Track Abstracts

Track 1: Emerging Technologies and Practices

Unprecedented change continues to occur in the way computing, communications, and information transfer take place. Peer-to-peer applications, active and mobile learning environments, wireless networks, collaborative ventures, high-performance cluster computing, and innovations in enterprise security, open source, and connective middleware represent challenges and opportunities for today’s academic managers and leaders. The information technology field continues to evolve at Internet speed, resulting in new organizational paradigms, technologies, systems, and applications. Universities and other institutions face great challenges in their efforts to develop, enhance, and maintain infrastructure and service programs to meet the delivery opportunities available and to provide competitive environments. These presentations will deal with the escalating technology surge that creates critical questions and issues related to the adoption, integration, and funding of emerging practices and applications in higher education.

Track 2: Administrative Information Management Systems

Administrative information systems serve the mission-critical areas of an organization. Such systems are expected to perform flawlessly and to evolve into new or expanded services for a broad range of constituencies. Managing this increasingly complex environment requires an understanding of technology, enterprise resource planning software, development life cycles, application integration strategies, implementation methodologies, data administration and management, the total cost of system development and operation, and continually changing customer expectations. It also requires the skill to manage multiple internal and external partnerships. The sessions in this track will provide case studies and a range of solutions for approaching the technology, information, and people required to make these critical systems provide value to different constituencies.

Track 3: Networking, Infrastructure, and Advanced Computing

Establishing and maintaining a robust, scalable, and seamless technological architecture to support both academic and administrative needs while accommodating rapid change in a tight budget environment are daunting tasks. The core services of networking, infrastructure, and advanced computing range from networks, hardware, and operating systems to database management, network system management, directory services, authentication systems, production readiness, Web services, and research computing. These core services are an essential part of the enabling technology infrastructure needed to support the academy in achieving its strategic goals. Presenters in this area will offer solutions for effectively addressing a wide range of networking, infrastructure, and advanced computing needs. Included here are sessions on directory services; wireless environments (for example, the mobile digital campus); identity management; Web service applications; research computing; and security issues and policies.

Track 4: Leadership, Management, Support, and Funding

This track will be all about the capacity to integrate vision and culture. It is also about 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 will 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 will 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: Library, Information Resources, and Digital Content

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 about using 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 6: Teaching and Learning

As more and more institutions promote the enhancement of the teaching and learning process with new educational technologies, greater and richer varieties of implementations, both within and outside the traditional classroom, are appearing. Sessions in this track will reflect this new innovative wealth. Panels and poster sessions will cover topics such as innovations in content (learning objects, open-source sharing), in-class enhancements (next-generation uses of course management systems, multimedia classrooms), new projects connected with distance learning, faculty engagement and the support necessary to sustain that engagement, and new assessment tools (online evaluations, laptop assessments, e-portfolio-based assessments).