Student Demands or Strategic IT Planning?

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

Are we placing too much importance on students' needs when making IT decisions? A new survey's findings include the fact that at today's higher education institutions "executives place students well ahead of faculty and staff in their adoption of IT." According to Jose-Marie Griffiths, chair and professor of information science at the University of Pittsburgh, and an author of the survey's report, much of the IT agenda - including things like connectivity on- and off-campus, mobility, smart classrooms, distance learning, course management systems, help desks, and more - is driven by a competition to recruit students.

This is not necessarily bad, but she sees it creating a subtle disconnection from institutional strategic planning that might be diminishing the attention paid to the potential IT might have for the academic disciplines.
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Indiana, Purdue Universities to Join NSF 'TeraGrid'

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MIT Publishes 500th Course on Open CourseWare

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Following an increase in incidents, and especially a major one where a graduate student was arrested for hacking into others' university e-mail accounts, the university's new Standard Practice Guide has a beefed-up policy on identity theft, e-mail spoofing and spamming. (The Michigan Daily)...
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Collegetown to Persuade Students that Baltimore is Cool

The PDAs are synched at hospital stations, allowing students to get updated information on their calendars and assignments on a daily basis. UBMobileMed uses applications like Patient Encounter, so that students input patient information in their PDAs and send electronic reports to their clerkship directors. (University of Buffalo Spectrum)...
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In a twist on the now-outdated (but probably still in use somewhere) "bookmobile," Beaufort County Community College sends out a van with a satellite dish, printers, digital cameras, a computer network server, and 24 laptop computers - taking the Internet and needed tools to students in rural areas with otherwise spotty Internet access. (triangle.com)...
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Study on Students and Technology

A recent study from Pitt's Sara Fine Institute for Interpersonal Behavior and Technology is said to suggest that students push technology on campus a little too much, perhaps at the expense of better integrated planning into academic activities and institutional missions. (University Times, University of Pittsburgh)...
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EDUCAUSE Core Data Service 2002 Summary Report

EDUCAUSE CDS has just released its 2002 summary of data collected from 561 U.S. colleges and universities and 65 universities outside the U.S. concerning campus IT environments and practices. The report includes information on IT staffing, budgeting, and organization and contains numerous tables and benchmarks...
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U.S. Department of Homeland Security Partners with CMU

Carnegie Mellon's CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) will work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create US-CERT, a coordination point for prevention, protection, and response to cyber attacks across the Internet. U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge says that US-CERT "a key element to our national strategy to combat terrorism and protect our critical infrastructure." ...
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University of S.Florida Gets Network Upgrade from Avaya

USF, the second largest university in the state of Florida and serving more than 40,000 students, upgraded its communications network with Avaya's IP telephony solutions. The new converged network includes telephony, messaging, and contact center applications and is one of the largest deployments of IP telephony on a campus. The system supports more than 16,000 IP, digital, and analog phones and offers new messaging features such as fax messaging, message manager, voice messaging management, and Internet messaging via the Web.
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