Terry Calhoun, IT Trends Commentator
Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
University of Michigan

Elephants in Our Room

I've spent a little time learning more about the roles of Chief Business Officers (CBOs) or Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) recently, so when I read the following essay by Richard N. Katz, Vice President of EDUCAUSE and Director of the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR), it resonated with me. Luckily for me (and you) Richard agreed to let this piece be our guest opinion piece for IT Trends this week.

Richard takes a look at a little bit of the departmental cultural bias that partly springs from the differing perspectives that academic/campus culture allows its top executives to have. The CIO at a university or college d'esn't have quite the same role as the CIO in a for-profit company d'es, and that g'es for the CFO as well. Part of that result is a need for the IT folks and the folks at the business end of things to work together in ways that might not happen in a Fortune 500 company - because IT surely d'es matter in higher education. Enjoy!
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U. Makes Effort To Raise Level of Available Technology On Campus

Two hundred out of 300 general-purpose classrooms at the University of Minnesota have received a basic technology upgrade, at a coast of $4.2M out of a $7M budget plan that is two years behind schedule but still making faculty and students happy.
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Michael Dell Says American Higher Education Is Not Doing The Job

In Dell's opinion, companies like his can move quicker and adapt faster. Institutions, like Southern Methodist University, where he spoke, are working hard to train future workforces, but they're too little, too late.
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Open Source Risk Management Grabs Attention for Linux Insurance

It's an idea, but it's also a business, for Daniel Egger, entrepreneur in residence at Duke University. The idea is to offer a certificate that a given version of open source software is free of copyright violations, thus letting the user of the software more easily obtain insurance.
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UNC's Carolina Wireless Initiative

It's not required of students, but UNC is now in the cell phone business, having inked a deal with Cingular. For students, the bonus is in the extra goodies: For students, the real bargain is in the extras the plan would provide, Oberlin said. Internet connectivity will be included in all calling plans, as will free text messaging.
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ITaP Nears Completion of Campuswide Upgrade At Purdue University

Purdue's largest single campuswide network upgrade since it got a network in the first place is nearly done.
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Tiffin University Survives A Few Days With No Internet

"It's like you've lost your life because everything is tied to that little machine," said one university staffer among those at the library, in alumni relations, and the bookstore who either were stopped dead in the water or really slowed down due to a planned move by the university's IT department into a new building.
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Cal-(IT)2 Is Getting A Couple Of New Directors

The new directors, professors William Hodgkiss and Leslie Lenert, will oversee research in homeland security and medical informatics.
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LambdaRail Fiber-Optic Network Gains Six New Members, Enough to Go National

An innovative project to create high-speed linkages between universities and colleges has enough members not to be considered national in scope, not just regional.
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Tech Firms Putting Quality At Top Of List

Security, reliability, longer battery power, stability - all these things are getting a little more focus from IT manufacturers now, with a little less emphasis on power and speed.
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Start Marking Your Oracle-DOJ Score Card

Things are starting to heat up, and at the very beginning of the first quarter of this football game-like fight, the Department of Justice scores. But Oracle, in its attempt to take over PeopleSoft, isn't out of the game yet. The trial started Monday and is expected to last four weeks, then the appeal begins.
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Smoke, Mirrors and Silence: The Browser Wars Reignite

The browser wars we saw before weren't the "wars to end all wars," and this author believes that the current, new browser wars are just the surface of a larger, World Wide War to control the future of the Web itself.
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Getting Your Books For Class . . . For Free

A surprising number of books assigned for college and university classes are available online. And even if that availability might mean viewing them one page at a time, with waits for downloads, a growing number of students are using that technique to save money. (Requires free registration)
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Flash Chips On Their Way To Replacing Traditional Storage, Facilitating New Products

One company currently sells a 16 gigabyte flash chip, for $2k, but prices are expected to continue to fall. Possibilities for implementation in a variety of innovative consumer goods are endless.
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Comments on Possible FCC Regulation of Internet Services

EDUCAUSE has filed a comment with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) arguing that any regulation of Internet-based services, in particular, Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), should recognize and treat the Internet as a unique technology, distinct from the heavily regulated telephone industry. The complete comment filed with the FCC is available in PDF form.
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HP Awards $10 Million in Technology Grants

HP named 193 elementary, middle and high schools, colleges and universities that will receive more than $10 million over 2004-2005 from the HP Technology for Teaching grant, which is designed to accelerate learning through the innovative use of technology. Awards will total more than $8 million in 2004, and recipients who have successful projects will be given the opportunity to apply for an additional $2 million in 2005.

The HP Technology for Teaching grant supports HP's broader education goals of transforming teaching and learning through the integration of technology in the classroom and beyond. The grant enables teachers to creatively apply technology to enhance learning and improve student achievement in math, science and engineering education.
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