Leadership Awards 2001 Winners

Excellence in Leadership

J. Gary Augustson
Vice Provost for Information Technology
The Pennsylvania State University

Professional Background
For more than 20 years, Gary Augustson has kept Penn State positioned as a national leader in applying information technology to the challenges faced by higher education. As CIO of this 24-campus, comprehensive research university, Mr. Augustson's focus has been on facilitating and creating learning communities and supporting top-quality research. This has required construction of a flexible information technology infrastructure embodying "best in class" applications and management techniques that he has continued to develop and adapt throughout his professional career.

Mr. Augustson is widely respected for his early advocacy and leadership of higher education's national networking efforts, and for the key role he has played in shaping the higher education position on national IT policy issues. He is recognized by his peers as a visionary, a creator, and a builder of constituencies to implement a vision. He chaired the steering committee of Educom's Internet2 project, which led to the creation of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), then served on UCAID's board of directors and was first chair of its Network Policy and Planning Advisory Committee. In a parallel activity at the state level, he was instrumental in establishing PREPnet, the Pennsylvania Research and Economic Partnership Network, where he was a tireless advocate for outreach, quality of service, and equity among the various constituencies. A key behind-the-scenes player in the founding and early success of the Coalition for Networked Information, he was also instrumental in ensuring the implementation of a number of early networked information projects such as the Z39.50 interoperability testbed for library exchange. He was an early advocate of involving the presidential associations (particularly NASULGC) more closely with IT policy and politics, and has been unusually effective in obtaining corporate support for new campus initiatives and in balancing the interests of the corporate and educational worlds.

An intuitive sense for the next important issue for higher education information technology, strong critical and organizational skills, and an extraordinary ability to build alliances have positioned Mr. Augustson as one of the most influential leaders behind many of the major higher education technology initiatives in the past decade.

EDUCAUSE 2001 Award Presentation (PowerPoint version)

A $5,000 contribution is being made in Mr. Augustson's name to the Renaissance Fund, an endowed fund providing support for the brightest Penn State students with the greatest financial need. Created by five University trustees, the fund has awarded more than $3.7 million in scholarship support.

Leadership in Information Technology

Carl F. Berger
Director, Advanced Academic Technologies
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Professional Background
Carl Berger has been a mainstay of the University of Michigan for almost three decades, since his 1972 appointment as associate professor of science education. As a faculty member specializing in science and instructional technology education in the School of Education, he is known for his innovative work to understand how people learn using technology, his lively and visionary use of technology to make complex subjects accessible to students, and his insistence on developing effective assessment tools to evaluate faculty and student use of technology. As an administrator, in his role as dean of the School of Education and later as director of several academic technologies departments, he built superb organizations that were far ahead of their time in supporting faculty in their use of technology in the curriculum. As a technologist, he has brought thoughtful, rational, and often unconventional insights to his service on corporate advisory councils and professional bodies.

Dr. Berger has been a wise and generous contributor to the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) since its beginning in the mid '90s. He was instrumental in the founding of the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) cooperative, when he acted with vision, determination, and flexibility to take a project he headed at the University of Michigan and partner with others, through the NLII Call for Partners process, to create a body that could channel bottom-up, independent innovation and experimentation into coherent, widely useful tools for technology-supported learning. The IMS has since grown into an independent, not-for-profit organization, the IMS Global Learning Consortium. His multi-faceted professional career, writings, and awards show him to be a man of energy, integrity, humor, and vision, not hobbled by convention or tied to the past.

Personal Web site

A $2,000 contribution is being made in Dr. Berger's name to the CARAT (Collaboratory for Advanced Research and Academic Technology) Fellowship of the Rackham Graduate School. This scholarship fund supports graduate students who are working with a professor on advanced academic projects.

Carl W. Jacobson
Director, MIS
University of Delaware

Professional Background
Since the advent of the World Wide Web, Carl Jacobson has been a pioneer in the use of that medium to provide access to institutional administrative information resources. He managed the ground-breaking efforts at the University of Delaware to build secure, organized, dependable Web front ends to administrative systems. Through this work, Mr. Jacobson presented the rest of higher education with a revolutionary vision of the impact of the Web in the information systems area. Previously unimagined levels of outreach and customer service became seen as possible. Mr. Jacobson continues to be an advocate of re-thinking the roles of the Web and e-business in institutional administrative processes, and has promoted the evolution of early task-based Web applications into comprehensive process-based systems. His visionary leadership was instrumental in Delaware's recognition as winner of the 1994 EDUCAUSE Award for Excellence in Campus Networking.

An early adopter of the Java language for administrative Web development, Mr. Jacobson was instrumental in the formation of JA-SIG, the Java in Administration Special Interest Group. This organization has worked to increase the exchange of best-practice information within higher education involving Java-based applications and to build partnerships with corporations involved with Java development. A frequent speaker at CAUSE, EDUCAUSE, and other technology conferences, Mr. Jacobson has also been a proactive communicator of his ideas with his colleagues in higher education. He won the CAUSE/EFFECT Contributor of the Year Award in 1995 for his article "Internet Tools Access Administrative Data at the University of Delaware," and has been published in EDUCAUSE Review as well. He has led numerous preconference seminars at CAUSE and EDUCAUSE conferences based on his expertise and vision of the Web environment in higher education. Mr. Jacobson currently serves on the Steering Committee for JA-SIG, the faculty of the EDUCAUSE Institute for the Leadership program, and on the EDUCAUSE Advisory Group on Administrative Systems and Services (AGAISS).

A $2,000 contribution is being made in Mr. Jacobson's name to the Harry W. Rawstrom Scholarship Fund, a general scholarship fund in the memory of a former University of Delaware professor and swimming coach.