Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

Both Jolee and I attended the 20th annual meeting  of Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) at Union College in Schenectady, NY. The campus is  beautiful and sprawling. The College was founded in 1795 and  I think they bought all the land they could and help on to it. CLAC is a very small group of like minded institutions and this is the second time I have attended the meeting and I really like it. It is not like EDUCAUSE, where the issues that are being discussed have much less relevance to us.

The keynote speech on the first day was less useful. It was given by a Union College alum and the goal of the presentation was to bad mouth Bill Gates every sentence. I tuned out after a while and enjoyed the beautiful building with a dome where the talk was held. The speaker finally pronounced that “Google will fall under its own weight” in answering a question without providing any backing as to why.

The next talk I went to was about content management system. Four institutions talked about it – two of them (Reed and Union) use Cascade as the content management system and they praised the software vendor as one of the most cooperative one. Gettysburg uses a modified version of an open source CMS called DotCMS. What became clear was that the software itself was less of an issue, but the organizational challenges that each of them faced in managing the web was very similar to ours.

Basically, we heard several variations – the responsibility for institutional website was split between public affairs and ITS to where everything is managed from a single point. It was also the case that in many institutions (who presented as well as others with whom I spoke later), academic department websites were ITS responsibility.  In the end, it was clear that an organizational structure where there is goal setting by a group on what the institution wants was considered critical. In a couple of cases, senior staff members were members of this group.

The other talk which was very interesting was by Jeff Pestun from Hope College on how they moved their entire email operation (all users) to Google Apps for Education. In addition, Macalester and Oberlin  have  taken this path also. I was really surprised by the boldness of moving ALL users to Google Apps. There was considerable discussion about the privacy issue and Google “probably selling the data” and based on the reading of the SLA, no one seemed that perturbed by this. Whitman College has moved only the students over to Google Apps. You will hear from me more on this – During the next few days I will post a road map for where we want to go with Email.

We had a Hudson River Cruise which was fun and got to talk to a few more people. Through these conversations, it was becoming increasingly clear that we are doing far better than many of our peer institutions in a lot of areas.

The next morning’s keynote speech was by Mark Sheehan from ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research) on a recently published survey of Cyberinfrastructure (CI). It was basically a recounting of data from the survey showing pretty much what one would expect. Cyberinfrastructure is not clearly defined; the five areas that Mark would define as the core infrastructure (high performance computing, applications for CI, large network based storage, advanced high speed network, collaboration through virtual communities) was the focus of the survey and he split the results up based on overall responses vs CLAC schools. Not many CLAC schools were engaged in CI.

I spoke then about a proposal that we have been trying to advance – become a CLAC Hub and expand our Cyberinfrastructure to include other CLAC Schools and build a virtual community. It was received well and Hamilton College is very interested in moving forward with this and we heard from Earlham college folks on what is happening there (very interesting stuff).

Overall, it was worth going to…