This is the fourth week of the fall semester and to say it’s been hectic is an understatement. The new campus portal myRedDragon with its single sign-on capability coupled with the new format for student netid’s has created a flurry of activity at the Technology Help Center. Information Resources has debuted its new Webpage with TechInfo to dynamically provide information about where to find support. It is still in a development stage but seems to be used with some regularity. Site visitors aren’t always sure what to do with the tag clouds but they are catching on quickly and the echat feature seems to be getting some activity.

The challenge as always is getting the word out to campus about the many services and resources that we offer. Faculty and students alike are interested in Web 2.0 technologies and the interest in their use is growing, as evidenced by the size of those tag clouds on the Tech Info blog. Many of IR’s instructional services are located in Memorial Library and next week they are hosting an Information Fair to showcase instructional technologies for faculty and students. The IR annual Information and Technology Planning Document has been updated and is a good barometer for progress and priorities.

It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged. Where has the summer gone?

The end of the academic year always goes by quickly, and there are many deadlines to meet. Budget finalization, staff evaluations, and annual reports are all very necessary, yet time consuming. Read the 2007-08 Information Resources Annual Report to learn about this year’s highlights.

In mid-July I co-presented at the 2008 NACUBO Annual Meeting. Together with my colleagues in the Facilities and the Business Offices, we delivered a paper “Green is Not For Money: Innovative Efforts Towards Campus Sustainability.” I talked specifically about the energy savings we realize from our enterprise Blade Server environment, our use of energy saving features in desktops across campus, and our use of Crestron control systems to manage energy savings in the classrooms.

Our biggest campus-wide project this summer is the implementation of a campus portal. Using Sungard’s Luminis platform, we have integrated our Blackboard eLearning system with our enterprise student information system, Banner. Students and faculty will now have single sign-on and will have only one password to remember. The power of Luminis is the unified and personalized access to a full complement of information and services. It’s been a real team effort between Administrative Computing Services and the departments who deliver their services online through BannerWeb. In keeping with Cortland’s tradition, we’ve named the new Portal myRedDragon.

Not everything is about information and technology. I recently participated in the Collection Exchange, part of this summer’s Collexbibition in the SUNY Cortland Dowd Fine Art Gallery. Coordinated by Syracuse artist Joanna Spitzner, I was able to exchange a piece of art from my collection for a copy of a work in the Gallery Collection. So I brought in a print of a mid 1700’s Flemish engraving and exchanged it for a copy of an etching “Conte des Milles et Une Nuits” by Jules Pascin, one of my favorite expressionist artists. It’s an innovative gallery program for sure and I was glad to have to the opportunity to be involved.

As CIOs we are first and foremost administrators, and most of our time is spent planning, coordinating, negotiating, budgeting, etc.  Sometimes we are so focused on solving problems and putting out fires that we lose sight of the core of what we’re all about: enriching the education experience.  I was able to reaffirm that purpose earlier this week.

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�

Spring is coming to Central New York. In our yards green grass has replaced dirty snow, green spikes are starting to emerge in our gardens, and there is the slightest hint of green buds on the trees. I noticed how spring-like green our surroundings are becoming as I drove to Albany last week to attend a Green IT Conference sponsored by the NYS Forum IT Greening Committee and the New York State Energy and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The New York Governor’s 15-15 initiative — to reduce energy by 15 percent by 2015 — is one of the most aggressive in the country. And as a member of the American Colleges and University Presidents Climate Commitment SUNY Cortland has also agreed to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent by 2014.

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.

It’s been a busy couple of months but I’ve finally had a chance to read this year’s Horizon Report, jointly produced by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium. The annual Horizon Report identifies and describes emerging technologies that are certain to have a major impact on higher education.

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.

Here in Central New York where outside temperatures are hovering around zero  and inside they vary from building to building, we often dress in layers. In the technology world we often think about layers: the layers in the TCP/IP and OSI models and  the overlay of various applications.  Recently we’ve been discussing the layers of software components during the process of integrating our e-Learning system (Blackboard’s WebCT) with our Student Information System (Sungard’s Banner), as part of our implemention of a campus portal (Sungard’s Luminis Platform IV).

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.

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about Library/IT collaboration. Just yesterday I participated in a Webcast on this topic. Eugene Spencer, previous CIO and current consultant to higher education and library groups, responded to questions and comments about merged organizations, the role of the CIO, and change management, among other issues. The transcript of the entire Webcast is available online.

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.

YouTube and iTunesU are not the only Websites where you can find lectures and presentations. Earlier this month I wrote about Big Think, a site about ideas and intellectual discourse that features interviews with scholars from many disciplines and provides opportunities for readers to participate in discussions. An interesting post on today’s Wired Campus has references  to a number of Websites that feature lectures and presentations. Among them are The Research Channel, a non-profit consortium of colleges and universities that broadcasts video in a several formats; Princeton University’s UChannel; and University of Maryland’s DoFlick. Here at SUNY Cortland we have made lectures and other learning materials available on our own Website, as well as on iTunesU, Second Life, and YouTube. With free access to these resources through libraries, and as more universities are willing to share their intellectual capital, learning is truly becoming more democratized.

The September/October 2007 issue of EDUCAUSE Review was all about how the faculty use emerging and collaborative technologies, and how to provide systems and services to support their efforts. Last week our Information Resources group and The Faculty Development Center co-hosted a retreat for faculty, technologists, and librarians. The faculty attendees ran the gamut from early adapters of technology to those who had recently begun creating online collaborative teaching environments. And many of the discussion topics reflected the “It’s All About the Faculty” themed issue of EDUCAUSE Review as noted above. Faculty talked about a variety of e-learning experiences. Several have begun using wikis and blogs. We learned how others have their students create podcasts and other digital media. We even got to see SUNY Cortland’s island on Second Life and hear how faculty are using this virtual world to engage students.

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.

The current Chronicle of Higher Education Tech Therapy podcast is all about Change, a phenomenon that we deal with constantly.  Warren Arbogast asserts that people must first feel pain in their status quo situations in order to be willing to change. That’s somewhat ironic, since change itself seems to be painful to so many. Change means having to give up comfortable ways of doing things and to begin new learning processes.

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.