Thoughts from the EDUCAUSE Conference

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the annual EDUCAUSE national conference in Denver.  I always enjoy this conference, not only because of the interesting speakers, but also because of the opportunity to connect with friends and colleagues.

This week I would like to point you to an interesting speaker, Clay Shirky, a faculty member from NYU, speaking on IT as a Core Academic Competence.  The video recording of his speech is available at the EDUCAUSE site.  If you are pressed for time, go directly to minute 20 of the recording to skip the introductions.

Dr. Shirky gave many interesting examples of how the openness supported by the Internet, the web, and clever applications has changed how people learn.  Here is a quote from his conclusion:

"The big change that's coming in our community is not higher bandwidth;  it's not online courses;  it's not massive classes.  These are important things.  They present hard problems we have to work on.  But the big change is openness."

 I will try to report on some other interesting sessions over the next several weeks in this blog.  Stay tuned.

Compliment of the Week

I just wanted to a take a couple minutes to share with you that the service I received from Jacob (from Hub) today was superb. I do not believe I have worked with Jacob before and I was impressed by his customer service skills. I called to ask a question about connecting to the Hub's Samba server because there's a faculty member and a lab full of students who will be saving their projects to the Hub server from a campus PC lab. When I called the Hub, Jacob did not know the answer. He provided background as to why he did not know and also provided follow-up procedures and questions he will be bringing to the Hub team next week. In talking with Jacob we figured out that Adam Moren helped set up the server. I called Adam and he was super helpful by providing the server path and connection process for campus PC labs. I then called Jacob back to fill him in. Jacob was very helpful by testing the process on a machine in the Hub and he was also appreciative and professional throughout the process.

New UM IT Communities of Practice Starting Soon

The  Information Technology Community of the University of Minnesota System is developing a communities of practice approach to major projects.  I attended a meeting of the IT Leadership Community of Practice yesterday, along with Jason Davis and Peter Angelos from Duluth.  This is a very large group with approximately 90 members.  We enjoy professional facilitation services from Brian McDonald of MOR Associates, and the leader of our community of practice is Scott Studham, VP and CIO of the University of Minnesota.

We will be starting up three new communities of practice in November:

• Help Desk Community of Practice
• E-Learning Community of Practice
• Security and Privacy Community of Practice

Membership will be self-selecting, although ITSS Management will be encouraging participation from the Duluth campus.  We recognize that we can't influence the process if we aren't at the table.  Participants will need to gain agreement from their supervisors, and they also need to be committed to the process.  CoP leaders will make arrangements for participants from UMD and other campuses to participate using technology tools, without having to travel to the Twin Cities campus for all meetings, although it can be good to attend some in person.

This will be an opportunity to build relationships as well as to positively influence processes and services.  Please consider serving.