CIO Web Musings

Many years ago, a colleague suggested to me that far more important than any other attribute of the Internet and the Web was the notion of disintermediation, removing the filters and overseers that shape and organize information and services for us, thus allowing us to share and receive information and services with anyone we wanted. This “sleeping giant” would in fact completely change our lives, he suggested. As I think about it, my colleague was right. We now have easy access directly to colleagues or like-minded individuals throughout the world; we can order books or caviar or cheese from small shops or conglomerates anywhere; and, we can now find our own “perfect” flights and print our own boarding passes, fill in form after form of administrative data for our purchases, medical tests, and business activities.

Wait a second? Here I was painting a rosy picture of disintermediation, but something has gone awry. Disintermediation has also become an engine for removing individuals in the middle who can help us do things efficiently. Obviously, airlines have learned that it’s cheaper to have you line up at a kiosk and swipe your credit card. We all have jumped at the opportunity to print our own boarding passes, to avoid long check-in lines; somehow, I have been trained to feel privileged to go to national conferences and stand in line at a computer kiosk to print my boarding passes in advance. And, I am now grateful to know that at least some hotels now have one “free” computer solely for printing boarding passes. What's wrong with this picture?

Now, we all appreciate and value the ability to be able to share ideas with other genealogists or basket weavers or order an out-of-print book from the one little mom-and-pop shop in Florida that has it cheap. And, we all like the idea (at least some of the time) that we can find the perfect route for our flight to Hawaii in January. And, at least in principle, we all understand the value of lowering costs for services by taking advantage of the efficiencies of computers. And I sure don’t want to go back to the days of the office typing pools, where we turned in awkward hand-written manuscripts to others to “type up” grant proposals in triplicate with carbon paper (I’ll bet some of you don’t even know what I’m talking about!).

But, we need to think carefully about the value of our and our colleagues' time and efficiency. While I could comment on the wasted time with medical and other personal paperwork, I want instead to comment on the effort in the academic sphere. It has become clear at least at my home campus that our faculty and staff (and students) are concerned at the amount of time they have to spend entering, managing, and interpreting data in administrative applications.

Often, these applications require re-entry of data that is “somewhere else” in the system. Applications are often written to do a great job on a particular set of tasks (“best of breed” solutions), but integration with other applications is often an afterthought or, just as frustrating, is assumed to be someone else’s problem. To be sure, some of the frustration is unavoidable, in that we have to integrate with applications controlled by others (e.g. for grant submission), but much of it we foist on ourselves by creating false efficiencies.

We create these false efficiencies by valuing near-term cost savings for a particular service or application or by valuing only the complexity for the groups developing or supporting the application. These are the directly measurable costs and, to be sure, they are often significant. Saving fifty-thousand dollars here means money that can be directly spent on something else important—T.A.s, new research equipment, and so on. But this is short-sighted.

We need to look at measuring administrative impact on the campus as an ecological system, understanding how different services interact with one another or, more importantly, analyzing how new or “enhanced” services change the work load of our most valuable resources—faculty and staff in the units. We may not save any direct resources in the near term by optimizing their efficiency (and sanity), but we will increase their effectiveness and productivity. But more than that, we will in the longer term be more competitive and innovative within the academy and in fact will reap longer-term cost savings overall.

As we all know, companies manufacturing herbicides can save money by just dumping barrels of toxic by-products in a ditch somewhere, but that cost will appear elsewhere and on a much larger scale, as we not only develop plans for cleaning up the toxic waste, but are forced to dig new wells for groundwater, when the old aquifers are threatened.

In just the same way, we need to use this kind of ecosystem thinking in planning our administrative services. We can’t just do our own thing any more. Just because we can be agile, that doesn’t mean we have created a long-term service.

Sure, I love the idea that I don’t have to stand in line at the airport any more for a boarding pass or I can be searching for flights during a boring conference talk. But my sense of control and efficiency is illusory: more often than not, I’m being asked to take my valuable work or personal time to wait in line somewhere else or entering my own information for the umpteenth time into a form somewhere.

In summary, while I am still a big fan of disintermediation, I urge us all to think about ourselves as part of a community ecosystem. Our task is to ensure that the system (in the case of a campus, the campus community) is able to work effectively and, often, efficiently; sometimes, that takes a thoughtful consideration of the investment that others are going to have to make to take advantage of our tools and services and, always, we can do a better job by understanding how different tools and services can work together to reduce complexity in the longer term for our most valuable assets—our faculty, staff, and students.

Recently, Educause president Brian Hawkins issued a statement regarding a major action by the learning management company, Blackboard, against a rival company. In his statement, he described the action:

This year, Blackboard was awarded a patent for intellectual property contained within its course management system and then filed a lawsuit against Desire2Learn for infringement of newly established rights under this patent. This action has lit up blogs and listservs, and we at EDUCAUSE have received a large number of inquiries about what the association plans to do.

Brian’s note outlined a number of forums at the (then) upcoming Educause meeting (a gathering of 6,000 or so faculty, IT professionals, administrators, vendors, and others) in which the Blackboard (Bb) suit and its ramifications would be discussed.

Well, the forums took place and what a firestorm. While there were many important issues discussed at the meeting, this topic took center stage as the “buzz” of the conference. In the past, I was at a Bb school, but more recently was a key decision maker in the acquisition of WebCT’s learning management system (LMS), well before the merger talks. One of the reasons for selecting WebCT was the fact that the company had a clear understanding of its academic roots and the fact that its innovation depended on continued ties not just to academic administrators (like me), but to the faculty themselves. As WebCT transitioned into Blackboard, we were given strong assurances that the combined company still “got” it and would maintain its strong community relationship.

Right now, this relationship appears in question and many folks are ready just to walk away. I want to point out that walking away is not an ideal option; the community needs to find ways to get this back on track.

Right now, my recently adopted campus, UC Davis, stated its plans to invest in community source, Sakai, as its primary LMS, and has taken great strides to implement Sakai, first in its Vet Med and Medical programs. Davis has shown great prescience in seeing Sakai both an engine of innovation and a framework within which other innovations can be effectively integrated. Even at my last institution, Illinois, while we were a WebCT institution, we were investing significantly in Sakai and other community LMS systems like Moodle and Lon-Capa. So, my point isn’t that commercial vendors are the only or best solution—absolutely not.

But my point is also not that Community (or Open) Source tools are the only or best solution. We absolutely need both vendor and community technologies; in fact, we need the partnership.

I believe it’s essential for universities to invest substantially in the innovation in their areas of core competency like learning. To be sure, community source development is a key way to do this, but a successful LMS requires many components—learning modules, quizzing tools, gradebooks—and (IMHO) can only be successful if integrated with many others (online collaboration tools, video conferencing, chat facilities, simulation tools, as well as a host of administrative services). Vendors are awfully good at these many other areas. So, a successful LMS may have a Community-source tool at its core, and then build a range of vendor or community tools around it. For many campuses, depending on expertise and interest, however, a strong vendor system is essential, especially if integration with complex administrative systems is expensive or risky; again, with such a system, the ideal solution is to view it as a framework around which innovative tools from all quarters can be built.

So, the real danger of the Bb controversy is that we will find (perhaps superficially legitimate) excuses for distancing ourselves from the kind of vendor-academy partnerships that have served us so well. Of course, not all partnerships have been effective and some have been contrary to our interests, but most have served to move the academy forward. And, they have done this by creating efficient “pre-competitive” partnerships between smart academics and their industrial counterparts—creating academic spinoff companies or products, serving on advisory boards, or just sitting down to share ideas.

So, while some at Bb have apparently said that this is just a legal issue between two companies, far, far more is at stake—it is forcing a polarization that none of us will benefit from. While I have no doubt this controversy won’t create a great rift in other areas (e.g. in security or operating systems), the problem is that the LMS area is far more fragile. There aren’t a lot of players in this community, the development isn’t cheap, and the need for flexibility and variation is enormous. One thing I learned at Illinois is that institutions with a long history of using LMSs (since the 60s at Illinois) use tools very differently and much more intensively than those just getting into the business—for example, faculty who have developed sophisticated quizzing tools for decades have no interest in moving backwards. So, a one-size fits all solution, or one that is aimed at community colleges primarily or at R1 research institutions primarily, won’t be effective; we need more granularity in our tool sets. So while Blackboard is to be commended on its financial success, even those of us moving down the community source path need competition and innovation in the vendor space to achieve this granularity, as much as we need community source contributions. We are all still learning a lot about the use of technology in teaching, so an open conduit between companies and real, live faculty is essential. The fact that the community understands Bbs actions as impacting not only other vendors, but academic innovators as well, makes the game high stakes. If we walk away from vendors and focus primarily on our own solutions, we will come up short in the long haul; if, on the other hand, we accept this kind of chilling effect, we will be endorsing (in my view) a permanent disconnect between LMS vendors and innovative faculty. While this is understandable (though not commendable) for general-purpose tools like browsers and operating systems, it is sheer folly for learning tools!

So just what has concerned and perhaps infuriated the academic community is at the same time the reason why we must solve this problem. We need the trust and confidence of the academic community in our industry partners. Lawsuits aside, even the appearance that a major commercial player’s actions could quash competitiveness and innovation damages not only that company’s reputation (and perhaps its bottom-line), but also our common mission of providing the best set of teaching tools to our faculty and learning experiences for our students. Can we talk?

I wrote this blog a few weeks ago, but then put it on the back burner as my orientation to the campus moved into high gear and information overload set in. I share it without further emendation!

We Really Are a National I.T. Community, but We Still Aren’t All the Same

I have just completed a move from one institution of higher learning to another, having been at work at the University of California at Davis for four working days. While I am sure that at some point in my second week, I will start to achieve “information overload,” I am really impressed by just how smoothly my first near-week has gone. This is not at all to my credit, but it relates to two very important things, the first very specific to UC Davis and the second quite universal to American higher education, I think.

First of all, I have come to a campus that prides itself on effective communication. I have had several early experiences that have really impressed me that this pride is translated into practice. Faculty members at an informal lunch described their priorities to me, and I was able to tick off in my mind how those relate to the UC Davis Strategic Plan, because they describe them using the same basic framework and terminology as everybody else. An informal lunch of senior campus administrators and deans had a full house, even though the provost and chancellor were unable to attend, because, as one person put it, we all had important things to talk with each other about. When I volunteered to my new staff that they could just drop by, several did—to tell me not only about what they did, but how important it was to reach out to the campus community. One person, humbly suggesting he was “only” a technical person, went out of his way to share some documentation on his project and explained how other folks in the organization were really behind making the materials so effective. Another person came in to say that we really needed more faculty on an oversight committee, so we could be confident in our planning process. In short, I am at a place where people really enjoy working together and understand that their success depends on working with people with complementary skills and views.

Lest you believe my story too positive, I attended some tough meetings, where really hard issues were presented and blood pressure went sky high. But these demonstrated some of the best examples of this view: it was here that it became abundantly clear that we had a group of people who were going to do whatever it took to achieve success, together. Frustration came not at complexity or external obstacles, but when (for a moment) goals did not seem shared or, more serious, opportunities to share concerns early may not have been taken—in short, a strong corrective seemed to be part of the system, to move back to effective communications.

The second thing that has made my initial transition so pleasant, challenges or not, is that I can see very clearly from the ground now (and not just from 30,000 feet) that many of the issues that one major R-1 public institution faces also are likely to be faced by others. Working in the national community in educational and information technologies, I often see and respond to surveys on my key issues. We often grouse a bit about all the things that concern us, but the fact is, the commonality of issues does mean that there is a lot of value in working together across campuses to define the problems and to work on joint solutions.

To be sure, each campus is unique and any strategy that doesn’t recognize that fully is sure to fail. Each campus not only has different technical requirements, but it has important differences in its faculty culture that may be ignored only at our peril. More than that, each campus has a unique and special history that make one-size-fits-all solutions hopelessly ineffective.

But, if we adjust for these important differences, we all have similar issues. We are all struggling with new ways to lower the barriers for faculty using learning technologies and “productivity” tools. We all see the tension, within IT, between being a rock-solid “utility,” whose services never fail, and being the engine for innovation and out-of-the-box thinking in partnership with the best and the brightest among the faculty, staff, and administrators. We pride ourselves on our commitment to effective practice, but at the same time struggle with (as several folks put it) the community’s appetite for solutions that exceed our budget.

There is one area that I need to mention that has also caught my attention. Having come from one campus (Illinois) that prides itself as a leader in the use of information technology to another early innovator, I have to say that both have amazing technical depth among the faculty and technology professionals (both centrally and in the colleges and administrative units). I don’t say this lightly—both have individuals that are recognized nationally and beyond as among the very best in their field. And, broadly speaking, both have real excellence in relatively similar areas. But, here is what I don’t quite have a grasp on yet-- the specific areas of excellence is quite different. Both schools have astounding research accomplishments and work extraordinarily effectively at building interdisciplinary partnerships that are both deep and wide. Both schools are working hard on key collaboration technologies and strategies (including identity and role management services, one measure of the campus's eagerness for collaboration), but the specific expertise is quite different. Both schools have a long history of commitment to learning and classroom technologies, but not only have they solved problems in vastly different ways, but they have very different specific strengths. So for their administrative services, project management, campus communications (tele- or people), and so on.

What is exciting to me is that these differences in specific strengths, very much like the differences in history (accidental and intentional, depending on the case), make my job very exciting. Issues are at the same time astoundingly familiar, yet critically different. My intuitions in general still work (I think), but I need to listen carefully to distinguish the substantial, nuanced differences from those of language or style.

It’s a bit like ethnic restaurants. A good Italian restaurant in Tokyo or Jerusalem is recognizably Italian, but it is nonetheless different in important ways from a good Italian restaurant in Northern California or Central Illinois, not even to consider those in Rome. One can argue whether each is authentic in some way, but I don’t bother. I long ago learned to love Japanese-style Indian food (and make it myself), knowing they wouldn’t make it that way in Chicago or Bombay. I look forward to good Chinese food made in Tel Aviv (or Eau Claire, Wisconsin), with its local accent of culinary adjustments.

To make the point, these differences are important in their own right and add a unique and fresh perspective. I hope I can bring to the table something of what I learned in my prior positions that allows me to be a creative force in my new community. My task is not to make it “my way,” but to help nurture and grow the special strengths I see here so that we can together address the many programmatic and technical issues that are before us.

Pass the curried Alfredo sauce and the jalapenos, please.

Recently I went to a very interesting conference, which focused on the nature of "millennial" students and how they learn. The gathered community consisted mostly of information technologists, including many CIOs, and so the emphasis was on the strategies campus IT organizations might adopt to serve (and teach) these new and special students well. While it seemed to be a noisy secret that Millennials were a real phenomenon, I was not aware of the apparently pervasive changes needed in our educational systems and infrastructure to respond to them. As a colleague once put it, these things are "well known to those who know them well," and I for one needed to brush up.

The keynote speaker, William Strauss, was a delightful presenter, demonstrating that a very smart, scholarly person who can break out in song can make his subject most engaging. Strauss, who co-wrote in 2000 with Neil Howe the seminal book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, is the co-founder and director of the Capitol Steps, known for their outstanding political satire. Other outstanding conference speakers included Chris Dede of Harvard, well known for innovative thinking about technology and teaching.

So, who are the Millennials? They are the newest "generation" of Americans, whose first wave is coming just now to a college near you. As the Millennials Rising web page puts it, "They're the most numerous, affluent, and ethnically diverse generation in American history. Teenage Millennials are mostly the children of Boomers, preteen Millennials mostly the children of Generation X." As Strauss and Howe point out, they are doing well in school and, what's more, they are likely to change how we teach, because they have years of practice in new ways of learning, "suggesting that Millennials will be a generation of strongly positive academic trends from first cohort to last." Part of this excellence comes from their peer interactions from their middle-school and high-school days, where (as Dede points out) they already learned how to use technology to collaborate at a distance, both as part of developing and maintaining their social interactions and on schoolwork-- often at the same time! According to Strauss and Howe, "Where Boomers and Xers had once seen computers as a force for social individuation, Millennials will see them as a force for social homogenization." Strauss and Howe's confidence in their view, echoed very broadly by others, comes from both substantial and substantive research and analysis (by them and others) and from prior success at prediction in an earlier book, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, published in 1997.

What's important about the buzz about Millennials is not only the fact that the buzz is positive-- these "kids" really are engaged, they are "global", and they are rebelling in a way that makes them "the inheritors of the mantle of the upbeat, team-playing, World War II-winning G.I.s." What more could we want? Before I comment on that, I have to tell you the most provocative presentation the authors make is in their chart, Generations and Archetypes, which describes all the American generations from Puritan (1588-1617), with famous representatives John Winthrop and Anne Hutchinson, to the Millennials, whose legacy is to be upheld by... Frankie Muniz (who?) and Mandy Moore! In between, we have some fierce competition for Frankie and Mandy, including "Tommy" Jefferson, "Abby" Adams, "Susie" B. Anthony, and Abe Lincoln. To be overly fair, I am sure that Frankie and Mandy are temporary stand-ins, until the Millennials get enough education to make real names for themselves. But the point is that the authors present a common sense (i.e. we all thought this anyway, evidence or not) and intriguing portrait of not only this generation, but all those before it to the beginning of (American) history.

There are a number of arguments against the fundamental value of this view of generations and some of these are as persuasive (if less slick) as Strauss and Howe's views, but that is not what concerns me today. What concerns me is that while these authors emphasize the global, diverse nature of this new generation, they at the same time precisely fail to recognize that diversity, even among the Millennials themselves, really matters in very fundamental ways. And this is where I want to bring it back to education and technology.

Once upon a time, there was supposedly just one view of how students "should" learn and academic institutions developed a very strong sense that students who were not thriving were improperly prepared (by others), lacked initiative, or were just not cut out for higher education. Yet, as the notion developed that higher education was valuable, often essential, to a far broader constituency, scholars started (albeit slowly) to recognize and respond to the fact that students learn differently, sometimes very differently. Students come with different levels of preparedness; different learning, studying, and test-taking skills and styles; and certainly different motivations for excellence and, ultimately, success. Years ago, I was involved in an NSF-funded program aimed at increasing the numbers of women and under-represented minorities in engineering. The program was aimed at high school students, but we very quickly learned that to make a real difference, we needed to start with middle-school students. Not long after that, it became clear that all the major math and science habits and fundamental skills were established by the second or third grade. This made it hard to solve the problem at the other end. But we also learned something else-- that different students had markedly different motivations for learning and faculty who didn't understand and teach to these different motivations effectively disenfranchised students who were otherwise poised for success in engineering.

The point is that while there is surely some real truth to the notion of generations, insofar as it relates to a cohort's self image and to what others expect of it, we must strongly resist the urge to believe we "know" these students learn in some new and monolithic way. Just as cultural diversity deeply matters, so does diversity in learning styles. While what we do know is that many more students today, no matter what their discipline, have a basic comfort level with technology (but this is hardly new information), that should empower us to use new teaching approaches to broaden the options, not to shrink them. In fact, we can be sure that the same issues apply as always: we must continue to improve our understanding of the range of learning styles and make even more of an effort to compromise on our "sage on the stage" tendencies, whenever we can convince ourselves (and this is most of the time) that alternative learning approaches can and do lead to similar and even superior outcomes in terms of preparedness to make substantive contributions to society. So, more video may help some learn better, but writing may be critical to others. Gaming may effectively demonstrate certain pedagogical goals, but not others. And so on.

So this brings me at long last to my fundamental point. The fact that this generation is technology-savvy is not the story; it is one facet of the solution. The academic community needs to find ways to move past the newness factor, to bring technology into the basic life of the campus in substantive ways. We should do this not because it is cool or even because it's millennial-friendly, but because it provides us with tools that increase our reach and flexibility. At the same time, it provides both faculty and the students themselves with new mechanisms for assessment and creativity. I.T. allows students who enjoy the sage on the sage to thrive, both in the classroom and at a distance, while allowing students who learn best from the "guide at the side" or (better) from mentors and peers to do so. I.T. provides tools, but the faculty must determine how best to use them, that allow strongly collaborative student teams to develop, that mimic how complex problems get solved in the real world, while at the same time ensuring that individual students can assess their own fundamental knowledge and skills. In short, let's embrace this generation's comfort with and demand for technology.

But let's not lose sight of the best thing about technology and this new generation of students. It is not about homogeneity. In fact, quite the opposite: it is about supporting different learning and teaching models, different methods of student engagement, and new varieties of assessment techniques. To put it back in human terms, technologists should be excited about the Millennials not because of their supposed sameness, but because we have in information technologies some of the very best tools since the beginning of (world) history to accommodate real diversity among our students. Once we understand just what we have, we can get on to the even more important task: not just accommodating diversity, but treasuring it. Let's shout it from the hills with pride. After all, just because some of us are older, that doesn't mean we can't also learn something new.

The Director's Cut 9 May 2006

According to Wikipedia, “a Director's cut is a specially edited version of a movie that is supposed to represent the director's own approved edit of the movie. It is often released some time after the original release of the film, where the original release was released in a version different from the director's approved edit.”
I would like today to comment on the growing importance of the concept inherent in the definition above to a completely different arena—books and articles, both in the popular press and in academia. First, some history.

A few months ago, a colleague of mine, Lanny Arvan, and I were talking about the impact that an institutional repository might have for teaching (we are building a really innovative one here at the University of Illinois called IDEALS). Lanny mentioned that it is often the case that the “working papers” version of a publication is often the most useful, having attached to it all kinds of detailed examples, alternative scenarios, and lots of data useful to colleagues and students. In addition, as faculty teach, they come up with other ideas, examples, and models that are associated with the publication and that tend to be shared along with it. None of these end up in print, but they are really useful.

Move ahead a couple of months. I happened to be at a joint meeting between Illinois library and IT folks and our Michigan counterparts and we were struggling with the question of what the target par excellence of an institutional repository might be. Yes, we all agreed we wanted to put in lots of things, but we wanted to be able to communicate clearly with the potential users, faculty, about what we thought they would really value and so we were determined to define the “core” object for the repository.

Somewhere in the discussion, I had drawn a bulls-eye on the board, with the traditional publication itself in the center and the additions and elaborations that Lanny had envisioned in the surrounding rings, followed by raw data, supporting computer simulations and applications, and so on. To my surprise this simplistic picture caught on and we all agreed we were not aiming for the bull’s-eye itself, but wanted to include the one or two rings that surround it, with the choice determined by each individual faculty member. We began to call this “the Director’s cut,” on the notion that this is the publication the faculty member really wants to disseminate—her own edit. Some of the material might be additions the publisher didn’t have space for or multimedia material that the publisher might traditionally reject as part of print materials, but our focus was far more on the notion that the faculty member, like a director, had a vision in mind of what she (or he) really wanted to get across to the audience (or audiences), whatever the media.

So “the Director’s cut” was born in its expanded sense as a version of a publication (broadly understood) that is specially enhanced to encompass what the author intends to communicate her way, and that often includes supporting material that is key to a full appreciation of that communication by one or more audiences. Unlke the traditional publication, it may include supplementary materials for students, or for faculty at institutions abroad. Much of the time, it will include additional material of interest to peer faculty. It may be more accessible, providing different ways of communicating the same insights (e.g. an audiocast, as well as charts). It may include video performances that a publisher views as superfluous (or at least, someone else’s profit stream). But, it must, as in the Wikipedia definition, be the author’s “own approved edit” of the material.

Recently, I was perusing a very worthwhile book by Linda M. Scott (who happens to be an Illinois faculty member), “Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism.” (While my point here isn’t to comment on the content, it is a really insightful book and you might take a look). Right in the introduction, she points the reader to additional material on the web (not that uncommon any more), but— here’s what caught my eye—the web material includes a “lost” chapter.

Quoting from the Fresh Lipstick website, Professor Scott describes the “lost” chapter, Warring Images:

“This chapter, which covers the 1940s, was cut from Fresh Lipstick for length considerations. Though I incorporated some of the material—on kinship and on the postwar lesbian subculture—into the chapters on the 1930s and 1950s, much of potential value and interest was left completely out. In this chapter, I discuss subjects ranging from pinups to Latina movie stars to women war workers while exploring questions of work, sexuality, and kinship. The images mentioned are not included right now because I am working on permissions while the website in under construction. –LMS”

So, here we have barely defined the term and we need it! Here is critical information that the author views as an essential part of the book (cut, after all, only for length), along with images that will make a difference to the reader in really understanding the book.

To close, I want to suggest that while universities will certainly lead in organization the rich range of information associated with “publications” in ways to enhance the search, display, and experience of the materials, a critical value will be in ensuring that the additional material is as accessible and usable years and decades later by serious scholars, curious school children, or committed citizens. The fact that innovative faculty are interested in creating these enhanced materials is important to scholarship and teaching and drives home the importance of institutional repositories like IDEALS at Illinois. The fact that even published books are likely to have key components not in their pages, but somewhere on the web (possibly only temporarily), makes this work all the more important and timely. Lead the way!

Postscript: This past Sunday (5/7/2006), the NY Times Book Review had a full-page ad for Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (p. 7), which I had read many years ago. It noted two new printed versions of the book—taking up most of the page in living color, a hardcover edition with color illustrations and a “striking slipcase and a ribbon marker… perfect … for graduation” and in very small print in the lower left-hand corner, a teensy bland book cover picture with this tiny caption:

“Also in paperback, Plus Edition, which includes special bonus material.”

I’ll see if the library has it.

Last year, the University of Illinois embarked on a new strategic planning process that will allow us, in the words of our new president, "to create a vibrant future for this great institution." An executive summary for the strategic plan has been produced, which in fact summarizes the Stage 2 campus plans and related university-level plans. Currently, the colleges and units are completing their more in-depth plans, according to a road map prepared by the president. That is, the plans have gone from broader, more institutional conceptualizations and measures to more and more specific plans as we move from university to campus to colleges and units. But now for something completely different!

Last fall (or even earlier), I broached the notion of having a campus-wide information technologies strategic plan for the Urbana-Champaign campus be developed in a "relay" fashion, where we (metaphorically speaking) "run alongside" the colleges and units as they put the finishing touches on their plans (this spring), and then begin our sprint to the finish line (next December) with a strategic plan that involves all the colleges in an open, comprehensive way. The notion is to create an IT Strategic Plan that makes explicit the implicit IT needs in the college plans, that develops clear strategies for the explicit needs, and that, at the same time, develops in a coherent way a common vision for information technologies on the campus. Let me talk briefly about each of these things.

Let me say at the outset that the mission here is to create a campus vision, not a centralized information technology vision. This is not merely politic, it is essential. There are many things, to be sure, that are best done centrally-- notably things that are pervasive, that are very expensive, or that have policy or institutional responsibilities that are both complex and out of scope for most units. At the same time, there are things that must be done at the college or unit level to be successful; these are often activities that require substantial faculty innovation or leadership, that are or must be supported on a small scale, or that are just cheaper or more flexibly done on a smaller, more intimate scale. But as important as these is the best option of all: hybrid capabilities or services born of partnership. There are many, many things that must be done as a partnership between units and larger entities like colleges (college offices) or central IT organizations; these include modular services, where there are parts that are best done centrally (identity management, say) and parts that are very specific (research systems that tie to central services). So, even if one were to say some things must be done centrally and some must be done in a distributed fashion, my vision is that the most important things are those that can be modularized or segmented as building blocks, some of which are central, secure, and bullet-proof and some of which are innovations throughout the academic enterprise.

So, let's first talk about why it's important to make explicit the implicit IT demands and needs from the college plans within a Campus IT Strategic Plan. Well, this is an easy one to explain (and hard to do!). First and most significantly, individuals with a vision for academic programs may not understand the complexity or cost of the IT portion-- it may be easy to say (or even just to assume): "Just add a 10 gigabit, fault-tolerant, 5-nines reliable network to all these locations and we can serve all those students (or clinicians or what have you)," yet that assumption could be an order of magnitude more costly than the faculty component of the program!

The important thing is that the faculty and college administrators should be free to develop their vision without the (frankly, rather distracting) task of figuring out all aspects of how to achieve their vision in IT terms (or in terms of library impact or other synergistic groups). Just as importantly, even though departments will try very hard to anticipate IT issues, they may not do so with sufficient detail to develop effective costs and measures; even more so, they may not (nor should they) understand the various approaches one could take to provide the capability they are looking for. This recalls the old adage from computer centers since the Stone Ages-- the faculty members state their problems in research, educational or other academic terms and the IT folks identify solutions in technology terms (ok, this is simplistic, but you get the point).

All this being true, we expect the colleges to do an awfully good job at making IT needs and issues explicit, weaving these issues expertly into their college narratives and measures. In fact, we hope to build on the excellent work they are doing. But each college may not be aware of common threads and IT-interplay among the colleges or even the commonality among similar threads within the colleges, so the Campus IT Strategic Plan will play a crucial role in integrating the various IT needs across the colleges in a way that identifies common infrastructure, capabilities and services and that proposes mechanisms for providing those. Again, the goal is not to "roll up" these needs into central services. Put simply, the goal is to make sure they are clearly identified and to make some recommendations as to how best to provide them. In most cases, I would hazard to guess, the recommendations will be for "building block" services that combine strengths within units, within colleges, across colleges (perhaps just two or three), and at the campus or university levels.

Finally, last and in some respects most and least, the IT Strategic Plan must provide an overall vision for the information technologies programs (and concomitant investment) on the campus. I say "least," because the most effective IT plan will have an exemplary strategy for addressing college needs, but some of the best academic goals will be achieved with IT solutions that are "good practices" and "well thought out," without necessarily being best-of-breed or innovative solutions. Some things will emphasize agility or faculty innovation over IT innovation. That is not only acceptable, but it is absolutely necessary.

I say "most" because in other aspects, however, we all recognize that leadership in Information Technologies is critical to the success of any campus, but most of all campuses like Illinois with a long history of leadership in both IT-related research and in the integration of IT into the research, scholarship, performance, and educational fabric of the campus. So, in some respects, the campus IT Strategic plan must show where we want to be in the medium-term and do so in such a way that it is a bold and exhilirating reach for a higher rung on the ladder (or even a leap to the next ladder), but with a substantive and detailed road map that gives us confidence we are not merely leaping into thin air. Universities are inherently conservative, so the balance between a vision for boldness and the need to proceed with fiscal prudence and a modicum of consensus is a delicate one-- but one we must find.

So, who will develop this Campus Information Technology Strategic Plan? Right now, the colleges are completing their draft plans and we hope to begin soon to review and synthesize key issues from the plans within the campus IT Advisory Board. This is the relay race, where the college folks hand "us" (i.e. hand other college folks and a few central IT leaders) the baton, and we begin the next phase. Current plans are for the the chair of the IT Advisory Board, the CIO (me), and a dean or similar academic leader to come together as a steering team to direct the full synthesis and visioning process, involving faculty from around the campus, but building critically on our first-rate IT Advisory Board membership. Using central and college IT experts as "staff" to the committee (i.e. helping organize the technical issues and solutions), the faculty involved will identify college goals with implicit and explicit IT needs and help shape a coherent campus-wide strategy for meeting those needs and measurably enhancing the ability to meet those goals.

Finally, ensuring a balance among the academic priorities already laid out in the campus and university strategic plans, we will document a common vision for information technologies as defined above.

While the basic plan will be developed over the summer and into early fall, we will invite broad participation from the campus in refining, redirecting, and enhancing the plan through a transparent information-sharing process, focus groups or town meetings with faculty, staff, and students, coordination and communication through college representatives at the IT Advisory Board, and information-sharing with the deans and associate deans (not to mention, constant communication with the administration, which after all must embrace the vision and understand how the information technology investments catalyze or otherwise crucially enable the college and unit academic goals).

In summary, the Campus Information Technologies Strategic Plan is a key component of a campus strategic planning process. At the same time, it is a different beast, in that its value comes from making explicit the implicit, seeing patterns of commonality that spread across the college plans like threads in a tapestry, and must at the same time have its own story of innovation and creativity that contributes in very special ways to the intellectual strengths of the University of Illinos. Echoing President White, through a well-crafted and inclusive strategic planning process, it is our task to lay out the critical catalytic role that Information Technologies will play in creating a vibrant future for this great institution!

Recently, I was asked to give a talk on a Vision for Information and Educational Technologies in the Research University. One way to be bold about the future is to consider the nature and rate of change in the past (it's also a good way to be very wrong in the details). Recently, there was a milestone of 20 years since the start of the National Science Foundation High-Performance Computing Centers' Program. Since I was in on the ground floor of that initiative (though wet behind the ears), I feel qualified to say a bit about what has changed.

The big revolution then was very focused on simulation (often stated as the third leg of research along with experiment and theory, but it's always been part of each of them). There was an emphasis on new and, especially, faster algorithms. There was a major emphasis on insight, individuals gaining greater understanding of cellular structures, brains, solar events, the weather, and so on. Finally, there was a growing understanding of the importance of data-- data manipulation, data storage, data visualization.

But, where are we today? Certainly, 20 years later, all of these things are still absolutely critical to academic scholarship and associated teaching (including graduate apprenticeships). But, there has been a remarkable revolution and enormous progress in areas that were not well understood 20 years ago. The revolution is in fact broader now, adding to the above: tremendous progress in communication (physical and interpersonal), linking humans together literally around the globe in seconds. Part and parcel with that, the revolution has developed our capabilities for group insight, where individuals at a distance are able to work together in ways that we only dreamed of before.

The IT Revolution (my buzz phrase for the revolution in the use of information and educational technologies) has fundamentally changed the world of academia because it has become an engine for collaboration and community building. But, while this is good news, it is overstated: it has not had as much of an impact on teaching and learning as it has on scholarship. But today's overstatement is also tomorrow's opportunity. It is my view that we are at the inflection point on a giant S-curve, where some very small changes in input parameters (incentives, investments, leadership) can-- and indeed must-- lead to significant changes in output (here, in terms of new and more effective ways to teach and learn).

In fact, to mention the vision thing, my vision here is that collaborative "hybrid" teaching is in fact not a compromise for the overcrowded, but a way to bring in more effective and diverse expertise, mirroring a similar pressure for multidisciplinary research as the best way to meet a host of societal challenges. What's more, in a global, flattened world, these same community-building strategies will allow students at multiple institutions (and our "own" students when overseas) to work together as learning teams, across time zones, through rich cultures, and (especially) creating critical new ways of looking at things.

So, the revolution is not over after all. In fact, it has scarcely begun. In a future post, I want to make some suggestions on what may be in the crystal ball for IT in the Research University, but let me complete this entry with some comments about the key attributes of the revolution. The revolution will be volatile, virtual, local and global, convergent, and ubiquitous. Let me highlight each of these attributes in turn.

The revolution is about volatility. Just as a few years ago, the endgame seemed to be laptops, it is now a dizzying integration of hand-held devices (with video, audio, GPS, and so on) that will soon wirelessly connect to large displays (it can be demo'd today) and keyboards in hotel rooms or study halls. Just as convergence just recently meant tethered voice, data, and video becoming one, it now means wireless voice, data, and video coming together in both public (cell) and campus (802.11) environments.

Just as a full-service learning management system was the holy grail a few years ago, we need LMS systems, blogs, wikis, and... oh, did I mention ITUNES and facebook. Did you imagine that facebook would be an important element in your students' lives? What about yours (coming soon!)?

And just in case you weren't paying attention, it's not all about portability. Just as you are carrying everything around, we are moving quickly to fiber optics on multiple light wavelengths to bring together collaborators without limit and create "multi-institutional servers" that can span states or even countries. And we are building servers in machine rooms that run so hot, they require "extreme" cooling, boosting room costs from $200 per square foot to $900 or more. And you thought the server would stay under your desk!

The revolution is about virtuality. We are talking about less dependence on bricks and mortar for collaboration. We are talking about situational awareness, where my AIM session knows where I am and (with appropriate privacy protection) can tell you whether I am available online or at the coffee shop. We are talking about more powerful asynchronous tools for learning and teaching together. We are talking about reliable (!!!) synchronous tools that ensure that our video collaborations and shared presentations appear seamlessly without an army of support technicians.

So, we will build new research and teaching collaborations without having to build buildings. Why not have native speakers of Navajo able to teach their children or health care workers their tongue, no matter where they live or work? Why not have translators virtually present via wireless and HDTV at the hospital bed of an immigrant, to make sure the patient is well served, despite the high costs of having translators of lesser represented languages "on hand." (This is something that is being done today, but at the "best" hospitals-- it is not yet common, much less ubiquitous).

Rather than build bricks and mortar, which keep on taking long after the program has served its purpose, we should build collaborations, which means reliable, flexible services that join partners, both local and around the world, into a common environment. Let's focus buildings on areas that don't demand collocation-- classrooms (of course), expensive instruments that can't be duplicated, programs that involve hazards and other complex safety and monitoring issues.

Virtuality means new learning models, really serving the students of the future-- traditional students, alumni and lifelong learners (those baby boomers really are not going to go away quietly), and students at partner universities overseas!

The revolution is about locality. Paradoxically, virtuality strengthens local ties-- it allows natural collaborators to stay "in touch" wherever they are, creates and strengthens group identity among busy people, and motivates people to get together when it matters (often to build personal ties, rather than to share basic information). Part of what we learn from locality is what feels right in collaborations-- the joy of sharing a good meal, of brainstorming in the office as the sun goes down, and just saying "I'll call you" as you meet by chance crossing campus. What we must do with that learning is apply it to working at a distance, both with colleagues we have met in the flesh and those we only know from the Internet.

The revolution is about globality. Globality is "a worldwide, interconnected economy," says wordspy.com. The global information economy creates opportunities for the most highly effective groups to form at will with non-traditional partners anywhere on the globe. It should create opportunities for responding better to international crises, like avian flu or natural disasters; it will create opportunities for companies to create or serve new markets; it must allow learning and scholarship to reach and impact every citizen of the planet in ways that in the past we could only dream of.

But globality also scares us. At its scariest, it means very different cultures are interacting in ways that threaten us. Perhaps worrisome in a different way, it allows others a real opportunity to compete with us for our best students; to the victor go the spoils, where the victor is defined as having the most agility, lowest cost, highest quality, and so on. While some aspects of globality are truly problematic and even chaotic, it is a fact of our future and we must manage it, not let it manage us.

The revolution is about convergence. As I mentioned earlier, we had a vision for convergence of voice, data, video and multimedia. Now, its about going from streaming audio and video to stereos and HDTVs, to having cell phones operate as video conferencing tools, as clickers (providing instant feedback in class), caching data so you have it with you everyhwere, acting as your secure interface and proxy, and creating collaborative teams wherever you go!

But convergence doesn't just mean of hardware. It means a slow migration away from clunky, complex learning management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, calendars, email, course reserves, and so on. Towards? Well, towards flexible toolkits that provide a spectrum of collaborative services that run the gamut from research environments (like virtual gaming, I mean simulation systems) to tools for scholarship (like digital repositories and online publications) to teaching tools (like online quizzing) to learning tools (like online quizzing, but virtual gaming tools too) to administrative tools (like course planning tools) and so on. While Sakai may be the best example today of the vision, it is only the smallest snowflake in a New England Blizzard.

What excites me so much about an integrated vision of collaboration-- where learning/teaching and research/scholarship are on a spectral continuum-- is that it allows for diversity in learning, it brings students together in new (and old) ways, providing real ties between what students learn in the classroom and how faculty explore important research topics. It naturally embraces multidisciplinary teaching and research and prepares us for multi-institutional partnerships. It speaks hybrid, not monotone. Idealized, it takes the very best and makes it available to those who otherwise could only dream of it; it brings the worthy, but disadvantaged, into a peer relationship with those with every advantage.

"So, this is an exciting picture indeed," you agree. "But," you say, "it is expensive, it is complex, and it represents too much change-- what makes you think it is going to happen. In a phrase, what is the value proposition for the academy?"

That is a story for another day. I will give you a hint, though-- global competitiveness, aging baby boomers, the need for an agile workforce, and the growing intellectual strength of China and India are important, indeed irresistible, factors. In the end, the value proposition will be more effective learning, scholarship and research and, from them, new ways to understand and solve critical societal problems and a better understanding of our complex and changing world. And these are things we all are willing to invest in.