Securing IT's Road to the Future

2005 Annual Conference

June 23-24, 2005, Portland, OR

Overview | Agenda | Travel/Hotel | Board Members | Register

Full Agenda

Thursday, June 23, 2005

7:00 - 8:45 am
Buffet Breakfast

9:15 - 9:30 am
Welcome
Russ Poulin, Associate Director of WCET

9:30 - 10:30 am | Future Trends in Online Learning
Dr. Darcy W. Hardy, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Director, UT TeleCampus University of Texas System

Distance learning has been in our midst for over a century, starting with correspondence study in the late 1800s.  With the explosion of the Web in the mid-1990s, online teaching and learning changed the face of distance learning.  But has it all been good?  Have we learned anything about what constitutes good quality in online education?  There are many current trends that might lead one to believe online education has succeeded, that there are no longer any issues to be addressed.  However, not all trends seen today are in the best interest of the faculty who develop courses, or the students who enroll in courses.  The future holds many opportunities for online learning.  This presentation will explore some of the current trends, both good and bad, and take a look at future trends that could define excellence in this exploding field.

Suggested readings:
Is There a Future for Online Ed?
http://www.universitybusiness.com/page.cfm?p=188

The Future of Online Learning
http://www.downes.ca/future/

10:30 - 11:00 | Break

11:00 am - noon | Higher Education, Cyberinfrastructure and the Knowledge Economy
James Hilton, Associate Provost for Academic, Information, & Instructional Technology Affairs, Interim University Librarian, and Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan

Although the knowledge economy should be good news for higher education, colleges and universities now confront a variety of technical, legal, and cultural forces that threaten to relegate us to the periphery. Chief among these are aggressive copyright laws that feed the growing sense that ideas are "pure property" to be jealously protected and proprietary systems that inhibit interoperability and the free exchange of information. Fortunately, open source software, mass digitization projects, and the emerging cyberinfrastructure offer us an opportunity to redefine the university and to do that on a scale not seen since the emergence of the research university.

Suggested readings:
"Preparing for the Revolution: Information Technology and the Future of the Research University", National Research Council, 2002, http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10545.html

"Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure: Report of the National Science Foundation Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure, January, 2003, http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/

Noon - 1:00 pm | Lunch

1:30 - 2:00 pm | Excellence Award: Orbis Cascade Alliance

The Orbis Cascade Alliance is a library consortium composed of 31 public and private colleges, community colleges, and universities in Oregon and Washington. The Alliance provides a range of services to member libraries, and to other libraries in the region. Chief among these are the Summit union catalog, Summit Borrowing, electronic resource purchasing (ejournals, ebooks, databases), and courier service.

2:00 - 2:30 pm | Outstanding Project Award: James Tice, University of Oregon, The Nolli Map Web Site: Visualizing Rome (http://nolli.uoregon.edu/)

The purpose of the project was to use a unique historic document, the 1748 Nolli map, to create a highly interactive teaching tool for the study of the city of Rome. The Nolli map web site includes a centralized database that supports the compilation and digitization of geospatial data by distributed authors. Initially used for architectural studies, the web site can be used by a wide variety of Rome scholars and serves as a model for collaborative investigations of other ancient urban centers.

2:30 - 3:00 pm | Break

3:00 - 4:00 pm | In Search of the IT Sweet Spot: A View through the UCLA Lens
Jim Davis, Associate Vice Chancellor Information Technology, University of California - Los Angeles

The need to balance centralized and distributed IT resources is a challenge faced by most universities, both large and small.  Finding just the right mix can lead to a university environment that is energized by the dimensions of 'individual' and 'community'.  When the mixture is right for the university’s objectives, culture, and community - when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - then the university is able to achieve an identifiable 'IT sweet spot'.  This session will  describe the use of the 'sweet spot principle' at UCLA and how it may be applied at other colleges and universities.

4:15 - 5:15 pm | Breakout Groups

A) CIO Round-Table: Security, Privacy and Identity Management
Session Leader: Jacqueline Craig, Director of Policy, Information Resources and Communications, University of California Office of the President

Jacqueline will lead a roundtable discussion on security and privacy, with a special emphasis on identify management.  She will discuss the University of California's federated identify management initiative, and will facilitate discussion of  strategies and solutions under consideration by NWAAC member institutions.

B) Help Desk, Labs, and Other End-User Support Issues
Session Leader: Ethan Benatan, Director of Computer User Support, Reed College

Peer discussion on matters of interest to those who provide front-line support to academic users, including technology in (and beyond) the classroom, trainings, and documentation. Topics to be selected by participants.

C) Networking, Operating Systems, and other Infrastructure Issues

Session Leader: Joe St Sauver, Director of User Services & Network Applications, University of Oregon

Topics to be selected by participants, potentially including: network security and performance; scaling systems to handle growing loads; managing O/S migrations; SAN and NAS-related storage; deploying multicast and IPv6; supporting mixed proprietary and open-source architectures.

5:30 - 6:30 pm
Reception

Friday, June 24, 2005


8:30 - 9:30 am | The Next Generation of IT Leadership: Preparing Ourselves, Mentoring Others
Cynthia Golden, Vice President, EDUCAUSE

As IT professionals we spend a good deal of time anticipating and planning for future information and technology needs of our institutions.  What we don't often spend much time doing is planning for the future of our own careers or cultivating the next generation of IT leadership.   In this session some simple and effective career development strategies will be offered, with attention to our responsibilities to ourselves and our responsibilities to our staff.  Topics to be discussed include planning for your own professional growth and development, and having and being a mentor.
Bibliography

9:30 - 9:45 pm | Break

9:45 - 10:45 am | The Role of the Academy in Information Security
Mary Ann Davidson, Vice President, Oracle Corporation

If charity begins at home, cybersecurity begins in academia. Academic institutions produce both the next generation of computer scientists and the users of the systems those CS graduates design. As such, academic institutions have a key role to play in ensuring the security of cyberspace. From the economics of information security to ethics around acceptable use and hacking, to the social policies around information security, few areas of the academy are or should remain immune from awareness and contribution to cybersecurity. Academic institutions also have technical means at their disposal today to ensure the security (and thus the privacy) of their students and educators, and need to lead by example. The traditions of academic freedom and institutional openness are only enhanced by improved information security.

10:45 - 11:00 pm | Break

11:00 am - noon | Trustworthy Computing - Building Trust in the Digital Decade
Scott Charney, Vice President, Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft Corporation

As we move into the digital decade, we find ourselves becoming increasingly dependent on computers, networks, and the information they contain. Yet each week we hear of new attacks on the confidentiality, integrity and availability of computer systems, from the theft of personally identifiable information to distributed denial of service attacks. While such attacks may pose a serious threat to our public safety, national security, economic prosperity and privacy, preventing and responding to such attacks raises other complicated technical, social and public policy issues. Scott Charney will detail the history and current state of cybercrime; talk about the challenges governments, industry and the public face as they attempt to prevent and respond to computer abuse; and describe how Microsoft's is attempting to meet these challenges through its Trustworthy Computing Initiative.