TechTalks Transcript
Hot IT Topics: Live from EDUCAUSE
 Judith Boettcher [JVB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 John Bucher [JB] |
 Barbara O'Keefe [BO] |
October 28, 1999
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JVB: Welcome to the CREN TechTalk series for fall of 1999 and to this session on "Hot IT Topics," coming live from EDUCAUSE in Long Beach, California. And if we were upstairs in the hotel, we could look out and see the Queen Mary, but we are in the ground floor -- no view at all. But anyway, welcome very much. You are here because it is time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus.
This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today. We'd like to welcome our live studio audience. This is the first time we've done this and we've got a large group here to participate. And at the count of three, would all of you here like to say hi out to our Webcast audience? One, two, three!
Audience: Hi!
JVB: And there we go! All right. To get started, let me welcome the technology anchor for TechTalk, Howard Strauss of Princeton. Now as you know, Howard is a well-known Web and all-around information technology expert. Welcome, Howard, and thanks for being here.
HS: Thank you, Judith.
Welcome to this edition of TechTalk originating from EDUCAUSE 99, which is the very first EDUCAUSE conference. I'm Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the TechTalk series of technology Webcasts. As technology anchor, my job is to engage our guest experts in a lively technical dialogue that will answer the questions you'd like answered and ask those very important follow-up questions. You can ask our guest experts, John Bucher and Barbara O'Keefe, your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net any time during this Webcast. If we don't get to your question during the Webcast, we'll provide an answer in the Webcast archives.
Today, in addition to being the technology anchor, I will also be one of the experts. I'll try to be sure to ask myself just very easy questions during this broadcast!
Conferences such as EDUCAUSE 99 give us the opportunity to learn about what our colleagues at other universities are doing to explore what new things the commercial IT vendors have to offer, and to network with our peers at other institutions. When we return to our home colleges and universities, we tend to regale our associates left at home with the amazing things others are doing so well and kvetch about how our own institutions are mired in the Antarctica of information technology -- or so it always seems.
One important thing we get from going to conferences such as this that we often fail to mention to our colleagues is a chance to reflect on where we are, where we should be going and how best to get there. In truth, we could accomplish this just by being far enough away from home to avoid the day-to-day pressures that all of us face. Knowing this, perhaps we should leave our cell phones at home and ignore the distraction of pagers and e-mail that are all too available over here.
Today's three experts -- counting me -- have wandered about this conference and have seen and heard some wondrous things. But we've also spent some time reflecting on what this means to our universities. From this distance from our offices, we've been thinking about how we can support all the new stuff we've seen. Our users are seeing it all, too. How can we deal with their expectations that we'll have all this new stuff on their desktops by tomorrow? And once we do meet that need, what will they ask for next?
We've always known that there are many common tasks in research, instruction and administration. Barbara has been involved with ways to share some of the IP objects that people have developed for instruction. Can that help us solve our users' soaring needs and expectations and keep our costs under control?
Ultimately, much of the solution will force us to empower our users to do more for themselves. The Web has become the source for all ideas, information and, increasingly, services. For much of our user community, if something isn't on the Web, it doesn't exist. That challenges us to enable all of our users to not just browse the Web, but to publish their ideas and applications on the Web. We can't do it all for them.
Fortunately, there are some tools that will help, but users' expectations seem to rise quicker than appropriate tools can be developed, and the Web continues to change. What was once an electronic bulletin board where users could read simple documents has become a multimedia marketplace to transact the business of universities in the world. Even the HTML foundation of Web pages that you might have thought was so solid is about to be pulled out from under us and replaced with XML.
Tomorrow is the last day of the conference. Soon we will all be heading home. Before we do that, we'll share reflections on these issues and others on today's Webcast of TechTalk.
Judith?
JVB: Thank you very much, Howard.
Howard did forget to mention something else that does happen at conferences and that is that we all go down and check out the vendors and see the new things that they're showing there as well as the toys. So be sure and ask Howard about the toys that he picked up.
We'd like to introduce the panel of experts that we have for you today. John Bucher, who is the Director of Information Technology at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and John is also a member of the CREN board of trustees. Our second panelist is Barbara O'Keefe, the Director of the Media Union at the University of Michigan. And as Howard has mentioned, he is also a third panelist for today and wearing two hats as the technology anchor and Web expert.
I do invite you, since it is a very dynamic session today, to be sure to send in your questions as to what's happening here at EDUCAUSE to expert@cren.net.
Welcome, John and Barbara, thanks for being here.
JB: Thanks for inviting us.
HS: John, I know that you've been wandering around the halls, as I've said, and into sessions and things, trying to get some sense as to what some of the important issues are that IT managers are concerned about. Could you tell us a little bit about what you've heard in the hallways?
JB: Sure, I'd be happy to. And it's rather amazing, the diversity of things that are coming forward. I've talked to CIO's and deans and perhaps a president or two, and certainly lots of mid-level managers from schools big and small, public and private. And I have to admit that I've been somewhat overwhelmed in this last 24-hour period or so of the great diversity.
It seems like wherever you take a slice of this -- that is, when you ask somebody to give you their very quick reaction to the support issues -- a lot of it depends on where they are on their particular campus. Sometimes you hear very high-end, very forward-line or front-line kind of technology issues, and other times, it might be very fundamental.
For example, I just talked to a Vice President of IT at a very large school in the east, and her immediate reaction was, "We've got to get a new phone switch. And we have to replace the wires in some buildings." And so I chuckled a little bit because I expected her to answer with much more cutting-edge kind of answers when, in fact, a new phone switch and new wires --
JVB: I thought she was going to say something about Internet2 connectivity.
JB: That's right, that's right. And perhaps the wires are part of the I2 infrastructure. But gee, a phone switch?
And the third thing she mentioned was getting her administrative applications up and running. They've had an awful lot of trouble. And so, although perhaps this is not the most technical things, as we all know it involves a great deal of changes in the way we do business on our campuses. And she did not hesitate at all. In fact, she mentioned administrative applications as number one.
JVB: Do you suppose her Y2K problem had something to do with that?
JB: I'm sure it did.
HS: I mean, what are we going to talk about after Y2K, once this thing is over?
JB: Oh, I hope -- I'm going to have a party. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm really ready for the end of the Y2K nonsense.
Let me go further and say some other things that had come forth and this is, of course, not surprising. The staffing issue, the support of all of the services that we have to offer and the staffing issues that are needed to supply those support services. Everybody mentions that, almost right out of the chute.
In fact, one person said to me -- I don't know if this was exactly correct, but he was mumbling something about "two times two times two". Twice the people doing twice the amount of stuff twice as often. And then he concluded that our stress level has increased eightfold because of it.
HS: Well, at least he can multiply correctly.
JB: That's right. He was having a little trouble with that, but he succeeded. And it's amazing. You ask folks what are their infrastructure needs right now or the most important things? And they answer very quickly, but from campus to campus, they will be different, based on the chronology of where they are in their hunt toward applying these infrastructure-related services.
HS: Barbara, what kind of things have you heard from folks as you wander the halls here?
BO: Not only here, but back home on our campus, one of the big things people are becoming aware of is the easy access faculty and students are going to have to digital media -- not just as consumers but as producers. This has led people to be very concerned about implementing network upgrades to make sure that that kind of material can get delivered to the desktop the way our customers want it to be. So that's been a main concern for a lot of the people that I've talked about.
And down in the exhibits, there have been a number of exciting products to look at this year that do put that kind of very sophisticated media production capability in the hands of ordinary users. Things like Apple's Final Cut Pro, a lot of the digital camera affordable technology and so on.
JVB: That links right into your Media Union at the University of Michigan, Barbara, right?
BO: Indeed. Yeah, the Media Union is Michigan's center for study and application of emerging digital media technology. It was designed to foster work on media convergence, back at a time when nobody talked about media convergence. But now, of course, that's old hat.
HS: Well, maybe it's old hat, but what do you mean by media convergence?
BO: I mean the digitization of video, audio, image material, interactive software and its integration into new synthetic media, modes of interaction and creative expression.
HS: So that everything's sort of the same because it's all digital stuff and we can manipulate it using similar technologies, that kind of thing.
BO: Yeah. And moreover, that it can run on the same distribution network so that it all becomes, in a sense, the same medium in a way that has never been true before, where we've had whole separate systems of institutions to deal with -- TV, radio, print and --
HS: Telephone, even.
BO: Right, telephone.
HS: In fact, we're going to be doing that, a TechTalk in a few weeks on IP telephony, which is the same sort of thing where we're taking something that looked like it was entirely different because it used a totally different instrument and a totally different network, and all of a sudden it can be carried over the IP network as just digital streams.
BO: Right. So, yeah, at the Media Union, given that that's our mission, we're extraordinarily sensitive to the ways in which the activities of our students and faculty are beginning to have an impact on our network, and that's why that's become such a hot issue for us.
HS: Given that everything is converging, all these media are converging, how can we take advantage of that so that we can solve some of the problems that John was talking about, where we have two-times-two-times-two as much work to do. It's kind of nice that we have kind of one medium now. Can we do anything to take advantage of that so that we can actually get ahead of this two-times-two-times-two thing?
BO: Well, a huge -- I mean, naturally, we've been very frightened by the possibility that every faculty member and student might need huge amounts of support to help them with this sort of activity that they're becoming increasingly excited by. So at the Media Union, I and my staff have been working very intensively to develop tool kits that make it simple and easy for faculty to do this on their own.
For example, we recently hired Charles Severance, who many of you may have been familiar with from his work at Michigan State on the creation of tools to make it easy to do lecture capture. Chuck is now an Associate Director of the Media Union and has developed a new tool we're code-naming "Clipboard 2000" that makes it extraordinarily easy for faculty members to capture lectures and publish them on the Web so that their students can get them as streaming media. Clipboard is great because the faculty member simply starts the software, opens a PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint presentation becomes a white board that the faculty member can draw on and use to illustrate the lecture. And with a digital camera plugged in, the faculty member's lecture or audio narration is immediately captured. And at the end, it's a single mouse click and the whole thing is encoded and published to the Web.
JVB: Do you need special media servers to run that streaming media, then, Barbara?
BO: It's QuickTime, so it cooperates with a lot of different pumps, video pumps.
HS: If you folks are successful, I think the network folks will be a little scared.
BO: Indeed.
HS: Maybe we can talk about that for a moment. I mean, if everybody is suddenly doing real-time HDTV on their laptop and sending it off to folks across the country, we're going to gobble up all the bandwidth there is. John, is anybody you talked to concerned about that?
JB: Oh, absolutely, although they haven't said it in those specific terms. I'll bet you half of the people that I asked the question to, of infrastructure needs and concerns, they mentioned the network in some fashion.
In fact, I just made a note to myself here. It seems that several times they would mention something about financing the 'net and the future of the network, fixing the 'net when it breaks and thirdly, protecting the 'net. Boy, those are real concerns about the security of the networks and certainly the protection of that security, the enhancement of our networks and the enhancement of various security tools so that we can maintain the quality of service that we want to deliver. A lot of concern about that.
JVB: Now, it's interesting. We do have a question coming in from one of our audience, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he's commenting on John's math problem here and he suggests that the idea of doubling one's staff would be a good thing to do, if one could, but commenting that they're really losing the technical staff. I don't quite get Keith's numbers -- he has .5 x 4 x 4 -- but at any rate, more seriously, he says, "Without more optimistic projections of more income from tuition or other sources, how can we give our faculty and students more access without further increasing the load on the tech staff?" And I think you were planning on talking about that, John, weren't you?
JB: Oh, yeah, tough question!
My passion these days has been to make sure that we do everything we can to set expectations in a proper manner, and we start from the top. We also start from the bottom and have to be kind of a grassroots kind of thing as well as a top-down sort of effort.
Clearly, if we're going to deliver these new services and do so with a high quality, we have to make sure that everybody's on board with just how fast and how much we can do. Very tough to do on a campus. No mistake about that.
But we're not going to double our staff. That's not going to happen, at least not in the norm. It might happen in some very special cases where some big grant money or a big endowment or some kind of corporate partnership is taking place. But generally, I think it just demands -- those of us that are on the hot seat to provide these services need to pull in a lot of people from our campuses to make sure that the kind of things that Barbara is talking about -- certainly we don't want to throw a bucket of water on those things, but on the other hand, we have to make sure that they are within the confinement of the services we can deliver. And people have to understand that. No magic bullets there, but certainly --
JVB: But certainly managing expectations is one of the concerns.
JB: Oh, it's been my passion for the last couple years and I ask myself every day, "How do we -- what can I say, what can I do, how can I act, how can we bring people in" so that we can continue with the neat stuff that Barbara is describing and yet at the same time not get so far ahead of the service curve that we end up having this terrific product that no one can get to.
HS: Some of the people I've talked to have said that one approach to that problem is to outsource -- to decide which things are strategic and which things are non-strategic and take the non-strategic things and outsource them.
One problem is deciding which is which. And out here, I've talked to folks who outsourced e-mail, outsourced modem pools and I've even bumped into a company called Signal Corps that will let you outsource directory services like LDAP. Have you talked to folks who are struggling with how to do that or what to do?
JB: No, I mean, people are talking about it but I haven't talked to anybody who's actually doing it or doing much of it.
And as you know, one of the lead articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week was about outsourcing -- the successes and failures of that. And as I read that article, I couldn't help but smile about -- you know, regardless of whether or not you outsource these services or do them in-house, you have the same kind of challenges of staffing, of training, of getting good IT people and keeping them. I personally believe that while there's a lot of things that might be candidates for outsourcing, we need to be very careful, especially in the early stages of this.
Again, to use the kind of examples that Barbara's giving and the sorts of things that she's trying to do at Michigan, I can't imagine outsourcing those things. The campus has to keep their hands on the controls of that and how fast, how much, how big, how -- who uses it and when. I just can't imagine outsourcing those things.
HS: But perhaps if you could outsource some things, that would enable Barbara's staff or your staff or everybody else's staff to focus on the new things, on the emerging technologies, while we take the old mundane back office stuff and get rid of it. I mean, is there any reason for people, for example, to do their own payroll systems?
JB: Oh, well, again I would guess there would be some opportunities there. But again, that's going to be a campus by campus decision. At Oberlin College, I can tell you that I can't imagine outsourcing our payroll system. Not that Oberlin is all that special, but it's special enough and our methodologies are unique and so many campuses would say the same thing.
JVB: Well, let me just remind our audience, both here and out in Web land that we're taking questions by e-mail by sending to expert@cren.net, and also that our studio audience folks can submit questions via 3x5 cards. Okay?
John, let me ask one of the other questions that we had talked about. Kind of looking forward, we know that we've got a big problem with user support right now and we know some of challenges that are coming down the pike. What is the next challenge you see yourself facing at Oberlin, for example?
JB: I think my quick reaction to that, or quick answer, would be the multimedia support, the kinds of things that -- University of Michigan has this wonderful facility that Barbara is looking after. And terrific -- that's great! And the big campuses are moving ahead in some regard to that -- some more, some less.
At a little arts college like Oberlin, I think we're pretty well endowed with a lot of good resources, and yet when I try to figure out how to make that happen and provide the infrastructure support around it, it's a rather mind-boggling task to see how that's going to happen.
JVB: Do you have requests from your faculty, for example, to videotape their lectures, for example?
JB: Not that specifically, but we certainly have had similar kinds of requests from people who want to move into this media world and do so.
I would say that at Oberlin, it's pretty much an early adopter kind of thing, but as we all know, if you've been in this business long enough, the early adopters can present some really impressive demands. That's good! That's good! I'm not being critical in the least about that. In fact, it's fun to talk to those folks sometimes. After you've been dealing the whole afternoon with simple and mundane e-mail problems, somebody forgetting their password, it's fun to have a professor of psychology call and say, "Hey! I want to do some neat stuff next semester in the classroom with some media. How can we get started?" So yes, to be very specific in my answer, I think that the support -- both the human support and the technical infrastructure support of these things (as Howard was talking about earlier) -- is the next big thing that I see.
HS: So Barbara, you said that you were doing some interesting work with digital libraries and things. Would you talk a little bit more about that?
BO: Yeah, actually we're developing quite an extensive sort of standardized learning technology infrastructure, I think, for the campus right now. And a lot of that effort is precisely directed at trying to manage some of the support costs that we see coming once the faculty adopts it.
HS: Right, so they're doing standardized things.
BO: That's right.
HS: You don't have to do it again and again.
BO: That's right. So if we can standardize the course publishing kit and tools for managing multimedia -- including a digital library -- that will be a campus-wide resource, a space where they can store multimedia material, manage those assets efficiently and so on.
HS: What exactly is going to be in this multimedia library? I mean, if a professor wants to put together a course and this library's well-developed, what will the professor be able to get from this library to get things going?
BO: Well, we're expecting a number of different kinds of uses for the digital library that we're making available to faculty. Among other things, they'll be putting captured lectures there that are generated through the use of Chuck Severance's Clipboard tool, so that will be the home for that kind of material.
HS: But that would be an entire lecture, so that this would help with distance learning and continuous education and things like that.
BO: And not only that, we also anticipate a lot of use in standard instruction, in cases where, say, a faculty member is called away suddenly from campus and wants to put out material that will be an alternative to a regular class meeting. So actually, we anticipate that being used as much for on-campus instruction as our distance education projects.
We also are working with a number of units that need to put up virtual reserves, where those are unconventional kinds of reserve materials. For example, our school of music needs to manage its audio reserves and their delivery to students in classes.
HS: But are you putting together smaller modules so that if I were a faculty member, I wanted to put together a course that had never been taught on your campus, that instead of putting it together from ground zero, I could get some bits and pieces? Is there any of that happening?
BO: Indeed! Here we're working with Apple, which has been a big leader in this area. You may or may not recall that some years ago the National Science Foundation put quite a bit of energy and funding into convincing people to begin to think about making their instructional technology more shareable, more modular, more standardized, more easily exchanged. And a number of interesting projects came out of that, including the EDUCAUSE National Learning Infrastructure Initiative.
JVB: Right, right.
BO: And the Apple Educational Objects Economy, which many of you may remember, that then evolved into the General Object Economy. Also at EDUCAUSE this year you could see SMETE's NEEDS Database, which is another similar project.
JVB: The NEEDS and which other one was it?
BO: SMETE's, S-M-E-T-E.
JVB: S-M-E-T-E.
BO: NEEDS is their big database of engineering instructional objects.
JVB: SMETE is what?
BO: Science, Mathematics, Education and Technology -- I can't remember exactly. Sorry about that.
JVB: Okay, we'll have to take a look at that and put some references up.
BO: Right. In any event, Apple's project has evolved into what they call the Apple Learning Interchange (ALI). And they've developed a number of learning interchanges for K-12 education.
They're debuting at this meeting an interchange for higher education. Michigan has partnered with them to develop a prototype for that. And Michigan is specifically working to develop learning interchanges in some of the cross-curriculum areas. So a faculty member who needs to teach writing skills in their economics course because they're giving a writing assignment, or group dynamics because they're giving a group project, etc., will be able to come to our repositories of instructional modules and pull out instructional material that they can use in their class.
JVB: Let's go back and pursue that just a little bit more, Barbara. You know, we've heard a lot of programs about writing across the curriculum, reading across the curriculum. So from what you're saying, you're building a database of objects that would help support this new teaching -- active teaching and active learning by having collaborative tools, how to work with groups and how to do collaboration?
BO: Precisely.
JVB: Okay.
HS: And you imagine this is going to be useful, not just for your university, but this will be available for all universities.
BO: Indeed, and we did some pilot work before I arrived at Michigan in which we developed such an online repository of information that was then made available to people, and we found that people all over the world were using that material. It wasn't just our colleagues and students or those at partner institutions that had assisted in development of the material, but we had people with very different goals and interests picking up our modules and using them.
For example, I got fan mail from a fellow in England who was using it to train his yacht crews in how to work together.
JVB: Did you say "yacht"?
BO: Yeah, yacht -- as in sailing ship.
JVB: All right. Great.
We do have a couple of questions coming in and since I'm the only one that has access to the questions today, let me raise them.
We have one question that came from John at Smith College and he says, "Gee, for those of us who can't attend EDUCAUSE who want to know more about the conference -- " he asks two questions. Everybody asks two questions! Howard, you noted this last time, didn't you?
HS: It's impossible for people to ask one question alone. It's more efficient, really, to ask two questions.
JVB: Well, the first question is "What is the best bar in Long Beach?" which we'll skip over that for night now. We'll get back to you on that, John.
HS: Perhaps one of the members of the audience could answer, but we won't.
JVB: What is it?
[Audience member speaks]�
JVB: The Yard House?
[Audience member speaks]�
JVB: Two hundred and fifty beers on tap. Mark that down. We'll put that as a URL coming up.
HS: The folks who are busy doing this CREN Webcast don't have time to do this but members of the audience do, right?
JVB: After the TechTalk, right. And let's see, Dan, where did you say?
HS: We have to provide that information.
JVB: He said it's a research project for this afternoon.
HS: For the audience. The audience is going to check this out this afternoon.
JVB: But John really did ask, seriously, what new products or technology or software have we seen, perhaps, in the exhibition hall or on the floor that we're personally very excited about? I think -- or, I'm sorry, the question is from Herb Mickels and the question was for John Bucher. I'm sorry. Sorry about that, Herb.
JB: That's right.
JVB: John, what do you think? What's the most exciting thing you've seen on the exhibition hall?
JB: Well, you know, I have to admit my answer to this question is pretty much influenced by some particular needs that I have, that I looked for.
One of them is the solution for our banner implementation run on our Macintosh desktops.
JVB: Oh, well, okay.
JB: It turns out that we're going to have to come up with a bit of solution for that because of some technical issues that cause the Mac client not to -- the pointers not to work quite right. So admittedly, I'm not exactly sure of all the implications of it but I can tell you that I spent some time yesterday trying to work that out between the booths of Oracle and Apple and --
JVB: Well, you know, John, actually that sounds like an old problem rather than a new problem.
JB: Well, it's an old problem but I have to solve it. I'm sorry, folks, but sometimes old problems have to be solved first!
And then I would also say that I think the other things that have interested me -- I'm not done in my investigation of it yet, but these portals that are being advertised, the portals for our campus student community. It's not really clear how that's going to fit in. At least, I don't -- I'm not exactly sure how it's going to fit in, but it's going to happen. And I guess I'm feeling challenged to make sure that I know about some of the vendors and some of the technologies. And I can tell you I don't know, we're probably going to wait a little bit on --
JVB: Wait a little bit on the portals? I think we've all seen a lot about portals. Howard, how about you? Did you find something interesting on the exhibition hall?
HS: Well, actually, it's kind of interesting. I've seen a lot of interesting things on the floor, but the thing that I found even more interesting was something that I saw at an electronics show in New York just a week or so before this show. And unfortunately Hitachi is not on the floor right here. But I thought I would mention the device anyway.
Hitachi has a thing called the M2 Media Recorder which is -- it looks just like a little camera but it weighs about a pound. It sits in the palm of your hand very nicely and it's battery powered. But it has some advanced chips in the thing and it has a little hard disk in it, a little one-inch diameter hard disk that has 1.1 gigabytes on it. And the result, it can store -- this is not a misprint or misspoken thing -- it can store 12,000 JPEG images on the thing! So you can go around and you could store all the pictures you're going to ever take in your life on the thing, or it can do 16 hours of audio or even two hours of MPEG 1 video on the thing. Just wander around -- it has an interface for Mac's and PC's both.
The audience has just indicated by a hand gesture, "How much money?"
JVB: Good question!
HS: The thing is, it's under $1,000 for something like that. So it's not completely outrageous. But I think that that's illustrative of the kind of devices that are beginning to appear. And when devices like that appear, it means that our users are going to be using them and therefore, we're going to see a lot more of this digital content that we're all talking about.
JB: That's exactly the kind of thing that I was referring to earlier. The infrastructure needs that are going to come our way. Gosh, I hope I don't sound too cynical about this, you know, but those of us -- and so many of us here are in the support issue, the support end of things. We love technology or we wouldn't be in this business, and yet when we try to figure out how we're going to fit all this into our budget -- our support services, repair services -- it's rather daunting. And I welcome it, but I also, you know, I scratch my head and I say, "How are we going to get this done?"
JVB: Well, you know, actually these comments do lead us into a question that we did have from the audience. And the question goes as follows, and that is, he comments on -- this was from Dan, by the way --
HS: Dan Ellers.
JVB: Dan Ellers from Princeton, who we happen to know here. Actually, Howard and Dan are waving to each other here. But higher ed has been at the trailing edge, so to speak, of technology often and yet also the bleeding edge of technology. With Web time, consumer net devices, etc., where does higher ed fit now on the tech curve?
And the second part of the question is where should we be, perhaps? Who would like to -- Howard, do you want to take that? Why don't you do that?
HS: Well, I think Dan's right, that we're both at the bleeding edge and sometimes at the trailing edge, both at the same time. And I can't imagine that that's going to change.
I think in some areas, we are going to be on the bleeding edge, I think, in a lot of cases with things like networking and with security and authentication and some of those things. I think we've been, you know, way out in front. Sometimes -- and I think also that if you look at different universities, you'll see different kinds of things.
If we look at what's happening with wireless, for example, there are some universities who have never even thought about wireless. They barely have their campuses wired today. And other universities like Carnegie-Mellon University or UNC are way out ahead with wireless stuff. So I think we're going to be all over the block and continue to be. John?
JB: You know, a friend of mine -- George Strahn of the National Science Foundation -- said to me something prophetic a couple years ago. (Maybe it's been five years ago now.) He said, "You know, the bleeding edge is not necessarily the front edge, it's the trailing edge when you have to trail off the old technology to make room for the new." And boy, I sure do see that on our campus many times. You know, you've got old technology that somebody is still using. You can't really afford to get rid of it just yet.
JVB: Is now a good time for me to say something about BITNET going away at the end of the year?
HS: Is BITNET really going away? I mean, I heard that COBOL was going away, too, and I've never seen it happen.
JVB: Well, BITNET probably will only go away when everyone who's on BITNET decides to get onto the Internet, but the official support by CREN of BITNET will be going away at the end of the year. We just -- solving the Y2K problems with that just didn't seem to be an option that we wanted to follow. Been trying to get the word out, by the way, so --
HS: Actually, I think, though, Judith, you bring up an interesting point and it's an interesting support point. When I've been talking to people here at the conference about various things that I've seen and that we're doing and they say, "Well, but if you do that, the old browsers won't support it and there's lots of people with old browsers." And it's not just an old browser problem. It is in general an old software, old technology kind of problem. We can't just move ahead unless everybody moves ahead with us.
JVB: Um-hum, that's a good point.
HS: And it's not even enough to do it on our own campuses. I can't say that on my own campus, everybody has switched to the latest browser -- if they have -- because this stuff is on the Web and the whole world sees it. And are we ready to say, "Oh, well, only the people on our campus will be able to see stuff that we put out on the Web." In fact, a lot of the stuff is available to the whole world, so how do we deal with this kind of -- there's lots of old technology and old software and old hardware still floating around out there.
JVB: Howard, we were going to ask you a couple questions about what's next.
HS: I thought we were going to skip those!
JVB: We were to skip those, I know. Your turn for one or two here. When you're talking about keeping up to date on the browsers, the new -- the new! We've been hearing about XML for years now. Tell us where you think XML is now and what we might have to think about.
HS: Well, actually, I think it's moving faster than I even a year ago would have expected it to. By the way, for folks who don't know what XML is, it's Extensible Markup Language. It's sort of a replacement for HTML and I understand that it really should be EML for Extensible Markup Language, but whoever names these does what they will. But without going into a great deal of discussion about the difference between HTML and XML, let me give you a two-line explanation.
JVB: Okay. Great.
HS: HTML really is the formatting language that is the basis of all World Wide Web pages. And that's all it is. It's just a formatting language.
XML is not a formatting language at all. It gives you no formatting information. It tells you what a document means. It's an abstraction language, and that creates both an opportunity and an interesting problem because it has no formatting information in it. If you create a document in XML, there's no way to look at it unless you provide additional information, usually in a style sheet, that gives you some formatting information.
On the plus side, because it tells you what a document means, it gives you the potential for actually searching a document. You can actually go off and search on the meaning of the document. So XML has been the real promise for the Web. It's promised to make the Web actually searchable. It's promised to make it so that we can take documents and interchange them into databases and store them and get the power of databases.
But it's been kind of slow in getting folks to do that. You can imagine it's been kind of slow because there's already hundreds of millions of documents out there on the Web that are HTML. And to make XML work, at very least you need browsers that can read XML or this thing wouldn't work.
Now, what's happened, I think, recently is that Office 2000 -- which is a Microsoft product -- if you use the individual products like Word or Excel or something like that and you go over to the little file menu, in Office 97 there was a little thing that said SAVE AS HTML.
JVB: I remember that.
HS: In Office 2000, it says SAVE AS WEB PAGE. Now I thought that was just a marketing thing. I thought people were upset about seeing SAVE AS HTML and so some marketing folks came in and said, "Change it to SAVE AS WEB PAGE."
But that's not what happened at all. SAVE AS WEB PAGE is really SAVE AS WEB PAGE. It does not save it as HTML. It saves it as XML. There's no HTML generated whatsoever on the thing.
Now, this is kind of an interesting thing. The Internet Explorer browser handles just fine, does a fine job, so it is already XML-enabled. In fact, I tried some older versions of Internet Explorer. It's been XML-enabled for quite a while, back before one would even have expected it to be. And the current Netscape browser does a pretty good job, but that's unfortunate. It just does a pretty good job and it really needs to be modified or updated to handle some of the XML features.
JVB: Does that mean we want to slow down the adoption of Windows 2000? (I didn't say that!)
HS: No, I think that means that the folks at Netscape, which I guess is AOL now, if they want to be serious about this thing had better be able to handle XML. I think with a product like Office 2000 generating XML, that's going to really open the floodgates to XML.
JVB: Let me just remind folks that they can send questions to expert@cren.net, and we do have one other question that did come in on outsourcing, and it's from John who is on earthlink.net. I won't try and pronounce your name, John.
He's asking about is it possible to outsource certain functions in support and even the infrastructure to a company such as E-college? And is this a valid way to go ahead and increase the amount of support that we have on campus? Doesn't that come back to really asking the question about strategic vs. non-strategic programs? John, did you want to take that?
JB: Well, sure, and I have to admit a personal bias here. I feel very strongly that you should only outsource those things that are non-strategic, and I would think that many of our infrastructure services are indeed still strategic.
There may be some pieces from campus to campus that could easily be outsourced. It's interesting. Howard mentioned the company who is looking to perhaps maintain LDAP services, and that's quite interesting. That deserves some investigation. And yet, I have a real concern about these infrastructure services that change so quickly, that are so terribly important to everything else that we want to run on top of them. I think of security issues, for example.
HS: So you think it's like trusting some outside firm with the family jewels, and you'd really like to keep them locked away in your own organization?
JB: Well, at least I want to know what safe I have them in and when I move them from safe to safe and how I change the combination on occasion and things like that.
It just seems to me that these things are so dynamic and so terribly important to so much else that's running. Like the things Barbara was mentioning, for example. She can't do what she needs to do without good quality infrastructure services at the University of Michigan. And so big campus or small campus, public or private, it doesn't much matter. You have to have your hands on those controls, I think.
So I'm not a complete opponent to outsourcing, but I certainly would suggest that everybody who's looking in this regard ought to ask themselves how much control do I want over it and what am I going to give up if I do outsource it?
HS: There's a lot of things out there that are very important for a university to run yet are not really strategic.
JB: Oh, yes, sure. Waste services, you know, trash services, custodial services, perhaps.
HS: Water.
JB: Right. A lot of campuses have outsourced their dining services and so on, and I don't mean to say demeaning things about those. I mean, they're not necessarily mundane services, they're very important services such as residential life services and so on.
And perhaps if you can kind of put a box around those things and easily define them, you can put what some people might call a service level agreement -- a contract -- together. You hand that to an outsourcer and you say, "This is exactly what I want." And hopefully there's some discussion and then they provide them.
But boy, with these technology services that are so dynamic, I question whether or not you can really do that.
JVB: Okay. Well, good. I think the combination of costs and staffing and everything else is causing people to really re-ask these questions about outsourcing.
JVB: Let's go back. Barbara, when we were talking in our preparation talk about the Media Union, you raised a question that I think is worth addressing. In this day and age of distance learning and distributed learning, distributed education, why did Michigan choose to build -- how big a building did you say you had there?
BO: Two hundred and fifty thousand square feet.
JVB: Two hundred and fifty thousand square feet.
HS: This is a classroom building, library, what kind of building?
BO: It's a technology center. It contains four library collections, distributed across its four floors. The largest campus computing site with 500 seats that are available to students and faculty.
HS: Those are wired, those are not wireless?
BO: Correct.
JVB: How many seats was that, Barbara?
BO: Five hundred and fifty.
JVB: Five hundred and fifty, wow. Okay.
BO: Those, that -- the library and computing site provide a kind of state-of-the-art academic workplace that supports coming to the building and using the information resources in the building to do one's academic work, whether you're a student or a faculty.
In addition to that, however (and this is one of the really, I think, exciting things about the Media Union), that same facility is used to house many of the high-end shared academic computing resources on the campus. For example, we're the home for the supercomputing center, the visualization and virtual reality labs, the digital library projects and so on.
Then -- and this makes it an even more unusual place -- we've got an entire wing that is nothing but media production facilities, a very large video studio, audio studio, electronic music laboratory and so on. So under one roof, you have a number of different kinds of technology centers all aggregated. And as I mentioned when we were talking earlier, the goal was to precisely make it possible for people to carry out very advanced experimentation involving the intersections of those different kinds of functions.
JVB: Okay. And if you --
BO: So why would you put them --
JVB: Why would you put them all there in that one building and what about -- maybe you could just address, too, what kind of people do you have in the building to support?
BO: It does seem to many of us like an anachronism to build this kind of very large aggregated technology center in this day and age because we're all working so hard to distribute our computing resources to the desktop. And in fact, a huge part --
HS: I think it's not just to the desktop. I think it's to the individual.
BO: To the environment, right.
HS: I mean, in fact I find that the 500 and some desktop machines kind of unusual. Daunting.
BO: More than daunting, believe me. I have to find the funding to replace all of them. But, we're working as hard as we can to move the capability -- as much of the capability of our environment as possible -- out into the ordinary work world of our students and faculty outside the building.
So the question is what do you get from having that sort of facility in that kind of context? And I think there are two things you get. One thing you get is a place where the bleeding edge can be examined, studied and translated into services that can be delivered out into the environment. And that's one of the big important functions we serve is to simply look at the newest, hottest stuff, mount demonstrations, carry out pilots and so on.
But the second thing that we do for the campus that I think is really critical is provide a collaboration and meeting space for faculty and students who come from a lot of different disciplines yet who are all drawn together by the opportunity to work in that kind of advanced computing environment and digital media environment. We get very interesting collaborations among faculty and students involved in engineering, the arts, the humanities, social sciences.
For example, we just finished doing a demo at the Internet2 meeting in Seattle in which a cross-disciplinary group of our artists -- a poet, a sculptor, a composer, a dancer, a videographer -- worked together to create a multimedia work, and their collaborative work was carried out over high-end videoconferencing using Internet2.
HS: You say that that's done over Internet2 or done over electronic media -- why do they have to be together? Why can't we do a lot of this collaboration electronically?
BO: Actually, that's what they were doing. I don't know if you're familiar with the Michigan campus. We have one of these geographically dispersed campuses. The Media Union, Engineering and the Arts, many of them are up on what's called the North Campus, separated by a mile from the Main Campus. And this is actually a huge barrier to many of the kinds of cross-disciplinary collaborations we want to encourage.
And a lot of what we were interested in in this particular project is creating a videoconferencing solution for our own faculty that would allow Main Campus faculty and North Campus faculty to collaborate. And that's how this project was done. The faculty worked together using that videoconferencing system and that's how the work was creating.
JVB: It sounds as if it's also that one of your goals and missions must be for research and development purposes to explore and help those early adopters with the new tools, Barbara.
BO: Indeed, and also begin to bring in the rest of the faculty. A huge goal for all of our activities at the moment is to get beyond the early adopter community and address the interests and aspirations of mainstream faculty. And in a number of the things that we're doing, we're actually beginning to see that rather than the conventional technology-oriented faculty member, all of a sudden it's the artist in residence at the Humanities Institute who is coming to us, or someone like that who's not a conventional early adopter. So we're very excited by that.
JVB: Okay, well, it appears as if our time is about out. We did have a couple other questions about outsourcing that we didn't get to that we'll perhaps get to those offline.
Howard, do you have any final question or comment that you would like to have here?
HS: I just want to remark that this is kind of a very big conference. It's the first EDUCAUSE conference. There's been about 5,700 people attending here, and I think that all of us are going to go back off to the conferences and sessions and down on the floor and see all of the neat stuff we have here, tempered by all the challenges, I think, that we heard during this TechTalk.
JVB: I think you're right. I think we've got almost humbled with everything that is going on and all the challenges that we do face.
JB: Have you noticed everyone had a cell phone at this conference?
JVB: And everyone has a cell phone at this conference. As everyone is walking between the convention center and the --
HS: Not everyone has a cell phone.
JVB: Except for some holdouts! People are walking by you and --
HS: I will take one of my trinkets and pretend it's a cell phone so I'll fit in here.
JVB: You know, it's funny. I've talked to a number of people I've been wanting to stay in contact with and they say, "I have a cell phone but I don't keep it turned on." Oops, here we go! We've got cell phones flying across the room. Let me close out here.
Thanks to all of our Web participants for being with us here today, and also especially thanks for our live studio audience. You may send follow-up questions to CREN at expert@cren.net. Be sure and mark your calendars for November 4th, just one week from today. Our next TechTalk will feature Frank Grewe from Minnesota and Mike LaHaye from the University of Michigan answering questions about "Getting Started with Campus Directories -- or everything you haven't even thought about asking about LDAP directories." Check the Website for upcoming spring events -- upcoming spring and fall events, I would say -- and as always, we welcome suggestions and feedback on what you'd like to see and hear on TechTalk.
Thanks to all who helped make the event possible today: to the board of CREN; our CREN member institutions; our guest experts, John Bucher, Barbara O'Keefe; to Howard Strauss; to David Smith and Patty Gaul of CREN; to Julia O'Brien, Jason Russell, Carol Wadsworth and the whole support team at the MERIT network; to Susie Berneis, our audio file transcriber; to Laurel Erickson, our transcript editor and indexer; and finally, again, our thanks to all of you for being here. You were here because it's time.
Bye, Barbara. Bye, John. Good-bye, Howard.
JB: Good-bye�
BO: Bye.
JVB: Bye, everyone. And audience, if you want to say goodbye on the count of three, one, two, three.
Audience: Bye!
JVB: Here we go. Thanks for being here. Bye-bye.
