Information Technology

Unless you’ve been on a very, very long vacation (or are one of the lucky few), you are currently facing budget cuts at your institution.

I know I wrote a lot about this lately, but I’m trying to find ways to help you weather that storm.

In a few days, my next University Business column to be published in the Februay issue will even provide you with some very practical tips to do more with less. And, you probably know by now that you can also register for Saving Big Webinars scheduled on February 4 & 5 to listen to 2 of your colleagues, Joe Hice from the University of Florida and Rachel Reuben from SUNY New Paltz, to find out about creative ways to save your institution big money while getting great results.

In the meantime, I’d like to share with you some of the notes I took while reading a very interesting and timely white paper written by Philip J. Goldstein and published as a 10-page PDF file by Educause this week:

Managing the Funding Gap:
How Today’s Economic Downturn Is Impacting IT Leaders and Their Organizations

This paper summarizes the discusssions that took place in December 2008 at an ECAR workshop for IT leaders.

What tactics have been implemented by IT leaders to cut costs?

Most approaches started with freezing open positions, cutting budgets for travel, discontinuing plans to expand services, and the cancellation of discretionary projects. As the budget situation has worsened, other tactics are also being implemented:

• Deployment of software to turn off desktop computers to reduce power consumption
• Accelerated plans to implement server virtualization, accompanied by increased server consolidation
• Retirement of underutilized technologies where viable alternatives exist (such as modem pools or legacy applications with small groups of users)
• Elimination of less-strategic or less widely used services
• Expanding use of videoconferencing as an alternative to travel

Is it all that bad? Aren’t there any opportunities out there?

However, some participants saw opportunity in the degree of challenge institutions face today. Perhaps never before have institutions and institutional leaders had more reason and need to try to work differently. Things that even a few months ago might have seemed politically impossible to accomplish now seem possible.

Winning strategies include:

• Rebalancing Services: rationalize services by centralizing IT services for bigger institutions.
• Sourcing Externally: explore open-source services, the cloud and collaboration with other institutions
• Targeted Operational Efficiency: focus on smallest projects that improve a particular business process to save money or increase productivity across the institution.

These participants believed that institutions would become more willing than they were in the past to make the changes required to benefit from technology.
[...]
Some IT leaders have been reticent to engage in collaborations or be early adopters of new technologies like cloud computing because their institutions had little tolerance for risk and provided little reward for innovation. Perhaps institutions, IT organizations, and IT leaders will now be more receptive to these risks.

So, there’s definitely an opportunity for Web professionals to push for more cost-effective solutions (aren’t all Web solutions more cost-effective by nature?) in institutions looking for ways to do more with less.

Have you managed to get approval lately on a project that you tried to push for months or years?
Tell us by posting a comment!

According to the 2009 Horizon report, while mobiles and cloud computing are already well established on many campuses across the world, geo-tagging and the personal web should be widely used in higher education by 2012.

Released yesterday by The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI), an EDUCAUSE program, this report is definitely a must-read as it offers an interesting overview of the current trends and technologies that should impact the world of higher education in the near future:

To create the 2009 Horizon Report, the 45 members of the 2009 Advisory Board engaged in a comprehensive review and analysis of research, articles, papers, and interviews; discussed existing applications and brainstormed new ones; and ultimately ranked the items on the list of more than 80 technologies that emerged for their potential relevance to teaching, learning, and creative expression. The 2009 Advisory Board included representatives from eight countries — the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Board members conducted most of their work online during the fall of 2008 using a variety of collaboration tools, including a special wiki dedicated to the project.

This 32-page report is available as a free PDF file under a Creative Commons license

What really makes this report a great resource is the way the highlighted technologies are presented:

• an overview
• why they are relevant to teaching, learning and creative expression
• current examples in different institutions (with links)
• online resources for further reading

The University of Bath Web Services team didn’t expressively request any help, but if any higher ed web developer can provide some tips, it looks like it would be more than welcome as Phil Wilson hints in this blog post:

So, two days in, and dealing with FBML, the Facebook API and the low quality of the documentation has felt very much like playing a Grand Master at chess, only he won’t tell you the rules.

None of this is to say that we haven’t made progress of course (because we have!), but it has meant we’ve had to revise our initial plans to take account of what we’re finding possible to do within a week.

Something very interesting is going on this week for the members of this web services team as they are working on building Flat Out, a new Facebook application for the students of this university based in the UK as part of a 5-day-long team building initiative called “Get Creative” under Alison Wildish’s lead:

So last month I announced “Get Creative”. A week long project to work on as a team. A project that we would decide, scope and deliver together.

The aim being to break away from the norm, to establish new ways in which we could work together and to create something cool.

You can follow (as I have been since the beginning of this week) their progress via Twitter. That might be the best way to offer some help, links or tips as well by twittering @getcreativeweek.

As promised in one of my latest posts, blogging has been very light lately. Don’t worry, I’ll be back in full mode soon.

In the meantime, you might want to have a look at a feature-long article I wrote for the August issue of University Business about email outsourcing: E-mail, Gmail, Hotmail, and Beyond.

And, if your institution went that road, I’d like to hear from you about the whole “email outsourcing” experience.

Do you think this is as good as it sounds in my UB article?

Tell us by posting a comment!

Note from Karine: This year, I’ve asked all the eduWeb speakers working in universities/colleges to share in 140 words or less the biggest take-away from their presentation or table talk. If you’ve attended this session, feel free to weigh in by posting a comment, a question or a suggestion.

The cloud is cheap, easy, distributed and redundant. It alleviates load on your campus network and on you, the web developer.

I think it will really be eye-opening to the people that the cloud doesn’t have to be expensive or hard to manage.

One quick snippet – we’re serving 50 GB of data a month using Amazon S3.
Cost to serve that?
$9.

The load taken off our campus network and the joy I get knowing its being served from multiple data centers: priceless!

Note from Karine: This year, I’ve asked all the eduWeb speakers working in universities/colleges to share in 140 words or less the biggest take-away from their presentation or table talk. If you’ve attended this session, feel free to weigh in by posting a comment, a question or a suggestion.

Setting expectations are crucial for a successful CMS implementation.

If you have never gone through a CMS implementation, find someone who has and talk to them about how to set expectations correctly among your community. Then, set up a communication plan so everyone knows what the status of the project is at all times. Make sure there are periodic opportunities to tell everyone where the implementation and subsequent conversion stands. Finally, have a well thought out training plan designed to provide content providers with the information they need to update their content.

Don’t try to be fancy, just give them the tools they need so the system is a productivity tool, not an impediment to them getting their work completed.

After taking 2 airplanes to get to Philly and a ride with Mike Richwalsky & Josh Tysiachney from Allegheny College and Brad Ward from Butler University (and BlogHighEd) to Atlantic City, I checked in yesterday around 4:30 pm.

My room has a gorgeous view, but the $12.50 Internet wireless connection could definitely be better.

I’m missing quite a few bars and the best spot to get access is actually not the desk, but the bed (Wayport‘s – the company providing the service – help desk support if not very helpful was really professional, and I guess the view from the bed isn’t bad either)

We had a very interesting conversation over dinner at The Cafe about cloud computing with Mike, Josh and Mark Greenfield. Mike and Josh are scheduled to present about the topic at 9:45 Tuesday morning.

We also discussed email outsourcing to Google or Microsoft as I had some fresh examples from my upcoming feature article for the August issue of University Business.

Before Mark’s keynote this afternoon, I’m supposed to work a bit more on my own – scheduled on Wednesday, fine tune the scheduling of the speaker’s blog posts, have coffee with Pamela Michael, Head of Digital Media and Marketing at Imperial College (London) and meet Stewart Foss from eduStyle.

If you see me in the lobby, don’t be shy and come say “hello.”

Happy Independence Day to my readers in the US!

If you’re looking for independence, a new job (or a new skilled team member) might be the way to go (I know that’s kind of a lame transition).

It’s been a few months since I decided to work on a better solution than the Higher Ed Experts forum to help the community on the job front.

Well, today I’ve just had the time necessary to complete this project (weird what I would do when I procrastinate on my presentation and webinar scheduling duties ;-) and I need your help to get things started by posting your job ads or by pointing hiring managers in your institution to this new free resource available at www.higheredexperts.com/work.

Post a new job / higheredexperts.com/work

I hope you find this new FREE service helpful.

I’ll be sending an email to the +1,400 members of Higher Ed Experts next week to announce it, so your job postings will be seen by many qualified professionals working in higher education.

What I really love about this application is that you can actually subscribe to the new job postings via RSS.

Sorry for my light blogging, but I have been working on a few projects lately… and something had to give.

One of these projects is a feature-long article for the August issue of University Business (it’s due June 1st – it’s a magazine, not a blog ;-) about email outsourcing in higher education.

If you don’t have a clue about what I’m talking about you can read a previous post, From outsourcing email to outsourcing IT, I wrote after reading a very good piece about the topic written by Andy Guess from Inside Higher Ed last November.

Anyway, I’m going to interview folks from Google Apps and Live@edu (the solution offered by Microsoft) for my article, and thought you might like me to ask a couple of your questions, my dear readers.

So, if you’ve been burning to find out more about these free are-they-too-good-to-be-true email outsourcing solutions, post your questions now in the comment section or email karine@collegewebeditor.com if you prefer.

And, while we are talking about this, if your institution has implemented either (or both) solutions, please share your experience with the rest of us via a comment as well.

This morning, I received a few emails asking if it was still possible to register for the March 4-6 webinar series about Facebook applications (the initial registration deadline was yesterday).

As a result, I decided to postpone the registration deadline until this Thursday (Feb 28) at 8PM ET. If you want to learn more on how to engage students via Facebook applications, this 3-webinar series featuring Chris Mocko (KissMe creator & Stanford graduate student), Mike Richwalsky (Allegheny College) and Dr. Tony Hirst (The Open University) should help.

Institutions registered for this series include:

• Tufts University
• RIT/NTID
• Saint Michael’s College
• Alfred University
• Berkeley College
• US Naval Academy Alumni Association
• University at Albany
• Southeast Missouri State University
• DePaul University
• Northern Arizona University

For more information and to register online, just go to www.higheredexperts.com/facebookapp

And, if you have any problems or issues, just send me an email at karine@collegewebeditor.com