Track Abstracts
Track 1: Emerging Technologies and Practices
Today, we have unprecedented opportunities to deploy new technologies and integrate existing ones in new ways. What are the new technologies that require the attention of technologists and planners now or in the near future, and what new opportunities might they provide? How can we contribute to the capacity of our institutions to deploy and use new technologies effectively? What issues and best practices relate to adoption, integration, funding, and support for new technologies and strategic innovation? Emerging technologies and practices covers a wide range of topics including convergence, mobile devices, continuous computing, classroom design, portfolios, open-source software, authentication, and Web-based simulations, to name just a few. Our community is experimenting with, implementing, and assessing an enormous range of innovative capabilities, many of which have the potential to contribute to academic excellence. Track 1 will showcase some of the technologies and practices that are poised to have a dramatic impact on higher education.
Track 2: Enterprise Information Systems and Services
This track addresses a broad range of issues that arise from planning, implementing, supporting, obtaining resources for, and evolving enterprise-wide systems and services. Major topics include (1) administrative solutions, from broad ERP approaches to systems for specific aspects of enterprise business, from packaged software solutions to open and community sources; (2) business intelligence and decision support, the application of data access and analysis to specific needs in higher education, from supporting student educational progress to managing IT services; (3) enterprise course management systems and their continued evolution from niche origins to become a crucial foundation for instructional delivery and collaboration, both within and across institutions; (4) integration solutions, a wide variety of techniques and approaches that help tie it all together and make it work, featuring portals, classroom technologies, document imaging, workflow, and CRM; and (5) support services and how to manage them, staff them, and automate them so that they are more usable.
Track 3: Information Resources, Digital Content, and Libraries
Libraries are concerned with building digital collections and developing new network-based services for reaching their increasingly mobile users. As a result, librarians and information technologists, working collaboratively, are creating and employing tools to meet users' rising expectations. Among these expectations are seamless university-wide systems for accessing virtual collections, examining the results of scholarly research, and mining massive data repositories. Librarians and technologists are also pioneering ways to educate users on how to use these new tools. In addition, faculty and administrators concerned about copyright and intellectual property law are consulting with librarians when campus policies and practices are developed around these topics. The sessions in this track will highlight examples of how librarians, technologists, and faculty are rethinking how to accomplish the fundamental work of academic and research libraries in less traditional ways.
Track 4: Leadership, Management, Planning, and Partnerships
This track explores the capacity to integrate vision and culture, along with effective design of systems and organizations and their timely and efficient implementation. How about finding and retaining the right talents and resources and putting them together in new combinations? Or, how about surviving rapid technological change and meeting ever higher expectations, while addressing core issues with sensible and legally defensible policy? Such is the modern art and science of being a leader in the area of information technologies. Sessions within this track address how to organize, assess, manage, support, and fund information technologies, as well as how to build and maintain collaborations with internal and external partners and how to develop IT staff. They also focus on how to assemble the right policy and legal and ethical foundations, from which we can address the relentless waves of challenge to both theory and practice that IT leaders in higher education face every day. Attendees will learn about the tools of both innovation and reason that we can use to set our directions and to manage our success.
Track 5: Networking and Infrastructure
A strategic imperative of higher education is establishing and maintaining a robust technical infrastructure to support both academic and administrative needs while accommodating rapid change. The core services of this infrastructure range from networks, hardware, and operating systems to Web services, database management, network system management, directory and authentication services (middleware), imaging and multimedia systems, and on-demand services. These core services are essential for maintaining the industrial-strength infrastructure required to support the teaching, learning, research, and administrative needs of the e-university. The technology and information assets of our institutions are considered mission critical; however, the "open" environment of higher education creates a high-risk and complex challenge to protect those assets. These challenges include protecting institutional networks, computer systems, data centers, personal and institutional data, communication services, and interinstitutional access to resources.
Track 6: Security, Privacy, and Policy
Recently several high-profile news stories on the exposure of personal finance and medical data have involved higher education institutions. Regulations requiring privacy protection and data security are also increasing, but organizing and managing an information security function is relatively new to many higher education IT departments and can be a challenge in an academic environment in terms of finding staff and funding. It is useful to learn how others have garnered support and buy-in and have obtained guidance in the information assurance mission. These issues have placed a higher priority on the development of policies and tools and often required a change of approach and response strategy. This track explores privacy and security management issues related to identity management, personal identifiers, policies/procedures/practices, incident response, regulations/laws, ethics, risk assessment, information security awareness and education, asset management, network authentication/registration/access, and tools and technologies for prevention and remediation.
Track 7: Teaching and Learning
As the use of technology in the academy becomes more mainstream, demands to develop and implement standards that measure effective practices are increasing. At the same time, there is a constant push to explore the digital frontiers of learning, whether that occurs in a traditional classroom or in nontraditional venues, and experiment with new techniques for faculty engagement and development. And, of course, infrastructure and support must always keep pace. Sessions in this track will represent a wide range of perspectives and approaches. Panels and poster sessions will cover topics such as evaluation of education technologies, student portfolios, open-source tools, e-learning and e-collaboration, and innovative uses of new technologies, from iPods to personal response systems.