EDUCAUSE '99 Tracks

Celebrating New Beginnings
October 26-29, 1999
Long Beach (CA) Convention Center

Conference Track Descriptions

Clicking on the track title will take you to a list of presentations for that track. From there you can get to the presenters' names, time for the presentation, and the presentation abstract.

TRACK 1: Building the New Information Technology Foundation and Infrastructure

Many of yesterday's advanced applications have become today's basic services. Our users now expect multi-media e-mail, high-speed mobile networks, easy Web publishing, and much more. Faculty, staff, and students rely upon a base set of IT services in order to do their work. We must build, support, and maintain a number of complex functions that, today, have become the basic foundation of IT services. These basic foundational issues include: robust and reliable voice, video, and data services; middleware applications that replace obsolete mainframe applications; core services for communication and collaboration; effective help service; change management that really works; solving the Y2K problem.

Presentations in this track will address today's basic IT services and support, including the management and organizational strategies that make it all work. This track should appeal to administrators who manage the service and/or to technologists who create and maintain the service.

TRACK 2: Technology-Enhanced Teaching and Learning

As technology is infused into both physical and virtual learning environments, individuals and institutions design new learning strategies, organize new faculty support models and services, forge new partnerships, and create innovative ways to evaluate these new processes and products.

This track offers presentations concerning instructional and multi-media design processes that take advantage of technology to enhance content and pedagogy, including best practices, lessons learned, and underlying theories that impact the design process. Also examined are effective faculty development and student training strategies, the role of designers, how faculty find time for developing new digital learning environments, and how new teaching/learning centers and instructional design labs provide faculty support.

How do issues such as electronic classrooms, digital libraries, intellectual property rights, commercial publishing, distance learning, and faculty policies and politics challenge faculty and service providers and facilitate the formation of new partnerships? What research questions and methodology are faculty and institutions asking and using to evaluate how we design and support these new technology-enhanced teaching and learning strategies?

Presentations will address issues such as cost/benefit ratios for course development or teaching/learning centers, the impact of technology on learning outcomes, and specific research questions and methodologies faculty and institutions are asking and developing.

TRACK 3: Renewing Administrative Services

Administrative computing has always been important, but it has taken on greater strategic importance as institutions struggle to remove the limitations of space and time in delivering instruction to a wider, more diverse audience. The focus of this track is to celebrate new beginnings for administrative computing: how we move beyond our historical back-office role to deliver administrative services in new and innovative ways -- increasingly, directly to students, faculty, and staff.

Examined will be topics of administrative services such as e-commerce, workflow/imaging, and direct web-based delivery of services; access and security issues; automating specialty functions such as grants management, the physical plant, and auxiliary enterprises; distributed support strategies; and how administrative computing can help enable the transformation of higher education and support the strategic directions of higher education institutions in the new millennium.

TRACK 4: Outreach, Public Service, and New Communities

The Internet and other distance technologies have given us new ways to collaborate with important institutions in our local and regional communities: K-12 schools, public libraries, museums, community-based organizations, small businesses, and others. Our challenge is to use new technologies for meaningful collaboration that benefits our communities, helps our students develop intellectually and as citizens, and fits within the mission of our institutions.

This track provides a forum for participants to exchange knowledge, insights, and experiences related to outreach initiatives. The sessions will explore issues of building community networks (access); providing training to develop technology and information literacy (training and tools); developing and scaling exemplary applications in such areas as K-12 education, access to unique library collections; job and community development (applications); and evaluating the efficacy of such projects (research).

TRACK 5: Advancing the Leading Edge

Advances in information technology capabilities made possible by developments such as massively parallel environments and high-performance networks hold promise for advancing the leading edge of knowledge. Emerging technology leading to great leaps in computational power and its application is creating a variety of new opportunities for furthering the frontiers of knowledge. This track is designed to identify and showcase examples of promising information technology, tools, and applications. Topics and areas of interest include modeling and visualization tools; complex data analysis; communication modes for joint research efforts; knowledge databases and tools to access and analyze them in a networked environment.

This track will consider the range of developments to improve the accessibility and usability of knowledge using new technologies, including areas such as universal access, human language technology, knowledge modeling, data mining, database access technology, human-computer interaction, embedded intelligent systems, as well as wireless, wearable and mobile computing technology. Innovative applications for a high-performance distributed computing infrastructure, such as scientific collaboratories and digital libraries are of interest. Also of interest are information on standards, and technology profiles for interoperable services that will enable greater adoption and new applications.

The EDUCAUSE Track

Despite efforts to make certain that the critical issues of the day are covered at the conference, the call for proposals process doesn't always allow us to achieve that goal. Therefore, to ensure that such critical areas are addressed, we've developed the EDUCAUSE track.

The EDUCAUSE track offers a wonderful mix of sessions that are a great complement to the rest of the EDUCAUSE '99 program. Several of the sessions report specifically on association activites and initiatives.