EDUCAUSE: A Conference Report
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050610653896 |
| Published date | 01 January 2006 |
| Pages | 6-9 |
| Date | 01 January 2006 |
| Author | Colby Riggs,Barbara Cohen |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
EDUCAUSE:
A Conference Report
Colby Riggs and Barbara Cohen
6LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 1 2006, pp. 6-9, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050610653896
The EDUCAUSE 2005 Annual
Meeting was held October 18-21 in
Orlando, Florida. The Annual Meeting
theme was ``Transforming the academy:
dreams and reality.'' The meeting
offered diverse session types including
preconference seminars; track sessions;
poster sessions; small group meetings;
and corporate exhibits, presentations,
and workshops. The sessions covered
the top higher education issues such as
funding IT, security and identity
management, administrative/ERP/
information, systems, strategic
planning, infrastructure management,
faculty development, support, and
training, governance, organization, and
leadership, enterprise-level portals and
web systems and services. The
following are highlights of a variety of
presentation types including general
sessions, featured speakers and general
sessions.
The opening general session was
``Welcome to the participation age''
presented by Scott McNealy of
Microsystems, Inc. He humorously
opened the session with the top ten
excuses of students for not turning in
their homework. Continuing the theme
of education he expressed several areas
that he found frustrating in the US
education system. These included: the
high cost of textbooks especially in
K-12; the teaching of history to fifth
graders when they really do not have a
sense of time and the need to change the
when and how we teach subjects; and
the structure of the education model
which naturally limits the access and
the scalability of the knowledge. He
was disturbed by the fact that parents do
not know what is happening in the
classroom and there should be a camera
in the classroom so parents can review
why their student did not understand a
subject or task. He stated that the
standard report cards do not reveal the
performance of the student. He
concluded his list of complaints quoting
John Seeley Brown that today's kids are
digital native and we are digital
immigrants and as a result we are
creating an interesting gulf, a challenge
to put content together for the digital
natives.
Next he offered solutions from Sun
Microsystems, Inc. stating that their
vision, mission, and strategy is to
stimulate the participation age where
everyone and everything is on the
network. Sun wants to create the
technologies, products and services that
power the participation age. He said
there is a cause at Sun, a new addition,
to eliminate the digital divide while
making the planet better off. They are
trying to reduce global warming by
bringing down the watts per thread and
using thin client technology. Sun's
strategy is to share and to create
communities and as a result
communities create value.
He described the changing nature of
our society. In terms of education, the
environment is changing. The student
profile used to be between the ages of
five through 22 but now has expanded
to age 105. The traditional hours of
operation have changed from Monday
through Friday 8:00a.m. to 5:00p.m. to
24 by 7. In terms of resources and
budgets in education they have
traditionally always been limited but
today they are really limited and
therefore educators must invest time
and budget wisely. For education in the
new reality of the future scale,
standardization and barriers to exit will
matter and have profound impacts. To
meet the evolving educational trends,
Sun is developing services to support
self-paced learning, online
communities, and mobility with
security and standardized components.
The second general session speaker
was Karen A. Holbrook, president of
the Ohio State University and her
presentation was titled ``Dynamic
stability.'' She offered a perspective on
technology in higher education and
detailed the core values, the strength of
our university's today. She said that
technology is a liberating force that
helps US universities continually
re-conceptualize their environments of
learning, discovery, and transaction.
But, while we are increasingly
invigorated by the exploding
opportunities for innovation, we are
also challenged by the need to remain
steadfast in our unalterable core values.
She summarized the common content
of the core values of the major
university such as creativity,
communication, knowledge, research
and discovery and life-long learning
and the overarching concepts of
integrity, ethics, accountability and
respect. She shared examples of
innovative uses of technology that
uphold and support the core values of
the university. One core value is to
pursue knowledge for its own sake, and
produce discoveries that make the
world a better place. She stated that
technology plays a significant role in
how we conduct research and
memorialize the findings when we
simply pursue knowledge for its own
sake.
She next described various
technology related projects on the Ohio
State University campus. She spoke
about the Advanced Computing Center
for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and
explained the work performed in the lab
to capture the movements of the mime
Marcel Marceau. She talked about the
Knowledge Bank which is a knowledge
management system, a repository for
the university that is housed within the
libraries in the form of communities.
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