101 BEST PRACTICES >> Connectivity

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101 BEST PRACTICES >> Connectivity

11/23/2006

Edited By Mary Grush

Nothing has changed the landscape of higher education IT more than connectivity. From “on-demand” services for our net-gen students and advanced eLearning systems for faculty, to high-performance computing grid resources for researchers, IT is now dishing out more networked services than ever to connect campus constituents to each other and to the world. Expectations from students, faculty, researchers, administrators, their professional communities, and the general public will only grow as IT leaders grapple with the challenges of providing distributed, secure, interoperable networked services for today’s connected campuses. On the next pages, we’ve highlighted some of the best examples of how campus IT is meeting the connectivity challenge.

33 :: WHAT D'ES WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY LOOK LIKE?

BALL STATE’s Shafer Tower became
part of a multisensory network experience.

Artists and IT managers at Ball State University (IN) collaborated this past spring on an interactive digital sculpture project depicting the school’s wireless network infrastructure in a multisensory experience, incorporating projection screens, cameras, computers, speakers, lights, and even the carillon bells in the campus’ Shafer Tower. The sights and sounds reacted to changes in network activity and traffic location as they happened, including the activity of local participants using their handheld 802.11g wireless devices to interact with the sculpture in real time. The digital sculpture will be recomposed and displayed permanently on a series of wall-mounted plasma screens; plans are to overlay real-time and historical data that illustrate the full spectrum of campus wireless traffic.More info here.

34 :: MULTI-INSTITUTION CONNECTIVITY

LSU’s Brian Voss

Louisiana State University CIO Brian Voss says that supercomputing is a priority at LSU: “One of the things we’re very focused on, because of the presence of Ed Seidel and the Center for Computation and Technology at LSU, is high-performance and grid computing for the advancement of science. And the LONI project—the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative—g'es beyond what we’re doing on our own campus. What differentiates it from many of its regional optical networking peers around the country is that LONI is not only a network; it is also a scientific grid computing environment. In addition to buying the fiber pathways, optical gear, and network switches to bring up LONI as a regional network, we’ve also purchased high-performance computing resources to distribute to state institutions so that we can use LONI to form a computational grid.” This plan will include six Dell server clusters running at 30 teraFLOPS. Adds Voss, “LSU is also a member of SURA, the Southeastern Universities Research Association. SURA has a project called the SURAgrid that allows member institutions to put computational assets or resources into a broader grid across the SURA community, to provide that resource to researchers working collaboratively within SURA. And that is moving forward at a rapid pace over the next few months.

“Both LONI and the SURAgrid are initiatives that help advance the collaborative nature of 21st-century science, and show how building IT infrastructure can really enable scientific advances that go beyond the borders of an individual lab or campus, or even, say, to a broader region,” he says. “And that fits well with our role in the national infrastructure in terms of our involvement with national high-performance networks such as National LambdaRail.” More info here.

35 :: P2P AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING

Judith B'ettcher reflected in her June 2006 eLearning column: “The P2P paradigm is not restricted to music sharing or moviemaking. Clearly, two key P2P features are fast becoming essential to the future of eLearning: instant communication between peers, and file sharing (which includes more control over content). Add in the growing culture of sharing and collaboration, and sprinkle with the continuing evolution of the faculty member into the role of producer and director, orchestrating learning from the sidelines. These are the elements of the eLearning experience we should be preparing and designing for. The relationship between faculty and students will continue to change, and adjusting our tools and systems to benefit, not collapse, from these changes is our challenge. Where P2P services will lead is yet unknown, but their future application to collaborative eLearning will no doubt hold surprises for us all.” More info here.

36 :: NEXT-GENERATION WIRELESS

At the University of Texas-Austin, Nortel is getting some expert advice on the development of tomorrow’s wireless technology. Through the university’s multidisciplinary Industrial Affiliates Program, students and professors are carrying out pre-competitive research on wireless technology. UT’s Wireless Networking and Communications Group, a research center within the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working with Nortel and other wireless, software, and semiconductor company sponsors on research in such areas as propagation and antennas, modulation and coding, signal processing, sensor and ad-hoc networks, network security, and network architectures.

37 :: COLLABORATION VIA THE PORTAL AND BEYOND

Loyola Marymount University (CA) turned its SunGard Higher Education Luminis campus portal into a two-way web application to support document sharing and collaboration for the whole campus. By integrating Xythos Digital Locker applications within its portal, LMU is encouraging users to store all of their content in the portal, making it much easier to share with others. Single sign-on authentication and encrypted file transfer provide improved content security and compliance. The Xythos solution will also help support the university’s strategic initiative to increase its focus on research, because it provides web-based tools for securely sharing research-related materials among different organizations that connect via public networks such as the internet.

38 :: HANDHELDS IN THE FIELD

In New York City’s borough of The Bronx, Hostos Community College of CUNY students are taking their Palm Tungsten E2 PDAs to city parks, to study forest ecology. The devices are part of an initiative at the college that will introduce mobile technology into curricula across various disciplines, including mathematics, nursing, and biology. More info here.