Collaboration and EDUCAUSE Review Articles

In the spring of 2008, students from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University (IU) and the Jenkins Graduate School of Management at North Carolina State University (NCSU) “virtually” came together, using a variety of Web 2.0 tools and the virtual world Second Life, to learn about managing the services lifecycle and to apply what they learned to two corporate-sponsored projects.

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?

Increased openness, two-way dialogue, and blurred distinctions between experts and amateurs have combined with numerous technology tools for dialogue, personal expression, networking, and community formation to “remake” conferences, influencing not only how attendees participate in but also how organizers host conferences today.

nanoHUB is an online portal for nanotechnology researchers, instructors, and students created by Purdue University and the National Science Foundation. It uses cyberinfrastructure to provide access to scientific tools for research, demonstration, and collaboration, as well as instructional materials. Users can run experiments, review research, or download lectures. nanoHUB is a virtual toolkit as well as a community where students and faculty contribute to the science of nanotechnology.

Campus IT leaders are responsible for providing a view of the technology changes that are coming over the horizon and a vision of where the “ship” of IT should be headed. The retiring EDUCAUSE president offers ten nautical maxims for charting this course for higher education IT.

The international e-Framework for Education and Research is helping the research and education world take advantage of the opportunities offered by the service-oriented approach.

The author discusses the delicate balance of creating collaborative relationships between faculty, librarians and IT staff. One such Fellowship effort is sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). In attracting recent Ph.D.s who believe that there are opportunities to develop meaningful linkages between disciplinary scholarship, libraries, archives, and evolving digital tools, the program brings scholars with both teaching and digital experience into the academic library so that they may serve as a bridge between librarians, faculty, and IT professionals.

Under the direction of SURF, the higher education institutions in the Netherlands are working on a collaborative strategy for the application of information and communications technology (ICT) to meet the needs of individual users.

The author discusses the use of open source in the context of advancing learning in both secondary and higher education.