Converging Campus Technologies: Evolution or Intelligent Re-Design?

2006 Annual Conference

June 7-9, 2006, DoubleTree Hotel Lloyd Center, Portland, OR

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

Wednesday, June 7, 2006


10:30 a.m. - 1:00 pm| Executive & Finance Committees Meeting

1:00 - 5:30 pm | Board Meeting (Board members only)

6:00 - 9:00 pm | Reception and dinner (All conference attendees)

Thursday, June 8, 2006


7:00 - 8:00 am | Buffet Breakfast

8:00 - 10:00 am | Registration Table Open

8:15 - 8:30 am | Welcome - John Balling
Executive Director of ITS, Willamette University

8:30 - 9:30 am | Further Reflections on the President's Conference Car, the BlackBerry®, and Open Source
Greg Jackson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, University of Chicago

"So I just picked it up," EL Doctorow recalls about a book he found in the NYPL as he was researching Ragtime, "and it was a history of trolley car companies in America.... you could go from New York to Chicago by streetcar in those days, and it was a great system, and it was destroyed probably -- J.P. Morgan bought up some lines that he felt were competing with the New Haven Railroad. He destroyed them. Then the General Motors corporation went around to cities saying buses are much cleaner and better, which was not true. And so trolley cars, streetcar transportation folded." Unfortunately, Doctorow missed the middle part of the story, where everyone collaborated on a common solution to a vexing problem. Still more unfortunately, we in IT are given to the same cynical pessimism as Doctorow, and it costs us. Effective convergence requires concerted action, lest our vendors (or our own "I can code that!" staff) take us down myriad divergent paths. Let's revisit why we all insist on being idiosyncratic and non-collaborative in all kinds of domains where we gain nothing and lose a great deal from doing so.

9:30 - 9:45 am | Break

9:45 - 10:45 am | Wireless Convergence
Brad Noblet, Chief Operating Officer for IT, FAS, Harvard University

Communications “convergence” has finally arrived. That once-overstated industry term now delivers on the promise of enabling new communications paradigms while reducing capital and operating expenses. Brad Noblet will explore how the value of convergence is greatly improved when applied to wireless communications and how it can dramatically change the way we live, work and play.

10:45 - 11:00 am | Break

11:00 - 11:30 am | Excellence Award Presentation
Catalyst WebQ for Research • Tom Lewis, Director, Catalyst Research & Development, Office of Learning Technologies, The University of Washington

11:30 am - 12:00 pm| Outstanding Project Award Presentation
Using Digital Imaging and GPS/GIS Technologies to Map Biodiversity Patterns • Joel Elliott, Associate Professor of Biology, The University of Puget Sound

12:00 - 1:00 pm | Lunch

1:30 - 3:00 pm | Convergence on a Ten Year Plan
David Carr, Director of Telecommunications, Northwestern University

Northwestern University has had a long term strategy for converging communications services across the campus network. As opportunities have presented themselves, Northwestern has migrated video and voice services to the campus IP network. Each of the decisions made has been by expanding and improving service to the community, while avoiding new additional expenses. In fact, the university has dramatically reduced its cost of traditional communication. David Carr will review the Northwestern convergence of voice, video and data into a single communication system. He will also discuss staffing issues, organizational changes, financial remodeling, and user acceptance.

3:00 - 3:30 pm | Break

3:30 - 5:00pm | Music to our Earbuds: Stanford and iTunes
Lois Brooks, Director of Academic Computing, Stanford University

Stanford on iTunes launched in October 2005 during Reunion Homecoming Weekend, providing hundreds of Stanford-related audio programs to alumni via Apple's popular iTunes application. The audio content includes faculty lectures, speeches, sports broadcasts, and Stanford music, and offers a new way for alumni - as well as the general public - to stay connected to the university. Simultaneously, Stanford deployed iTunes for course content to Stanford students, starting with Introduction to Humanities and Music classes, and extending to other classes after the successful pilots. As the iTunes projects gain momentum, we continue to explore new ideas for how this technology can be successfully used in a university, and refine our approach to collecting and delivering digital content.

For more information, visit itunes.stanford.edu.

Dinner on your own


Friday, June 9, 2006


7:00 - 8:30 am | Buffet Breakfast

8:30 - 10:00 am | Investing in the Core, Leveraging at the Edge
Randy Stiles, Vice President for Information Management, Colorado College

“Core” – the basic or most important part; the essence. The academic program is at the core of the mission for all colleges and universities and the network is at the core of their information technology infrastructures. At Colorado College, there is growing interest in digital space and the role it plays in our mission. This interest led to the establishment of a Presidential Advisory Council on Information Architecture, a new trustee committee on information technology, and an initiative to rebuild our network infrastructure with convergence in mind. Randy Stiles will review the key technical, political, and financial issues that have surfaced during these actions as well as lessons learned from consultant-supported planning for a network that will serve the needs of the College in the coming decade.

10:00 - 10:30 am | Break

10:30 am - 12:00 pm| The Inescapable Inevitability of Convergence (Unless You "Help")
Joseph St Sauver, Director of User Services and Network Applications, University of Oregon

The organic convergence of voice, video and data on campus networks, and on the Internet as a whole, is well under way, to the delight of many but to the consternation of some. In this concluding session, we will review some of the powerful evolutionary forces that make convergence "inevitable and inescapable" -- unless we as a community mistakenly try to "help" that process in unneccesary (and ultimately harmful) ways. Session format will be a half hour prepared talk to provide background and context, followed by an hour of participant discussion.

12:00 pm | Conference ends