EDUCAUSE | Contributed by Organizations or Campuses; Articles, Papers, and Reports; and Collaboration

Beyond Being There: A Blueprint for Advancing the Design, Development, and Evaluation of Virtual Organizations

ckeller — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:01:37 -0500

This report is based primarily on a workshop involving 42 people from academia and industry.
The goal of the workshop was to share systematic knowledge about the components, characteristics,
practices, and transformative impact of effective VOs; identify topics for future research that will
inform the ongoing design, development, and analysis of VOs for science and engineering research
and education; and create a new cross-disciplinary VO research community to conduct research across
a range of important topics. A subsequent workshop brought together more than 200 practitioners and
VO researchers to discuss how to build effective virtual organizations, and some of the material from
that workshop is represented here.

When Authorship Isn't Enough: Lessons from CERN on the Implications of Formal and Informal Credit Attribution Mechanisms in Collaborative Research

elilly — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:48:53 -0600

As research collaborations grow in size, scope, and time horizon, they increasingly resemble organizations in and of themselves. The traditional institutional structure of science, however, is fundamentally focused on individual scientists. Reconciling these novel research organizations with traditional structures has proven a difficult challenge for the high energy physics community, which has a longstanding tradition of large collaborations. In this paper I draw on interview data gathered in this community to explore the issues of authorship and credit attribution, with an eye toward extrapolating lessons for those in other disciplines. Results suggest that authorship practices in physics are fundamentally problematic in several respects, and that this stems in part from a need to recognize multiple types of contributions.

Enhancing Graduate Education: A Fresh Look at Library Engagement

ckeller — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:02:14 -0600

Over 100 librarians, administrators, faculty, and other members of the academic community concerned about issues relating to graduate education convened in Washington DC on October 12, 2007, to participate in the forum "Enhancing Graduate Education: A Fresh Look at Library Engagement."2 Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the event promoted engagement in conceptualizing the library's evolving role in graduate education, and it encouraged academic libraries to begin considering new ways to partner with the broader graduate studies community. The forum was inspired by the Council of Graduate Schools 2007 report, Graduate Education: The Backbone of American Competitiveness and Innovation,3 which examines the current state of graduate education and how it influences the positioning of the United States in the global economy. Asserting the need for cooperation across education, business, and policy sectors, the report emphasizes the need to strengthen and promote an educational model that will "enhance US innovation and national security in the 21st century."4 The report's authors emphasized essential cooperation across sectors, enhanced flexibility within institutions of higher education, and focus on interdisciplinarity and globalization, themes that were equally dominant throughout the daylong
forum.

Large Scale Collection and Sanitization of Network Security Data: Risks and Challenges

ckeller — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:11:16 -0600

"Over the last several years, there has been an emerging interest in the development of wide-area data collection and analysis centers to help identify, track, and formulate responses to the ever-growing number of coordinated attacks and malware infections that plague computer networks worldwide. As large-scale network threats continue to evolve in sophistication and extend to widely deployed applications, we expect that interest in collaborative security monitoring infrastructures will continue to grow, because such attacks may not be easily diagnosed from a single point in the network. The intent of this position paper is not to argue the necessity of Internet-scale security data sharing infrastructures, as there is ample research [13, 48, 51, 54, 41, 47, 42] and operational examples [43, 17, 32, 53] that already make this case. Instead, we observe that these well-intended activities raise a unique set of risks and challenges.
We outline some of the most salient issues faced by global network security centers, survey proposed defense mechanisms, and pose several research challenges to the computer security community. We hope that this position paper will serve as a stimulus to spur groundbreaking new research in protection and analysis technologies that can facilitate the collaborative sharing of network security data while keeping data contributors safe and secure."

FBI-.edu security partnership trying to overcome decades of mistrust

ckeller — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:41:35 -0600

"Two weeks ago, we described a report from the National Research Council on the challenges of balancing an open academic research environment with the risks that the fruits of the research could be adopted by terrorists. One of the report's recommendations was the formation of a standing committee comprised of academics and members of the national security agencies. It turns out that the FBI had already heeded similar advice—back in 2005."

When Wikipedia Is the Assignment

ckeller — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:39:58 -0500

A professor and a technology specialist discuss their attempt to bring term papers out into the open with the resource many faculty members abhor.

Working and Learning Better: Virtually Together

ckeller — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:04:36 -0500

Collaborative software creates new options for students and educators.

Culture Morph

ckeller — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:58:09 -0500

Technologists and librarians are discovering that intelligent organizational overlap is the route to the digital library of the future.

Open Science Grid: Building and Sustaining General Cyberinfrastructure Using a Collaborative Approach

ckeller — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:09:19 -0500

The author describes in this paper the creation and operation of the Open Science Grid (OSG [1]), a distributed shared cyberinfrastructure driven by the milestones of a diverse group of research communities. The effort is fundamentally collaborative, with domain scientists, computer scientists and technology specialists and providers from more than 70 U.S. universities, national laboratories and organizations providing resources, tools and expertise. The evolving OSG facility provides computing and storage resources for particle and nuclear physics, gravitational wave experiments, digital astronomy, molecular genomics, nanoscience and applied mathematics. The OSG consortium also partners with campus and regional grids, large projects such as TeraGrid [2], Earth System Grid [3], Enabling Grids for E–sciencE (EGEE [4]) in Europe and related efforts in South America and Asia to facilitate interoperability across national and international boundaries.

OSG’s experience broadly illustrates the breadth and scale of effort that a diverse, evolving collaboration must undertake in building and sustaining large–scale cyberinfrastructure serving multiple communities. Scalability — in resource size, number of member organizations and application diversity — remains a central concern. As a result, many interesting [5] challenges continue to emerge and their resolution requires engaged partners and creative adjustments.

Analysis of Open Source Principles in Diverse Collaborative Communities

drupal — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:00:34 -0500

Open source culture and practice emerged as software hackers took control over the production, ownership and distribution of their skilled work. This revolution, quiet and unnoticed by most, began over twenty years ago. Along the way, free and open source software hackers developed organizational and dialog structures to support their ethos, creating a successful model for collaboration. This paper applies traits common to successful free software and open source hacker communities as a framework to analyze three non–hacker collaborative communities.

Shared CMS Hosting Services in Ohio: Year One

drupal — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:37:56 -0600

To encourage shared infrastructure, the Ohio Board of Regents funded a partnership among the Ohio Digital Commons for Education (ODCE), the University of Cincinnati (UC) and Kent State University (KSU) to provide statewide CMS hosting, content repository, and authentication services in Ohio.

Campuses Make Way for the Worldwide Wiki

drupal — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:08:34 -0600

Do you wiki? Almost sounds suggestive, doesn't it? But while it is a trend on college campuses, where it may be bordering on a craze among the millennial generation, you can still get blank stares when you ask a grayer general audience about wikis.

University of Tennessee's Collaborative Digital Media Spaces

drupal — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 13:22:00 -0500

How can we provide access to several hundred songs to 1,300 students who enroll annually in the History of Rock course? This was the initial question to be answered by the University of Tennessee (UT). The answer ended up to be two workable models and accompanying collaborative spaces for production and creation of digital media content for the campus--the Digital Media Service and the Studio. Formulating the answer required close partnerships between the library, the Office of Information Technology, and faculty from across the campus.

Collaborate or Die: Designing Library Space

drupal — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 13:17:30 -0500

Collaboration might not pose a life-or-death choice, but it is required for designing the library of the future. This article discusses the impulse for collaboration, the social nature of design, collaborative design in libraries, and lessons learned.

Texas Universities Join to Create a Digital Library for Scholars and the Public

drupal — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 10:25:51 -0500

Four Texas university systems and Rice University will collaborate on a digital repository whose goal is to offer online resources, such as teaching aids, dissertations, and practical information, although not books.

Implementing an Innovation Cluster in Educational Settings In Order to Develop Constructivist-Based Learning Environments

drupal — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 11:04:44 -0500

This forum initiated with a description of the implementation of a constructivist-based reform effort in k-12 classrooms in the US. The reform effort was an online collaboration among four teachers in 4th and 5th grades classrooms to implement a design problem-based unit meant to develop higher-order thinking responses in students. The unit design principles are correlated to current research in the cognitive sciences and the teachers' efforts at implementing reform are correlated to current research in theories of innovation. The initial description also briefly characterizes aspects of the implementation process that led to productive or less productive reform results.

Community Source Springs Forth

drupal — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 15:36:32 -0500

Implementing new administrative systems software takes time, but support for community source projects is gaining ground.

MusicGrid: A Case Study in Broadband Video Collaboration

drupal — Wed, 18 May 2005 16:35:18 -0500

The technical requirements for widespread deployment of broadband video over the Internet are rapidly being met. But a harder challenge remains: how can video–based technologies promote collaboration and learning?

We present a case study: the MusicGrid Project. Running from 2002 to 2004 with partners in several Canadian and international locations, this modestly funded initiative ran over one hundred successful multi–site education and performance sessions. The rationale, development, and operation of the project are discussed, along with general lessons learned. We believe that our experience and the opportunities and issues identified will be useful to all those interested in large–scale, video–based collaboration projects.

Virtual Dissection and Physical Collaboration

drupal — Wed, 18 May 2005 16:25:06 -0500

This paper explores how software can be designed for individual use or for collaboration in the physical or virtual world, focusing on physical collaboration. The case study explored is the design and use of frog and human dissection simulation software. Since socialization has traditionally played an important role in the dissection laboratory experience, yet dissection simulations do not typically incorporate any online or offline interactions, the idea of virtual dissections or other types of educational software for physical collaboration is proposed.

Libraries and University Presses can Collaborate to Improve Scholarly Communication or "Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?"

drupal — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 11:19:49 -0600

Scholarly communication is evolving to meet the challenges and opportunities of the current technological era. Research universities expect academic libraries and presses to overcome cultural differences and collaborate to improve the production and dissemination of scholarship. This paper examines the separate worlds of libraries and presses and explores the common ground between the two where collaborations occur, particularly those related to monographic publications.

Improving Art History Education: Library and Faculty Partnerships in Instructional Technology Development

drupal — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 17:04:08 -0500

This article discusses the provenance of a partnership between the Digital Projects Department (DPD) at Northern Illinois University (NIU) Libraries and NIU's Art History Department that seeks to improve art education at NIU. Academic librarians and other library personnel have unique skills, which along with providing traditional library services, should be utilized to meet instructional and educational challenges. Since DPD has a history of providing access to multimedia content via the Internet, it seemed natural to partner with the art history department to create a tool for accessing slides of artwork via the Web.

Using the Internet to Enable Developing Country Universities to Meet the Challenges of Globalization through Collaborative Virtual Programmes

drupal — Fri, 10 Oct 2003 13:17:57 -0500

Globalization represents a significant threat as well as a substantial opportunity to the economies and educational systems of Africa and other areas of the developing world. This paper shows that, if used wisely, information technology has the power to help create powerful and synergistic educational partnerships at local, regional and global scale. Such new and large-scale partnerships, only possible because of the existence of the Internet, have the potential to allow educational institutions to respond positively to globalization and help promote development if enough partnerships can be created and sustained. This paper explores two emerging educational partnerships, NetTel@Africa and the International Ocean Institute Virtual University (IOIVU), in terms of the lessons for how technology can be used to respond to the challenges and opportunities of globalization, and to allow institutions in developing countries to achieve results that could not be achieved by either institution acting alone. Although they are responses to different circumstances, and operate at different scales, NetTel@Africa and the IOIVU have many common elements. These partnerships serve as examples of how the Internet can unite widely the scattered expertise in most areas of human endeavor that exist in Africa and other areas of the developing world to create virtual concentrations, or "centres of excellence" that do not have a single physical base.