EDUCAUSE Honors Outstanding Higher Education Information Technology Achievements

At its annual conference next month in Indianapolis, EDUCAUSE will recognize outstanding contributions in the use of information technology to support and advance the higher education mission. As one of the preeminent associations addressing these complex challenges, EDUCAUSE supports five award programs to identify exemplary achievement in key areas of activity. Honored in 2001 are:

For individual leadership
J. Gary Augustson, vice provost for information technology at The Pennsylvania State University, has been named recipient of this year's award for Excellence in Leadership. This lifetime award honors extraordinary influence, statesmanship, and effectiveness on both individual campuses and within the higher education community. Augustson is widely respected for his early and skilled leadership of higher education's national networking efforts and for his key role in shaping the higher education position on national IT policy issues. He was instrumental in the start of the Internet2 project, the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), the Pennsylvania Research and Economic Partnership Network (PREPnet), and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). For more than 20 years, he has kept Penn State positioned as a leader in applying information technology to institutional challenges, with a focus on facilitating learning communities and supporting top-quality research. His early recognition of coming issues, strong critical and organizational skills, and extraordinary ability to build alliances have positioned him as one of the most influential leaders in his profession.

Carl F. Berger, director of advanced academic technologies and of the Collaboratory for Advanced Research and Academic Technologies (CARAT) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will receive one of two 2001 EDUCAUSE awards for Leadership in Information Technology. Dr. Berger has been a leader at the University of Michigan for almost three decades. As a faculty member in the School of Education, he is known for his innovative work on how people learn using technology, his lively and visionary applications of technology to make complex subjects accessible to students, and his development of assessment tools to evaluate faculty and student use of technology. As an administrator, he has structured responsive, visionary organizations to support faculty use of technology. Influential in the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) since its beginning in the mid '90s, he was also instrumental in the founding of the Instructional Management Systems (IMS) cooperative to channel independent innovation and experimentation into widely useful tools for technology-supported learning. The IMS has since grown into an independent, not-for-profit organization, the IMS Global Learning Consortium.

Carl W. Jacobson, director of management information systems at the University of Delaware, is also receiving one of this year's two EDUCAUSE awards for Leadership in Information Technology. He has been a pioneer in the use of the Web to provide access to institutional administrative information resources, offering a revolutionary vision of the impact of the Web on information services. He managed ground-breaking efforts at the University of Delaware to build secure, organized, dependable Web front ends to administrative systems. Continually re-thinking the roles of the Web and e-business in institutional administrative processes, he has promoted the evolution of early task-based Web applications into comprehensive process-based systems. His innovation was instrumental in Delaware's winning the 1994 CAUSE Award for Excellence in Campus Networking. An early adopter of the Java language for administrative Web development, Jacobson was instrumental in the formation of JA-SIG, the Java in Administration Special Interest Group. This national organization supports the exchange of best-practice information within higher education involving Java-based applicatio