Presentations

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. Higher education IT organizations have become increasingly aware of the need for governance processes that sit above day-to-day management and address strategic alignment and the political realities of satisfying IT's many constituencies. But how should -and do- higher education institutions govern IT? This presentation uses the results of an ECAR study of IT governance to frame an interactive session on how to mix good structural governance practices with practical politics.

How to Cite This Work: Yanosky, Ronald, and John W. McCredie. "IT Governance: Solid Structures and Practical Politics." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. Within the past year, SaaS-based office solutions from Adobe, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and Yahoo! became available or will soon be available. In this session, Burton Group Senior Analyst Guy Creese describes this rapidly evolving market and talks through the pros and cons of SaaS solutions.

How to Cite This Work: Creese, Guy. "Should We Work in the Cloud? The Pros and Cons of Software as a Service." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. This talk reviews scholarship on social networking sites, focusing on the use of Facebook among undergraduate students. Nicole Ellison discusses findings from a recent study examining user practices and the social capital implications of Facebook use, demonstrating evidence of positive outcomes from some kinds of use. Educational applications of related technologies, such as blogging, is briefly discussed.

How to Cite This Work: Ellison, Nicole. "Facebook Use on Campus: A Social Capital Perspective on Social Network Sites." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. Successful online communities must be able to attract and retain a core of active participants. In this presentation, Robert Kraut will describe how the relationship between communities and new members develops. Because the relationship is especially fragile during newcomers' initial interactions, the success of these interactions is likely to determine whether the relationship survives. Kraut's analysis of over 200,000 messages from almost 25,000 newcomers to 99 Usenet groups shows that newcomers are much more likely to continue participating if their initial posts received replies, especially socially positive ones. Longitudinal studies and three field experiments show that introductions referencing commitment to the group increase the likelihood of getting a reply, while introductions emphasizing connections to the topic of discussion do not. This research both increases our understanding of a new social phenomenon and informs intervention that can improve the integration of newcomers into online communities.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. The social web is reflecting a radical change in the nature of publishing: the who, what, why, and how of authoring is changing in ways not imagined even five years ago. In this talk we explore the new terrain of publishing and collaboration by visiting social web sites, and through online videos and even confessionals. We explore three key question areas: (1) Why is this happening? What are the technological and social drivers? (2) What does the social web mean for the future of authoring? Who will be in control? (3) Should information professionals support or resist these changes? How?

How to Cite This Work: Riedl, John. "The Social Web." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. What information technologies are used by undergraduates? How does IT contribute to their academic experiences and learning? What has changed since 2005? ECAR presents 10 key findings from the fourth annual survey of undergraduates, with responses from 27,846 students at 103 higher education institutions.
How to Cite This Work: Caruso, Judith Borreson, and Gail Salaway. "Highlights of the 2007 ECAR Study of Students and Information Technology." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. The 2007 ECAR help desk study, Service on the Front Line: The IT Help Desk in Higher Education, identified a number of practices as being associated with help desk success, viewed in terms of overall service quality, positive impacts on various service areas, and reliable meeting of help desk goals. This presentation explores those associations in search of landmarks the help desk can use in navigating toward excellence.

How to Cite This Work: Sheehan, Mark C. "The Upward Trail: Success Factors in Help Desk Management." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. What are the essential skills for an IT leader? How do rising IT leaders perceive the CIO role, and are we doing enough to cultivate them? Are generational differences and demographics reshaping the IT workforce? This session presents preliminary findings from ECAR's research of IT leadership and workforce, including data from a 2007 survey of higher education IT leaders and IT professionals.

How to Cite This Work: Goldstein, Philip J. "Leading the IT Workforce." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR Symposium, December 5-7, 2007, in Boca Raton, Florida. In June 2007 EDUCAUSE Vice President Richard Katz began a personal and organizational voyage of discovery. Katz and University of British Columbia CIO Ted Dodds visited 10 European countries and dozens of universities in four months. This talk summarizes a portion of their findings, both personal and professional.

How to Cite This Work: Katz, Richard N. "IT's a Small World - Observations of a Global Community." Presentation at the ECAR Symposium, Boca Raton, FL, December 5-7, 2007, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. This presentation was part of a panel discussion about the challenges of harnessing the power of digital content to support learning at scale in both institutional settings and in national efforts. They considered the potential roles of digital content as cognitive media and social media, and they used cases and models that highlight best practices and sticky issues.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. This panel discussed the challenges of harnessing the power of digital content to support learning at scale in both institutional settings and in national efforts. They considered the potential roles of digital content as cognitive media and social media, and they used cases and models that highlight best practices and sticky issues.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. In January 2007, Michael Wesch released a video on the history of the Web called "The Machine is Us/ing Us." The video quickly tracks the transformations of the Web from its beginnings as a place to retrieve information into a vibrant user-generated and user-organized platform of RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, social networks, and folksonomies that encourage, enhance, and capitalize on collaboration. At the video's end, Wesch suggests that these transformations require us to begin rethinking virtually everything, from authorship and copyright to our sense of identity and selfhood. These new technologies also have profound implications for education. What possibilities and challenges do they bring to our teaching? What should we be teaching to students who are habituated to a new media environment where Google and Wikipedia are always at their fingertips? How are these technologies changing the way students learn and assess information?

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. When Yochai Benkler's book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, came out, Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig said, "This is -- by far -- the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this." This work examines the ways in which information technology permits extensive forms of collaboration that may have transformative consequences for economy and society. Benkler's presentation outlines the characteristics of the networked information economy and the roles of collaboration and commons-based production of information, knowledge, and culture, and it suggests avenues to apply these broad trends to education and education-related policy.

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.

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. This session presents preliminary findings from the ECAR survey on prevailing IT help desk practices in the U.S. and Canada. Using standard assessments of help desk practice from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and others, principal investigator Mark Sheehan is developing a robust view of the state of the practice of service delivery, service support, and other IT help desk and IT practices.