We enjoyed the holiday break and I hope you all did too. We have been spared the wrath of Hercules in central CT. As far as I can tell, we got about 3 inches of snow, however, it is supposed to be bone chilling cold. Boston area seems to be affected more significantly and the College is closed for the day.

Though weekends, end of the month and beginning of a year are all totally arbitrary, we have grown accustomed to them and live with the cycles and in some cases the hype that comes with them. In that spirit, I have been following the various technology predictions for 2014. “2014: The Year That Puts the Nail in Desktop’s Coffin“, “Eric Schmidt’s 2014 predictions: big genomics and smartphones everywhere“, “Top Technology Trends for 2014” and “Cybersecurity Will Get More Complex in 2014” are a few that are worth a quick read. The problem with all of these is that no one bothers to measure these predictions at the end of the year to identify who has been a reliable predictor so far. In fact, in the second one regarding Eric Schmidt, the author notes correctly “It’s worth noting that Schmidt has a shaky track record on predictions.” It is the case that these trends have significant implications for libraries, but you would be hard pressed to find direct predictions for libraries!

Many of these predictions are relevant to businesses to prepare to maximize their profits and based on “consumer” behavior. Whereas we all have a “consumer” persona when we make purchasing decisions in our personal lives, it is a bit different when it comes to the use of technologies at the College. Primarily, the “consumer” options don’t always work well for what one needs to get done as a faculty, staff or a student. Whereas all the buzz about mobile phones and tablets is exciting and these devices are great for information consumption or even reading (for those who can like e-books), you can’t write a paper on them or solve a math problem or even run many of the academic software that you need to run. Of course, for the advanced users, there are apps that solve every one of these, but they are not convenient or efficient. Though it is extremely important to be tuned into these trends because our future students will be arriving on campus as users of some of these trendy technologies and we need to be prepared to support them.

A more relevant prediction for us is from New Media Consortium’s Horizon report.  For 2014, they have identified what is going to be featured in the report and we will closely follow how it develops.

How should LTS prepare itself to react to and prepare for these changes and challenges. The answer is very complicated. As technologists, some of these changes are exciting, but not always relevant to what we are charged to do. However, there are many developments that are relevant and advantageous, but implementing them is not easy. We have financial and cultural constraints that we need to worry about and we have to go through the governance structures that have been established (which is essential and works well). The net result of all of this is that the group that is eager to adopt and take advantage of the advances in technology feel unhappy that they are being pulled back, and those who are averse to changes feel unhappy that they are being asked to constantly learn new things. And then the group in the middle who will go along with whatever we decide to do.

I am sure I have referred to this piece by Lev Gonick from Case Western before, but this articulates the 12 technology trends that Higher Ed cannot afford to ignore. In this he refers to how “our organizations are very, very slow, by their very nature, to make the move”, while the rest of the world doesn’t wait. This is a real issue for us and it results in unrealistic expectations about what we should support! We end up continuing to support older systems, often officially unsupported. These systems also tend to pose security threat.

During the end of the last year, we heard from the senior administration a financial plan that is needed to implement the facilities improvements. This will result in significant reductions in budgets, requiring us to think more strategically about how we spend the money. This will yet again introduce changes! However, I think that this also provides us a great opportunity to implement changes that may have been seen as unnecessary during better times.

This is where the emerging technology trends and our future plans interact. How can we take advantage of emerging technologies to support the College while driving down expenditures? Every idea that we will come up with will be challenged because change is hard! Our job is to be fully prepared to answer the hard questions, justify the changes and manage the transitions well. For eg. we will be looking at ChromeBox and/or Chromebooks to replace public computers. Of course, we need to worry about securing them appropriately and look at the total cost of doing all of this against buying a desktop computer like we do now. We will always need powerful desktop computers in computer labs that run specific academic software, but we have a lot of public computers that are currently used for accessing only browser based applications, which is where we will look for this change. We have been planning to deploy thin clients, but that has met with many implementation issues, but Chromebooks, based on the predicted trends and its capabilities, seem like a viable alternative.

Should we be looking at Chromebooks and Chromecast with HDMI projectors as an alternative to expensive classroom technologies? Of course, this will not work in every classroom or even for every class. But, if someone only wants to do slides and YouTube and whatever can be done on a Chrome browser, why not? You will not believe  how much it costs to maintain our current classroom infrastructure. The cost of replacing a DVD player in a classroom can be several times the cost of the player itself! It is ridiculous, but, remember, change is hard! But, we have no choice but to keep exploring!

Happy New Year to you and I am looking forward to an exciting year.