I was invited to attend the last class of the semester where students (Adolescence Education majors) in an English Language Arts Class presented their final projects. The instructor had participated in our Institute on Teaching Strategies last summer, and redesigned her class to be truly collaborative using Web 2.0 technologies.

The class developed a wiki and blog, and their final assignment was designed for students to research a contemporary societal issue and communicate through the electronic media and social networking applications. The instructor, who herself was just learning about new media and their applications in education, took a risk. The success of her class would partially depend on robust and reliable systems and strong technical support. The class required collaboration of many kinds: among students, between faculty and students, and also among the class (both instructor and students), librarians, and technologists.

For me, that is where the proverbial rubber hit the road, and where the distinctions between information itself and technology were forever blurred. Research, writing, and technology skills became parts of a greater whole. The advantages of our blended library/IT organization were never so apparent: the librarians and the technology trainer worked together and they engaged the support of our distributed computing and enterprise technologists, who made systems work and provided centralized storage for the data-intensive final projects.

The instructor will be giving a presentation about her experience in developing and teaching this class at the upcoming SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies (CIT). You can check out the student projects at the following links:

Liberation in the Classroom

Free Tibet  

Find Your Musical Identity

America’s Sacred Oil 

Child Abuse:  A Call to Action

Are You at Risk?

Speaking for Those Who Can’t Speak for Themselves  

Anti-Semitism in Cortland  

South Otselic Town Website  

America’s Self-Image  

One Shot to Save a Life  

ELA and Technology: A Modern Approach to ELA Learning�

Last week’s Green IT Conference dealt with issues of global warming and the role of IT in finding solutions to reducing the carbon footprint. Plenary session speakers were from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Gartner Group. Information Technology has a responsibility to reduce its own energy consumption through energy savings both at the enterprise and distributed levels and through responsible recycling of electronics. IT can provide systems for monitoring energy and systematically managing power campus-wide and offer leadership as campuses invest in and adopt new energy saving technologies. Reduce, reuse, and recycle was the mantra.

I found out about many on-line resources devoted to Green IT. Some of the more useful include:

The Green Grid — a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems.

Simply Green: A Few Steps in the Right DirectionToward Integrating Sustainability into Public Sector IT — a Paper fromthe Center for Digital Government features best Green IT practices in state and local government

The Federal Electronics Challenges promotes initiatives to encourage the purchase of greener electronic projects, the reduction of energy during their use, and the management of obsolete electronics in an environmentally safe way.

Energy Cost Calculators — these Energy Cost Calculators at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Web site estimate the energy cost savings from buying more efficient products.

A Guide to Greener Electronics — a ranking by Greenpeace of electronics manufacturers based on their global policies and practices on eliminating harmful chemicals and on taking responsibility for their products once they are discarded by consumers.

The Report provides descriptions and in-depth discussions of “key emerging technologies” that this year include grassroots video, collaboration webs, mobile broadband, data mashups, collective intelligence, and social operating systems.

Each year the Horizon Report identifies critical challenges that we will be facing in the next five years. This year’s report includes: significant shifts in scholarship, research, creative expression and learning which have created a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy; the growing expectation to deliver services, content and media to mobile and personal devices; the renewed emphasis on collaborative learning which is pushing the educational community to develop new forms of interactive and assessment; and the need to provide formal instruction in information, visual, and technological literacy, as well as in how to create meaningful content with today’s web-enabled tools.

The significant trends discussed in this year’s Report are, in order of perceived priority:

• The growing use of Web 2.0 and social networking;
• the evolving way we work, collaborate and communicate as boundaries become more fluid and globalization increases;
• the increasing access to and portability of content as smaller, more powerful devices are introduced;
• the widening gap between students’ and faculty’s perception of technology.

In its fifth year of publication, this year’s Report identifies metatrends, or conceptual threads, that have been recurring themes each year. Three notable megatrends are collective sharing and generation of knowledge; connecting people through the network; and moving the computer into three dimensions. You can learn more about these and other metatrends and participate in an online discussion at the Horizon Project Wiki site.

The Report has full descriptions and examples of each of these technologies, challenges, and trends, and their impact on the educational environment. At SUNY Cortland we use The Horizon Report to frame discussions among technologists, librarians, and faculty and to provide a context for our strategic planning. I encourage everyone to read the Report in its entirety.

We in Information Resources also think of our IT services in terms of layers. First we rely on the underpinning layer: the technologists who support the servers and the operating systems on which the software applications run. Those folks are part of our Administrative Computing group, responsible for enterprise systems. Next we have the software applications specialists, who install and maintain the software and are responsible for upgrades. Those technologists belong to the Academic Computing group, responsible for distributed computing. The final layer is the front-end team. The technologists in Academic Computing answer questions at the Technology Help Center. In Memorial Library the technology trainer, the instructional designer, production specialists and librarians spend their days working with faculty, staff and students. Of course staff throughout Information Resources offer direct assistance to our customers, whether or not that service is officially in their performance programs. Our success is measured not only by the work we do, but more importantly by how well our campus is able to use technology in teaching, learning and administrative work.

The question of different cultures arises whenever the topic of blended organizations is discussed. Of course there are the distinct library and IT cultures, but there are also the administrative/enterprise and the academic cultures within IT to be considered, to say nothing of the media services culture, which is a hybrid of sorts. In actuality, there are probably more similarities than differences among the various cultures. In order to successfully meet the needs of the campus, a new culture with common values needs to exist. Everyone involved must be committed to working collaboratively, and must recognize the importance of new technologies to benefit students and faculty by enhancing the learning experience.

In Cortland’s blended organization, we recognize the unique characteristics of the four departments that comprise Information Resources. At the same time we work to create synergies among the departments. To this end, many of our IT initiatives such as Second Life and iTunesU are managed by cross-departmental teams, with each team member bringing distinct strengths and skills. We often include teaching faculty on our teams, since we need to understand their needs and specific teaching objectives. We recognize and respect organizational boundaries, but as we work together to be creative with emerging technologies, those boundaries have become less important.

Some examples of what is going on in the classroom here at SUNY Cortland:

• An historian using wikis to help the students get a sense of how history is recorded;
• A psychologist giving in-class quizzes using clicker technology;
• Students in professional writing classes collaborating on Second Life with students in Japan, Korea, France and Canada;
• Students in a New Media course composing music, then sending it to another group in the class who create a video from the music score;
• Biology faculty collecting field data through cell phones and PDAs and having that data instantly available on the server;
• An art historian who has moved from analog slides to exclusive use of images through the ARTstor database.

There was a lot of energy and excitement throughout the day. Although it was a typical cold Cortland winter day, participants ventured outside to have a geographer lead them on a geocaching adventure to locate eight sites in the downtown area.

In the afternoon a panel of faculty and technologists relected on their experiences in using and supporting technology in the classrooms. The faculty readily admitted that their success in the classroom depended on the technology working flawlessly; labs are expected to always be in working order. Technologists emphasized that ongoing communication about faculty needs is critical, and the technologists should be consulted as soon as faculty begin to consider any new technology. As more faculty than ever are using Web 2.0 applications and other emerging technologies, we must continue to expand our infrastructure. Our resources are being stretched as we learn about new applications while continuing to support more traditional technologies.

We’re in a dynamic environment and a culture of change. We’re embracing the 2.0 world with new technologies as best we can, working closely amongst ourselves and staying in touch with our faculty. The partnerships are growing and together we’re creating a vibrant community of discovery and learning.

In the IT and library worlds change is constant and it is everywhere. First the Internet, then the Web, then Web 2.0, each requiring us to review our services and how we provide them and to revisit our organizations and their structures.  Change is an evolutionary process, influenced in large part by the the new information and communications technologies that are reshaping our lives at home and in the workplace.

A common adage states that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Before considering strategies for change and developing processes, we must understand what needs to change and why. In order for change to be effective we must carefully analyze our current situations and thoroughly understand what we do and how we do it. We need to review everything – our policies, services, organization, staffing patterns, facilities, and our technologies and how we use them. As a metaphor for this process, the Chronicle podcast uses the activity of clearing out old vines. We must first separate the vines and understand how they are growing before carefully pruning them so they can sustain a healthy growth.

 As we continue to face rapidly changing and often unpredictable environments, we must constantly assess and modify our operations. Our future successes depend on how well we manage and anticipate change at all levels of our organizations.

Such merged organizations have been around for awhile. When I came to SUNY Cortland almost fifteen years ago to establish and lead this type of combined administrative unit, there were other such models in higher education, each with its unique structure and personality. In the late 1990’s SUNY Cortland participated in a research study on the topic which was conducted by Tara Lynn Fulton, then a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University. Her 2001 Ph.D. dissertation, “Integrating Academic Libraries and Computer Centers: A Phenomenological Study of Leader Sensemaking about Organizational Restructuring,” examined the experiences of seven CIOs who had created Information Services units that included libraries and IT departments.

The Chronicle article refers to “at least three dozen colleges” having merged their library and technology departments. The Campus Computing Project, which supports a continuing study of the role of information and technology in higher education, indicates that 11.3% of the 555 colleges and universities responding to their survey have a library that 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.  

Whatever the organizational structure and whatever it’s called, in order to be successful, IT and Library staff must work well together, providing seamless service to the campus. The focus must be to know what kind of services and resources our students and faculty need and to make them readily and easily available.