January 06, 2010
2010: The Year Ahead for IT in Higher Education
What a difference a year makes. Most CIOs in higher education are turning their 2009 holiday stockings inside out looking for any extra crumbs that Kris Kringle might have left behind. For many technology leaders, the general fiscal crunch facing higher education – and the double digit percentage cuts to IT budgets it has compelled -- may have made playing the holiday Scrooge a piece of cake compared to the negative consequences to core IT services and offerings likely in the year ahead.
To those living with the hopeful yet delusional strategy of an early return to the status quo ante, my suggestion is to get use to the so-called “new normal”. The reality of our 2010 technology services portfolio on the campus is likely to make CIO leadership seem more like ‘high siding’, the art of leading a white water river raft down a Class 6 set of rapids, than the image of the captain of the enterprise ocean liner that many associate with the slow moving, reliable, robust, legacy organization on campus. High siding is the deliberate act of leaning the weight of the entire raft and its riders towards the obstacles ahead, rather than approaching the obstacles sideways following the current.
The new normal carries the contradictions of both a fragile macro-economic recovery and a countervailing trend of only modest increases in enrollment and new federal research investments predicted for the fall of 2010 (with the important exception of the community college environment). The new normal is less financial leverage and smaller investments in core infrastructure, including IT on campus, even though the price of borrowing money has never been lower. The new normal is more and faster disruption to the consumer technology eco-system at the same time that levels of investment in our aging IT enterprise infrastructure decline in both real and relative terms.
Finally, the new normal is reflected in the contrarian wisdom of the need to be more, not less, innovative, more creative, not more conventional. During a downturn, at the very moment when the real fiscal pressures leads to squeezing out almost all of our abilities to provide strategic capacity, this is the very time our universities need it most.
The portfolio of managing requirements for operational excellence, customer service, and even more selective innovation (r&d) activity has never been more challenging. Taken together, the prospects of multiple years of negative budget growth in IT on campus, end-user expectations for near real time, free, and fully integrated services to their consumer world (choose your favorite mobile platform as an example), and a series of real Tylenol 3 headaches around security and personal information breaches -- both in the enterprise domain and across the distributed parts of the campus -- portend for a wild river ride ahead in 2010.
With dueling banjos strumming in the background, if you’re old enough to remember the movie “Deliverance,” here are my top 10 trends for higher education for the year ahead, 2010.
(1)Public Cloud Services Go Private. Cloud services are a wide range of hosted services and solutions that migrate from the data center on campus to hosting environments somewhere on the Internet. The “somewhere” is known as the Cloud. First came e-mail, then calendaring. What were once critical on-campus services are now living a normal and nomadic lifestyle. The overall outcome for the campus has been positive. But it doesn’t stop there. Hundreds of campuses have migrated their video platforms off campus to iTunes and YouTube. Millions of hours of branded academic and academic-related content including lectures, performances, panels, colloquia, and student content are now reliably served up in the Cloud. New cloud services roll out weekly. In 2010 we will likely see the next frontier of these tools, and even turnkey solutions. Expect new “private cloud” services that allow the same economies of scale associated with public cloud services, yet are “protected” with a layer of privacy and regulatory ability. These new private cloud services will afford additional certainty that data are residing on geographically knowable infrastructure, or in a way that assures compliance with export licensing, or honors certain service level agreements regarding privacy or a no co-mingling requirement for certain data. More pragmatically, starting in 2010, universities will want to embrace a hybrid architecture for storage and computing that combines on-campus resources, private cloud services for others, and open public cloud resources for other kinds of applications. The emerging typology will go a long way to define taxonomies for our services portfolio for 2010 and beyond. Hard resistance to this mega-trend remains futile; the value proposition only grows in its attractiveness. Confronting cloud services on campus is a proxy for an always important dialog on what constitutes today’s ‘core’ services for IT and what can be considered ‘context’ around which others have developed core competencies.
(2) The President’s Climate Commitment Meets the Campus Data Center. Nearly 700 college and university presidents have signed up to go green. Plans follow and each one contains a commitment to be scored. IT infrastructure on campus produces perhaps as much as 20 percent of the total carbon footprint of the campus. According to the Climate Group, 37 percent of the carbon footprint comes from network electronics, 14 percent from the data center, and 49 percent from PCs and peripherals. Going green is important to University Presidents, our Boards, our students, and hopefully to the IT community. One trend for reducing campus carbon footprints is the move to the Cloud. Cap and trade, and/or some kind of carbon regime, is emerging on the fast track. There’s a lot of work to be done by the IT community both on campus and in the corporate vendor community to get on board. In 2010 we’ll see several major offerings to contribute to reducing campus carbon footprints by investing scarce resources to virtualize more of our data center infrastructure, monitor our infrastructure on an even more granular scale, and embrace campus-wide commitment to go both smart and green through our purchasing offices. Pro-active engagement by IT on the Climate Commitment and our own infrastructure affords us an important opportunity to work with the facilities and planning communities on adopting a smart and green plan across the campus. More introspectively, embracing the commitment also positions IT leaders to begin an overdue internal discussion on organizing a single, unified, and intergraded network engineering team for data, voice, video, and now data center services.
(3)Big Science meets Next Generation CyberInfrastructure. In the past 12 months more than $100 billion in federal “stimulus” funds have found their way to universities and research labs across the country. Coordination of the big science projects across the federal agencies has been constrained by one time gold rush fever, combined with bureaucratic imperatives and exacerbated by the directive to get dollars out the door quickly. Obviously not all big science is computationally based. That being said, university-based big science teams together with their computational research infrastructure colleagues on campus and across the country have an opportunity in 2010 to map out how to leverage this unprecedented one-time set of investments into a set of sustainable, network-enabled and network-based mega science endeavors. It’s been more than seven years since the NSF blue-ribbon committee in 2002/2003 posed the question “how can we remove existing barriers to the rapid evolution of high performance computing, making it truly usable by all the nation's scientists, engineers, scholars, and citizens?” While the challenge of breakthrough science remains as compelling and important as ever, the absence of an integrated national cyberinfrastructure planning framework and action plan serves as a major rate-limiting dead weight on the nation’s future. 2010 would be a great time to join the President’s Climate Commitments on campus and turn them and a handful of other big science challenges into a national call and strategy for scientific renewal and advancement, leveraging next generation cyberinfrastructure.
(4)Time to Declare the PC Dead and Embrace the Mobile Platform. In 2010, it will become more obvious than ever that the PC as we have known it for the past quarter of a century is obsolete. For the foreseeable future there will be three kinds of emergent learning hardware platforms. One will be a fixed and tethered brick (or something) product designers can make look more interesting than the only semi-intelligent thin-client representing the legacy of the PC. The second hardware platform will be personalized-pizza-box-sized “laptop” computers. Now the dominant hardware platform on campus, laptops, netbooks, and tablets are all descendants of the PC, featuring similar interfaces enhanced by mobility. The third and clearly emergent hardware platform for learning is the mobile smart pad, including smartphones, e-book readers, next generation iPods, and what will likely be a bevy of smart pad entrants in the market in the year ahead. The major difference of this third generation of hardware is that we have all but left the old computer interface behind us. For those interested in disruptive innovation, the broad availability of the underlying platform infrastructure, devices, and generative application environment for smart pads is where the action should be. Look for innovative applications relevant to the campus associated with geo-tagging, location-based services, and a whole new generation of intelligent search tools related to our work, study, and play on campus. It is time to break with the 25-year run of PC culture on campus centered on hardware break fix. With new platform technologies and application development tools, the next 25 years of personal computing support should move to developing and providing services and experiences that contribute to innovation, workflow, and discovery.
(5) The E-Book Reader Grows up and Goes to Campus. 2009 marked the birth of the e-book reader in the university market place. The first set of entrants put the already nervous higher education (text)book market on notice. New business models, publishing models, revenue sharing strategies, and new models around intellectual property and the assigned ‘text’ for a course proliferated and served to dislodge the staid legacy economy for many universities. If buying second hand books online was not enough, the new e-book readers were perceived by some to disintermediate traditional providers of services and economic benefit in the college supply chain. In 2010 a whole new generation of E-Book Readers will emerge as the life cycle of innovation really takes off for this class of mobile smart pads. Dedicated, single purpose readers will be eclipsed this year by new, integrated platforms supporting new functionality, Web services, rich media, open application development environments, and a wide range of new experimental interface approaches. Publishers, bookstores, technology, and entertainment giants will all clamor to the market marking a significant if not final shift from the traditional bound book toward fully repurposable content for learning, including traditional texts.
(6)Social Networking Finds its Niche at College. The next killer app for social networking in support of the traditional curriculum on campus will be student tagged, rated, reused, and remixed learning content. The single most popular site among students at many universities is a tossup between Facebook and Google. Google is their library, Facebook is their hangout. Many students will spend more time per week on social networks, engaging, commenting, tagging, digging, and rating their experiences than they do watching traditional television, talking on the phone, in the physical library, and attending classes combined. Nearly a third of students report that they use existing social network platforms for studying and reviewing their courses. University technology strategists have spent five years trying to building alternative social networks. More recently a small cottage industry has flourished in building hooks from campus feeds to popular social networking platforms. The search for the Holy Grail continues. The most compelling content poised to undergo the social network effect is video content of everything in and around the learning environment on campus. Formal lectures, recitations, study groups, mini-documentaries, recordings at the nerd bar, reality tv for campus are all prime time candidates for a new part of the learning eco-system. Look for early experimentation and emergent business models for repurposable and reusable video content for learning in 2010. Publishers, campus media consortia, platform players, and faculty innovators are all poised to make a run at the rich media centric learning environment.
(7) Course Management Platform Alternatives Make Major Inroads. Promising a kinder and gentler attitude to the competition, the dominant course management platform is coming to terms with a new reality in the marketplace. Campuses are not prepared to accept a single dominant course management platform and have been voting with their feet. Course management services are emerging in publisher suites, platform players, new and maturing open source alternatives and dozens of atomized stand alone modules for popular services like grade books, and collaboration tools that readily ‘connect’ to other web services. In 2010 expect an active listening effort by both dominant and emergent players in the course management space. New innovation and offerings are all but certain in the year ahead. While there is a temptation to spend time reflecting through the rear view mirror about the missteps and judgment of some of the decisions made in the course management vertical, the more important issue for 2010 is to see whether Blackboard or any of the other players can effectively execute on a new generation of requirements for learning systems. The stakes are high. The year ahead will be the most interesting since 1995 when Murray Goldberg began innovating and developing what would become known as WebCT, one of the first early entries in what would be known as the course management industry.
(8) Serious Gaming Gets Serious. Gaming software is now both big business (bigger than the Hollywood economy) and a more readily accepted pedagogical tool for a wider cross section of disciplines including science, history, sociology, business, economics, communication studies, engineering, and a wide range of health sciences. Serious gaming, as the term has been coined, is now working its way through faculty curriculum committees, faculty senates, and up to deans and provosts. In 2010 we will see an important inflection point reached as new company entrants join campus-based serious gaming software (both in solitary mode and massive online player formats) to build and compete for robust gaming platforms dedicated to the serious college market. Changes in the textbook and course management markets make the serious gaming platform particularly compelling in the immediate future.
(9) Mobile Security Hits the College Campus. Information Security is an important and growing facet of the University IT landscape. Gone is our innocence. Our university networks and communities of users are prime targets for every conceivable denial of service attack cooked up by hackers from Azerbaijan to Zambia, all looking to earn their stripes. Campus information security leaders need to help the university get ahead of the curve on a range of emerging realities. Many CIOs have ignored or wished away the emergence of smart pad devices that integrate voice, video, and data services. After all, most use the public network and not our special campus networks. In 2010, expect to read research findings and security bulletins that report that the single fastest growing exposure and vulnerability facing the campus is mobile smart pad devices. While corporate enterprise CIOs have been gnashing their teeth for years on risk mitigation strategies for mobile security, 2010 holds high probability for that reality hitting the college campus. It’s not a matter of “if” mobile security headaches will bring down the wrath of audit committees and public exposures in the headlines of local and national media. It’s only a matter of ‘when’. My bet is 2010.
(10) Open Content meets the Open University and the Vision of the Metaversity. It’s hard not to reflect on the past decade as we say good bye (good riddance) to the first decade of the 21st century. University CIOs have contributed in important ways to the transformations underway in the university mission over the past decade. The arc and rate of activities on our campuses, as breathtaking as they may seem, are moving at a completely different slope and velocity to the genuine explosion of open education, research, and innovation enveloping the broader Net eco-system. On a global scale, on a population-wide vector, our institutions are generally ill-suited for addressing the needs and opportunities in 2010 and for the next generation. To be sure, universities are not heading for obsolescence. What continues to be worrisome is our collective ability to remain genuinely relevant to the Internet society in all its complexities and contradictions. While this country has a rather anemic tradition of Open Universities, these organizations all over the world are now engaged in regional and global dialogues on how the Open University platform can contribute to the Internet-scale challenges and opportunities. Former MIT President, Charles Vest (building on Kerr's 1963 thesis) suggested (as early as 2006) that a meta-university would be “a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced.” We’re quickly approaching the maturing of all the requisite elements in Vest’s analysis against ever sharper and growing emphatic need for collective response. In a year in which a movie called “Avatar” will likely be the odds on favorite for a golden boy or two, look for new sources of inspiration and experimentation in framing up the 21st century metaversity project(s).
A decade from now, those reflecting on the second decade of the 21st century will likely point to the new normal, in which learning follows the student/professor rather than student/professor coming to learning and the research agenda. Technology is already far more than ‘just’ an enabler of 21st century learning. Both informed by and helping to shape the next 10 years of the intersection of technology, learning, and university leadership is an agenda that should excite the academy. The year 2010 will prove prescient in our ability to think beyond the possible.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
January 2010
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November 19, 2009
Wi-Fi at Cleveland Airport - A Smart Connected Community Strategy
Four years ago, I wrote a blog about Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (CLE) as the gateway to Northeast Ohio. If the region's future and vision was around being a smart connected community, leveraging technology, giving CLE a major makeover was a high priority. Kudos to CLE airport director Ricky Smith who since arriving in Cleveland has worked diligently and effectively to move the needle. One of the basic storylines in a smart connected city is the ability to provide connectivity. That's the underlying logic of the six plus year journey that is today OneCommunity. I am pleased that starting tomorrow, the 12 million annual visitors to CLE will have free wi-fi sponsored by Case Western Reserve University and OneCommunity. "Connect in CLE" is a small but important step in securing the brand and image of Northeast Ohio as a forward looking and progressive hub. Waiting for flights to your 2009 Thanksgiving destination just got a little easier.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
Posted by lsg8 at 07:15 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
November 17, 2009
New Gold Standard for Smart Connected Communities: Case Western Reserve University Announces 1,000 mb/sec fiber to the home research project
The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the Mandel School for Applied Social Science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland estimates that as many as 72% of the households in and around the University have no Internet access at all. On a national scale neighbors of the University have as much Internet access as Panamanians or Vietnamese. Broadband Internet access in neighborhoods like East Cleveland, Fairfax, Glenville, Buckeye Shaker and Hough are a small fraction of those who have basic Internet connectivity. Being unconnected is only one indicator of a community ‘at risk’ in the 21st century. As many as three out of five (60%) of the University’s neighbors are on food stamps. Four out of five (80%) newborns in some of the census tracks around the University are enrolled in Medicaid. Foreclosures in the area are as a high as one out of every three households. As the neighborhood witnessed, and the world watched and read these past two weeks, violence in some of our neighborhoods can be horrific. In urban America the debate over broadband is not about whether it exists but rather whether it is relevant to the needs of neighbors like those around our University. If broadband Internet connectivity is to have any relevance at all, it must be about safety in the neighborhood, health and wellness starting with the basics like nutrition, obesity and diabetes, and education for the young people in our city, their parents and grandparents. Broadband Internet connectivity in the areas around University Circle in Cleveland have little, if anything, to do with marketing gimmicks like ‘triple play’ or ‘download your favorite aps’. Sustainable use and adoption of Internet connectivity in our neighborhoods is about basic human needs. If broadband doesn’t speak to urgent needs around public and personal safety, health and wellness, and a wide range of educational initiatives that all point to the here and now, Internet access is and will remain largely irrelevant.
This week, with no marketing campaign, fancy promotions, or Hollywood celebrities, Case Western Reserve University launches an initiative to roll out a new gold standard for creating a smart connected community around University Circle. The standard, 1,000 mb/second, that is switched gigabit over fiber optics marks and meets an international competitive bar that we believe can be sustained for no less than ten years of use on infrastructure that will last no less than 30 years. The university is currently scoping a formal university research project to connect the first 100 households in the immediate area the university as a ‘beta block’. An unprecedented collaboration of university researchers, technologists, public sector institutional partners in the region, and vendors will bring neighbors around the University the same quality Internet connectivity that students, faculty, and staff enjoy on the campus. The University Circle Innovation Zone beta block will be a research project conducted by the University in cooperation with more than 40 institutional partners, technology vendors, and community organizations. Eventually, the University Circle Innovation Zone seeks to connect more than 25,000 residents.
The research program has specific metrics and goals that include contributing to the reduction of the incidents of violence and crime, increasing completion rates of high school in STEM subjects, better identification of chronic health conditions along with increases in monitoring and ultimately, through wellness education, the reduction of the deleterious impacts of chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity, and better knowledge of and participation in household and neighborhood energy education and management. The research efforts are being directed by principal investigators at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, University Hospitals, Cleveland Clinic, Metro Health, STEM high school hub in collaboration with the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve, the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, the Faculty of Engineering and the Great Lakes Energy Institute, public institutional partners in the City of Cleveland and East Cleveland, and a coalition of public safety forces. Though a small and circumscribed research program, the University hopes to learn in the near term what technology and solutions prove relevant and consequential as it pursues efforts to scale the University Circle Innovation Zone.
A smart connected community is a portfolio of endeavors to leverage broadband technologies to affect positive change in the lives of neighbors and in the communities where we live, work, and play. The University Circle Innovation Zone gigabit to the home research project is being supported by unprecedented co-investments by the research community, start up ventures in Cleveland and around the region, and major underwriting support by an “A” group of technology vendors, partners, and thought leaders who, along with Case Western Reserve University, believe in the efficacy of testing and analyzing the impact that broadband can have on real challenges and priorities of the community.
As the project works its way through our Institutional Research Board (IRB) and the various layers of review of our partners I hope to be able to share more about this effort along with many other coalition partners in this smart connected community venture.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
November 17, 2009
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November 10, 2009
100 Day Countdown to National Broadband Policy Looms
100 day countdown for new national broadband policy framework – what’s it mean to Cleveland and AnyTown, USA?
The sand is slipping through the hour glass and today the magic counter on http://www.broadband.gov/ slipped to 99 days. On February 17th, 2010 Julius Genachowski and Blair Levin of the FCC will send up to Congress what may well be the single most important infrastructure policy framework since the 1956 legislation on building the nation’s interstate highway under the President Eisenhower. Funny thing, unless you happen to be an ‘insider’ you’re not likely to even know that the FCC is working on this massive and potentially transformational infrastructure policy. Even more important, the FCC and broadband evangelists are having a hard time getting air time (ironically) to explain “so-what”. Let me try to outline why folks in Cleveland and AnyTown, USA should care and engage.
The preview of the conclusion is simple. The hopes of Clevelanders for a vibrant future for themselves, their children, neighbors, and friends are intimately and inextricably linked to the systemic transformation of our traditional economy. That journey involves new collaborative leadership, thoughtful and consensus-based investments in our regional leading-edge advantages, and a blueprint for a globally competitive 21st century infrastructure. A huge part of that 21st century infrastructure is ultra broadband. The truth is, most anyone anywhere can substitute Cleveland for their home town and the story about tomorrow has a similar calculus. For reasons that folks living in the rustbelt know better than others, the inability to shift core industry and infrastructure comes at a high price. Communities and their leaders all around the country should educate themselves about broadband and practice civic engagement. Five years from now, it will simply be too late. We’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t have a fairytale ending.
Back in 1956, under the President’s call for a national interstate and defense highway system, some $25billion for construction of 41,000 miles of highway was appropriated over 20 years. Today, the stakes and the need for leadership for public investments in core national infrastructure are as important as was the bold action to shape policy to build our nation’s 20th century transportation infrastructure. The ‘hook’ is no longer the Cold War and defense and the need to be agile in our response to an invasion of our boundaries by a hostile foreign army. We are in a globally competitive environment for attracting business, developing and retaining talent, and developing leading edge economic engines for the 21st century. As is appropriate, there is plenty of concern and significant energy and brainpower being deployed to respond to what most everyone now understands as a great leveling of the economic, education, and innovation around the globe over the past 20 years. Indeed, many of our legacy industries that defined our greatness in another era are now part of our risk portfolio moving forward. No one knows that better than the communities like Cleveland in the rustbelt of America. The next 99 days may be the most important precursors to whether the United States will remain globally competitive over the next 99 years. Hyperbole aside, there is, in my view, not another public policy agenda as important as what the FCC and the other agencies in the federal government are positioned to do over broadband infrastructure.
All around the world, the stature of cities and knowledge regions are being defined by a dynamic and messy combination of research, talent, culture, entrepreneurship, amenities, services, and public policy. In Australia, the national government just announced a $43 billion (Australian) dollar national broadband policy as a “major piece of infrastructure contributing to economic growth and prosperity (Sydney Morning Herald Nov 6, 2009). As Chiehyu Lili and James Losey from the New America Foundation point out (http://www.newamerica.net/files/100%20Megabits%20or%20Bust.pdf) the story is the same in cities and countries around the world. The single most important new public investment portfolio is ultra broadband. The framework being developed by the FCC is a high stakes undertaking. Many otherwise intelligent consumers of broadband services in Cleveland and around the country live with the twin fallacy of continuing American primary in the global digital economy (after all, we invented the Internet) and that somehow, public investment in broadband is un-American, or something like that. Anyone who has travelled to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, northern Europe, indeed most any OECD country and spoken with friends and/or colleagues knows that ultra broadband connectivity (on the order of 100 to 1000 times more broadband than we currently typically experience) is now the DNA of their everyday experiences. Health services, education and training, energy and traffic management, public safety and yes, their generic data, voice, and video services are all enabled over what are generally (all though not exclusively), public investment or co-investment in this next generation infrastructure. The single most comprehensive survey of the international environment comes from the Berkman Center at Harvard (http://www.fcc.gov/stage/pdf/Berkman_Center_Broadband_Study_13Oct09.pdf). More importantly, take a look at Yochai Benkler’s response to the feedback on the original submission (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/5751).
Clevelanders and every other American are exceptional only in only one sense and that is that we do not have a national broadband policy. Indeed, our policy until this FCC led by Julius Genachowski is that we did not need a policy. Beyond bravado and obfuscation the simple reason we are not globally competitive and we pay more for less is that there are very powerful and extremely well-funded companies whose narrow interests are best served when we have no public policy. One last word before trying to attend to the ‘what difference will this make’ to Clevelanders. The naked truth in the broadband debate is obvious to everyone. No one (and here I mean to include the hundreds of lobbyists being paid millions of dollars in total) has any illusions as to what the stakes are in this policy arena. Decision makers at the highest levels of Government are inundated with what they and everyone around them know is poppycock and b-movie scripts about why we do not need to make a change in our no broadband policy policy.
The broadband debate in Washington has remained, by and large, a policy wonk and ‘inside the beltway’ conversation. Too bad. I mean, really too bad. It’s not like the healthcare debate, where most folks have an opinion and care about the outcome. The broadband debate could be all about a focused set of new models to help deliver more cost effective, preventive wellness education and health care. It’s not like the debate over safety in our neighborhoods where we try and care about the outcome of community policing, parks, and lighting. The broadband debate could be all about our common interest in safer neighborhoods and more efficient and collaborative public safety responses to incidents made possible by broadband. It’s not like the debate on ‘no child left behind’ and our continuing concern and hope that we can close the so-called ‘achievement gap’ so that our children might have a future as good as, if not better than our own. The broadband debate could be all about extending structured and informal learning, at home, in the community library, between generations, through pathways of self discovery and exploration of the global village enabled by the Internet. When the price of gas at the pump goes up above $4.00 a gallon we certainly care about our energy policy. Home heating fuel prices are a major concern for folks in the Midwest and Northeast. Many folks know whether it’s an ‘inconvenient truth”, or not, that there is a global and local awareness about Carbon emissions and the need to develop a forward looking policy on energy conservation. The broadband policy could be informed in significant measure on new alternative energy strategies and their relationship to economic development. Or incentives for alternative energy consumption tied to broadband adoption and new models of working.
Broadband is the enabler of opportunity in the 21st century. Breakthrough discoveries in our universities based on new models of global collaboration are enabled over ultra broadband that connect researchers and their labs around the globe. Remote surgeries, health-related consultations, and daily interactive wellness programs are made possible by the roll out of next generation internet connectivity. Education disadvantage for underserved urban and rural America are reduced as ubiquitous internet connectivity becomes an attainable set of expectations that they, along with middle class suburbanites can enjoy. Public and neighborhood safety should be every American’s entitlement and made possible by smart public policy investment in public broadband infrastructure.
Public investment in infrastructure makes sense under three basic
conditions;(1) new market creation and incubation of new markets , (2) evidence of market failures (where profits are not attainable), and (3) when such investments serve the broad public interest and are related to other public policy goals. Incumbent market players as well as new private sector entrants into the marketplace have an enormously important role to play in helping all of us, young and old, inner city residents or rural community families, healthy and frail, to understand and create value in using this powerful and potentially transformational infrastructure. In the 1956 debate over the build out inter-state highway system the public investment was made in the name of national public policy. An enormous and robust private sector set of services grew up to take advantage and provide much value on that public investment. Clevelanders and residents of Northeast Ohio understand how important our transportation and transportation logistics industry is to our region and to the nation. The same is true on the long over-due public investment in a national broadband policy. Over the next twenty years, every American should have an ultra broadband enabled home, neighborhood, city to call their own. The future of the quality of life in our communities and in our country’s global competitiveness rests on getting this broadband policy right.
In my next blog entry I will outline an exciting set of new initiatives underway among more than 40 public sector anchor institutions in NEOhio to deliver a working model and set of pilot projects to support ultra broadband infrastructure to the front door of our inner-city neighborhoods.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
November 10, 2009
Posted by lsg8 at 04:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 10, 2009
Time for Higher Education To Step Up on National Broadband Strategy
Blair Levin is a man on a mission with a major Tylenol three headache. Levin's day job these days is Executive Director of the Omnibus Broadband Initiative for the USA. He has less than 160 days to deliver a national framework. The challenges are considerable. The broadband czar is not hiding his angst.
We are looking for creative solutions from everyone – government, think tanks, spectrum license holders, wireline providers, cable systems – that will help deliver the synergies of broadband to the entire nation. ... we need everyone to be, shall we say, “constructively worried”. So let’s be creative and find a solution together so that five years from now we don’t have to worry about the ramifications of our failure to plan ahead.
More recently, he added, "It is striking how the parties [in broadband comments] have stayed within the same framework in looking at a problem that is evolving; seeing things only in the light of long-established patterns that are tied to preferred policy outcomes, not analysis."
I have had limited direct exposure to the inner workings of this effort but I have a wide range of trusted colleagues who are actively and tirelessly working to constructively engage and position the Omnibus Broadband Initiative for advancing the birthing of national broadband policy for the United States.
Given the historic opportunity, in view of the national need, because this is so important to the future, it is high time for higher education to become actively and constructively engaged in the national broadband policy making effort. The futurists in academe have offered their crystal balls to the FCC panels. Higher education, and in particular our research and education networks, have much, much more to offer. In turn, we have much to gain from active and constructive engagement with Levin. Hyperbole aside, this may be the single most important moment in the Internet's short history to reposition the future of the era which I think future historians will rightly call the Broadband Epoch. I have no doubt that our research and education networks will be around 25 years from now. I think we should be recasting the question and ask 'how relevant will our research and education networks be' if we continue to think, build, and operate a national and regional set of shadow network infrastructures as in 'our interest' somehow separate from the 'national interest'.
The time has come to offer leadership and commitment to contribute to the designing and ultimately build out an integrated national broadband fabric. We should begin by placing our coveted publicly-funded research and education networks on the table as the foundation of a national public broadband infrastructure. We should offer up the billion plus dollar State and Federally funded investments in the more than 30 regional optical networks in 37 states, reaching more than 55,000 community institutions. We should offer up our two national backbone services in Internet2 and NLR with investments totaling well in excess of another quarter of a billion dollars over the past decade. The infrastructure assets entrusted to and built by higher education over the past twenty years are the single most important catalytic resource available to the nation in the pursuit of a national public broadband strategy.
Ed Lazowska from the University of Washington in Seattle outlines the tradition of innovation and the contribution of higher education to our nascent and current broadband state as a nation in a submission to the Department of Commerce (in the context of NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunity Program).
Colleges and universities are innovation incubators. They brought us ARPANET in the 1970’s, the Internet in the 1980’s, the graphical World Wide Web browser in the 1990’s, and Google and Facebook in the current decade. These and other transformative innovations from America’s colleges and universities have generated countless millions of jobs and countless billions of dollars in economic growth, making America the world leader in information technology. We would not be here today, were it not for these engines of innovation.College and university applications drive advances in networking. These institutions are the heart of demanding, advanced scientific applications. The data-driven experiments, simulations, and analyses of science today require high-speed broadband to move data from remote instruments to the lab and to share massive data sets among scientists globally. Why does this matter? Because these scientists will help us model climate change, discover genetic markers for inherited diseases, and explore the potential of low carbon and renewable energy sources. Colleges and universities are also the source of innovation in America’s health care system, providing cutting-edge health research, medical education, clinical care, and rural telemedicine. The bandwidth demands of today’s advanced scientific applications – tens of gigabits per second – foreshadow similar bandwidth needs in homes and businesses in the future.
Colleges and universities have a four-decade proven track record in deploying, managing, operating, and continually upgrading advanced networks. With seed money from NSF in the 1980’s and 1990’s, CSNET, NSFNET, and Internet2....provided neutral territory for open, non-proprietary, unclassified advances, fostering close partnerships with and among industry and government and across all sectors ranging from education to health care....
Two lines of questioning emerge. Why and how could the Higher Education network infrastructure become the basis of a national public broadband framework. Second, why and how would Higher Education leverage these stewarded infrastructure assets in support of the research and education mission of their respective organizations and the national imperative for research and development a global competitiveness.
First, the debate in Washington on the future of broadband is bounded by the view from 'inside the beltway'. Make no mistake about it, as intelligent, objective, and visionary as the FCC and the architects of the Omnibus Broadband Planners may well be, policy making is the extension of politics and interests by other means (to bastardize von Clausewtiz's well known idiom about war). As Levin notes in his comments quoted above, much of the policy debate and thought leadership is bounded by what "is" and the inherited sense of "self interest" which leads to a pervasive condition of incremental and bounded policy making. The future vision of the policy possibilities are extensions of and highly constrained to what we see in our rear view mirrors. Those charged with policy development end up being self-hostaged to their perception of the limits of the policy options as articulated by the delimited set of self-interested parties.
Second, America's research and education networks offer an existent proof point of a very different vision of the future of broadband. Ours is an integrated, national, regional, and local set of inter-connected advanced network infrastructures built to advance a public services set of needs and requirements. Today, a wide range of education research, learning, teaching, and outreach activity is supported on the only truly globally competitive broadband infrastructure in the country. It is globally competitive not because of the size of the bandwidth pipes. It is competitive because the range of educational research and development services, educational learning technologies, educational teaching innovation, and the abundance of Net-based education experimentation is world class.
Third, the public services platform can be and should be extended as part of an integrated effort to extend to a vibrant and transformative set of network-based activities ready for take off in the health and wellness eco-system. Our national broadband policy should aspire to leverage network-enabled health and wellness technologies and services to create efficiencies and to service the nation's diverse and multi-faceted health and wellness agenda for the 21st century. If health care and wellness follow the higher education network deployment architecture we will have a world-class infrastructure not because of the size of the pipes (or the number of lambda waves we light up). We will be competitive because health research activities, consumer and public health education technologies, health and wellness advocacy and a wide range of health economic efficiencies will make our integrated public services platform second to none in the world.
A national broadband policy which does not begin and remain constrained with the assumption of an incumbent-only provider set of policy options can include not only education and health care but also our national interest in energy management both across the grid and within communities and neighborhoods across the country. An integrated public services grid can and should include a strategy for not only network-based and home-attached utility readers to support the objectives of efficiency on the energy grids. Energy management can and should extend through a smart-home sensor network to enable household energy management. If energy management, designed as end-to-end energy management follow the higher education network deployment model we will have a world-class infrastructure not because of the number of smart grids or the size and speed of our grids. We will be competitive because energy research in both the commercial and university labs will be integrated with consumer and public energy management education technologies in home, integrated education programs, and a wide range of energy management sensor-based technologies that will make our integrated energy management the most innovative and consequential to Americans from coast to coast to coast.
There are additional public sector services, such as public and neighborhood safety, environmental and home health, smart and connected public and private real estate, and transportation grids that together with education, health, and energy form the basis for an integrated and public national broadband future. Our broadband future becomes informed by a national consensus to build, manage, and operate a smart, green, and connected infrastructure to service the needs of communities both urban and rural, aged and young, rich and impoverished, new immigrant or well established families. The architecting of a public services network can leverage and scale on the foundation of the research and education networks that touch tens of thousands of communities across the country. The new 21st century community emerges as an integrated, dynamic eco-system whose DNA is knowledge and innovation in support of and delivering against articulated community needs.
The broadband policy debate about our future must extend beyond the rear view mirror image of current 'triple play' services offering. Architecting next generation ultra broadband connectivity is a necessary but insufficient condition for a globally competitive America. Becoming globally competitive is not a debate about whether incumbent providers do or do not provide broadband services to America's underserved. Serving America's needs today and tomorrow is intertwined with advancing and sustaining an open and inherently generative platform that continues to enable innovation and unconstrained experimentation. The threads interwoven with the platform will hopefully be an integrated approach to providing broadband services for education, health care, energy management, public safety and so on. The broadband technical requirements are an extension of, not a substitute for, our common vision of a smart, green, and connected future.
Some might well ask, why should the research and education networks place their assets into national play? How does an integrated public sector platform advance the dynamic and important network-based research activities that are the raison d'etre of our networks? R&E networks is one of relatively few things in the national and globally competitive broadband space that we can proud of. Why screw it up and let our relative advantage devolve into a dumbed down version of, fill in the blank's, commercial provider service? There are probably a dozen other expressions of cynicism, horror, and disbelief. At the very moment that the R&E community is driving towards a new 100 Gig national backbone standard, why at this very moment would we want to 'give it away'.
First, our networks are public networks. They have been funded with public tax dollars and entrusted to higher education. By and large, we have been good stewards of that investment and created leveragable value. Second, we need not 'give it away' our access to commodity, research and development, and experimental use of the networks. The governance authority for provisioning tiered public access from institutions, consumers (outside their institutional relationships), and commercial users is both attainable and can and will lead to win-win-win scenarios. Third, the University's sphere of influence and interests continue to bleed well beyond the confines of the University's physical plant footprint. Fourth, our long term health and well being is intimately and perhaps inextricably linked to the well being and health of the communities around us. And fifth, and finally, it is in on our selfish and narrow interests to be part of, rather than separate and apart from, the single most important set of investments in broadband in our generation.
To be sure, it is possible that our siloed approach to securing broadband network funding from NSF, NIH, DOE, and so forth might have some short term legs. However, there is growing evidence that, at least under this administration, there is an effort to orchestrate, coordinate, and leverage major policy objectives, especially in the infrastructure arena. Working together, we should be able to make the case that it may well be within the institutional self interest of the federal funding agencies to also join and lock arms in trying to work with one another, as well as the FCC, Commerce, and the White House on an integrated approach to public sector investments in broadband. Making an effort to align Federal and State agency interests, higher education research interests, and the interests of the provider and managers of the higher education network infrastructure is as difficult as it is important if we are to keep an eye on the challenge facing Blair Levin and the nation as a whole.
Finally, a word about the incumbent carriers and the presumed insurmountable interests of the telecommunications industry. Advancing the cause of a next generation ultra broadband public services platform is not antithetical to the interests and position of the incumbent providers. The notion of binary choices between the incumbent provider or a public services platform is a framing that is simply false. Many off the record conversations with leaders within the telecommunications industry suggest that the 'either/or' framing is simply 'more of the same political posturing'. Indeed, there is overwhelming evidence that the telecom industry will continue to pursue the "Janus" approach of breathing fire on anything smacking of public sector investments in the public policy 'dialog' while, turning around, presenting a willingness and interest to advance collaborative approaches to public and private investments to reach new communities and to enable new services. Embracing that ambiguity is an art form, especially when it is underwritten with very substantial financial resources and long standing political influence. An integrated public services platform will create new dynamics in the marketplace. As long as there remains a commitment to an open and neutral network platform, there will be competition, innovation, and service options to the consuming public. That's generally thought to be a good thing.
It is quite reasonable to assume that there will not be consensus on every last detail of an advanced, ultra broadband future for the United States. There is, however, plenty of evidence that there is significant consensus on many of the goals, including a portfolio of approaches to investment, adoption, use, and accountability. The time for higher education and in particular the higher education regional optical networks and the national backbone providers to engage in the effort to design a comprehensive broadband strategy is now. We should do so because we have much to offer. We should do so because we have much to gain.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
September 12, 2009
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September 07, 2009
College Advice from the Technorati on Campus
The NYTimes asked nine distinguished scholars for their advice to incoming college freshmen. No arguing with many of the solicited pieces of advice including the value of great teachers, read newspapers, read books, remain open to new ideas, engage and find your passion. In the Book Review section of the same Sunday Times, Harvard President, Drew Gilpin Faust writes a provocative treatment on the crisis of identity and purpose of the University.
All but absent from the advice columns and from the analysis of the crisis of purpose of the University is the impact of information technology on the University campus and its antinomies in dislocating much of the received wisdom about the university ideal. Most everything defining the 'multiversity' has been impacted by information technology over the past 15 years, including what entering freshmen should know about their journey of discovery over the next 4 or 5 years and beyond. Multiversities offer liberal undergraduate education, professional education at both the undergraduate and graduate level, research driven education for students through the doctorate, applied research opportunities, and a wide range of research, scholarship, and creative pursuits. When President Obama calls on academe to be 'part of the solution' the role that we are to play is multi-faceted and indeed contradictory.
While incoming freshmen are part of a great tradition tracing its origins back 800 years or more, in reality, their experience, not withstanding the sage advice and wisdom of their elders will be very different than the post-war retiring faculty cohorts, the baby boomers, and the technorati who still regale in tales of coding their own html 'back in the day'. Information technology on the university campus is often delimited in terms of its essential qualities; big bandwidth, enough freedom of use to get into trouble, redefining the meaning of procrastination from the last hour to the last second possible, and a bevy of new excuses to the old 'the dog ate my essay' for why stuff happens. In addition to its essential features, information technology is both a strategic lens and a platform for exploration that can help engender a robust and vibrant multiversity. Here are 5 initial and perhaps not so sage suggestions for incoming freshmen. Your suggestions for additional advice for freshmen are welcome in the comment section.
(1) University is about the challenge of ethics, ethical behavior, and finding out something about your own ethics. Blog a dialog about software piracy between yourself, Socrates (self-knowledge), Cyrenaic hedonism (immediate gratification), and Kant (the pursuit of inherent good). Which two of these philosophers would you vote off the island?
(2) The idea, contribution towards, and impact of the 'global village' is a major theme that draws many young people to University campuses to explore and have their world changed. The rise and interest in environmental studies, public health, international trade, and architecture for sustainability, to mention but a few, are majors worth exploring that were probably not part of your high school curriculum. Use your knowledge and interest in the theme of a 'global village' to organize and make a video montage among young people. Here are some popular examples and here.
(3) One of the goals of coming to University is to become more literate. Many of your professors would probably tell you that literacy is a prerequisite for a democracy society. Some would argue that the way you and your generation 'view the world' is a series of windows on a screen filled with semi-complete sentences, disjointed ramblings, music blaring, and video streaming. Is multi-tasking incompatible with literacy? Do the ideals of a democratic society change with a civil society more attached to their computer screens than perhaps protesting in the street for civil rights or marching on the State capitol? Some one once said that "the medium is the message" (Marshall McLuhan). Use your preferred medium to share your message.
(4) The challenges facing your generation, as you enter university, are daunting. From the environment, to health care, from wars in places that many of us would have a hard time finding on the map to global financial crises the opportunity to make a difference is every bit as noble as is the prospects of growing discord and the loss of civility. Your judgment and your ability to engage in critical analysis is something that many of your professors think is important to explore while in University. Before "Google Search" developing critical insights and judgment was often the product of reflection and time on task. Take one of the 'big' questions above (or another one that you think matches the ones above) and use "Google Earth" to create a KML project that explores and reflects your judgment on one of the 'big' challenges. Here is a gallery of KML projects to give you a taste of what is out there and possible.
(5) Many of our major multiversities are located in major urban centers. Most universities are surrounded by moats that separate themselves from the realities of urban life around them. The 'backs' of our buildings face the communities around us. Look around your university. The technologies that you will experience in your University careers connect you to the world around you with the click of a mouse. The power of the technology has potential to change the relationship of your university to the immediate neighborhood around you in many different ways. Design a service or community outreach project for you and your residence program to help change the lives of the neighbors around you. You never know, the experience might just change your world too.
President Faust concludes her essay in the Times by suggesting "as a nation (we) have embraced education as critical to economic growth and opportunity, we should remember that colleges and universities are about a great deal more than measurable utility. Unlike perhaps any other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the present." The embodiment of those multiple commitments find their way into innovative new general education curriculum, the values and commitments of individual faculty members, and the potential strategic alliance between technology leaders and other members of the senior leadership of the university. The stakes reduce to the search for relevance in the 21st century for both the incoming freshmen class of 2013 and the role of the multiversity in society.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
September 7, 2009
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August 30, 2009
Connecting a Community Like Cleveland for Tikkun Olam
(An edited version of this blog entry was published in the Cleveland Jewish News. Thanks for the feedback on the first blog. Intentional community building has always been of considerable interest to me. The feedback from readers and commentators suggests a general view that the current state of the Internet is less enabled to support community building than it is self expression and individual discovery. In this piece I try and outline some opportunities for more intentional community building in a Jewish and Cleveland context. I trust the themes have some universal interest as well. As always, thanks for the feedback).
It's Time to Be First Again, for Tikuun Olam
Greater Cleveland should become the first geography in the United States to embrace and commit to legislative and community-based initiatives to design, build and operate a ‘fiber to the premise’ infrastructure that can re-imagine, re-invent, and ultimately re-invigorate both our Jewish and broader communities in pursuit of tikkun olam.
We need to bring fiber optic lines, which transmit more Internet data more quickly over long distances than cable or other methods, to the front door of every home and community facility like schools, libraries, health care facilities, and museums. Fiber connectivity is our generation’s version of rural electrification or the inter-state highway system. All over the world communities, cities, regions, and whole countries are competing to win in the 21st century with advanced fiber infrastructure.
Cleveland has a long and distinguished history of infrastructure firsts. Charles F. Brush’s arc at Public Square in 1879 brought urban lighting to the world. The first electric streetcar in 1884 introduced a new infrastructure for public transportation. The Old Arcade downtown in 1890 introduced a radical way to think about the exchange of goods in the marketplace. The foresight in opening the first airport and air-traffic controller tower in 1925-27 ushered an infrastructure that for most of us is the default way we think about enabling how we do business all around the world.
The cost to do the initial deployment of fiber is on the order of $1,500 per household if we scale it to the entire region. Better yet, northeast Ohio has an internationally recognized leading effort through the nonprofit organization OneCommunity, which already connects more than a million users in 1,500 education, health, non-profit, and government buildings in 26 counties in the region. Successful “networked improvement communities” -- like-minded people who share knowledge, experience, and caring and work together to contribute, learn and reciprocate to improve the world -- will depend on such next generation infrastructure. The Jewish community can help strategize how to blueprint this infrastructure build-out for the region by beginning to connect our own community facilities to fiber optics, perhaps most importantly our education facilities.
Education matters
Twenty-first century learning and innovation will be guided by peer-to-peer discovery, mentoring, and a portfolio of experiential and structured opportunities that provoke self-reflection, re-cognition, and a wide range of literacies, including screen and new media. While it is anything but a foregone conclusion, the underlying philosophical basis for 21st century learning and innovation could be tikkun olam or networked improvement communities.
The future of our community is intimately and inextricably linked to education. That is as true for the Jewish community as it is for the broader community. Sparking innovation in learning is the journey to the Promised Land – and will have to occur in spite of our school system. Twenty years ago the definition of technology in education was to add computers to the school computer ‘lab.’ Fifteen years ago, teachers began to get a computer station at the front of the class. Whether the teacher had the skills, inclination, or incentives to use the tools, the computer sat next to the teacher’s desk where most of the learning continued to get organized and transmitted. Ten years ago, computers were added as an activity pod in the back of the class, so as to not disturb the real learning going on in desks and chairs nailed to the floor.
In the past number of years, one to one laptop initiatives have begun to pepper the landscape. Having access to a personal digital, Internet-enabled learning device is a necessary but insufficient condition for 21st century learning. Indeed, traditional school systems will continue to grapple with the transformational potential of the Internet. The most compelling opportunities for sparking innovation and learning for the next 10 years will happen outside the formal and traditional school systems: community centers, museums, libraries, camps, Sunday schools, after-school, healthcare educational outreach opportunities, virtual schools, gaming clubs, user groups.
Cleveland Jewish Video Project
What if we established a Cleveland Jewish community video channel on YouTube (or another current or future online platform for community building)? Learning and innovation in the 21st century has shifted from millennia of oral traditions, to a few centuries of written traditions, to an emergent tradition of rich media and video-based learning and literacy.
One million videos are loaded onto the Internet every day. We are living through the transition from the priesthood and the period before the Guttenberg press to the democratization and the broad availability of reading materials. The difference is that it took the written tradition more than 250 years to hit the inflection of creating a mass market. The transition to rich media and video literacies is happening right in front of us. But it is not only the medium. Storytelling and re-telling over the past decade are intersecting with what we call a mashup culture of re-mixing stories with simple and incredibly powerful tools. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people re-mix pieces of other people’s stories on the Internet through video editing tools. Sometimes this is for aesthetics like adding a new track for layering an additional instrument. Sometimes it’s the community service of translating a compelling video in one language to another.
The Jewish Cleveland Video Project could be a video repository about the community by us for us. An active project for bubbies to tell their stories of early Cleveland, Jewish jocks and wanna be sports heroes, musicians, storytellers, professionals, world travelers, community activists, and devout scholars. No producers, no TV guide, no experts. We could create a series of simple incentives including ongoing competitions and rewards excellence, creativity, and inventiveness. The video project would be augmented by video blogs, community wikis embedding video content, and a wide range of collaborative technologies such as mobile smartphone. In a matter of a year the project could aspire to one million stories and re-mixed episodes from the life and times of a vibrant community intentionally engaged in a re-imagination, re-invention, and re-invigoration.
The Video Project could contain both scheduled personalized channels: your Rabbi’s favorite lineup, the top 10 video pieces suggested from your mahjong girlfriend, whatever self-identified sports jocks are watching, or you can simply browse and discover your own experiences. Instead of letting television ‘produce’ the event for us, we can collaboratively produce our own town hall meetings or debates on any topic at any time. We can also re-watch, re-mix, and reuse those episodes anytime in the future.
Learning is Not a Spectator Sport
We celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first man on the moon that gave us the now well-known and famous picture of our world from the outside looking back at us. That map of the world shaped important cognitive worldviews like “Think Global Act Local,” the rise of the environmental movement, and, I think it is fair to say, the resurrection of the Jewish tikkun olam. We’ve all seen John King or another broadcaster use Google Earth to show us a dynamic picture of a hurricane, election result, North Korean missile launch, or a visualization of Osama Bin Laden’s assumed most recent hideout in the mountain ranges between Afghanistan and Pakistan. These incredibly powerful tools inherently call for collaboration and interaction, and not simply one-way communication and demonstrations of events, out there.
What if we took Google Earth and constructed a series of ongoing projects to layer the stories and experiences of our community over space and time? The Cleveland Jewish Community Google Earth Education Project could include the story of every community member’s family tree told in stories, pictures, sounds, and movies, and the ability to travel back through time across the globe.
For example, my family comes from a small town called Selisht that was wiped off the face of the earth during the World War II. But its coordinates on the map are well known and the stories of the shtetl and the families who escaped are important educational and personal stories that I would like to contribute to my family’s and to our community’s collective memory. We could work on an extended set of oral histories and reconstruction projects with the historical societies and museums and individuals all across our community to recreate the Jewish historical experience in Cleveland, again with pictures, stories, sounds and movies. Jewish summer camp experiences over time and across space, the stories layered across space and time of Jewish sports heroes, entertainers, labor union organizers, scholars. A Google Earth project with our sister city in Bet She’an, Israel is a natural. Google Earth projects are an invitation for young people to discover and participate in their own education. Learning, it has been said is not a spectator support.
A community-based Google Earth education project could become its own eco-system thriving with user contributions, much like the Apple iPod phenomenon. Every community center, library, museum, Sunday school, or health center, for example, could have a Cleveland Jewish Community Google Earth education projection system that illuminates the surface of a large piece of educational furniture. Hands-on individual or group activities change the projected images from street-level images to riding a magic carpet at 50,000 ft above the earth.
To make learning more relevant, it must be engaging and connected to our values of sharing with our young people their connection to the long and varied stories of Jewish life through the ages. This type of project is also an invitation for inter-generational learning and strengthening the bonds among grandparents, parents, and children. The education gained by participants includes research skills, documenting, reflecting, synthesizing, developing narratives, reasoning, and effective communication. The project could be replicated and re-mixed by communities both near and far.
Economic Development and Technology Commercialization
Over the past 50 years, and for the next 50 years, the center of gravity of human interaction in the urban setting is shifting from European and North American cities to the megalopolises of Asia, Latin American and soon in parts of Africa. Cities of 10 million or more will shift the center of the world economy forever. A growing middle class in these cities will redefine the meaning of fashion, music, food, entertainment, and mass culture. The social chaos occasioned by this dynamic will disrupt traditional norms, values, and social patterns everywhere. We will necessarily become more connected, multi-cultural, with a broader appetite for culinary choices, palate for fashion and aesthetics, consumers of world music. If we are forward leaning we will also find ways of becoming co-producers of the emerging forms of mass culture.
The economic future of Jewish Cleveland and Greater Cleveland at large is linked to our ability to think strategically and create a broad vision of the future of our community. Technology needs to be an integral part of the vision, not placed into its own silo so we can ‘check off” technology on a grocery list. The vision must include a self-conception of our community as forward thinking, technologically savvy and committed to seeing itself as capable and determined to intentionally embrace the new technologies as a vital part of our very future.
Right now, the most common meeting place for technology professionals in Greater Cleveland is the check-in line at Continental Airlines on Monday morning, as they leave families, civic interests, and the local economy for 4 days, most every week for assignments outside the region. We should embrace an innovative and unorthodox set of practices to create incentives that attract hundreds of new IT entrepreneurs to Cleveland, perhaps through successive rounds of international competitions for great technology ideas that will change the world and Cleveland too. New ideas, risk-taking, social networks in new markets, access to new sources of capital, and different supply chains are all parts of the approach we can and should take. There are relatively few incentives for the current establishment to take this leap of faith. The alternative is for communities and community-based social networks to launch and model this activity in concern with community foundations. Certainly the Jewish community of Cleveland, through its own means and in collaboration with other resources like TiE Ohio (Talent, Ideas, Entrepreneurship; see http://ohio.tie.org ) with its origins in the Indian community can be at the forefront.
This community’s commitment to tikkun olam should include supporting those most at risk. However, if the community itself is not to be a recipient of someone else’s charity, we need to have our networked improvement community also include a commitment to tikkun olam through innovative practices that incentivize new ideas, ties them to relevant challenges here and elsewhere to produce a catalyst for a new innovation economy.
Whatever It Takes – Final Words
There is a tendency to dismiss the latest technology platforms as yet more examples of nerds amusing themselves. At best, some would say, we technologists are permanently distracted and engaging in obfuscation that does little more than disrupt the remaining remnants of the rational world we once knew. More charitably, Cleveland’s Jewish community and the broader community in Northeast Ohio rarely see our own identities and our vision of our own futures as being tied to the transformational potential of this new generation of advanced technology-enabled collaboration tools and solutions. It may be changing, enabling, or transforming some other community but ‘not here’, not in my back yard.
Yet the mishnaic imperative for tikkun olam challenges us to address in new ways our common future in the face of unprecedented economic challenges, social dislocation, and a way of life at risk.
All around the world, and certainly here in Cleveland and in our Jewish community, we see the spirit of tikkun olam offering us an opportunity for what anthropologist Mike Wesch calls a “new conversation” -- a new social pragmatism and call for “whatever it takes by whatever means it necessary.” The networked improvement community approach to building new kinds of infrastructure, re-thinking education, or engaging in unorthodox approaches to new economic development is neither utopian nor technologically deterministic. Rather, an intentional community can be formed and extended with the aid and progressive use of collaborative tools. While anything but a completed blueprint, I hope the Jewish community here and elsewhere, students, professionals, scholars, activists and nerds alike, will reflect and build a more complete and coherent strategy to enable us to re-imagine, re-invent, and re-invigorate our community.
Striving to contribute to the building of a mosaic of innovative, authentic communities bound together through a commitment to the leveraging of new technologies is a noble undertaking that most any rabbi in the Mishnahic or present era would find worthy.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
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