our Web Services Librarian provide front line service with technical support from our University Database Administrator. 

We expect to deal with many more issues as the service is used and expands.

What can I do when I’m not planning and implementing, talking, meeting? Well, why not start a blog that reflects on the constantly evolving online environment my team of librarians and technologists and I are always running so fast to stay ahead of? 

Students and faculty are interacting today in ways never considered when I went to college and attended lectures with the occasional 16mm film presentation . . .  or used labs where the latest technologies were analog, and the mainframe computers around were rarely available to non-computer science majors. There was no blogging, class wikis, podcasting, or digital imaging  – not even in the far reaches of the technologists’ minds. But they are here now, and we are looking at how to use them as our students – the Millennials who came of age with a variety of technologies – fill our classrooms, libraries and labs.

Like most of us I’m overscheduled and have too many to-do lists and leave meetings with even more to dos. I spend my days working with others to build and maintain robust technological infrastructures that never are supposed to fail and to develop and deliver programs to meet the information and technology of everyone. Read more about who I am and what I do on my website.

I’m always trying to stay abreast of new developments and best practices.  I read books, journals and online postings. I go to conferences and participate in webinars. But there doesn’t seem to be much time to reflect on the evolving online environment, with its many challenges and rewards. E-Musings is my attempt to take the time to think and write about my world, the people with whom I interact, the learning environments I help to create, the students and faculty who interact with each other and with me. Let the exploration begin!