Orlando, Fla. — This year’s Educause conference was as big as ever, despite a bad economy that is starting to impact travel budgets. The organization, which focuses on higher-education, drew more than 7,300 people to its annual meeting, but the sluggish economy was evident in the exhibit hall — many technology companies that usually tout their coolest new gadgets here instead focused their pitches on how their products could save colleges money.
The cost-cutting theme also emerged in several sessions. (This year Educause made video from select sessions available live, and then archived the videos immediately afterward, so you can see the best talks for yourself.)
In a point/counterpoint session about whether or not colleges should outsource technology services, Lev S. Gonick, vice president for information-technology services and chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University, said that colleges would soon be forced to do creative things to cut costs, including collaborate to offer shared services.
“There’s an 800-pound gorilla that nobody wants to talk about yet,” he said. “It’s about time we had a serious conversation about the global economic meltdown. To think that somehow we’re Teflon, that it’s not going to impact the IT organizations in a significant way,” is misguided, he said. “Now is the time to have the conversation to figure out what we’re going to do together. We can create our own scalable outsource models. We are still stuck in our campus silos.”
Some sessions highlighted gee-whiz technology, of course. Larry L. Smarr showed off some innovative uses of massive video walls for scholarship and teleconferencing. Mr. Smarr is director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a joint venture of the University of California’s campuses in Irvine and San Diego, where researchers have developed what they call a HIPerSpace OptIPortal. It’s one of the sharpest and largest screens in the world, and it’s connected to other research labs over today’s fastest research networks. The video wall is made up of several high-resolution monitors clustered together.
“We’re seeing very rapid adoption of this technology,” he said, noting that several large universities have set up similar displays.
One keynote speaker, Sarah B. Robbins-Bell, issued a warning to professors that unless they adapt to new teaching methods with technology, they could become irrelevant because students can find places other than traditional universities to learn. Ms. Robbins-Bell is a doctoral student in rhetoric and composition at Ball State University who has become well-known for her work teaching in Second Life, a 3-D virtual environment, where she goes by the nickname Intellagirl.
“Learning is changing,” she said. “Many of the benefits of institutional learning can now be accomplished via social media. If we’re not careful, social media will replace us. If we don’t realize that things are shifting and embrace those shifts, we will be left behind. We will become useless.” —Jeffrey R. Young
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