Posts Tagged ‘EDUCAUSE’
I was at one of the best annual conferences – CLAC Annual Conference. This year it was held in Swarthmore College with a reception and a dinner being hosted by Haverford and Bryn Mawr College respectively. They belong to the Tri-College consortium, so it was natural that we were hosted in all three beautiful campuses. I love this conference for the networking opportunities it provides. We are very similar institutions in terms of the number of students, faculty and staff, the services we provide and the issues we face. But still there are considerable variations in what we do and how we are organized, so it is always interesting to exchange notes and learn from each other.
You can read my tweets from the conference here. (more…)
I was at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference that was held from Oct 30-Nov 2 in Denver. I have accepted to be a member of the Nominations Committee of EDUCAUSE. There was an early meeting on Tuesday, that I needed to attend, so I arrived on Monday, Oct 29. It was a beautiful day with temperatures in mid to high 70’s. But then, it was all downhill, cold and a day of rain.
EDUCAUSE’s commitment to diversity and inclusion was evident everywhere this year. It all started with the Nominations Committee where we discussed the importance of creating a diverse pool of candidates for the Board. You could see it in messaging, programming and social media posts. I have been going to EDUCAUSE for quite a while and the lack of diversity was striking at the beginning, but it has continued to improve, but we have a long way to go.
I was active in twitter during the conference and you can see my tweets here.
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8,000 plus attendees converged in Philadelphia from Oct 31 till Nov 3rd for the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. The anticipation and expectations were high going into the conference. The agenda was rich and exhaustive (and exhausting too!). Here is my take on the conference.
I know how much time and effort goes into organizing such a huge conference, so I want to thank EDUCAUSE and all the volunteers for their hard work to make this happen. I am going to express the honest way I felt with the hope that some of this will be taken into consideration in the future conferences. I have shared this with others including a board member! You can also see my tweets which can help better understand my points below. I have completely omitted the vendors below because I derive absolutely no value in seeing them at the conference. I totally get it that they sponsor the conference and we need their support, but I also know that there are a lot of other attendees who are interested in visiting and learning from these vendors, including collecting those silly swags. I am not one of them!
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Last week I attended the annual conference of EDUCAUSE, the organization of Higher Ed technology organizations. It was attended by some 8000 professionals and vendors. The meeting was held in Anaheim, CA. I am happy to say that I was pleased with the meeting this year. You can see my tweets during the conference here.
I joined a few colleagues for a dinner to celebrate the retirement of a long term CIO from a small liberal arts college. This colleague is a terrific individual and though I have seen him in the liberal arts college gatherings and EDUCAUSE over the years, I have gotten to know him only in the past 6 years or so. He is a true leader who is a champion for collaboration and has taught us many things about how to be successful in collaborations. We will miss him very much. The dinner conversation was terrific and many attendees reminisced about the good old times (as in the ’80s and ’90s). (more…)
We hear a lot about mentorship in the context of middle managers who aspire to be leaders. You can read more about Mentoring as an EDUCAUSE Special Topic. I thought this is a great time to talk about someone that I consider as my mentor – John Meerts, who was the Vice President for Finance and Administration at Wesleyan University until he retired on June 30th this year. John was the Vice President for Information Technology Services at Wesleyan from 1996 till 2006, when he became the VP for Finance and Administration. I reported to him from 1996-2009 before moving on.
No matter at what stage of your professional career you are, you always should aspire to be better and an important aspect of that is to have someone that you look up to for advice or from who you learn a few things. To me this loosely defines mentorship.
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I was in Indianapolis attending EDUCAUSE Annual Conference last week. It was a reasonably good conference. Every year I come back and say to myself that I am going to seriously look into whether to go next year or not. I say the same this year. The conference has grown tremendously and the leadership was proud about 7000 attendees. Reminded me about admissions officers being proud of the number of applications. As always, the best part of the conference was meeting some of the colleagues. Some of the presentations I attended were interesting and so were the general sessions. This time, I also enjoyed meeting a couple of senior folks from companies with whom we either have a relationship or plan to.
I would have expected the programming to be a bit more interesting and diverse given the number of attendees. When I heard at least a couple were presenting twice, I was a bit surprised. Panels are great, but when most of the events are panels, where each presenter gets between 5 and 7 minutes to present and everyone is trying to be nice to the other presenters and therefore trying to keep to their time, it gets a bit restrictive. Now, on to the subject of my blog.
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After a brief visit to Scripps College , I headed to Orlando to attend the EDUCAUSE annual conference. It was well attended as evidenced by long lines during lunch times. I have never seen such lines before. If you are interested in my tweets during the conference, you can check them out here. If you want to see all tweets with the hashtag #edu14, click here. Though the latter one is long, it is worth reading through some of them or by further filtering based on your interest. I was too tired to tweet after a while because the sessions I went to did not have much for me to tweet and the others were doing a better job.
I always look forward to general sessions at EDUCAUSE. This year the first one was by Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation. The entire talk will be available to the public in 90 days here, unless you have a valid EDUCAUSE account, in which case you should be able to listen now. Since I have heard Christensen a few times before, there was not much here for me. Also, he has had recent health issues, and it showed. He himself mentioned his recent stroke, when he was unable to recall a word during the talk. He mentioned how Higher Ed is in a crisis and unless it is disrupted in some serious fashion, the consequences can be dire. Obviously, recent technologies have already disrupted Higher Ed, but the basic methods of teaching, learning and research have not changed and the indirect message that everyone heard is that we, as technologists, can make a difference here. Perhaps! Also, I was not fond of some of the analogies he presented because they may work for corporate America, but not necessarily in Higher Ed. On the other hand, may be that is the disruption that he was referring to.
Chsitensen was also arguing for more open, modular and interoperable “things” in general. We all, especially me, support this wholeheartedly. However, there was a problem. The slide where this appeared, was copyrighted by him!
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I constantly refer to EDUCAUSE in my blog, which is the organization that fosters the professional relationship amongst Higher Ed IT leaders. Prior to EDUCAUSE, there were two organizations, one called EDUCOM and the other called CAUSE. EDUCOM was primarily the gathering place for academic computing and CAUSE was for administrative computing. In 1998, the two merged to form EDUCAUSE. If you look at what is happening at EDUCAUSE conferences lately, they tend to be light on administrative systems because administrative systems professionals gather more at the meetings organized by the major ERP vendors – Ellucian Live, PeopleSoft HEUG and Jenzabar JAM. I was pleasantly surprised to hear about a collaborative effort between EDUCAUSE and NACUBO (National Association of College and University Business Officers) to bring together CIOs and CBOs (Chief Business Officers) of about 150 institutions for an Administrative IT summit in Chicago in June.
A report was produced based on the proceedings in the summit, which I have found to be very informative and easy reading. One of the most important things, while obvious, is not stated often enough, can be found in this report:
“Although administrative IT systems and services are essential to the operations of our institutions, most of them do not significantly differentiate one institution from another. For example, hiring and paying employees, handling procurements, and managing budgets are all important—even mission-critical—functions, but they don’t influence a student’s decision to attend an institution.”
I thought it would be nice to review the recommendations from this report and see how we are doing with respect to these.
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I am so busy with things that I am embedding images of my tweets instead of finding the appropriate plugin to do this. My apologies. Here are most of my tweets during EDUCAUSE Annual conference in Anaheim, CA. I really enjoyed the two keynote talks as well as meeting with several colleagues. Learned a few things, which I will talk about in some of my future posts. If you are interested in getting to this as a feed with clickable links etc. click here.
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Summer is winding down and we have already begun seeing increased activity in the College, preparations are underway for the orientation for students and new faculty. Several of us have been in conversations with some of the new faculty. They are some of the most technologically savvy and need computing power beyond the usual laptops. It is encouraging to see that there is no longer a discipline dependency to high end technology requirement. Faculty from all disciplines seem to need them.
In a shameless self promotion, please watch my participation in a discussion about MOOCs with the Chairman of edX Anant Agarwal on NECN CEO Corner.
I am sure you that many of read this in NY Times -“Universities Face a Rising Barrage of Cyberattacks“. If you haven’t, you must read this. In the early stages of internet, the technologies were also evolving and all of us faced attacks, our networks were penetrated and were used for activities such as storing and sharing large image and video files. Warez was one such common activity. I distinctly remember watching a perpetrator’s every keystroke when we were trying to track down what was going on. It was from Australia and I called the ISP who basically told me that they are helpless to do anything but temporarily suspend the account. Of course, in the heat of the moment, I was asking a lot more of them! As soon as I put the phone down, the keystrokes disappeared!
These problems have gotten much worse and far more serious than stealing file storage. Trying to guard information has become expensive. But most importantly, IT professionals alone cannot be responsible for information security.
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