EDUCAUSE | Resource Sharing

Information Sharing for IT Security Professionals

vvogel — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:44:50 -0500

Learn how to develop a network of professional contacts in order to create an effective support system for information sharing within the IT Security community. Read the article "Information Sharing for IT Security Professionals" by EDUCAUSE Security Task Force Coordinator, Rodney Petersen in the latest EDUCAUSE Quarterly.

Happy Families, Good Fences, and Winning IT Collaborations

ckeller — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:12:46 -0500

This ECAR research bulletin introduces the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation research on successful collaborative practices in the context of higher education. It details 20 collaborative success factors and maps them to relevant examples gleaned from research on IT collaboration conducted by ECAR.

Citation for this work: Pirani, Judith A., and Toby D. Sitko. “Happy Families, Good Fences, and Winning IT Collaborations” (Research Bulletin, Issue 15). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Information Sharing for IT Security Professionals

ckeller — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:32:29 -0500

Developing a network of professional contacts creates an effective support system for information sharing.

Things to Do While Waiting for the Future to Happen: Building Cyberinfrastructure for the Liberal Arts

elilly — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:29:26 -0500

What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this agenda forward?

Cyberinfrastructure: In Tune for the Future

elilly — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:20:55 -0500

Cyberinfrastructure permits a new kind of scholarly inquiry and education, empowering communities to innovate and to revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates.

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.

Hosting Enterprise Applications

drupal — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:11:20 -0500

There are increasing demands on state education networks to provide more enterprise applications and services, including course management systems, video-on-demand content repositories, disaster recovery, and shared high performance computing GRIDS. Beyond the sizable economies of scale and efficiencies to be gained by constituent members, what are the benefits to our community? The panelists will discuss initiatives underway in their states and will describe some of the challenges, strategies and implementation issues to consider when contemplating centrally hosting enterprise applications and resources within your StateNet.

Shared Converged Services

drupal — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:11:18 -0500

Starting and maintaining a new service offering is a significant undertaking that requires resources and time. Some services are tied directly to the network and local resources; these must be developed and run by the local state network. Others are not and can be shared by multiple state networks. Panelists will discuss how StateNets may offer services to other state networks, whereby recipients can then offer the service to their community as if it were their own.

NJVid - A Statewide Video-on-Demand Repository

drupal — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:38:31 -0600

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a 3-year grant for nearly a million dollars to a partnership between William Paterson University, Rutgers University Libraries and NJEDge.Net to develop and deploy a statewide academic video-on-demand repository. The digital video repository (Fedora Commons-based) will he housed in the core of the NJEDge network and will provide "lectures-on-demand", licensed commercial videos, and locally owned videos. A Video Commons collection will be publically available including history, lectures from notables, and video documenting research and scientific advances. NJVid is notable for providing a statewide video strategy to accommodate any type of organization-higher education, K12, public libraries, museums and archives. A substantial part of this project will provide the resources to develop a statewide Shibboleth-based Identity management infrastructure, supporting statewide network authentication and authorization that can be used for many content resources. This presentation will describe the open source architecture and middleware applications that are under development. Much effort will be expended for an extensible approach that can be implemented by other statewide or consortial video initiatives.

An Initiative to Share Digital Repository Services for Liberal Arts Colleges

drupal — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 11:04:18 -0600

In January 2007, 13 geographically separated liberal arts colleges joined with the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) and the Longsight Group on an initiative for shared, managed, institutional repository services. The resulting collaboration promises to dramatically lower the barrier for entry into an emerging technology for smaller colleges.

Digital Storytelling to Enhance Faculty Development in Universal Design for Learning

drupal — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 11:04:17 -0600

This presentation will demonstrate discipline-specific case studies to enhance faculty development in universal design for learning. We will highlight California State University's EnACT project, which supports learning for 10,000 CSU students with disabilities, and MERLOT ELIXR, a faculty development collaboration across state systems and campuses for developing cases and shared teaching resources.

Disaster Recovery: A Multi-Institutional Collaboration at the University of California System

ckeller — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:59:01 -0500

This case study complements the 2007 ECAR study by Philip J. Goldstein, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. Researchers undertook this case study to understand the benefits of multi-institutional development of a ubiquitously needed IT service. By leveraging emerging technology, procurement opportunities, and internal resources, the University of California Office of the President and University of California, San Diego were able to develop a complex disaster recovery solution involving the joint hosting and comprehensive mirroring of each location’s mainframe and non-mainframe computing environments.

The Kuali Group: Effective Practices and Structures Foster a Successful Collaboration

ckeller — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 13:53:04 -0500

This case study complements the 2007 ECAR study by Philip J. Goldstein, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. Researchers undertook this case study to understand the methods and practices used to manage ongoing collaborative activity and how the Kuali group partners plan for the sustainability of their collaboration. The case study highlights the collaborative nature of the Kuali Project to meet its goal of building a suite of administrative software, rather than the project’s history, structure, or operations.

7 Things You Should Know About Cyberinfrastructure

ckeller — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:09:16 -0500

Cyberinfrastructure is not a new technology, per se, or merely a better, faster Internet. While cyberinfrastructure brings together high-performance computing, remote sensors, large data sets, middleware, and sophisticated applications (modeling, simulation, visualization), it also involves people as participants in the generation of knowledge, giving them the opportunity to share expertise, tools, and facilities. Cyberinfrastructure merges technology, data, and human resources into a seamless whole.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

In addition to the "7 Things You Should Know About…" briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.

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.

Multi-Institutional IT Collaboration

ckeller — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 10:35:00 -0500

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. In 2006, ECAR distributed three surveys: the first was designed simply to ascertain whether the responding institution collaborated in significant ways; the second asked responding collaborators to describe their experiences, views, outcomes, concerns, and readiness with and for collaborations; and the third asked self-identified non-collaborators in IT to describe the barriers to collaboration they face, the cultural assumptions and beliefs of their institutions, and their views about the possible future for IT collaboration at their institutions. The survey responses offer a rich snapshot of how and when colleges and universities collaborate, the nature of the collaborations themselves, and a sense of the effectiveness of IT collaborations in higher education.

IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources Roadmap

ckeller — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:27:13 -0500

This ECAR roadmap synthesizes the important issues and recommended actions drawn from the 2007 study, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. The study explores multi-institutional collaboration in terms of the types of information technology (IT) collaborations in higher education and the practices associated with positive outcomes. It is based on a literature review to identify issues and develop research questions; a screening survey of 586 colleges and universities to distinguish collaborators from non-collaborators; a follow-up survey tailored for 157 institutions presently engaged in at least one form of collaboration and a separate follow-up survey tailored for 113 institutions that have elected not to participate in IT collaborations; qualitative interviews with IT leaders from 30 institutions including both collaborators and non-collaborators; consultation with a select group of chief information officers who are extensively engaged in collaboration; and two in-depth case studies that look at how collaborators form, manage, and sustain their ventures.

IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources - Key Findings

ckeller — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:09:11 -0500

This document presents the key findings from the 2007 ECAR study, IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources. The study explores multi-institutional collaboration in terms of the types of information technology (IT) collaborations in higher education and the practices associated with positive outcomes. It is based on a literature review to identify issues and develop research questions; a screening survey of 586 colleges and universities to distinguish collaborators from non-collaborators; a follow-up survey tailored for 157 institutions presently engaged in at least one form of collaboration and a separate follow-up survey tailored for 113 institutions that have elected not to participate in IT collaborations; qualitative interviews with IT leaders from 30 institutions including both collaborators and non-collaborators; consultation with a select group of chief information officers who are extensively engaged in collaboration; and two in-depth case studies that look at how collaborators form, manage, and sustain their ventures.

IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources

ckeller — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:08:10 -0500

This 2007 ECAR research study explores multi-institutional collaboration in terms of the types of information technology (IT) collaborations in higher education and the practices associated with positive outcomes. The study is based on a literature review to identify issues and develop research questions; a screening survey of 586 colleges and universities to distinguish collaborators from non-collaborators; a follow-up survey tailored for 157 institutions presently engaged in at least one form of collaboration and a separate follow-up survey tailored for 113 institutions that have elected not to participate in IT collaborations; qualitative interviews with IT leaders from 30 institutions including both collaborators and non-collaborators; consultation with a select group of chief information officers who are extensively engaged in collaboration; and two in-depth case studies that look at how collaborators form, manage, and sustain their ventures. A corporate edition is available here.

IT Collaboration: Multi-Institutional Partnerships to Develop, Manage, and Operate IT Resources - Corporate Edition

ckeller — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 17:02:20 -0500

Inter-institutional Collaboration with Technology

drupal — Sun, 27 May 2007 18:39:19 -0500

Many small, undergraduate colleges aspire to similar curricular goals yet lack opportunities to share resources in ways that could help them meet these common goals. These campuses go it alone by choice or for lack of information about others' solutions to their common challenges. Consortia have made progress in sharing administrative services; curricular collaboration is much more difficult in a context where faculty members work independently and are evaluated as individuals. Curricular wheels are reinvented when faculty on neighboring campuses develop similar course materials. Less commonly taught languages remain out of the reach of many small campuses. Students compromise on electives when faculty members take sabbatical leaves. Opportunities to enhance learning are often missed.

On the other hand, technologies that facilitate communication and collaboration, many of which are basic and reliable, allow our faculties to work more closely on curricular projects to the benefit of our students.

An Interview with Jack McCredie at CNI's 2007 Spring Task Force Meeting

gbayne — Tue, 01 May 2007 18:16:49 -0500

This podcast features a 13 minute interview with Jack McCredie, Associate Vice Chancellor, Emeritus, CIO, Emeritus, and Senior Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He discusses collaboration between departments, campuses, and institutions and the issues and challenges facing system unification.

An important issue in planning, managing, and funding the broad range of information services on campuses is how to get departmental, campus, system-wide, and external organizations to work well together. Often they do not, and sometimes they actively compete.

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR), the Common Solutions Group, CNI, the UC Berkeley campus, and many other organizations have been working on developing collaborative models that provide better service and that save money.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2007 Spring Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

Collaboration at the Core of Change

drupal — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:50:53 -0500

Lake Forest College and Kalamazoo College have undertaken a collaboration initiative to provide e-mail and help desk services on shared hardware located in a remote data center. Representatives from both schools will discuss the process for forming the collaboration and the benefits realized to date.

Collaborating on an ERP System Implementation in Wisconsin

drupal — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 15:50:53 -0500

Under the auspices of WAICU, four members of WAICU (Lakeland College, MSOE, Ripon College, and Wisconsin Lutheran College), with different constituencies and business processes, created the WAICU Educational Technology Consortium (ETC), Inc. to purchase, implement, and support a common administrative system.

EDUCAUSE Southwest Regional Conference 2007. Summary: Collaboration and the Academy of the Future

llarsen — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 13:23:18 -0500

Summary:

Opening General Session

2007 Southwest Regional Conference

February 21, 2007

Austin, TX

Collaboration and the Academy of the Future

Brian Hawkins, President, EDUCAUSE

Abstract

This session will discuss the essential need to collaborate in the new models of higher education. Collaboration is no longer an alternative strategy—it is the only means of competitive survival. The session will identify reasons why we must collaborate, obstacles to collaboration, and new business models to facilitate this much-needed approach in the current and future higher education environment.

Summary

Quoting from “The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century,” (http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=PUB6004) Brian Hawkins made the point that the things that have made US Higher Education strong in the past are now the barriers to the maintaining that strength in the future.

A short walk-through of history looked at the 1960-1980 as a period when we had fewer users and specialized uses of computing on college campuses. Computing was done with mainframes. People had limited use. Networking was not in the picture.

The 1980’s brought an explosion of computing with microcomputers which expanded the order of magnitude of use but still were somewhat limited. Networking was in the picture but still not a major player.

Today IT is ubiquitous and the increase in users is by two orders of magnitude. Support staff and financials have gone up 2-3 times but in comparison the user bases have grown astronomically. Much of our infrastructure and services simply can’t scale to meet the demand. We don’t have enough people and we don’t have enough resources.

Hawkins suggests that the resource problem is that we continue to have an incremental approach to our budgets. Our budgets have increased by about 3.5% per year over the past 30-35 years and that’s our budgets today. The role of the CIO is relatively new.

Issues we face include:

An inability (unwillingness) to do major reallocations
An inability (unwillingness) to ever cease ending programs
An inability (unwillingness) to refuse the desire of users – we’re not good at saying “no” which means we have too many people to serve with complexity and have a labor intensive approach.

New models are needed as we move into the future.

From the Spellings Commission report (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/index.html)

What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise; increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied and unduly expensive.

Hawkins indicated that we must work together as we look for new models for the future and said that “we can’t get help from the government and there is no gravy train.”

Companies that are successful and compete successfully are agile, nimble, and flexible. Higher Education is not. Higher Education IT needs to collaboratively develop new and adaptive structures! If we don’t we won’t have critical mass and we will not have enough resources. Trying to go it alone doesn’t work. We’ll NEVER have enough resources if we do not collaborate.

Hawkins spoke of the ideas of Milton Friedman, monetary economy and policy expert (http://www.adamsmith.org/friedman/home.htm) and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the marketplace” (http://www.answers.com/topic/invisible-hand)

We are not used to collaboration and cooperation and we have excuses why we can’t

Not enough time
Competition with campus priorities
Recognition – who will get credit
Sharing/trusting/inequities
Diversity of standards and cultures.

Hawkins suggested that we talk the talk, but we don’t walk the walk. We meet at the conferences and get excited about collaborating but we forget it when we get back to the minutia of our day to day work-life.

Often we choose our collaborations by “who do we play football with” rather than by our values and circumstances.

Prejudices that hinder our moving forward in collaborations include:

Pride in “our way” (“the name-your-institution her” way”)
The “Not-Invented-Here” Syndrome -
Control: Who will be in charge? If you have a collaboration of 75 institutions they can’t all be in control.
Desire for “yesterday” when things were “simple”
“Uniqueness” of our campus
Something we do after our primary work is done.

Hawkins asks “Are these differences strategic or merely an exercise in hubris?”

Our basic services from campus to campus are essentially the same.

Mandates to collaborate include:

Finding the personnel to implement and maintain individual campus services can be a roadblock. For example, rural areas may not be able to find appropriate personnel yet a large campus may have access to many.
We have redundant/duplicative efforts even on our own campuses with our libraries and other units. We often ignore economies of scale and don’t think about how to share the little excess that we may have.

Hawkins discussed work on models of social infrastructure by Andrea Youngdahl (http://www.oaklandhumanservices.org/department/message.htm)

Cooperation – for us this is like EDUCAUSE conferences and activities behavior, informal and superficial, where we do information sharing, have committees, but fundamentally stay separate.

Coordination – for us this is where the activity lasts as long as personal relationship trust results in a mutual commitment. Differences are accommodated, we work on filling in the gaps together, and we share resources.

Collaboration – for us this is activity that leads to a new community through a shared vision and is based on a business model that is sustainable.

Hawkins described a need for classics study in small schools where each couldn’t afford to hire faculty individually. They received a grant that enabled them to split up the work and it worked as long as the grant lasted.

Another situation described was one in which the National Association of College Stores, (http://www.nacs.org/) who could not individually compete with large university bookstores, set up a separate third party, not based on a relationship, that succeeded in helping all, both small and large.

JSTOR and ARTstor efforts to make resources (periodicals / art images) available are succeeding because of having an appropriate business model. (See www.jstor.org and www.artstor.org)

ITHAKA – (http://www.ithaka.org/)

To do things not addressed by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace (we need it now)

To create new organizations to address critical needs not met by the market

To create sustainable models

The Boston Consortium – procurement and more and could get together because they were close.

Hawkins listed the following elements needed for success:

It should be run professionally
It should not be dependent on volunteerism
It should be an investment
It should have an appropriate business structure
It should be able to do business across state boundaries
It should have a Governance structure like a corporation (not yet another consortium)
It should be based on quid pro quo (not just good will)

He concluded that what’s good for one side is philanthropy, what’s good for business is good for both sides

Some illustrations included:

EDUCAUSE, which is run like a business.

Open Source

CAUSE began in 1952 as the College and University System Exchange. They shared programming, had high cooperation, and bordered on collaboration. This was essentially Open Source as it was primarily about sharing code. However, the actions to keep up the documentation, upgrades, maintenance, and ongoing support were not so good. Today a great deal of cooperation and coordination, but not yet collaboration, is happening in this space.

Ira Fuchs, who funded SAKAI and other collaborations, is now talking about EDUCORE as business. You can listen to a podcast by Ira Fuchs that includes comments about EDUCORE at http://connect.educause.edu/podcasts/ira_fuchs_cni_2006.

More characteristics needed for success include:

Help institutions avoid the tyranny of stair-step increments
Actively leverage the technology
Stay out of areas in which the market is working effectively
Draw upon existing perceived strengths and brands (great universities are a great brand)
Where saving are not just temporal as buying consortia which delay the inevitable because corporations will eventually just jack up the price to gain what they want in profit.

To combat the myth of going it alone, we should ask questions such as

Do we have the expertise to do this internally?
What can we leverage if we work together?
What price are we willing (or able) to pay?

Hawkins discussed cost reduction strategies reported in the Core Data Survey and responses to these from his perspective

Consortia/shared purchases. These only delay the inevitable price jacks.
Freezing salaries before outsourcing. We need to re-examine outsourcing and see how to better use our resources.

We have grand challenges facing us in Higher Education.

“If you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem”

The process:

What are the big issues?
What role will IT play in solving them?
What are the Impediments to IT impact on Issues?
What can we do together to work on these impediments?

EDUCAUSE top ten issues are a look at our own navels.

We need to ask our Presidents and Provosts about their top ten issues.

Higher Education issues include: access, affordability, assessment/accountability, effectiveness, workforce development, economic development, and change in the social contract (we need educated people for democracy to succeed)

Is IT

a solution to the challenges?
a contributor to the needed answers or just another cost and yet another cost center in the eyes of Higher Education administration?

We need to review and rethink campus IT services.

We need to develop a business plan to under gird and provide feasibility for a significant project to demonstrate the viability of a new service delivery approach

We need to look at shared services where the “invisible hand of the marketplace” is not at work.

We need to stop thinking about collaboration as an avocational approach – it’s not something we do in our spare time but how we will survive and well support our clients.

Focus – remember Alice (in Wonderland) asking the Cheshire Cat

Alice: Which path should I take?

Cheshire Cat: Where are you going?

Alice: I really don’t know.

Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t matter.

Hawkins remarked that “whining won’t get you anywhere.” What we need our new models and to know where we are going. He said, “Where are you going, because if you don’t know, it really doesn’t matter!”

Q & A

It was suggested that this presentation should be made available to those in Higher Education administration

Hawkins suggested that we need to have demonstration projects to show Higher Education administration.

A question from the floor suggested a need to map the two lists (IT and Presidents/Provosts) and note where they are the same and where they are different. Hawkins noted the fact that IT showed up as a saving in labor costs for corporations but that is not true for us because we work in a culture where we don’t put people out of work.

Another question asked clarification on Hawkins’ statement that we stay out of areas where the market is not effective, asking where is the market not effective? Further clarification regarding demonstration projects was asked including suggestions on how EDUCAUSE members can participate? Hawkins said that Adam Smith was right and the market place does “work” but some markets are very specialized such as “Classics” for Academics. We should ask how many of our very specialized markets do we need. security? research support? etc.

Regarding, demonstration projects, Hawkins said that things are just getting started and but there should be some things in place by mid-late summer and presentation will likely be made at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Seattle in the fall. Everything will be on the EDUCAUSE website. The EDUCAUSE executive team agreed to “under-promise and over-deliver.”

A query on policy and funding frameworks asked Hawkins to discuss the fact that education leaders are not incentivized to work together and asked how can we encourage the collaboration needed? Hawkins replied that a market place approach works better in these situations because it’s a business decision not policy or governance.

The last question asked how we can reach the heart of new faculty in these issues and use of technology. Hawkins suggested inspiration and reducing the cost so we that can keep the faculty we need. We should ask how some of these shared resources/support can help in the teaching areas. What’s the lowest hanging fruit for EDUCAUSE is important now. The core may not be in the teaching arena.

Information about Brian Hawkins is available at http://www.educause.edu/PeerDirectory/750?ID=05619.

Information about the 2007 Southwest Regional Conference is available at http://www.educause.edu/swrc07.

Leveraging Your Existing Campus Systems to Access Partner Resources: The InCommon Federation

drupal — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:30:44 -0600

Campuses can leverage investments in single sign-on systems to access external systems and information resources partners. This session will explain InCommon Federation participation, what it means for a campus, and how existing identity management systems can facilitate a much richer learning and working environment beyond the limits of campus boundaries.

A Collaborative Approach to Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

drupal — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:30:44 -0600

Loyola Marymount University and Bowdoin College have formed a business partnership to inexpensively provide an enterprise-class disaster-recovery and business-continuity solution for their institutions. How did they make this opportunity a reality? What hurdles and successes did they encounter? What technologies were leveraged to implement this low-cost solution?

Collaboration and the Academy of the Future

drupal — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 09:30:43 -0600

The Use of Rich-Media Resources for Scholarly Communication

drupal — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 09:47:18 -0600

The ResearchChannel is an intellectual community that acts as a technology test bed and innovator for new methods to globally distribute scholarly research. Network, computing, and content-creation collaborations allow participants to make the most of traditional, new, and emerging technologies. New technologies are essential for enhancing research, reaching a wider audience, and providing alternative, high-speed exchanges of video resources. Through partnerships and collaborations with other academic and research institutions, the ResearchChannel creates accessible, high-quality video resources for use within scientific communities. This session will also include a briefing regarding efforts to improve access to federally funded research by Clifford Lynch from CNI.

What They Need, When They Need It: Implementing a Statewide System for Sharing Library Resources

drupal — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 16:15:37 -0600

The University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions library consortium implemented OCLC's ILLiad system on eight campuses to enhance consortial sharing of articles and other materials. Authentication and security issues including the use of Shibboleth, integration with other systems, and related IT management issues will be discussed.

Working Together: Multi-Institutional Efforts to Develop and Deliver Technology Services (Non-Collaborators)

drupal — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 16:01:54 -0600

This November 2006 survey is for higher education institutions that indicated in an ECAR screening survey of September 2006 that they have not engaged in a major IT collaboration within the past 24 months. The survey will inform research that seeks to understand the reasons institutions have not engaged in IT collaborations and their plans for future collaborations.

Working Together: Multi-Institutional Efforts to Develop and Deliver Technology Services (Collaborators)

drupal — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 15:58:18 -0600

This November 2006 survey is for higher education institutions that indicated in an ECAR screening survey of September 2006 that they are involved in one or more significant multi-institutional collaborations. The survey will inform research that seeks to more deeply understand what drives institutions to collaborate as well as the extent of the collaborative activity.

Resource Sharing in a Self-Organizing Online Forum

drupal — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:56:51 -0500

Open Learning Support is social software integrated with MIT OpenCourseWare that allowed users to find each other to ask/answer questions. This session will describe how learners shared resources to answer questions about math and science course content. It will also describe the process of improving an online forum to meet learner needs.

Leveraging Your Existing Campus Systems to Access Partner Resources: Federated Identity Management and Tales of Campus Participation

drupal — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:56:50 -0500

Campuses can leverage investments in single-sign-on systems to access external systems and information resources partners. Panelists will explain InCommon federation participation, what it means for a campus, and how existing identity management systems can facilitate a much richer learning and working environment beyond the limits of campus boundaries.

Cat Herding in the Green Mountains: An Enterprise Information System for the Vermont State Colleges

drupal — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 15:56:47 -0500

When the Vermont State Colleges decided to replace a 20-year-old legacy information system, the "loose confederation" of five colleges needed to become a highly collaborative organization to exploit the functionality of an enterprise information system. This presentation will review the technical and organizational challenges faced during the implementation process.

Working Together: Multi-Institutional Efforts to Develop and Deliver Technology Services

drupal — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:07:52 -0500

This September 2006 screening survey seeks to understand how higher education institutions collaborate to develop and deliver essential technology services. Before tackling a topic this broad, ECAR must better understand the landscape for collaboration. This survey assesses whether institutions are involved in a collaboration or agreement to purchase services from (or sell them to) other institutions today.

A Collaborative IT Support Model for Research at Georgetown University

drupal — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 11:09:28 -0500

This case study depicts the formation, characteristics, and organizational success factors of Georgetown University's Advanced Research Computing (ARC) division. In collaboration with university researchers, ARC provides a range of services from computational support to multi-layered, multi-institutional support for research. A companion to ECAR's 2006 research study, IT Engagement in Research: A Baseline Study, this case study describes how Georgetown created a unique, collaborative, shared-cost IT division specifically for university researchers that now provides a secure environment for computational equipment and increases Georgetown's grant and fundraising competitiveness.

Sharing Educational Resources Worldwide: An Interview with Shimizu Yasutaka

drupal — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 12:21:14 -0500

"I believe that spreading and integrating the learning environment by building a setup that enables the mutual sharing of the world's educational resources is vitally important to higher education in Japan—and also to higher education in nations throughout the world."

Browsing Library Collections: From the Shelf to the Online Catalog

drupal — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 11:32:29 -0500

Experiments are underway to provide library users with a browsable, electronic Table of Contents for books that are shared in a distributed collection environment.

Collaboration Beyond the Brick Walls

drupal — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 09:42:47 -0600

Framingham State College and Bryant University have successfully implemented cross-campus collaboration projects to place library resources and services at the forefront of research and teaching. They will share the ideas, steps, and outcomes of using course management systems in partnering with faculty to reach on-campus and distance learners.

DRM threatens 'fair use' rights

drupal — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:51:54 -0600

In his most recent rant about DRM (Jobs iPod Hi-Fi: Home stereo reinvented? Or load of HorseCRAP?), David Berlind once again reminds us why we should rail against Apple and its iTunes Music Service.

E2005 Podcast: The DPubS Development Project

podcaster — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 16:18:00 -0600

This 50 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled The DPubS Development Project: Building an Open Source Electronic Publishing System.

Digital Repositories in UK universities and colleges

drupal — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 12:31:51 -0600

Sometimes a word acquires so many meanings that it becomes difficult to use clearly. This happened to 'portal', and it may be happening to 'repository'. There is a lot of development work underway that claims to relate to repositories, that might previously have been related to 'archives', 'digital libraries' or 'content management systems'. Defining the boundaries is probably a waste of time, so for the purposes of this article, I'll take a reasonably pragmatic approach, which is to say a repository is a digital object store into which material can be deposited. Repositories therefore offer information professionals a way of becoming more involved in the processes whereby digital information is made shareable, applying their expertise earlier in the information cycle than has often been the case.

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.

Building the Texas Digital Library: Shared Infrastructure for Research and Learning

drupal — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:14:16 -0600

As enrollments increase at universities throughout Texas, there is ever-increasing pressure on resources that support the two-fold mission of research and instruction. The goal of the Texas Digital Library is to establish a common infrastructure for use by all members of the consortium.

Experience TeamSpot: “Walk Up" Technology for Informal Learning Spaces

drupal — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 09:01:04 -0600

TeamSpot helps accelerate collaboration when teams use digital resources. Deployed at a growing number of academic institutions around the world, TeamSpot allows laptop and Tablet PC users to interact with each other and with information in accordance with emerging Net Generation preferences.

Knowledge Management: What Is It? Why Do You Need to Know? How Do You Support It?

drupal — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 09:01:03 -0600

This session will explore a coherent and well-defined framework for understanding knowledge management tools in education from national, cross-institutional, institutional, and technological perspectives. Building on the framework, we will offer practical solutions for putting knowledge management tools into practice to support students, faculty, institutions, and initiatives.

7 Things You Should Know About Grid Computing

drupal — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 13:36:54 -0600

Grid computing uses middleware to coordinate disparate IT resources across a network, allowing them to function as a virtual whole. The goal of a computing grid, like that of the electrical grid, is to provide users with access to the resources they need, when they need them. Grids address two distinct but related needs: providing remote access to IT assets, and aggregating processing power.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use "7 Things You Should Know About..." briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Humanities Grid at Montclair State University

drupal — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 10:44:10 -0600

The library at Montclair State University has initiated a grid to enable full interactive collaboration among departments and institutions using multiple machines on a fast network. The grid is transparent to users, giving the impression of a single virtual computer that allows for the sharing of resources and the optimal use of computing capabilities wherever they may be.

SuprNova.org denunciation dropped

StuartYeates — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 04:46:38 -0600

A year ago today the wildly successful Bittorrent search engine SuprNova.org went offline. It has now emerged that, despite police raids on their ISP and administrators home, it wasn't doing anything wrong.

Bittorrent, like explosives, has a wide range of legal uses, particularly in the open source and open content worlds. Azureus maintain an excellent list of legal torrent sites carrying only apparently legal content.