Organizations, especially colleges, can be slow to change. Why is taking an organization in a new direction so difficult?

That’s the latest topic of discussion on Tech Therapy, The Chronicle’s podcast for everyone in higher education.

Warren Arbogast, Tech Therapy’s co-host, says organizations are hard to change because they involve people. “People respond to pain,” he says. “And at the same time, people have a high tolerance for pain.” Listen to the whole episode here:

In the days of paper reserves, course materials could be checked to make sure they conformed to copyright laws, says Bill Shell, director of academic technology and computing services at Eastern Michigan University. But in the age of the Internet and course software, professors can post anything online, bypassing those old checks. Today many professors could be breaking copyright law and not know it.

In his appearance on this week’s Tech Therapy, Mr. Shell talks with Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant, about how to make sure professors know their copyrights.

This short episode of Tech Therapy includes a preview of episodes coming in 2008 and information about how to appear on the podcast at The Chronicle‘s forthcoming Technology Forum.</...

Tech companies have been trying to sell disaster-preparedness tools to colleges following incidents like the shootings at Virginia Tech. But there is no one-button answer to dealing with mass murderers, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and various other calamities that might hit your campus in the future (although technology may help).

Jan Fox, CIO at Marshall University, talks with Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast about how to deal with disaster preparedness in the latest edition of Tech Therapy. (Here’s a hint: It’s about people.) Click on the box below to listen to the episode.

On average, what portion of the college-president brain is devoted to thinking about technology on campus? Not enough, say chief information officers. In the latest edition of Tech Therapy, Bob Cernock, the CIO at Central Connecticut State University, says that more college presidents should talk to their campus technologists, and that more campus technologists should go knocking on the presidents’ doors.

Click on the box above to listen to this week’s Tech Therapy, or go to http://chronicle.com/techtherapy to hear archived editions of the show.

Last week on Tech Therapy, Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast talked to Cary Sherman, the president of the Recording Industry Association of America. The recording industry has pressured colleges to do more about campus music piracy, but college leaders feel that they are being unfairly targeted. The show featured questions for Mr. Sherman from some Wired Campus readers. If you missed the show, here it is again.

Guest experts will appear on the podcast now and then. Bob Cernock, the chief information officer at Central Connecticut State University, will be on the next show, talking about getting college presidents and provosts involved in discussions about technology.

Dwight Fischer, chief information officer at Plymouth State University, stopped at the Chronicle booth at last week’s Educause meeting to talk about the increasing demands on campus technologists and the stresses they deal with. The Tech Therapists felt his pain.

In the coming weeks, you’ll hear presidents, CIOs, and other influential people on Tech Therapy. Jan Fox, the CIO at Marshall University, will talk with the Tech Therapists about campus security. Robert Cernock, from Central Connecticut State University, will talk about getting presidents and provosts into the conversation about technology.

And, of course, Cary Sherman of the Recording Industry Association of America will be on the show soon.

If you want to be on the show, or if you want to ask a question, write us at techtherapy@chronicle....

Next week our Tech Therapy podcast is heading down to the offices of the Recording Industry Association of America to talk to Cary Sherman.

Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast want to hear from you. What should we ask Mr. Sherman? What message should we pass on from CIO’s and administrators in higher education?

Write us at techtherapy@chronicle.com

If you want a hint of how serious the U.S. Air Force is about security, just consider its requirements for passwords: They are 15 characters, with at least two uppercase, two lowercase, two numbers, and two special symbols, and they cannot form any recognizable words or follow any keyboard patterns. Oh, yeah — and computer users must change them every couple of months.

Two technologists at the U.S. Air Force Academy used the Air Force password as an example of how burdensome security can be. Larry Bryant, the academy’s director of academic computing, and Richard Mock, its chief information officer, discussed “academic freedom versus network security” at Educause 2007. The main question of the session was “Can you have too much security?” The answer, it seems, is yes.

Mr. Bryant and Mr. Mock detailed some of the struggles they have encountered in running computing for a military...

Seattle—On Thursday, a panel of members of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education spoke to attendees of the 2007 Educause conference about the Spellings Report and how technology might improve American higher education.

Mara Liasson, a reporter for National Public Radio, interviewed Robert Mendenhall, the president of the Western Governors University; Charlene Nunley, president emerita of Montgomery College; and David Ward, the president of the American Council on Education.

The group discussed aspects of the Spellings Report, and questions about technology and the future of education were sprinkled into the talk. The panelists said that technology would play a vital role in helping to provide access to higher education, especially among underserved communities.

The panel also said that technology and campus technologists should play a role in helping to assess...

Seattle — Lisa Trubitt is not a technologist. She has degrees in English and criminal justice, and she says she is the kind of person who breaks computers. And yet she is playing a vital role in the IT office at the State University of New York at Albany. She is teaching them how to talk.

On Wednesday she took her message to a room full of people at the 2007 Educause conference. Ms. Trubitt, assistant to the CIO for policy and communications at Albany, and Mur Muchane, executive director of information-technology services at Davidson College, detailed the ways their institutions are trying to streamline, simplify, and clarify IT-department communications.

When talking with others on their campuses, IT departments at Davidson and Albany ran into common pitfalls. The messages are often highly technical and contain more information than the recipients can digest. Techies are big...