February 25, 2008
Chronicle Tech Forum: Top Trends in Campus Technology
Tampa, Fla. — The age of technology hype in higher education might be over, and that’s a good thing. That was one theme of the opening session of The Chronicle’s Technology Forum, taking place here this week.
For many years, technology at colleges was in a Cro-Magnon period, said Mark David Milliron, president of Catalyze Learning International. Any decision about technology was simply greeted with a cave-man-like grunt of “Technology, good!”
“People have realized now it’s a lot more difficult than that,” Mr. Milliron said. “Conversations are becoming much less hyperbolic and are happening much more slowly.”
But that doesn’t mean that the age of innovation is over, even if the “velocity” might slow down a bit, he argued. “We’ve got 15 or 20 years of really dynamic time before us.”
Among the top trends in college technology identified here:
- Analytics: Colleges are starting to better analyze the real costs and benefits of technology by using hard numbers on whether better outcomes are being reached. That’s part of the trend of asking harder questions about the benefits of technology, said Mr. Milliron.
- Customer service: Technology on campuses is starting to borrow customer-service techniques from Amazon and other online businesses. Or at least it needs to in order to meet the growing demands for such services from students, argued Richard A. DeMillo, dean and professor of computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
- Outsourcing: Colleges are starting to outsource technology services like e-mail. Institutions are also looking to collaborate with businesses or other colleges to tackle portions of IT infrastructure. Richard Garrett, program director and senior research analyst at Eduventures, said colleges needed to continually ask the question, “What is core business, and what should we outsource?”
The session ended with a quote from a poet, J.G. Holland. “That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.”
“Since we move at a glacial pace, we should be OK,” said Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who moderated the session. —Jeffrey R. Young
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The term “glacial pace” is acquiring new meaning in light of global warming.
Even the glaciers are moving faster today.
— zsampson Feb 26, 10:41 AM #