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Topic Area Descriptions

Proposals must be submitted by February 11, 2008.

Next-generation technologies provide new opportunities and potential competitive advantages to colleges and universities. The integration of emerging technologies in existing environments poses institutional challenges, and their alignment with and relevance to broad institutional goals and strategic directions are key criteria to consider. Grand challenges in higher education, along with the changing financial climate, provide the context for technical and organizational decision making.

Track 1: Emerging Technologies and Trends

Topic Area 1: Future Trends

Today, we have unprecedented opportunities to deploy new tools and technologies and integrate existing ones in new ways. At the same time, we face new challenges daily, from attacks on our networks to increasing customer demands to budget cuts to the need to integrate (and make sense of) a powerful but often disparate range of academic and administrative services. How can out-of-the-box thinking contribute to the capacity of institutions to deploy and use new technologies effectively? What issues and strategies relate to adoption, integration, funding, ongoing support, and even outsourcing, for new technologies?

Key topics include:

  • Next-generation technologies
  • Constant innovation and continual development
  • Assessing and measuring the impact and value of new technologies
  • Integrating and managing new technologies
  • New and emerging standards
  • Patterns of convergence
  • Technology planning
  • Funding models

Topic Area 2: Globalization

The world is flattening, to quote Tom Friedman. Our faculty collaborate internationally, our researchers work on global issues, and our students come from and disperse to far-flung nations. How do IT organizations support these efforts? What does it mean for our workforce in a global, always-on society? Can we take advantage of opportunities presented by global connectivity, or does it threaten our livelihood?

Key topics include:

  • Rapid advances
  • Patterns of convergence
  • Technology futures and planning
  • Outsourcing
  • Workforce needs

Topic Area 3: Next-Generation Technologies

The pace of innovation in IT continues to increase. What new developments just over the horizon will offer significant opportunities for enhancing the work of higher education in the years to come? How do we take advantage of new technologies as they emerge in the consumer, research, and professional marketplaces? How do we decide which technologies are worth investments of our scarce attention and time? What is the role of standards in helping us make sense of and integrate future technologies into our institutions?

Key topics include:

  • Constant innovation and continual development
  • Assessing and measuring the impact and value of new technologies
  • Integrating and managing new technologies
  • New and emerging standards
  • Next-generation infrastructure and systems

Topic Area 4: Social Networking

Web 2.0 technologies are interactive, participatory applications and services that value user control and participation in applications and services. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace are familiar social networks that link people and ideas, and more are created all the time with highly specialized audiences in mind. How can higher education harness social networking to meet institutional goals?

Key topics include:

  • Social networking services
  • Integration of applications
  • User-generated content
  • User-managed content
  • Knowledge management
  • Networks of practice
  • Virtual communities
  • Social Web
  • Rich media and immersive environments
  • Mashups and user-created content

Topic Area 5: Sustainability

How many gadgets, computers, cables, monitors, printers, and drives are consumed in the life of a technologist? Where does all this stuff go when it’s no longer useful? And what is the impact on the environment? As we select technologies and services for our campuses, what are the environmental factors to consider related to energy use, disposal, and so forth?

Key topics include:

  • Sustainability
  • Next-generation technologies
  • Constant innovation and continual development
  • Assessing and measuring the impact and value of new technologies
  • Integrating and managing new technologies
  • New and emerging standards

Track 2: Enterprise Information Systems And Services

Topic Area 6: Administrative Solutions and Business Process Improvement

Administrative information systems are vital services needed to run our institutions. Providing mission-critical services to our constituents is particularly challenging given the increased demand combined with the resource constraints all campuses face. While attention is most often focused on the largest systems (student, HR/payroll, financials, course management) many others including alumni/development, parking, food service, grants management, and student health services demand our attention. What are today’s best practices and most promising options to manage such a broad and diverse portfolio? Do mergers and acquisitions shake our faith in the viability of commercial solutions? Rather than build versus buy, should we use community source to build together, with colleagues in other institutions and with our commercial partners? How do we ensure that we are effectively delivering value and aligning with the institutional mission?

Key topics include:

  • ERP: deciding on the right vendor
  • ERP: implementation issues
  • ERP: postimplementation issues
  • External providers (ASPs, outsourcers, remote hosting)
  • When to build vs. buy: best-of-breed vs. comprehensive suite
  • How to wean off the permanent upgrade cycle in order to deliver value
  • 24 x 7 service demand on an 8 x 5 staffing budget
  • Funding models: dilemmas and solutions
  • Managing development costs, scope, and resources
  • Managing authorization and access control
  • Open and community source solutions
  • Vendor management and contract negotiations
  • Offshore development
  • Change management
  • Disaster recovery and business continuity planning and testing
  • Enterprise application integration
  • E-business and e-commerce
  • Staff recruiting and retention
  • Organizational strategies

Topic Area 7: Collaboration Tools and Portals

Collaborative software is more important than ever with rapidly changing user expectations and an increasingly mobile campus community. Faculty collaboration spans traditional organizational structures on and off campus. Wikis have emerged as a new way to build data repositories and collective understanding through collaboration. How can institutions stay current with this rapidly changing area? What lessons can be shared by the early adopters? How do collaboration tools impact interinstitutional collaboration?

Key topics include:

  • Collaboration among multiple campuses
  • Webconferencing
  • Instant messaging
  • Knowledge management tools
  • Wikis
  • Campus IT forums
  • Impact on the IT organization

Topic Area 8: Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, and Decision Support

Business intelligence is a user-driven process that includes accessing, exploring, and analyzing data to provide insights and deliver findings for rapid, intelligent decision making in an increasingly competitive, resource-constrained educational environment. We recognize that data is a valuable asset within our major enterprise systems, yet too often it is underused or inaccessible. It is the critical resource for accountability to funding agencies, auditability, compliance monitoring, and the extraction of information key to setting strategic priorities. Which tools, policies, and approaches deliver the greatest value and effectiveness? As our institutions and data become more complex, how do we prevent end users from becoming overwhelmed, and how do we avoid erroneous conclusions based on misunderstanding of the data? How can the intelligent use of data automate or streamline operational decision making?

Key topics include:

  • Business intelligence platforms, suites, and strategies
  • Dashboards and data visualization
  • Integrating data from disparate systems
  • Metadata and metadata repositories
  • Data administration: what matters most?
  • Data marts, operational data stores, or warehouses: does it matter?
  • Challenges of extract, load, transform, and performance
  • Managing user privileges: how do we know who can see what?
  • Data exploration, mining, and analytics
  • Text and image mining: what are the real enterprise applications?
  • Query brokers and federated systems
  • Tool versus data training

Topic Area 9: Document Management and Records Retention

Document management has emerged as an important IT component of business process improvement. The transition from traditional paper processes to leading-edge digital asset management requires a cultural change in the institution. Records retention has become a high-profile area involving regulatory compliance. Document management systems and related policies are also an integral part of disaster recovery and business continuity planning. What are the best practices for implementing document management solutions in higher education? What lessons involving records retention were learned from recent disasters?

Key topics include:

  • Digital asset management
  • Disaster recovery plans
  • Campus standards for content management
  • Enterprise imaging implementations
  • Retention plans: are you in compliance?

Topic Area 10: Enterprise Course Management Systems and Tools

Today’s academic vision generally emphasizes the need for specific strategies to manage student-student, faculty-student, and faculty-faculty collaboration. Commercial, community, and open source course and learning management systems provide avenues for institutions to manage course content, support interaction between faculty and students, and facilitate instruction-related workflow. On many campuses, such systems have risen to the level of a critical enterprise system rivaling e-mail and Web services in terms of daily impact on academic life. Which postimplementation issues need to be addressed?

Key topics include:

  • Learning management systems and infrastructure
  • Course management systems and products
  • Integration with portals
  • Open source, community source, and open knowledge endeavors
  • Virtual learning environments
  • Collaborative learning environments
  • Content management
  • Integrated and stand-alone online course tools
  • LMS attributes needed to serve residential, hybrid, and distance learning
  • Integration with administrative and library systems
  • Standards and specifications
  • Cost-effective e-learning course development
  • Course cartridges
  • Nonacademic uses of course management systems

Topic Area 11: Integration Solutions, Service Oriented Architecture, and Web Services

The increased volume and complexity of campus information resources and services require more emphasis on integration. The enterprise-wide importance of such integration requires a more cohesive approach to replace the point solutions of the past. The rise of portals, Web services technologies, single sign-on approaches, and other integration methods is a response to this growing need. What particular challenges and opportunities do we face in this area today? Paradoxically, the integrated suites of the current and previous generations of vended products created their own integration issues with external applications, and the emerging vendor products will be more loosely coupled, using enterprise service buses as the framework.

Key topics include:

  • Portals: extending campus services
  • System-to-system integration (Web services, EAI, brokers, and integrated messaging)
  • Loose coupling
  • Service oriented architecture
  • Knowledge management
  • Intranets, extranets, and Web sites
  • Integration platforms
  • Data administration and synchronization
  • Workflow and business process management
  • Standards: LDAP, XML, UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL
  • Identity management

Topic Area 12: Open and Community Source Solutions

The open source movement continues to gain more importance in higher education as a realistic alternative to traditional build versus buy decision making. Community source is based on many of the principles of open source development efforts, but they rely more on defined roles, responsibilities, and funded commitments. What are the decision points for considering community solutions? Are traditional software support roles being filled effectively by vendor partners? Does the volatility of the vendor marketplace and higher education’s shrinking share of the merged vendors’ total revenue impact community source initiatives?

Key topics include:

  • Buy versus build versus build together
  • The rationale: it’s not about being “free”
  • Community source student systems: the next wave?
  • Control of destiny
  • Case studies: implementation and support lessons learned
  • Integrating multiple open and community source solutions
  • Vendor partnerships for support

Track 3: Information, Access, Digital Content, and Libraries

Topic Area 13: Digital Content Creation, Preservation, and Retrieval

Libraries are creating digital collections that enhance access to traditional and special library collections. Librarians and information technologists are working together to develop strategies and customize tools that increase use and preserve long-term access in the digital era. Seamless university-wide information systems are needed to sustain institutional repositories, virtual collections, and scholarship produced by academic departments, research centers, students, labs, and the library. Libraries can provide expertise and guidance in developing the metadata to ensure access, long-term preservation, and interinstitutional sharing of new digital objects and their supporting datasets. New metadata standards, RFID, mobile phones, metasearch, tagging, folksonomies, context-aware, and other emerging technologies are reshaping how we think about, organize, and deliver library systems.

Key topics include:

  • Copyright, fair use, and intellectual property issues
  • Creation, integration, and preservation of digital content
  • Digital asset management
  • Digital libraries
  • Digital preservation strategies
  • Federated repositories
  • Institutional repositories
  • Life-cycle collection management
  • Metadata
  • Metadata harvesting
  • Outreach and marketing of services
  • Open access
  • OAIS: the Open Archival Information System
  • Partnerships with faculty and IT
  • Personal archiving technologies
  • Remote/virtual curation
  • Scholarly communication and publication
  • Standards and interoperability
  • Strategic alliances
  • Strategic assessment
  • Trusted digital repositories

Topic Area 14: Information Literacy and Supporting Scholarship, Teaching, and Learning

As users are increasingly inundated with new information resources, libraries are deploying new strategies to engage and educate users in developing essential information literacy skills. Integration of library resources into teaching, learning, and scholarship requires close collaboration with faculty, researchers, instructional technologists, and library professionals. Students demand increased access to technology. Faculty increasingly require support and resources to develop digital course materials. How are we meeting these demands, and how do we provide assistance in troubleshooting, advanced application support, instructional technology support, and resources seamlessly and to scale?

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Key topics include:

  • Course redesign
  • Collaborative academic support strategies and models
  • Context-aware technologies
  • Delivering information to digital natives or millennials
  • Developing 21st-century IT competencies and skills for lifelong learning
  • Educating digital natives
  • Embedding library resources into coursework, academic and student life
  • Enhancing faculty research skills in a digital world
  • Faculty development
  • Information literacy
  • Instruction
  • Online tutorials
  • Services and resources to support teaching and learning
  • Teaching with technology and library resources
  • Universal access
  • Use of social networking, gaming, and virtual worlds to support teaching and learning

Topic Area 15: Innovation and Transformation in Information Resources, Outreach, and Services

Libraries are using technology to position the library as a leader in the institution’s information management process. Partnering with central IT, libraries are reshaping computer-aided collaboration spaces, labs, learning commons, and academically-centered social spaces, both digital and physical. Librarians and libraries are guiding institutional policy on information literacy, developing curricula and courses to address this critical area. Libraries are playing a principal institutional role in addressing administrator, faculty, and student concerns about copyright, fair use, intellectual property issues, and current legislation. By establishing institutional repositories and preserving access to the campus’s intellectual capital, libraries are poised to lead academe’s response to the emerging crisis in scholarly communication. Libraries are leading the way in the development of faculty and research collections beyond the traditional boundaries of the library, especially in explaining and supporting the development of metadata. They seek to provide access to scholarly information in multiple formats and develop new services for an increasingly mobile user base. Librarians, faculty, information technologists, and other academic support professionals are collaborating, using new technologies to meet users’ changing needs and expectations.

Key topics include:

  • Accessibility
  • Collaborative use of physical and/or digital space
  • Collaborative academic support strategies and models
  • Content management
  • Context aware technologies
  • Copyright, fair use, and intellectual property issues
  • Course management systems and integration of information resources
  • Disruptive technologies in libraries
  • E-learning
  • Geographic information systems
  • Information literacy
  • Knowledge management
  • Metadata
  • Metasearch tools
  • Outreach/marketing of services
  • Open access
  • Partnerships with users, providers, and IT
  • Plagiarism
  • Strategic assessment
  • Virtual reference

Topic Area 16: Scholarly Communication, Intellectual Property, Copyright and Fair Use

As more content is either digitized or created digitally, and as commercial content creators grow more aggressive in their assertion of copyright, intellectual property, copyright, and fair use are becoming issues of vital concern throughout the higher education enterprise. As the information hub of the university campus, libraries have a particularly valuable view of this problem area, and their leadership and defense of fair use of intellectual property for educational purposes will be increasingly important as faculty and students seek access to the materials of culture and cultural innovation. Libraries can play a key role in reshaping scholarly communication not just by the purchasing decisions they make or the analysis of the economics of scholarly publication they provide. How do libraries meet the demand for access to digital content when the economics of scholarly publishing have outpriced academe’s access to scholarship? What are the technologies will enable libraries and institutions to address these challenges?

Key topics include:

  • Copyright
  • Creative Commons
  • Digital rights management
  • Digital Millennium Copyright Act
  • Google and Google Scholar
  • Fair use
  • Institutional repositories and electronic journals
  • Intellectual property
  • Licensing
  • Open access
  • Recombinations, mashups, and other derivative works
  • Sharing content and data sets between institutions
  • Strategies for transforming scholarly communication
  • Sustainable scholarly publishing
  • TEACH Act

Track 4: Leadership, Management, Planning, And Partnerships

Topic Area 17: Accessibility

Federal laws not only prohibit discrimination against persons with disabilities but also require that higher education institutions ensure that students with disabilities have equal access to programs and services, which include services provided through the use of IT. As technology-enhanced learning environments proliferate, and as our institutions are delivering more administrative services via the Web and other electronic means, we are obligated to design and plan for these services to be fully available to those with physical, visual, hearing, and other challenges. Not only is accessibility an important consideration for our physical spaces such as in computer labs and technology-equipped classrooms, we also must ensure that computer hardware and software, Web sites, online resources, and multimedia images, video, and audio can reach a wide audience of people with disabilities. Institutional policies and procedures need to be crafted to facilitate these endeavors, and training, education, and support must be provided not only for those with disabilities but also for those who provide the technical support.

Making these services widely accessible is not only the right thing to do—it is the wise thing to do. IT offices, in partnership with human resources, academic services, student services, communications and other campus departments, can work together to use technology to increase independence, productivity, and participation in education on the part of those with disabilities.

Key topics include:

  • Physical access
  • Accessible Web design
  • Americans with Disabilities Act
  • Assistive technology
  • Electronic and IT accessibility standards
  • Accommodation strategies
  • Facilities planning
  • Compliance requirements

Topic Area 18: Leadership

Leadership is not a thing but a process that combines the extraordinary qualities of vision for productive change, passion for the processes and people, and sensitivity to the multiple nuances of the work environments. While often reflected in status, ideally leadership qualities are independent of rank and belong to everyone. More important, they are qualities everyone can cultivate, especially in the dynamic IT arena. As efforts to align technology activities with the business and learning outcomes of the institution have grown in importance and visibility, leadership has become even more vital to the IT units.

Key topics include:

  • What is the vision for IT in higher education?
  • Strategic planning
  • Mission, values, and integration of goals
  • How can IT leadership help ensure alignment of technology with business and academic objectives?
  • How can IT support and lead the development of scope, goals, and missions of higher education overall?
  • Priority setting
  • Leveraging institutional opportunities
  • Communication
  • What is leadership?
  • Effective leadership styles and practices
  • Mentoring future leaders
  • How to make leadership training available to everyone
  • How to encourage interested IT staff to become leaders

Topic Area 19: Legal Issues, Regulatory Compliance, Campus IT Policies, and Ethics Education

Higher education has long been a focal point for issues dealing with intellectual property rights, personal privacy, institutional confidentiality, and academic integrity. Faced with increased legal exposure and regulatory requirements (FERPA, CALEA, the Patriot Act, HIPAA, UCITA, DMCA, GLBA, and more), institutions look to policy and policy development for guidance and compliance strategies. By virtue of the services that IT provides to our institutions, IT engages these questions about the intersection of law, policy, compliance, and education. Moreover, as our technical tools give us greater capacity to control and monitor the individual use of IT resources, questions remain about the relationships between and among ownership and responsible use of IT resources and the data they transmit, store, and protect. How can policy, mindful of law and ethics, guide us to a proper relationship between open inquiry, free speech, and easy access to information—hallmarks of higher education—and responsible management of our college and university information infrastructures?

Key topics include:

  • Institutional and IT policy development, dissemination, and enforcement
  • IT policy governance
  • Policies and procedures
  • National networking policy
  • Copyright
  • Compliance
  • Legal issues
  • Regulatory requirements
  • Institutional liability
  • Risk management
  • Audit management
  • Legislative advocacy
  • Identity theft

Topic Area 20: Managing Resources and Services

Advances in information technology present significant opportunities and challenges for campus IT organizations to support the institutional mission through the selection, development, deployment, and management of IT resources and services. IT organizations today with are faced with a complex array of choices and decisions. Given the complexity, how does the successful IT organization navigate the rapids of IT decision making in the arena of resource and service management?

Key topics include:

  • Risk assessment and management
  • Vendor partnerships
  • Cost management
  • Contract management
  • Federating
  • Services and resource management
  • Remote hosting
  • Partnering and collaboration
  • Service level agreements

Topic Area 21: Organization, Staffing, and Funding

What best describes the effective IT organization? Are IT organizations strategic units that provide the foundation for innovation and differentiation, or are they simply runaway cost centers that have only commodity value and no strategic importance to the institution? Are they collaboration builders or silos of service provision? Your view of IT, as well as your organization’s view, will shape your strategies regarding staffing, outsourcing, and planning, as well as your ability to secure funding. How does the successful CIO communicate the importance of an effective IT organization? How do we develop the next-generation IT staff? What skills are necessary? With growing demand and increased funding constraints, the need to communicate ROI and strategic value is critical.

Key topics include:

  • IT funding/strategic planning alignment
  • Interinstitutional communications
  • Organization-wide collaboration
  • Promotion of service offerings
  • Staff morale and productivity
  • IT and HR collaboration
  • Leadership development programs
  • HR measurement processes and tools
  • Evaluation and reward structures
  • Outsourcing and insourcing
  • Project and portfolio management

Topic Area 22: Planning and Assessment

As more technologies become available to support teaching and learning, faculty, and instructional and administrative support, campuses and institutions face more complex decisions about IT’s effectiveness and appropriate use. Formal planning and assessment provide a framework to measure the integration of IT within the institutional strategic plan, linking the institution’s goals to IT projects and outcome measurements and thereby demonstrating how IT adds value to the organization.

Key topics include:

  • Self-evaluation
  • Service evaluation
  • Strategic planning
  • Financial planning for IT
  • Responsibility, accountability, and relevancy to the mission of higher education
  • Institutional assessment
  • Alignment of technology services with business and academic objectives
  • Tools to measure and describe impact of IT to the user community
  • Prioritization
  • Institutional alignment
  • Outcome assessment
  • Course assessment
  • Assessment of learning and teaching
  • Assessment designs
  • Total cost assessment

Topic Area 23: Professional Development, Mentoring, and Succession Planning

As IT professionals work to align technology with the business and academic objectives of the institution, they seek a balance between order and chaos in a dynamic environment that is bombarded with changes in staff, technology, and organization. This dynamic environment has created the need for new careers and stimulated the need for the renewal of skills. The concept of building and creating new careers in higher education technology is fundamental to the notion of lifelong learning. New and innovative ways to provide training and professional development opportunities need to be identified, implemented, and evaluated.

Key topics include:

  • Emerging professions
  • Personal growth
  • Individual development plans
  • Role of educational institutions in developing staff
  • Skill development
  • Career development
  • Training
  • Self-paced training
  • Career and skills audits
  • Mentoring
  • Hiring strategies
  • Merged organizations
  • Evolving roles (librarians in IT)

Topic Area 24: Strategic Alliances, Collaborations, and Partnerships

Collaboration is one of the fascinating features of the development of information technologies. As we seek to align IT with the business and educational priorities of the institution, have we explored the connections and potential opportunities between and among us? How can we use a broad focus to find collaborators and change agents to gain from the very exciting dynamic that has not only contributed to the success of the Internet and IT, but also holds tremendous promise for the future? New skills in interinstitutional collaboration need to be developed or honed as more institutions engage in open/community source initiatives.

Key topics include:

  • Leveraging the power of individuals, groups, and associations
  • Building and maintaining relationships and partnerships
  • Outsourcing and insourcing
  • Business continuity planning
  • Consortia building
  • Joint venture taking
  • Capitalizing on regional resources
  • International and national collaboration
  • Exploration of open and community source options

Track 5: Research Computing, Networking, Infrastructure, and Middleware

Topic Area 25: Identity Management

Identity management is the business processes and infrastructure required to support the creation, maintenance, and use of digital identities within the enterprise. Identity management systems use middleware and integration services to build a consolidated view of identity, including roles, across disparate application and business systems. We look for applications that make use of existing tools such as Grouper and Signet or examples of locally developed tools. Identity management systems are integral in providing role-based access, Web single sign-on, and federated identity services.

Key topics include:

  • Innovative use of identity management systems
  • Group management, including the use of Grouper
  • Role-based access, including the use of Signet
  • Shibboleth and federated identity management
  • eAuthentication business processes
  • Federated identity management through Shibboleth
  • Implementing application level of assurance
  • Two-factor authentication
  • Directory services (LDAP, ActiveX, NDS)

Topic Area 26: Infrastructure and Infrastructure Support Services

A strategic imperative is establishing and maintaining a robust technical infrastructure to support both academic and administrative needs while accommodating rapid change. This infrastructure ranges from foundational elements such as data center management, network design, storage, and computational resources to software-based infrastructure supporting virtualization, grids, databases, imaging, configuration management, and directory services.

Key topics include:

  • Network design and architecture
  • Converged network architecture
  • Storage consolidation and management
  • Data center management
  • Server virtualization and management
  • Grid systems
  • Database management and administration
  • Capacity planning and configuration management
  • Directory services
  • ITIL implementations
  • SOA and Web services

Topic Area 27: Middleware and Integration Services

Middleware is a layer of software between the network and the applications. This software provides services such as identification, authentication, authorization, directories, and security. Integration services use technologies such as XML, RSS, portals, single sign-on, Web services, and identity management to interconnect disparate applications such as ERP, course management, and local or third-party developed applications to reduce complexity and provide a coherent user experience. Many of these integration services operate in real time and use external partners to provide Web-based services.

Key topics include:

  • Web services architecture
  • Application frameworks (J2EE, .Net)
  • Dynamic integration and security
  • Shibboleth and federated identity management
  • Grid-based authentication
  • Identity management and authorization services
  • Directory services (LDAP, ActiveX, NDS)
  • Portals and single sign-on
  • PKI
  • XML
  • RSS and SOAP

Topic Area 28: Research Computing and Advanced Networking

Nearly every academic discipline uses IT to support research and scholarship. Institutions vary widely in the degree to which support for research is organized on an institutional basis versus residing with the researchers themselves. IT is fostering new models for interinstitutional collaboration via grid computing, shared networked resources, and collaborative applications. While IT infrastructure services are not intended to be a research area per se, they provide the institutional context for successful contemporary research activities. Advanced networking goes hand-in-hand with high-performance computing lest powerful machines be bottlenecked by insufficient bandwidth for sending and receiving data. Collaborative, real-time interactions between people and between people and data are outstripping the capacities of institutional commodity networks. The most intense applications are moving away from packet-switched networks to dedicated lambdas and point-to-point light paths.

Key topics include:

  • Collaborative applications
  • Advanced networking
  • Data visualization
  • Research data storage, security, and integrity
  • Digital humanities
  • Disciplinary data repositories
  • Extensible and reusable digital collections
  • New publishing models
  • Data center buildouts
  • Funding research IT infrastructure
  • Middleware for research computing
  • High-performance computing
  • Dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM)
  • Static and dynamic light paths
  • Telepresence
  • IPv6
  • Intra- and interinstitutional resource sharing
  • Grid computing

Track 6: Security, Policy, and Privacy

Topic Area 29: Data Privacy and Classification

Higher education has been tackling traditional issues such as intellectual property rights, personal and institutional privacy, and academic integrity for many years. Emerging legal, ethical, and appropriate information use issues have shown the need for new policies and response strategies. Fundamental to these efforts is the development of data classification schemes that foster awareness of the values, risks, and responsibilities associated with various types and sources of data. Information must not only be retained, protected, and expeditiously located in response to e-discovery orders but also appropriately purged to limit institutional liability.

Key topics include:

  • Privacy statements
  • Classification schemes
  • Records retention and disposal
  • Security breaches and responses
  • Notification of breaches of confidentiality
  • Ethical use of institutional data
  • E-discovery and institutional liability
  • Nondisclosure agreements
  • Professional ethics and confidentiality
  • Monitoring and surveillance
  • Data custodians and privacy officers
  • Data exposure discovery with server and Web scanning

Topic Area 30: Encryption, Cryptology, and PKI

The higher education community has experienced many embarrassing and potentially harmful releases of confidential and sensitive data, especially Social Security numbers, financial information, and other data that could lead to identity theft. The sources of data have included unprotected servers, Web sites that should not have been publicly accessible, and, most notoriously, lost or stolen mobile computing devices such as laptops and USB drives. Firewalls, passwords, secure protocols, and institutional policies are typically employed in efforts to prevent unauthorized access to confidential data. Nevertheless, once well-intentioned individuals download clear-text information into insecure locations, it can be exposed. What can we do to make the technology infrastructure as fail safe as possible so that even if a laptop is lost or an access level breached the data will remain secure? How can we scale beyond ad hoc encryption of particular files, datasets, and communications to institution-wide solutions and interinstitutional interoperability? To what extent should we use commercial solutions versus developing communal higher education infrastructures and federations?

Key topics include:

  • Database encryption
  • Communications encryption
  • Whole disk or file/folder encryption on mobile devices
  • Encryption key protection, management, escrow, and use
  • Multifactor authentication
  • S/MIME e-mail applications
  • Commercial certificate authorities
  • Institution-wide public key infrastructures
  • Commercial versus open source solutions
  • Digital signatures
  • Interoperability with commercial applications
  • Higher Education Bridge Certificate Authority (HEBCA)
  • Federal Bridge Certificate Authority (FBCA)
  • U.S. Higher Education Root (USHER)
  • Integration with Shibboleth federations

Topic Area 31: Regulatory Compliance, Legal and Ethical Issues

Increasing government regulations and higher community expectations have placed new burdens on educational institutions. Regulatory compliance requires sustained effort and implementation of new technologies in response to a changing legal landscape. Achieving compliance requires greater understanding of laws and regulations and the process of legal review. Also, greater understanding is needed about the implementation of technical solutions in support of compliance. A strong ethical infrastructure is the foundation for regulatory compliance and operation within the law. Emerging legal and ethical issues have placed a higher priority on the response strategies at our institutions, including the need to respond to legislation and regulations such as the Patriot Act, SEVIS, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Sarbanes-Oxley, payment card industry security standards, HIPAA, FERPA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, FISMA, personal identity information protection laws, CALEA and e-discovery. It is useful to learn how others have garnered support and implemented solutions in efforts to ensure regulatory compliance.

Key topics include:

  • Strategic enterprise information security planning considering overall compliance
  • Effective practices for responding to external legal entities (Patriot Act, FBI, or e-discovery requests)
  • Effective practices for addressing SEVIS
  • Effective practices for responding to financial systems controls as defined (GLBA, PCI security standards, etc.)
  • Effective practices for compliance with HIPAA and handling ePHI
  • Effective practices for compliance with FERPA
  • Effective practices for responding to DMCA requests
  • Creating an environment for copyright education
  • Effective practices for responding FISMA and the role of information security in the grants and contracts process
  • Protection of Social Security numbers and other personal identity information
  • Effective practices for responding to CALEA and network security, registration, and access control
  • The Constitutional law: free press and IT issues
  • Effective practices for responding to state laws
  • Digital rights management technologies
  • Policies and procedures: professional ethics
  • An IT professional’s dilemma: obligation to report versus right to privacy

Topic Area 32: Risk Assessment

Risk management includes recognizing risk, assessing the likelihood and impact of the identified risk, developing strategies to minimize and manage risk, and risk mitigation using resources and planning. The pressures of an always-on infrastructure require strong risk management techniques, controls, tools, and strategies. Significant planning and management tasks revolve around disaster preparedness, emergency response, and business recovery planning. Risk management has emerged as a core competency for higher education professionals.

Key topics include:

  • Institutional risk assessment tools and techniques
  • Potential risk source identification for internal and external risks
  • Threat analysis and benchmarking
  • Vulnerability assessment
  • Tracking common vulnerabilities and mitigation best practices
  • Penetration testing and external scanning
  • Audit reviews
  • Information technology operational risk assessment tools
  • Insurance, self-insurance, and institutional liability
  • Risk avoidance strategies
  • Risk mitigation strategies, techniques, and plans
  • Assessing the effectiveness of a risk management plan
  • Disaster preparedness planning
  • Emergency response planning
  • Business recovery planning
  • Asset identification and protection
  • Assessing cost-effective approaches for risk management

Topic Area 33: Data Privacy

Organizing and managing the information security function can be a challenge in an academic environment in terms of finding staff, obtaining funding, and gathering support in an open and free academic environment. It is useful to learn how others have garnered support and buy-in and have obtained guidance for the information assurance mission.

Key topics include:

  • Information security office staffing and organization
  • Recruiting and retaining security staff
  • IT security certification and professional development
  • Security evangelism in higher education
  • IT security standards in higher education
  • Information security management
  • Operations management
  • Record and log retention management
  • Incident response, record keeping, and communication
  • Information security assessment
  • Information security metrics and data-based management decisions
  • Information security training and awareness programs
  • Copyright, security, and privacy education programs
  • Outsourcing security
  • Independent reviews and outsourced audits
  • Remediation plan creation and management
  • Alignment of security management with university goals
  • Procedures for digital forensics and chain of custody

Topic Area 34: Security Policy and Procedures

Emerging legal, ethical, and appropriate information use issues have placed a higher priority on the development of policies and documented procedures at our institutions. How can policy, mindful of law and ethics, guide us to the proper balance between the easy access to information that is a hallmark of higher education and responsible management of our information infrastructure? How have other organizations created processes to write policies and procedures?

Key topics include:

  • Institutional IT security policy development, dissemination, and enforcement
  • IT policy assessment
  • Creation of documented institutional IT security procedures and practices
  • IT policy governance
  • Security standards (ISO 17799, COBIT)
  • ITIL and best practices in security documentation
  • IT standards in higher education
  • Policy alignment with organization values
  • Policies and procedures:
    • professional ethics
    • privacy
    • confidentiality
    • data classification
    • configuration management
    • change control
    • network connections
    • firewalls
    • access control
    • monitoring/surveillance
    • advertising and sponsorship
    • institutional liability
    • e-commerce/e-business policy
    • outsourced data, ASPs, and hosted solutions
    • contract and vendor management
    • software licensing
  • Security policy development, dissemination, and enforcement
  • Security and awareness programs

Topic Area 35: Security Technology, Infrastructure, and Architecture

To secure a campus today it is essential to build in security from the beginning as we plan, design, and deploy networks, workstations, servers, middleware, and applications within our campus IT infrastructure. This topic area identifies proactive approaches to integrate security into our IT infrastructure.

Key topics include:

  • Network security, registration, and access control
  • Firewall configuration and management
  • System security: OS, database, and application security
  • Strategic enterprise information security planning
  • Digital rights management technologies
  • Logfile analysis and security event monitors
  • Security information management systems
  • Mobile device security
  • Advanced network security (802.11i, VoIP, Ipv6)
  • Intrusion detection/prevention
  • Automated patching systems
  • LAN-based group policy enforcement

Track 7: Teaching And Learning

Topic Area 36: Course Content

Developing, finding, using, and sharing digital course content requires a careful mix of resources, skills, and policies that facilitate collaborative work. Work may be informed by scholarship and practice from many fields: learning theory guides uses of technologies; systems and architectures facilitate sharing of materials; curricular initiatives drive development efforts; and innovative models for collaboration empower faculty to build, use, and share content easily. Institution- and domain-specific repositories are essential partners in identifying existing resources, informing development efforts, and creating standardized access to new digital products and content.

Key topics include:

  • Learning objects
  • Multimedia content
  • Course redesign and curricular development
  • Aligning curricular development with curricular initiatives
  • Production teams and project management
  • Best practices for teaching and learning with digital content
  • Collaboration
  • Course/learning management systems
  • Accessibility
  • Content sharing
  • Content management
  • Scalability
  • Standards
  • Metadata
  • Copyright
  • Open access
  • E-learning research
  • Digital asset management
  • Repositories
  • New media/rich media authoring

Topic Area 37: Faculty Development, Incentives, and Engagement

Higher education remains committed to the strategic use of information and instructional technologies in teaching and learning. Institutions are working to find the right combination of support services that will enable, facilitate, and encourage faculty to find (and employ) creative and innovative uses of instructional technologies. What incentive is most likely to attract faculty to get engaged in this activity? Is it release or reassigned time, stipends, project-based development, participation in local or national consortia, engagement with scholarly communities, or some combination of all of these? How can IT professionals and librarians partner with faculty members and each other to provide the best services? How does (and should) instructional technology use impact faculty hiring, retention, tenure, and promotion? How can institutions best demonstrate their commitment to this area? How do we know we are doing enough or doing it well?

Key topics include:

  • Faculty support models
  • Faculty engagement techniques
  • Assessment of teaching effectiveness
  • Course development teams
  • Faculty mentoring
  • E-portfolios or digital portfolios
  • Faculty recruitment and hiring
  • Institutional policies on technology and teaching
  • Faculty promotion and tenure
  • Incentives, rewards, and recognition
  • Community of practice
  • Scholarship of teaching and learning
  • Release/reassigned time
  • Competency-based learning
  • External or internal grant support
  • Faculty roles
  • IT and library support services
  • Partnering with scholarly communities

Topic Area 38: Learning Spaces

The entire campus has become the classroom of the future. Learning is taking place wherever the learner is so inspired. Wireless networking and other technologies have allowed the café, the library, the lawn, residential hall rooms, and other spaces to join the classrooms and the labs as learning spaces. New and unfamiliar yet exciting spaces are being created while the traditional classrooms and labs are being renovated to facilitate new teaching and learning practices. This expanded concept of learning spaces is forcing campuses to rethink the design, support, and management of these spaces.

Key topics include:

  • Classroom design
  • Blended social and study spaces
  • Learning spaces policies and procedures
  • Collaborative study spaces
  • Classroom support services
  • Pedagogical impacts on space design
  • Creating spaces that inspire
  • Furniture and flexibility
  • Integrating technology into the teaching space
  • Engaging faculty and students in learning space planning and design
  • Human-centered design
  • Classroom technologies training

Topic Area 39: Online Learning: Distributed, Distance, and Blended Learning Environments

Distance and distributed education have grown more complex and inclusive as blended learning environments emerge from combinations of online learning and face-to-face classroom settings. One-way transmission of course content has evolved into a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous interactivity, often with students collaborating electronically outside sessions convened by the instructor. Virtual worlds present a new perspective for remote collaborators. What are the possibilities and challenges of these new models of online learning? What role do instructional designers play in crafting distance, distributed, and blended learning environments? How can instructors and instructional designers be compensated fairly for the course content and design they contribute to the institution? How can schools cooperate to deliver, assess, and grant credit for online learning? What role do commercial partners play in supporting the costs of developing and delivering online learning?

Key topics include:

  • Distributed and distance learning
  • Mobile learning
  • Interactive and self-paced learning environments
  • Web-based instruction or courses
  • Virtual worlds for online learning
  • Collaboration tools
  • Computer-mediated student-faculty and student-peer relationships
  • Content development for online learning
  • Pedagogical best practices
  • Remote examinations and proctoring models
  • Remote help desk and support mechanisms
  • Delivery of library and other student services
  • Strategic planning for online learning
  • Cost-effectiveness and ROI standards
  • Learning outcome assessment and evaluation

Topic Area 40: Student Experience

Colleges and universities have long wrestled with questions about how collegiate experiences affect students and how those experiences might be further improved. In the current era, perennial change associated with generational shifts and advances in learning theory are regularly broadsided by compelling and disruptive technologies. Technologies may come from the institution, the marketplaces, or students themselves. How might these technologies, experiences, and energies be harnessed for higher education? What balance should instructors seek between inviting these technologies into the classroom and excluding them from formal learning? How can disruptive technologies such as wireless or peer-to-peer file transfers shape our understanding of student life?

Key topics include:

  • Social software (Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal)
  • Extracurricular projects
  • Learning styles and aptitudes as they relate to uses of technologies
  • Cultural approaches to technology
  • Informal versus formal learning spaces and practices
  • Student authoring
  • Relevant new findings in the science of learning
  • Persistent virtual worlds
  • Massively multiplayer online role-playing games
  • Continuous partial attention

Topic Area 41: Teaching and Learning Assessment and Evaluation

Teachers can’t employ teaching and learning technologies effectively unless they have reliable and meaningful measures of learning outcomes. Information technologies offer unprecedented possibilities for accommodating different learning styles, but without strong assessment models, progress has been slowed. At a time of declining public funding for education and increasing calls for educational accountability, thoughtful, multisource assessment of the effectiveness of teaching and learning technologies is a vital factor in strategic planning at all levels of the enterprise.

Key topics include:

  • Electronic assessment
  • Course assessment
  • Online testing and surveying
  • Instructional design
  • Learning models
  • Assessment of learning outcomes
  • Assessment of teaching
  • Performance evaluations
  • Evaluative studies
  • E-portfolios
  • Assessment designs
  • Academic policies
  • Instructor/student needs assessment

Track 8: User Services

Topic Area 42: Classroom and Lab Support

Computer-equipped classrooms and labs are now the norm, yet they can be difficult and costly to manage and support. Successful classroom and lab support has a positive impact on teaching and learning while controlling costs.

Key topics include:

  • Smart and multimedia classroom support
  • Mobile labs: PDAs, tablets, cell phones, and more
  • Reliability and response for in-classroom support
  • Quality assurance and preproduction usability testing and validation
  • Supporting both the leading and trailing edge
  • Accessible labs and classrooms
  • Classroom and lab configurations and configuration management

Topic Area 43: Client Support and Help Desk

The help desk and client support staff are the primary face of IT to many in the community. Wisely used, the Help Desk can provide a critical role in communications and satisfaction with IT. Among the “softest” areas of IT, it can be difficult to accurately measure the quality or effectiveness of client support.

Key topics include:

  • The evolving help desk: mission, challenges, and solutions
  • The role of the help desk in development, outreach, alignment, and communications
  • Support for remote and mobile users
  • Supporting the LMS and collaboration tools
  • Support modes: real-time versus asynchronous
  • Online/network-mediated support
  • Managing support services
  • Support benchmarks
  • Measuring support quality, cost, and value
  • Training support staff
  • Scalable support
  • 24 x 7 support
  • Problem reporting and tracking
  • Business support models
  • Multimedia support
  • Research support
  • Collaborative support models
  • Outsourcing support
  • Documentation
  • Self-service support
  • Support for emerging technologies
  • Support for obsolete technologies
  • Support for students
  • Change management

Topic Area 44: Desktop Support and Management

Even the smallest institutions have many hundreds of computers, and the largest own and manage tens of thousands. How they are managed, from acquisition to disposal, has great impact on cost, efficiency, security, and user satisfaction.

Key topics include:

  • Desktop and laptop configuration management
  • Security management on the client desktop
  • Software licensing, license management, and license compliance
  • ASP, Web-based, and subscription service models for software licensing
  • Privacy and confidentiality practices
  • Asset management
  • Hardware lifecycle: purchasing, maintenance, and disposal, including environmental concerns
  • Equipment replacement cycles and strategies

Topic Area 45: Supporting the Student Experience

Technology pervades student life beyond the classroom: in recreation and entertainment, communications, work, and home life. In some cases it can create a bridge between structured scholarly activities and the rest of students’ lives—with potential benefits and costs. Technology can aid our efforts to understand, support, and engage students beyond academics.

Key topics include:

  • Social networking
  • Intellectual property and copyright awareness for students
  • Peer-to-peer services and alternatives
  • Engaging and supporting remote learners
  • Recreational and social technologies
  • Gaming
  • Cell phones, instant messaging, and other mobile communications
  • Emergency notification systems
  • Collaboration tools and social networking
  • Residential networks and telecommunications

Topic Area 46: Training

Technologies are constantly evolving and emerging. Students, faculty, staff, and IT professionals all need training to thrive (or just to keep up). Successful training is effective at developing needed skills while making efficient use of resources.

Key topics include:

  • Just-in-time training
  • Outsourced training and training materials
  • Information security training
  • Collaborative approaches training
  • Developing student and professional staff
  • Training faculty
  • Training on specialized topics
  • Copyright, privacy, and security awareness programs
  • Information literacy programs
  • Online and remote training

Questions/Concerns

For answers to any proposal questions, please contact Leslie DeGrassi at cfp@educause.edu, 303-939-0325.