Paula’s E-Musings

There is a renewed energy on campus as students and faculty arrive and a new school year begins. Classes start on Monday, but the prep work has been going on all summer. Throughout this week several of us participated in new faculty orientation programs and we have posted a checklist to help new faculty familiarize themselves with our services. Students are arriving on campus and are eager to establish their network connections. We have simplified the process for them by automating the Hallnet Service.

There’s lots new on the horizon this fall. We have reopened Sperry Learning Center with nine new state-of-the-art classrooms and two interactive video rooms. We have information about the hardware and software in each classroom available on the web. We also have a listing of hardware and software in each of the computer labs. We have upgraded all of our PC labs and classrooms to Office 2007, and are working to get advance notice out to everyone teaching in those spaces. Since many faculty desktop computers still have Office 2003 the challenge will be upgrading software for those requesting newer versions.

In Memorial Library the Learning Commons is fully functional. The camera loan program is more popular than ever and this year we are loaning out a variety of mobile technologies including iPods. Partnering with the New Communications Media Program, we will be offering students full support in media production. As part of a Millennial grant sponsored by the President’s Office, we now have a SUNY Cortland island on Second Life where classes will be taught. Mobile technologies and social computing are certainly influencing pedagogies on our campus.

Welcome to the 07-08 academic year. The adventure begins anew!

A recent posting in The Wired Campus had a link to The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies’ list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning compiled from lists of learning professionals.  There are many of the expected sites, such as Google, YouTube, Flickr,  del.icio.us, and Wikipedia.  Google Scholar was also included, but as the posting points out there are few scholarly and library resources on the list.

Librarians and faculty are acutely aware that too often students do not use library databases in their research, and educators are always looking for strategies to promote these resources and encourage their use. Information Literacy is a critical skill that students must have to take full advantage of the new information resources. Within the SUNY System Information Management is among the general education requirements that students must satisfy in order to graduate.  

Millennial students know all about social computing and other technologies they are comfortable using. In fact they often perceive their facility with technology to be so thorough that they tend not to be interested in learning the information literacy skills necessary to effectively locate, evaluate and use the information they glean from the Internet.

The librarian’s role as facilitator of the research and information retrieval process has expanded and become more complex. The challenge for all educators is to broaden students’ e-horizons and familiarize them with the world of online scholarly and peer-reviewed literature so they are knowledgeable about how to find, use, and evaluate electronic information.

We have different titles, we report to different administrators, and our responsibilities vary from institution to institution, but as CIOs we all have responsibility for enterprise and distributed technology systems and we work with faculty, staff and senior administration to realize institutional goals through information and technology. In a 2004 EDUCAUSE Review article “Framework for the CIO Position” Brian Hawkins tells us that the first CIOs appeared in the late 1970’s when computing went beyond centralized mainframe applications and the advent of microcomputers began to give fuller control of computing applications to faculty and other end-users.

Not long ago there was a flurry of discussion on the EDUCAUSE Chief Information Constituent Group listserv about important CIO traits.  There was wide discussion about how important or not it is for CIOs to have a background in technology. There was clear consensus that the CIO does not need to be a technology practitioner,  but rather must be able to clearly understand technology and how it is used, and communicate about the major strategic issues related to information and technology. Vision, strong leadership and the ability to speak cogently to many constituencies about technology and its role in higher education were some of the characteristics that were identified as important in a successful CIO.

For me, with a background in libraries, my CIO position is an extension of my earlier roles in library administration. I must fully understand the technologies and be able to speak with and understand the technologists who are part of my organization.  It is critical that I recognize how technology can be used to realize the educational and administrative mission. I need to have the skills to work with others to develop strategic plans which must then be operationalized.

In some ways the role of the CIO has changed dramatically as technology has become so completely integrated into the educational experience and the use of a variety of new media is almost commonplace in the classroom. In other ways, it is very much the same: to provide leadership and manage and coordinate information and technology to meet the needs of the institution.