Higher Education IT

The strangest thing happened to me the other day while helping train some students on a collaboration suite we have at work.  The professor had already explained that students would be working in teams, with their laptops, to develop the beginnings of a legal outline.  They would use the software/hardware solution – powered by Tidebreak’s Teamspot software – to interact with the shared document.  Hopefully, the students would discover greater productivity and learn more about how to develop the outline through this collaborative effort.

That’s all and good.  It’s to be expected and the professor had a really great and open mind about how to use the suite that night, possible uses in the future, and ideas for best practices.  What was not expected was students asking me this:

“Do I have to take part in this project?”

or

“I downloaded the software.  Now I’m trying to decide if I want to install it.”

My basic response to these comments was along the lines of “well, it’s for a class assignment, and I believe the professor wants all of you to work as a team, with your laptops, on the shared display.”

This did not produce much of a response.  In fact, one of the students showed a rather blatant disdain towards me and commented on how she was willing to install the software only because she was using a Mac.  She would not have done so with a Windows machine.  Clearly implying that for some reason I would be recommending the installation of software that was either going to compromise her computer or, even worse, was malware to begin with.

This honestly baffled me.  On the surface, I couldn’t believe that students would question whether they should take part in a class assignment, as requested by the professor.  Even if it’s a situation and/or environment with which they are unfamiliar – this is the professor asking them to do an assignment that is, ostensibly, critical to their education (are assignments ever not critical to your education, really?).  And while a bit of caution when installing software is always prudent, why would someone think that I, an assistant dean, would be asking them to install malicious software?

We in Educational Technology are in the business of improving the teaching and learning of our respective fields (or, perhaps, to challenge existing paradigms that have generally governed those methods).  Most of the time, we seek out innovative technologies but, more importantly, act as consultants and work with faculty to find a tool – whether new or old, cutting-edge or somewhat banal – that will help them in their tasks.  We are here to help improve things.  We are not here to cause problems, to decrease productivity or success potential.  We are certainly not here to put viruses on your computers.

I’ll admit that when I introduce myself I was sufficiently befuddled that I sounded 100% geek.  I didn’t get into how part of my department’s charge is to introduce innovative technologies and methods to faculty.  I sounded like a robot.  A nervous, very geeky robot.  But that’s not the point.

If I’m there, it’s because the faculty member has agreed that there is potential for benefit and/or improvement to teaching and learning.  If I am asking you about your progress with some technology, it’s because I want to see how far along you are in getting set up to use that technology to improve your classroom experience.

Netgen, Gen X, part-time, full-time – whatever student category you fall into – understand this.  The faculty, the staff, and certainly my department are there to help.  It is to your benefit to let us do that.

FYI:  I struggled with the title of this post for days.  No matter what I did, I felt like I was writing something a 14-year-old would do and laugh about.  Very sad.

I often start my work-related posts with a qualification that I fully realize the difficulties that face university Central IT.  I make my comments about technology in higher ed and my opinions about the best ways to implement such technology and policies purely as my own opinion, but also with respect to the hard work of my university colleagues.  My opinions might be contrary to not only the university’s actions but even to their policy (or maybe even to their way of thinking), but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect their efforts or the challenges that they face.

I’m taking this one step further – the university has been under tremendous fire for communication, governance, and policy issues with its “IS” department.  IS is made up of Central IT, Media Services (classrooms, media support, etc), and the library.  In reality, the problems and complaints have been mostly about Central IT, with a bit of bleed-over to Media Services.  Most importantly, this has come from all sides – the faculty, the staff, departments as a whole, an external committee, and even the national accreditation group used by the university.  This is a big deal, and my perception is that IT is under a lot of pressure right now.

Interestingly, a university faculty member wrote the entire staff mailing list (why just anyone is allowed to write to the list is a whole different discussion, though perhaps related to the fundamental message of this post) praising a presentation by three managers in IT at a symposium.  These three – one of them the director of IT – spoke of the difficulty of providing an enterprise level service at a university, the challenges that any large IT infrastructure presents, and the type of staff power (both quantity and quality) needed to provide services that many people take for granted.

The real issue, however, isn’t whether IT at a university (or anywhere, really) is hard.  It is.  Nor is it just that our IT department has provided sub-optimal services at times.  It has.  These are very black and white perspectives that ignore some fundamental, cultural issues.  And difficulty in provision is never, ever, an excuse for low quality of product.

For instance – the difficulty of setting up and maintaining a university infrastructure is unimpeachable.  But the methods through which one builds such a system, and the policies that govern the development and growth of such an environment, must be examined closely.  To simply say that “it’s hard – acknowledge that and we can all move on”  is a gross oversimplification, and an insult to those that try to provide high quality service in such a “difficult” environment.  The complaints expressed by many during the external committee’s “Open Forum” session were often far too vitriolic and ignored the effort needed to provide the services we had.  The e-mail sent to the staff, in turn, ignores that just because something is difficult doesn’t excuse those responsible from mistakes along the way or for not remedying those issues since their emergence.

For instance – from my outside perspective, I have no idea whether the topic of outsourcing of services – cloud, third party, whatever you want to call it – has been discussed properly.  I do not have any clue as to whether the General Counsel has put forth our official stance on having sensitive data on someone else’s servers.  I am fairly certain that a stringent review of our business processes, our personnel, and an evaluation of what we actually need so that we can find the best solution has not been conducted.  I am pretty sure that we’ll go to Google Apps for Education just because that’s what everyone else is doing.  But that’s still probably 20% guessing and another 20% educated conjecture.

Not even all the right people are included in the conversation.  Why am I not better informed of what is happening?  No, I’m not a vice president or provost at the university – I’m not even part of the central university.  But I am the head of technology (CIO, whatever) for the law school.  We are the only other 100% full tech shop on campus (everything but e-mail, ERP, and networking).  Why am I not at the table?  Why have my requests (yes, I have been proactive) to be included on whatever committees come up been met with silence?  I am at the point of leaving vague messages about “however I can help” and “just say the word” in an effort to be informed.  Whatever process they do have in place does not include looking for outside opinions, as far as I can tell, empirically.

This is just one example, but the fundamental issue is that there is a procedural gap, flaw, fault, undersea trench that no one seems to see whilst they are viewing only the extremes.  Doing IT at a university is hard.  But that means that it’s all the more important to be as smart, as considerate and thoughtful as possible.  That all options must be weighed and that things are done the right way.

[needs some editing, but something I want to get out]

I attended a rather interesting session today at the AJCU-CITM conference on the future of technology and how CIOs at today’s universities needed to respond. We had an article on Gartner’s Predictions for Technology Trends in 2011 addressing the “consumerization” of highly capable mobile technology necessitated a change in how we managed technology. The article itself deserves a long post itself, but the session was the interesting part.

In a room of CIOs at major universities, supposedly all facing tremendous challenges in managing tight budgets, administrative pressure, and creating productive teams that would change the nature of IT, everyone apparently had it all figured out.

“How many of you have Business Analysts in your group to examine processes?”  Lots of hands.

“How many of you have strategic plans that outline your organization’s goals?”  Lots of hands.

“Do any of you have dedicated project management offices?”  Lots of hands.

If, in fact, these are the elements for a successful IT shop, and one that increases the Information part of IT, why do schools still face such challenges?  If everyone has it all figured out, why do we even fact problems at all?  Why are we not already the most nimble, agile organizations that will take higher education technology into the next 15 years?

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t have any of these answers.  After the session, I’m not sure whether I’m even doing my part in providing the right information to our students.  I’m not sure that we’re providing the right services to our community, and maybe whether I’m actually doing right by the students themselves.  I’m full of doubt.

But no one else in the room seemed to be.  Yet we all face these problems and no one is perfect.  So why did the conversation seem to repetitive?  And anti-climactic?

About…6 years ago, we used to make fun of our bosses because he always talked about “ubiquitous computing.”  At the time, it was the catchphrase, and was thrown around like it meant something more than just this yet-to-be-realized utopian idea.

The idea that computing technology (define that as you wish, but I think most people will get within striking range of the same definition) would become so common that everyone had it everywhere was kind of the holy grail concept a while back.  It was logical – a generation of users that grew up with technology everywhere, devices getting smaller and more powerful by the day, and more and more connectivity as wireless networks popped up here and there.  But we weren’t there yet.  Phones were not yet smart, computers were still too slow, and the best we had was the few local wireless networks around.  Broadband cards weren’t even an option then (and the speed on those networks would have been unusable anyway).

We are almost there.  First, the iPhone got us 99% of the way.  Most people that know me would find it surprising that I’d give so much credit to an Apple product (I’m not against them, but I dislike the fanboy atmosphere that surrounds their products and the company).  But even if you look at Android phones, Symbian phones, WebOS devices…they all started from the iPhone.  An incredibly powerful device that also had an everyday purpose – cell phone – that made it simple, logical, and easy to always have around.  With faster network speeds, wifi options and increased competition, the features of smart phones in general have made it to the point where I do a lot of just plain web surfing on my phone.  Yes, I use the Google Reader to keep up with RSS feeds, and another app to find restaurants, etc, but sometimes I just do a google (voice) search and see what happens.  I use the phone like a computer.

Many would say that with these smart phones we’re already at the point of everywhere computing.  However, the last 1% that I leave out is a critical one.  How do we connect all of these devices and the content that they provide and, more important, that which we create, together into one big mesh that is our “work?”

Right now, I use dropbox.com and box.net to bring a lot of my stuff together.  I have the apps on my phone, the files on my computers and online.  I work on a file on my computer at my desk at home, email it to colleagues while on the train going to work from my phone, then open it up on my other computer at work to get more done.  My address book is all Google now.  I am thwarted in my efforts to keep my book up to date with work contacts (to keep it truly my “one” address book), but overall all of my contacts are there, in Google.  With the right software on the server side, I can now look at my work calendar and e-mail on my phone and any computer.  I can tie the calendar in with Google Calendars (kind of) and then view multiple calendars at once to know all of the things going on in my oh-so-busy-life.

As I look at students today, here at the law school, working with tablets and doing some really innovative stuff with organizing large amounts of data, part of me says “it’s really here!  now we have these ultra-portable, highly usable mobile devices!  ubiquity!”

But then I see someone e-mail a file to themselves so they can work on it later.  Or they have to refer to notes on the iPad while doing a full brief on the computer.  That is a massive disconnect, and one which we, as Technology staff in higher ed, must remedy.