Day 8 opened with discussion on e-scholarship by Chuck Henry, president of CLIR and JQ Johnson at U of Oregon and Frye alum. This was not the most pressing topic for me since it was library-centric and publishing-centric. But I did get a lot of good references from Chuck on Humanities examples of e-scholarship like
Something in the discussion made me take note of Stacey’s blog post on library stats software. Something to follow-up on with the library. I think this is the package we have explored.
JQ focused on the Open Access model of e-scholarship. Again, not a topic close to my heart but a few things jumped out like
The afternoon brought James Hilton, University of Virginia VP and CIO. He was an energizing speaker and I was writing furiously during his session. He framed his talk around the fact tht the fabric of inquiry is changing — what questions we can ask and the ways we can answer them. For example when the Large Hadron Collider is running again it will generate 3 million DVDs of data per year. The four areas of computation, visualization, simulation, and technology-enabled represent the key areas affecting inquiry.
He then dove into how we navigate these disruptive changes. He highlighted looking at things as essential vs. strategic. I think this lens will be very relevant for me. For example, email is essential but it is not strategic. And if something is essential and commoditized it lends itself to be outsourced so that you can direct resources towards strategic endeavors. More on that in a bit.
James also touched on the “Does IT Matter?” book. He noted that because IT is mature enough now investment in IT alone does not give a strategic advantage. He framed it as, does oxygen matter? It doesn’t give us a strategic advantage but it sure is hard to live without it! He also warned that IT will become irrelevant if it is not aligned with the institutional mission.
He then moved into the need to embrace emergence. The world is emergent and not planned. We need to work in an emergence mode: we know where we are (starting point) and we then pick a direction to go. But we don’t define an endpoint — we don’t know where we’ll end up. We operate in a “fine tune as you go” mode and need to have a comfort with ambiguity. We need to develop a discipline of refining based on experience. Another mantra he uses is “tomorrow is better than today.”
We need to ride the current disruptive currents at play in higher ed IT.
The computer lab issue raised a lot of discussion. They found that 99% of the new students had computers and students were using the labs for web browsing and word processing — activities done easily on their own computers. They started transforming some of the lab spaces into student spaces — a nice way to repurpose the spaces. They’re also planning to use virtual labs to deliver applications to students. There will still be a need for specialized labs for software that isn’t common (unbundling). It makes me think we need to look at our labstats and see how our spaces are being used. Student learning spaces are more strategic than the commodity computing need in my opinion.
He wrapped up with the advice of identifying your values and steering by them. He emphasized power (influence) over force. He likes to think of leading as “enrolling them with a vision.” However, you can’t enroll everyone so you need to get a critical mass of support for changes.
The weekend has come and gone. I went with a group to the Saturday night Atlanta vs. Milwaukee baseball game. Atlanta lost. The high-tech stadium was interesting — the giant display screen was better quality than my TV! I haven’t been to a baseball game in like 20 years. It was interesting to see all the norms and traditions that happen. On Sunday I joined a group that went to the aquarium downtown. I got a lot of nice pictures of animals. We had lunch in the CNN food court — a few people went on the CNN tour (I didn’t). We took a cab downtown and took the MARTA back.
A few of my Frye colleagues got press at their institutions. Both Mike and Jody are people I really connected with. Mike’s photo is right-on.
Friday was short day, at least the programmed part. Today was all about policy issues which on the surface might seem dry but the speakers made it anything but! First Steven Worona gave us the big picture of privacy and security. He reminded me a lot of Noel Petit in his general manner. He drove home that you can’t have privacy without security and that you have to balance things. His main example was that we want everyone to know who the candidates are getting money from but we don’t want anyone to know who we are giving money to — you can’t have it both ways. He ended with “privacy is a basic human need.” We also looked at 2 scenarios. The first made me wonder if we have a policy on talking to law enforcement — that mysterious “general counsel” came up again. Another example about anonymous online chat counseling (something that we’re pondering) made me wonder what we would do if a student submitted a suicidal chat.
Next up was Tracy Mitrano who dove into questions and outlined the key factors/tensions at play here — law, social norms, technology, and market. We talked a bit about e-discovery and copyright — especially section 110. Chris from Stanford shared her q&a about this. Holly from USC shared a link to The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy which in turn links to Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video which gives some examples that I find useful. She ended with suggesting that institutions have an institutional policy process to guide creation of policies — at it’s simplest has 3 steps:
Ok, it’s a 4-step process.
This all ended just after 12 noon. That was end of the scheduled day. Then I met up with Fred from Loyla Chicago and Stacey from U Kentucky and Win from SUNY Albany and we headed to the Georgia Tech Info Commons. I snapped a few photos here and so did Win. They had some nice computing spaces, a nice practice space, and a nice cafe. We had lunch on the way back at the flying biscuit. Good food. I think the afternoon was the best time I’ve had with a bunch of librarians (they’re all in libraries).
I didn’t think yesterday could be topped. I was wrong.
The day started out with our peers sharing about 360 degree leadership — how you can lead from anywhere in the organization. That got my interest for something to help develop my team members. Then we heard from CFO Peggy Plympton from Lehigh University. Wow, she was a riot. She was so funny and so wise. After lunch we heard from Carie Windham Page from ELI talk about our students. Carie wrote the “student perspective” in the 2005 Educating the NetGen book. She had some activities for us that got us out of our chairs — always good. Then we heard from Michael Schoenfeld, Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations at Duke, on communications.
Then after diner a group met informally to talk about work/life balance. It was convened by Jim from UW Madison who is becoming our “guru.” He took a group to Sanskrit chanting last night and today before lunch we spent 5 minutes listening to the same chanting and clearing our minds.
My key take-aways today are