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What’s new? What’s next? Our field changes constantly, and the pace of change and the advent of new developments make our work especially challenging. What new technologies deserve attention? What problems can they solve? What effective practices or integration of existing technologies could make a difference at our institutions? Where do real opportunities for innovation lie? Covering a wide range of topics including virtualization, mobile devices, social bookmarking, open source telephony, flexible classroom design, wikis, ITIL, and even virtual worlds, to name just a few, this track will showcase the development and experimentation of these and other technologies from across our community. Track and poster sessions will address the potential impact of new technologies in student engagement, teaching and learning, libraries, project management, user training, and system management.
This track addresses a broad range of issues that arise from planning, implementing, supporting, and obtaining resources for enterprise-wide systems and services. Major topics will include (1) administrative solutions: ensuring that we effectively deliver value with our mission-critical systems, in alignment with the institutional mission; (2) business intelligence/decision support: using these technologies to make informed decisions as our institutional data becomes more complex; (3) enterprise course management systems and tools: assessing their broad diversity and growing daily impact on the institution; (4) integration solutions: moving toward enterprise models based on loosely coupled architectures and away from the more tightly integrated solutions of the past; (5) support services: seeking solutions to continue to provide quality service with limited resources while addressing increasing security risks and compliance requirements; (6) collaboration tools and social networking: considering these important topics as we work to meet rapidly changing student and faculty user expectations within our mobile campus community; (7) document management and records retention: addressing these areas, which have become key drivers for business process improvement and regulatory compliance; (8) open and community source solutions: exploring this movement, which continues to gain importance in higher education as a realistic alternative to the traditional buy versus build option.
Libraries build digital collections and develop new network-based services for reaching their increasingly mobile users. As a result, librarians and information technologists, working collaboratively, are creating and employing tools to meet users’ rising expectations. Among these expectations are seamless university-wide systems for accessing virtual collections, examining the results of scholarly research, and mining massive data repositories. Librarians and technologists are also pioneering ways to increase functionality and educate users on how to use these new tools. In addition, faculty and administrators concerned about copyright and intellectual property law are consulting with librarians when developing campus policies and practices on these topics. The sessions in this track will highlight examples of how librarians, technologists, and faculty are rethinking how to accomplish the fundamental work of academic and research libraries in less traditional ways.
This track explores leadership of the IT organization in light of the need to align technology activities with the business and learning outcomes of the institution. Sessions within this track address how to organize, prioritize, assess, manage, support, and fund information technologies, as well as how to build and maintain collaborations with internal and external partners; how to develop IT staff so they are prepared to meet the strategic needs of the institution; and how to support access for all to IT resources. Formal planning and assessment provide a framework to measure the integration of IT within the institutional strategic plan, linking the institution’s goals (and funding) to IT projects and outcome measurements and thereby demonstrating how IT adds value to the organization.
A strategic imperative of higher education is establishing and maintaining a robust technical infrastructure to support both academic and administrative needs while accommodating rapid change. This infrastructure has become essential to the day-to-day operation of the institution and typically includes core services, Web and middleware services, research computing, and advanced networking. Activities can include standard workstation software and configuration, help desk trouble ticket and problem resolution, e-mail and calendar services, network management, Web services, database management, directory and authentication services (middleware), imaging and multimedia systems, and on-demand services. The academy has also had an interest in “pushing the envelope” on advanced computing and networking as an integral part of most higher education institutional missions. While IT services are not always intended to be a research area per se, they provide the institutional context for successful contemporary research activities.
High-profile news stories regarding the exposure of personal financial and medical data on campuses continue to occur. Pressures to comply with privacy protections and emerging data-security regulations are also increasing in higher education, yet organizing and managing an information security function is still relatively new to many campus IT organizations. Complying with these requirements can challenge the academic environment not only in terms of finding the necessary resources and funds to support additional staff but also by constraining the open nature of our campuses. By sharing information and ideas, we can collaboratively develop successful strategies for implementing effective policies and technologies to protect our campuses’ sensitive and confidential information. In addition to establishing effective policies, procedures, and practices, this track will address other tools and technologies to help detect, prevent, and remediate security breaches, including issues and solutions related to identity management, incident response, regulatory compliance, network access control, risk assessment, encryption, and information security awareness and education.
Computers are nearly ubiquitous on many campuses, and information technologies from e-mail to virtual worlds are part of teaching and learning in most courses. As faculty and students become more culturally and academically engaged with the digital landscape, we need increasingly complex strategies to enable and support this engagement. How do we scale our technology offerings to meet the growing needs of learning communities? How can information technologies help librarians, IT professionals, academic support services, faculty, and students become better partners in the service of our academic mission? How do we assess the effectiveness of teaching and learning technologies? Sessions in this track will represent a wide range of perspectives and approaches. Panels and poster sessions will cover topics such as game-based learning and training, learner-centered training and support models, digital fluency, student perspectives on learning space design, assessment strategies and methodologies, and universal design principles that foster ease of use and greater accessibility.