Universities have a critical role to play in the R&D efforts of our nation. Some of that R&D is in support of basic science and other efforts lead to commercialization and technology transfer. Many of the discoveries and new ideas that originate in our labs, classrooms, and residence halls are among America’s best and most competitive offerings in the global economy. We have the absolute challenge and privilege of living the future today.

Before there was a commercial Internet, Case Western Reserve was one of the earliest universities connected to the ARPANET in January 1971.

Before there were companies that supported online bulletin boards and online libraries, Case Western Reserve pioneered the early FreeNet systems in 1986 and indeed the Cleveland FreeNet software drove a majority of such early pioneering efforts across the country.

Before all-fiber-optic networks became part of the way large organizations were wired up, Case Western Reserve was the first university to have an all-fiber-optic network, in 1989.

Case Western Reserve was one of the 34 charter university members of Internet2 in 1996 and an original member of the National Lambda Rail in 2003 which has helped drive new standards for our national network providers and the electronics from vendors like Cisco and Juniper that drive those national backbone providers.

In 2002, when 100 megabit /second was the standard network speed, and five years before switched gigabit became the de facto standard for large organizations, Case Western Reserve partnered to roll out the first switched gigabit fiber optical network in higher education across all of the university.

Case Western Reserve was one the founding members of OneCleveland now known as OneCommunity formed in October 2003. OneCommunity is an "ultrabroadband" (gigabit speed) regional fiber optic network. This network is for the use of organizations in education, research, government, healthcare, arts, culture, and the nonprofit sector in Northeast Ohio and has partnered with the Telecom and Cable industry to extend advanced networked connectivity to 22 counties in Ohio. OneCommunity has proved to be an important proof point and exemplar for the Department of Commerce's NTIA as it sought principles for the investments to be made in broadband through the National Broadband Plan and the Recovery Act.

In May 2010, Case Western Reserve lit up the nation's first gigabit fiber to the home research program, connecting 104 homes and apartments in a regular Cleveland neighborhood around the University known as the Case Connection Zone. Our research program was to advance the pre-commercial exploration and the advancement of new applications and services in health and wellness, energy and smart grid management, neighborhood safety, and STEM education that would leverage these unprecedented capabilities to advance both our research program at the University and the priorities of the neighborhoods around the University.

The Case Connection Zone is a proof point in creating a University - Community partnership, taking the very first steps in exploring what could be done and whether a marketplace might develop to support the replication and scaling of smart and connected communities.

Today's launch of Gig.U is the aggregation of the demand side interest for ultrabroadband among great Universities and Colleges across the nation, both for ourselves and for the neighborhoods around us. It is a call to the provider community both traditional and emerging that there is an expression of interest from the leadership of our universities and our cities to advance the research and education on our campuses and to help catalyze market forces to partner with us in transitioning our pre-commercial efforts that are part of our core mission to the competitive forces of the market.

We want to attract and retain the best and brightest students and scholar/researchers to bring distinction to our universities and to jumpstart never before seen ideas into globally competitive companies that will bring new jobs, wealth and enhanced the quality of living in the cities within which we live, work, study, and play.

Lev Gonick
Cleveland, Ohio
June 27, 2011

It’s difficult to make sense of changes and dynamics beyond our control. There are seismic shifts under way and many of them have various impacts on the university campus, teaching and learning, the research agenda, and yes, information technology.

While many university CIOs share collective angst and various manifestations of existential crises about our relevance and influence, there are larger contexts and micro-dynamics at play that warrant reference in this annual prognosticating of the year ahead.(For previous years’ versions, click here and here.). A myth is a larger-than-life story that serves to create a narrative filled with symbols, heroes and assertions of truths. Many of our inherited myths are crumbling around us. The challenge is to understand the dynamics leading to change and to be positioned to contribute to the creation and socialization of new myths, relevant for the year and decade ahead of us.

1) The Big Picture: The State of the Global Economy and What It Means for IT on U.S. College Campuses (or, globalization and localization). Is it possible to reconcile the twin myths that (1) there is global restructuring under way that privileges so-called emerging economies and (2) the counterpoint, namely that the global economic crisis is cyclical and the U.S. economy will bounce back, eventually? While both assertions are at play, university presidents, boards, and influencers from faculty to mayors are caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place if, and as, they try to place equal bets on both dynamics at once. The long-term health and well-being of our universities is inextricably linked to the health and well-being of the cities within which we work, research and live. As we continue to experience, our cities, knowledge clusters and regional economies are closely coupled to the dynamics of the world economy. As strategy begins to emerge, university technology leaders can and should play a strategic role to architect, enable, and help lead global engagement and collaboration strategies. In the next year we will see a critical mass of universities leveraging technology in new and innovative ways to create engaged learning strategies and more robust business models to enable universities to advance their strategies for sustaining our universities, the scholarly mission, and the student experience in the global era. At the same time, strategic IT efforts can be instrumental in the university’s relationship and strategy at the city level through partnerships, innovation activities, industry and commercialization relationships, and attending in demonstrable ways to the priorities of the communities around us.

2) How do you spell opportunity? A-U-S-T-E-R-I-T-Y (shared services and entrepreneurship). Public investment in higher education has become a victim of the general fiscal crisis of the state. No matter whether one reads the prospects of this as being cyclical decline/recovery and/or fundamental structural realignment, a “new normal” is likely to crystallize in the next year or so ahead -- with the outcome being multiyear predictable austerity measures impacting all segments of the higher education ecosystem. If economic austerity weren’t enough to give indigestion to the president’s cabinet, growing demands for accountability from accrediting agencies and federal oversight bodies will necessarily increase and grow bolder even as the rhetoric and hyperbole from campus defenders and apologists persist. The consequences on IT are equally predictable. Double-digit budget cuts will be the norm for many administrative units on campus, including IT, for several years to come. So too will the usual demands for further transparency and justification of central IT investments in technology. These scenarios will remain our lived reality, along with the myth that financial discipline alone can lead our way to recovery. Alternative scenarios and new narratives are possible, including (1) advancing long-overdue shared service models on the campus for IT and other administrative service organizations (see slides 20-33), (2) legislatures and boards demand and expect shared service models between campuses for IT services and demand a demonstrated reduction in duplicative services among all administrative organizations on campus, and (3) generating interest in moving IT from nothing but a cost center toward challenging IT to have its own profit-and-loss statement and become a revenue generator.

3) Operational Excellence Is Good Enough (leveraging the cloud for strategic re-engagement). For decades the Holy Grail for IT managers has focused on operational excellence. In the year ahead, operational excellence becomes a necessary but insufficient condition. More so than ever before, and largely related to the first two mega-trends, operational excellence must be tied to creating organizational capacity. Part of the capacity will be necessary to backfill holes in the general institutional financial books. The other challenge is to position IT to be strategic and to be positioned to demonstrate value-added services and a solutions orientation across the university. This calls for heavy lifting and the difficult task of rethinking the basic organizational structure of IT divisions within the university. For more than a quarter of a century IT has been organized along functional lines; IT services for infrastructure, IT services for application development, academic technology and so on. This traditional model has run its course. To become strategic and to demonstrably provide value-added AND generate additional financial capacity, IT needs to focus on new solutions architecture and alternative sourcing strategies for building and running much of IT on campus As secular, market-based IT trends like cloud services and software as a service continue to both shape and respond to the new realities on the college campus, IT organizations on the campus need to be poised to enable universitywide capacity to leverage new technologies. There is a distinct risk to IT organizations in our universities if they continue to cloak themselves in the guise of the fully integrated, full service, all services model for the campus. Leading IT organizations are aggressively positioning themselves through strategic effort to shed what were once considered distinctive and unique sets of service lines in order to re-imagine and reinvent their roles and responsibilities on campus, while of course owning operational excellence.

4) We Go to University to Learn (mobility, simulations, gaming, and unified communications). For many knowledge and creative workers, sometime over the past decade we woke up to realize that we no longer go to our workplace to work. Work follows us and is enabled through the growing pervasive availability of connectivity, tools, and solutions that make it viable to have an office at Starbucks, the airport, a park bench, or the library. The nature of work, the workplace, spaces, building, and architecture are all in a dynamic flux to accommodate these new realities. Less popularly understood, but equally true, is the reality that we no longer go to university to learn. The great myths of the inalienable value of “place” for learning is melting away and many students have significant cognitive dissonance when it comes to exactly what is learning in the confined space of a schedule and the four walls of a classroom.

While the rhetorical debates will continue, blended learning models based on hybrid pedagogies of face-to-face interactions with online exploration, discovery, reflection and mentoring are emergent realities. Universities will necessarily continue to grapple with how best to lean into these new realities. Leading institutions will embrace the change and seek to shape the evolving meaning of excellence through faculty innovation and demonstrated student success. There are a host of technologies that have contributed to this new reality so far and are likely to shape it moving forward. Mobile platforms extend where and when learning takes place. Gaming and simulation technologies can advance problem-based learning, hands-on learning, and play-based learning. How and when simulation and serious gaming technologies are experienced as part of the learning environment need not be a trade-off between pedagogical design and serendipity. New platforms will emerge that support both real time and asynchronous learning opportunities across multiple mediums, from traditional classroom experiences to online, large-scale online collaborations to personalized interactive video and telephony conferencing, and field-based, lab-based, or classroom based learning, either in stand-alone mode or in various permutations of integrated learning environments. Nascent experimentation leveraging these new technologies is poised to help frame new and powerful myths that might attract, engage, and retain student interest and time on task, two critically important conditions associated with deep learning.

5) Content is King… No, No, Platform Is King … No, No (learning management, publishing, and learning middleware). The perennial debate on the hierarchy of value and the most important determinants of educational success is derived from a series of powerful myths that are informed by and help to reinforce competing world views, reward and incentive systems, and efforts to shape the future of the education economy. Technology sits at the crosshairs of the debate. There are those who advocate a fully coherent, integrated, and fully specified theory of learning that should envelop assessment, content, platform, services and support systems, and outcomes analysis. Others advocate a more laissez faire and componentized plug-and-play approach to the future architecture of the learning environment. Platform players continue to position their offerings as "neutral" to the competing approaches. The platforms wars will continue to heat up in the year ahead, but only because the market place is fully saturated and disruptive entrants are positioned to challenge the monopolistic behavior and positioning of the dominant offering.

A second platform dispute regarding traditional textbooks and e-books will continue to evolve. New models for the publishing industry will continue to evolve, although the motivations for providers to take anything but an incremental approach to the changes in the market place are unlikely to lead to significant change among traditional content players. As the e-book industry begins to move from core functionality to feature development, there is a distinct possibility that we will see new emergent kinds of multimedia books in which more enriched, dynamic, and network-enabled learning materials and interactive experiences will be embedded in the presentation of text, charts, pictures, and video content. Given the maturity of the traditional course management platforms, the lethargic character of the academic publishing industry satisfied with its annuities in traditional textbooks, and the early state of e-books for learning, a new set of players in the area of student engagement, assessment, and support is likely to offer to stitch together the layers between the content and platform providers. This learning middleware play is as rich with possibilities as it is immature with requirements.

6) I Used to Walk 10 Miles in Snowshoes to School (rich media and 21st-century learning). It is hard for many to imagine a learning environment that is not text-centric and largely two-dimensional. We are the products of more than a thousand years in which text was treated as a sacred medium and in which, at least over the last century, powerful myths and economic interests associated with text became deeply embedded in our education system. Of course, higher education is a particular system that asserts universal principles while privileging and creating a dominant ideology of what constitutes literacy, citizenship, and the good life in the image of ourselves. Students of the history of science acknowledge that the intersection of the technology (printing press) and the supply chain of that economy have been contributing influences into what has evolved as our education system. Early on in the history of the Internet, the preponderance of Internet traffic was, not surprisingly, text-based. Telnet, DNS, newsgroups, FTP, and e-mail were all extensions of the dominance of the text-centric world we have known.

This year video, video-conferencing, and video-based collaboration will become the dominant form of Internet traffic in terms of percentage of total traffic on the Internet. Over time, we will see a maturing of video for learning take place. Early and exciting niche players are using basic video-capture tools and traditional mini-lecture pedagogies to deliver learning objects in multiple languages to learners all over the world. Homeschoolers, self-directed learners, family and peer enabled learning are turning to learning animated by video to support their needs. Popular platforms have turned a handful of university lecturers into rock stars with hundreds of thousands of downloads of great theater for learning. Still others have begun to experiment at cottage-industry scale with the exciting proposition of engaging students in a new form of learning based on digital storytelling through student video narratives. While industry remains focused on lecture capture, there is a groundswell of exciting new experimentation going on in the rich media for learning space, and around that we will see new technologies like multi-institutional video for learning cloud services, new learning theaters for integrated global learning, repositories for searchable learning moments nested in video content, the integration of student-initiated handheld video content and the mashing up, rating, ranking, and comment of students own perspective on their learning experiences.

7) If We Hang In There We Will See an ROI on Our 8- and 9-Figure ERP Implementations (new models for administrative systems). The myth of business support infrastructure in higher education is the tale of unsupported, discrete legacy programs, kludged together and webified over time, finally surrendering to a new architecture of big, unwieldy, supposed fully integrated services and enormously costly ERP systems. At many universities the insatiable demand for feeding and caring of ERP is a sacred cow. More recent focus on business intelligence and decision support tools has been an effort to help IT and university business and administration realize and remember that moving from data to information and onto intelligence was the aspirational goal of ERP in the first place. A decade ago, visionaries in the higher education IT community saw the strategic opportunity to focus on developing open source administrative systems as a long-term alternative to the commercial ERP systems in order to take control of our administrative systems’ destiny. Just as open source higher education ERP systems began to roll out into production, the entire approach of campus IT caring and feeding these behemoths began to be challenged by the emergence of new programming languages and new business models that evolved into software as a service. While the conversation has largely focused on proprietary ERP versus open source ERP, this year will we will see the first meaningful fruits of administrative systems as a service, hosted, supported, and delivered on a subscription basis at a fraction of the cost of the proprietary alternatives without the need for the depth of technical bench strength required from the open source ERP. One instantiation will be hosted open source ERP systems that, while not fully architected (yet) to be SaaS-enabled, still shifts many pain points off campus. The second promising direction is represented by the first wave adopters of commercial SaaS offerings in traditional ERP areas like Human Resources and General Ledger Accounting. Universities committed to focusing on business intelligence and the maturing role of business analysts will be in a position to leverage the emerging SaaS services for administrative systems.

8) Consumer Sovereignty Can Be Stopped at the Gates of the Campus (governance and enterprise program management]. There is a persistent and internalized myth that the university campus is (or at least should be) a place that is on the cutting edge of technology innovation and adoption. Faculty, students, and staff have been conditioned to expect that well-designed, multiplatform, fully integrated technology with nearly unlimited customizations and superior graphical user interfaces should be the norm. That environment is their experience in their lives as private consumers -- and no longer the reality of most university IT services providers. Frustration with the lack of agility, available resources and talents has led to a growing position that IT needs to get out of the way other than provisioning reliable network access, limited security and related regulatory and risk-mitigation roles. All other services, so the new mythology suggests, can be accessed with better customer satisfaction through alternatives sources beyond the campus. On the other hand, the wish list of solutions, initiatives, and development projects for IT continues to outpace organizational capacity by orders of magnitude. The unenviable challenge of attending to rising expectations associated with consumer sovereignty, within a constrained environment and real and present dangers associated with budgetary clawbacks, now needs to find an appropriate governance model for making tough choices on direction, priorities, and rationalizing available resources against nearly insatiable demands. While IT governance and project management offices are nothing new, there is significant momentum under way to revisit the assumptions that the issues at hand are IT governance and IT project management. In the next year and beyond, we will begin to see evidence of more integrated campus-wide approaches to governance, common priority-setting, and the emergence of university-wide program management. The inherited and silo-based and hierarchical functions within IT and across the university as a whole will need to give way to project-oriented and tightly choreographed project teams that can advance integrated solutions on big challenges like sustainability, business process management, customer service, internal and integrated consulting service abilities. Those campuses that directly confront these new challenges will be able to demonstrate that beyond consumer sovereignty, there are distinctive value-added services that IT and its partners across the university can deliver that distinguish it, and help to plant the seeds of a new myth of a differentiated experience economy available only at the best universities.

9) Overcoming the Myth of the University as Open. From the 10,000 research scientists and engineers from over 100 countries working on the hadron collider exploring the origins of the universe, to the billions of dollars from hundreds of national and private agencies investing in translational medicine to advance personalized medicine and advancing our knowledge of diseases such as Alzheimer's, many of the big challenges of our time are cross-disciplinary and multi-institutional, and all of them are leveraging information technology for data collection, analysis, and dissemination. The underlying economics of our disciplinary-based institutional arrangements are rarely facile enough to advance these grand challenges. Many faculty view their departments and the university as a whole as oftentimes rate-limiting to their aspirations to take on these global challenges. How the university acknowledges and rewards open collaboration, data sharing, and unprecedented knowledge dissemination, all enabled through information technology, will help distinguish those institutions and their faculty to attract and retain outstanding researchers.

While university administrators can provide incentives (or disincentives) and lend vision to those who might provide philanthropy or external funding for such an approach to 21st century global research questions, it is faculty and faculty governance that will evolve innovative institutional arrangements to enable research breakthroughs -- both on the campus and above the campus through collaborative scholarly societies. In small ways IT can support initiatives for data sharing and make it easier for others to share data both on and between campus research groups. In the year ahead IT can join our colleagues in facilities to create open data repositories reflecting our common commitments to climate change and sustainability initiatives on campus. In addition to trying to affect behavioral change on campus, the resulting open data sets will model the value of openness and sharing for advancing the research and administration of the university. Comparative, cross-campus analyses would and should follow. Closer to campus, university CIOs should consider this year following the lead of the federal CIO in developing transparent and common approaches to an open.gov for campuses (open.yourcampus.edu) and the university sector as a whole (open.edu).

10) American Global Competitiveness and Research and Education Networks (IT and its contribution to reducing the town-gown divide). A full third of the $7 billion in federal stimulus for broadband went to research and education. Next year the real work begins all across the nation as architects and network engineers begin the daunting task of doubling the size of the network to connect more than 130,000 educational, research, and other public sector facilities across the nation. This is the single largest investment that has ever been, and will likely ever be, made in research and education networks in this country. How the narrative around the national effort known as UCAN is told and internalized is likely to focus on the myth of advanced next generation networks being vital to American global competitiveness. After all, many of our international institutional partners and competitors continue to invest -- along with their national, regional, and local governments -- in next-generation infrastructure to attract and retain faculty researchers, graduate students, and creative entrepreneurs. The lighting up of the next-generation advanced network will launch globally competitive industries and bring America back as the “Comeback Nation.”

An equally compelling narrative can be developed to leverage this next generation infrastructure to advance the research activities of our great universities AND attend to the priorities of the communities around us. The result of the new advanced 100-gig network being built across the country could render meaningful a new myth of “impacting global by acting local.” For example, extending enhanced and advanced network-enabled university research and academic curriculum programs to focus on increasing wellness and health outcomes through neighborhood network connected health hubs and home-based wellness education can lead to better and more timely education, identification, intervention and reduction in important health outcomes measures. A rich and diverse research program could inform this effort and include wellness outcomes and examining new models of health economics. Another example might be to focus on improving STEM education outcomes for young people through peer, mentor, and collaborative community partnerships enabled over the advanced networks. The next-generation network will enable us to bring the nation’s best science museums to learners, organize town hall debates over science policy, and stimulate public awareness about STEM and workforce development opportunities delivered from a community center, church, or home. In a series of smart grid research projects (the Case Connection Zone is one such undertaking), university researchers in partnership with industry and public utilities can contribute to educating and enabling residences to reduce their consumption of nonrenewable energy, contributing to the planet and the pocketbook. Augmenting the research agenda of our great universities through deliberate community intervention strategies can be accelerated through choreographed activities of the research community, IT and network engineering, and a commitment to supporting evaluation and at the same time catalyzing innovation, attracting investment and supporting the value of quality of life. Being globally competitive becomes a derivative rather than the objective of the build out of the most ambitious networking project of our generation.

Challenging a myopic view of the year ahead is no small challenge. It is indeed difficult to make sense of dynamics beyond our control. As uncertainty and constraint become the oxygen we breathe in the year ahead, those organizations that can embrace the ambiguity and leverage changes in the environment to adapt will not only assure survival but refocus the relevance of IT to the mission of the university itself.

Rosencrantz: My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king.

Hamlet: The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing.

— Hamlet: Act 4, Scene 2

In the beginning we cast ourselves as high priests. We had others build us grand temples as modern mausoleums in the center of which resided the sacred mainframe computer. All of us old enough to remember recall the special wizard-like roles of those who tended to the machine. Those who led the wizards, plastic pen protectors in place, were viewed with reverence. Then the advent of the personal computer smashed efforts to preserve the hereditary line of the high priesthood.

The emergence of an era of possibility and plenty recast our role into those of the chosen people. Unabashed idealism combined with charismatic leadership and a healthy dose of rhetoric gave rise to the audacious idea of transforming the enterprise of higher education. The chosen people, themselves led by charismatic technology visionaries, would lead the academy, apparently lost and aimless for centuries in the wilderness of the desert of pre-personal computers, into a new promised land. The advent — and powerful appeal — of networks connecting computers and people from around the campus and around the world represented prophetic leadership. These prophets envisioned a world with as many blinking lights around network routers and switches as there were stars in the skies or grains of sand in the desert. The torch of scientific discovery and historical evolution naturally culminated in the digitally networked campus. A generation of heroes invented the Internet, and their prodigy produced a new platform called the World Wide Web. A new dominant ideology of endless possibilities was born. Compelling indeed were those who invented a leadership role to advance this emergent information technology ecosystem and convinced the powers that be that every president needed a new commander-in-chief for technology.

A message with a certain messianic appeal led presidents to privilege the message and the messenger of the knowledge age. Threats like Y2K positioned the CIO as the harbinger of untold chaos — and the bulwark against it. The insatiable demand for resources from networks to ERP led CIOs to command $100m organizations and staffing levels approaching 1,000 IT professionals on research campuses engaged in an arms race in pursuit of technological supremacy.

And then a funny thing happened. The promise of productivity and efficiency of information technology combined with the centrifugal logic of the networks came to pass. Globalization with all of its disruptive impulses in the economic, cultural, and education domains would not have materialized in the accelerated fashion we are witnessing without the compounding impact of our computing and networking power. Distributed technical architectures and the convenience of personal choice made possible by those architectures, along with the associated consumer sovereignty that they have spawned, have led to a new era of technical rationality. Just as history has recorded many eras of human ingenuity and the social organizations that follow, traditional forms of strategy and vision have given way to tactics, transactions, and method. The encrusting of rules, laws, norms, and practices associated with the use of information technology has become the preoccupation of the institution and thus informs much of its leaders’ roles. Power and authority associated with the hierarchy and control of earlier eras has begun to melt away under the network effect. Innovation and the artifacts of control now flow from the center to the edges of the network. Earlier investment patterns have yielded to incremental funding models in which centralized value is measured against an output calculation largely defined by accounting principles. The foundations of much received wisdom are now in flux. Through the success of our networks, the economies of scale associated with computing and storage capacity, and the innovations and economics of nomadic and mobile experiences, what was once solid is melting into thin air.

Is the king dead? The old assumptions about the roles and privileges of the king and queen and their courtiers have begun to collapse beneath the range of new possibilities for leadership on our campuses. Consider three broad leadership scenarios:

Embrace the assumption that technology is now a utility and generally does not provide strategic advantage. In this scenario leadership becomes managing sourcing strategies for the utility and internal customer relationships, and squeezing capacity to support new unfunded mandates associated with the new high priests, chosen people, and prophets on the campus planning horizon, whoever and whatever they might be.

Align the organization and its capacity to genuinely support strategic activity. If the institution embraces any form of strategic direction, IT can become an innovative enabler as well as a transformational agent in achieving strategic work. Maintaining focus on strategic differentiators is not easy in the best run organizations, and it is even more challenging in many institutional settings in higher education. IT leadership can provide a consistent and credible voice for the value of having strategies with which others, including IT, can align.

Dare to artfully challenge the institution and its leadership to continue to see a vital role for innovation and creative work in IT as an ineluctable part of the university’s strategic leadership portfolio. Learning to thrive in the ambiguity of where and how innovation and creativity dynamically render on campus is an existential identity question, not a strategic concern of the institution. Ceding a modicum of control, celebrating the innovation of others, partnering to co-produce and co-enable others to take the institution to the edge of the possible are the objectives of all 21st century university leadership, including information technology leaders.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
December 2010

About 85 institutions in the Western world established by 1500 still exist in recognizable forms, with similar functions and unbroken histories, including the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, of Iceland, and of Great Britain, several Swiss cantons, and 70 universities. Kings that rule, feudal lords with vassals, and guilds with monopolies are all gone. These seventy universities, however, are still in the same locations with some of the same buildings, with professors and students doing much the same things, and with governance carried on in much the same ways.
— Clark Kerr1

Forces of continuity and disruption are observable within any ecosystem. The complexion of today's university and college faculty is at once the single most important institutional force representing the high priesthood of continuity and agents provocateurs inciting adaptive innovation and experimentation at an almost breathless pace.

The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only serve to exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with the university. The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching, devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocational, nonprofit in their sensibilities and at the same time opportunistically commercial, in what Kerr calls an "aristocracy of intellect" in a populist society.2

Those contradictions are heightened in the information age. Given the underlying anatomy of the Internet — respecting no hierarchy, boundary, or presumptive authority — it comes as little surprise that faculty continue to grapple with their own identities in the context of the changes fomented by information technology. In the first two columns of this series, I reflected on the impact of:

tectonic shifts associated with the seemingly anarchic world of social networks, the avalanche of research challenges that beg for collaboration in a university social order that has yet to adapt fully and leverage the opportunity to its consequences, and the growing commoditization and consumerization of technologies on the future of students and staff in the university. While the proportions will undoubtedly vary depending on the institutional setting, there is an emergent typology of faculty roles and responsibilities in the Internet era.

Online Mentoring and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning — Revisited

Faculty acceptance of learning moving in part or in whole to online environments has been an important debate these past 20 years. While the debate will continue,3 the marketplace has already hit an inflection point — online education is a growing part of what learners want and are prepared to invest in. What has yet to emerge is a peer or professional association standard for outstanding online mentoring and instruction. Bill Gates's recent prediction that within five years the best education will come from the Internet4 generates ridicule and derision on the one hand and on the other the assertion that the best education already comes from the Net. In aggregate, according to research by Ambient Insight, online learning in both a hybrid bricks-and-click mode as well as completely online is quickly approaching parity with the traditional classroom-only experience.5 One of the studies predicted that by 2014 more than 20 million students will choose exclusive online and hybrid online learning experiences, far eclipsing the 5 million students who will choose the classroom-only options available. While a healthy skepticism about the trends predicted by any one study is merited, defining excellence, what constitutes best practices, and an emerging gold standard for online mentoring and instruction is an opportunity (as well as a threat) to the faculty in our universities and colleges. Beyond convenience, price, and agility, the wealth of experience among the professoriate can — and indeed, should — help distinguish and develop a new set of standards of distinction.

Reimaging Teacher Education in a Connected World

Of all the disconnects and contradictions in the early decades of the 21st century, perhaps none is as important to future generations as the challenge facing faculties in schools of education. Educating for citizenship in the global village, digital literacies, and reflection and originality in a mashup world are enormous challenges even if there were no legacy education system. All too often the refrain "students are simply not ready for university/college" leads to faculty and administrators washing their hands of responsibility. Over the next quarter century, the students we educate today will be tomorrow's teachers, challenged with developing meaningful curricula blending 20th and 21st century realities. Globalization and information technology have been great equalizers these past 25 years in terms of K–12 education, and over the next 25 years other countries' education systems with less legacy and more agility stand to make significant progress in preparing their younger societies with 21st century skills in what looks to be a hyper-connected global economy. Leadership among our university faculty should view the challenge to help rethink the boundaries within pre-K–20 learning as an opportunity to contribute to fashioning meaningful learning spaces and experiential learning opportunities for the 21st century.

Global Research Challenges

From the 10,000 research scientists and engineers from over 100 countries working on the Large Hadron Collider exploring the origins of the universe, to the billions of dollars from hundreds of national and private agencies investing in translational medicine, to advancing personalized medicine and our knowledge of diseases such as Alzheimer's,6 many of the big challenges of our time are cross-disciplinary and multi-institutional. All of them leverage information technology for data collection, analysis, and dissemination. The underlying economics of our disciplinary-based institutional arrangements are rarely flexible enough to advance these grand challenges. Many faculty view their departments and the university as a whole as too often hindering their aspirations to take on these global challenges. The university that acknowledges and rewards open collaboration, data sharing, and unprecedented knowledge dissemination, all enabled through information technology, will help distinguish itself and its faculty, enabling them to attract and retain outstanding researchers. While university administrators can provide incentives (or disincentives) and lend vision to those who might provide philanthropy or external funding for such an approach to 21st century global research questions, faculty and faculty governance will evolve innovative institutional arrangements to enable research breakthroughs both on the campus and above the campus through collaborative scholarly societies.

Reflected through these three prisms of learning, teaching, and research, the university will have an important purpose 500 years from now. Kerr's 70 universities will still be in the same locations with some of the same buildings. However, how professors and students engage in the process of discovery, reflection, and scholarly communication will look different 25 years from now, not to mention 500 years from now. Credentialing and offering the imprimatur of degrees of completion will remain our stock-in-trade. Kerr's reflection on the "uses of the university" in the 21st century7 challenges us to find opportunities to reinvigorate university faculty through new roles, new challenges, and new organizational arrangements to advance and meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Endnotes
Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University, 5th Ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 115.
Ibid., p. 91.
Josh Keller and Marc Parry, "U. of California Considers Online Classes, or Even Degrees," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 2010.
M. G. Siegler, "Bill Gates: In Five Years, the Best Education Will Come From the Web," TechCrunch, August 6, 2010.
David Nagel, "The Future of E-Learning Is More Growth," T.H.E. Journal, March 3, 2010, and "Most College Students to Take Classes Online by 2014," Campus Technology, October 28, 2009.
Gina Kolata, "Sharing of Data Leads to Progress on Alzheimer's," New York Times, August 12, 2010.
Kerr, The Uses of the University.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University

This fall there is an interesting dialog underway among CIOs in the research university setting that is very different than previous back to school seasons. As I note in a column in the current issue of Educause Quarterly the topic is the impact and maturing of a range of offerings that challenge us to explore the relevance of "IT as a service" on campus. In particular, in this column I focus on engaging with talented IT staff on our campuses.

As always, I welcome feedback and insights. Welcome back to campus.

Here is the text of the article

Vladimir: Well? What do we do?
Estragon: Don't let's do anything. It's safer.
Vladimir: Let's wait and see what he says.
Estragon: Who?
Vladimir: Godot.
Estragon: Good idea.
Vladimir: Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand.
Estragon: On the other hand it might be better to strike the iron before it freezes.
Vladimir: I'm curious to hear what he has to offer. Then we'll take it or leave it.
Estragon: What exactly did we ask him for?
Vladimir: Oh... Nothing very definite.
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Act One

Like the protagonists in Beckett's play, many IT staff are waiting for their own Godot, in much the same manner. We in higher education IT constructed the digital native as an instantiation of our own vision of the student of the future. We fantasized about faculty colleagues who would transform themselves from the sages on the stage to the guides on the side. To varying degrees our ideal types of the emergent 21st century student and the nascent teachers of tomorrow are less of a mirage than our understanding of our own future selves as information technologists in higher education. Secular technology forces and trends, institutional maturation and evolving priorities, new and different market realities, and broad and significant social needs separately and together challenge the identity and role of today's IT professional staff inside the higher education ecosystem.

As our futures become more open, global, lifelong, and informal, how does the role of the professional information technologist evolve to remain relevant to the new "normal" condition full of contradictory technology dynamics, shifting institutional priorities, growing security and privacy issues, and new demand-side realities of voracious consumer appetites that challenge our traditional value and role within the university?

University IT Staff as Experts

Universities and colleges enjoyed an advantage in the emergent networked world. After all, as much as any other major institutional force in society, higher education was there at the beginning. The explosive and transformational change occasioned by the networked world has far outgrown the boundaries of our university campuses, however. Our enormously talented technical staff now lead national and international standards bodies, contribute creatively and abundantly to open- and community-sourced projects, and still keep up, the best they can, with the enormous complexity and dynamism of the technology environments on campus. To the extent that there ever was a balance between agility on the one hand and expertise on the other, most campus technologists in network services, storage and server engineering, security operations, database management, and administrative applications support are rightly concerned about how they can best fulfill continuing professional commitments to remaining both expert and responsive to the multiple and conflicting demands for new services across campus.

Shifting Institutional Priorities and the Future of IT Staff Roles

While there were and indeed still are some exceptions, IT enjoyed its pinnacle as a strategic imperative on university and college campuses over a decade ago. University presidents and boards of trustees broadly embraced the transformational potential of IT in the early 1990s, succumbed to the institutional risks of not investing in IT (most notably during the Y2K "crisis"), and to varying degrees saw investments in IT as a possible differentiator in their broader strategic vision. As the new millennium has set in, general fatigue with the continuing insatiable demand for ever scarcer financial resources has led to a growing bifurcation of the institutional view of IT: the cost center, in which IT is managed for efficiency and directed to save costs; and the strategic force, worthy of strategic institutional investment as both an enabler of other strategic mission work and as an institutional differentiator. While CIOs continue to do their utmost to manage their portfolios between operations and strategic work, IT professional staff run the risk of being caught in changing institutional priorities.

The rhetorical institutional commitment to "invest in our people" has become more complicated in the world of IT on the university campus. To be sure, we need to invest in technical talent; the challenge is how to shift our orientation to staff hiring, development, and retention in a world informed by significant pressure at the institutional priority-setting level. Technologists are, most of them by their very DNA, interested in and attracted to change environments. The general organizational culture and practices implemented over the past quarter-century by IT management do not position IT staff to become as valuable as we might aspire to in the new institutional priority-setting reality of many university campuses. Transforming the traditional functional organization into a more agile, project-focused organization requires capacity building and deliberate organizational development efforts that relatively few organizations either inside or outside the university have carried out.

The Rise of Consumer Sovereignty, the Demise of Central Control, and the Future of IT Staff

Resistance to the onslaught of consumer products and services invading the campus environment is futile. The broad consumer electronics and technology economy now dwarfs the so-called "enterprise" commercial environment in both size and pace of change and innovation. Universities are incubation settings for life-style gadgets, social networking media, and new platforms for collaboration services. The longstanding core value of open environments makes it nearly impossible to imagine policing and locking down our network services. Surrendering a modicum of control need not be a blemish on the resume of a CIO. However, conceding the new reality that will inform our work, study, and play on campus does mean that the work IT staff do on campus shifts in important ways. Some parts of the university IT environment will remain focused on supporting vertical products and platform standards. The dynamic technical part of the IT organization will necessarily shift to competencies focused on integration services that connect different applications, applets, and services to enable reconfigurable, customizable, and personalized user experiences. More than ever, the customer experience rules, and IT organizations on campus will need to be very creative in shifting investments in staffing and cultural orientation to privilege the increasingly demanding requirements of our students, faculty, and staff colleagues.

Technology as a Service and the Future of IT Staff

The elephant in the room at many universities is how to make sense of the secular IT trend broadly described as technology as a service (Resources). Some will argue that the trend is early in its maturity curve, others will speak of first-mover advantages, and still others will warn of universities abandoning IT as a strategic asset in favor of unsustainable business models and market hype about what amounts to privatizing and outsourcing IT on campus. Make no mistake, this topic in various forms will be the central debate on our campus technology agenda for the next decade and beyond. This conversation can serve as a catalyst for strategic dialogue on the future of IT and the role of IT professional staff in higher education. Where will we place our finite IT investments, and how do we creatively generate capacity to attend to both operational needs and innovation agendas of the future? How can we ensure that IT stays relevant to strategic planning and the institutional mission rather than finding itself sidelined and playing a more limited role on campus?

We can wait for our Godot, or we can be deliberative in our internal conversations about crafting our futures. The choice is ours.

Lev Gonick
August 30, 2010

The six leading goals of the Plan include a baseline commitment for affordable access to broadband, leading edge commitments to ultra broadband connectivity for a significant number of households, public anchor tenants in every community with robust capacity to support next generation applications and services, a focus on safety and energy services, and an acknowledgement that mobility is one of the most compelling experiences associated with broadband. America's leading research and education networks have applauded the National Broadband Plan. The Plan's recommendation for One Gbps Connectivity Goal For Community Anchor Institutions positions our regional and national research and education networks, one of our genuine national strengths, for extending the connectivity by provisioning services to schools, libraries, colleges, museums and other community education assets that are still isolated and or not well served. Working with the FCC, our community's broadband leaders have collaborated with a broad coalition of public network champions to develop a comprehensive "Unified Community Anchor Network" (UCAN) touching perhaps 200,000 community anchor institutions envisioned by the FCC.

Building out UCAN is a multi-billion dollar undertaking. Leveraging the more than 60,000 institutions already connected to our regional and national research and education networks provides an undeniable and critically important jump start in completing this hugely important foundational highway building project. If someone asked me, I think funding a multi-phased UCAN is an undertaking of herculean proportion and should be a national priority. UCAN should be a clarion call for inter-agency collaboration at both the federal, state, and coordinated regional level. A deliberate choreography among transportation, education, economic development, general services administration, research, labor and job training, health, energy, and bevy of regulatory agencies is vital. Not unlike the imperative for national security coordinated activity, UCAN calls for nothing less than a national and integrated approach to building out this unified network. The stakes are too high to let the network design, funding, and operation unfold in a business as usual fashion.

UCAN is the beginning but hardly the end of what we in Higher Education should and can contribute to the national broadband plan. Let's recall, there are over 60,000 institutions and community pubic anchor "middle mile" assets already connected to the research and education community networks. In parallel to the highway building project, network R&D activity over the past 40 years has driven innovation and productivity gains, which has aided economic growth and community development. The five goals of the National Broadband Plan, beyond the highway building activity presents an historic opportunity for universities. Next generation research on wireless networks and new protocols for transporting voice and data services are made possible only because we have R&E networks. New sensors and technologies for energy grid and energy management activities can move from computerized simulations from our labs to testbed projects around our universities as part of the broadly endorsed President's Climate Commitment. Many of our great universities are physically located in inner-city settings. We all have responsibilities for public safety. Next generation integrated public safety services over IP using our networks and college neighborhoods for testbed facilities are all ready to come out of the lab and get road tested.

At the heart of America's Universities 21st mission is our capacity to introduce a whole new range of network enabled health and wellness services and advanced education experimental and research activities. Universities and colleges across the nation should align university-based strategic work with what will likely be a century of national investments and national policy goals associated with our national broadband plans. An active commitment to engage in a comprehensive manner with the 6 goals of the national broadband plan will advance a bold 21st century research and education agenda. In addition to supporting research and education we are positioned to contribute significantly to open access and support the conditions for a more competitive and generative network ecosystem. The future of our great universities is intimately and inextricably connected to the health and well being of the cities and neighborhoods within which we live, work, and study. Our network research program can and should reach out beyond the confines of the geographic boundaries of our universities. The social, economic, health, and educational challenges facing the nation are not limited to our research labs and our institutional boundaries. To the extent that we are committed to addressing the great and nasty challenges of our age we need to be deliberate in developing a research agenda and an infrastructure capacity that allows us to contribute to the major policy issues of our day. As we design and build our research platforms that take us to the neighborhoods and communities around our universities our network architecture should be informed by a commitment to open access. This means that we should develop business models and models of network operations that support our research and education program and, at the same time, allows for competitive commercial and non-profits services and offerings to be run over that same network capacity. As we see all around the world, this approach leads to a messy vitality of competitively-priced products and services being offered in the marketplace. Universities have an opportunity to pilot and test this approach. Here in Cleveland, at Case Western Reserve University, we have begun a small set of such research programs.

According to the Plan, "America’s top research universities continue this R&D effort today in their efforts to experiment with very fast 1 Gbps networks (gigabit networks). For example, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, with 40 institutional partners, vendors and community organizations, is planning a University Circle Innovation Zone in the economically impoverished area around the university to provide households, schools, libraries and museums with gigabit fiber optic connections. Case Western expects this network to create jobs in the community and spawn software and service development for Smart Grid, health, science and other applications, as well as foster technology, engineering and mathematics education services."

Later this week (March 25th) we will be providing a demonstration of the early fruit of the Case Connection Zone at our Gigabit Breakfast Club. As noted in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, the morning will focus on alpha demonstrations of big broadband offerings in health and wellness, STEM education, household energy management, and neighborhood safety. The end point in these demonstrations is our newly opened Alpha House, a public briefing center. The Alpha House is part of our first 104 home Beta Block research program. A second Beta Block and Alpha House are now in the early design stages.

If you are interested in more details, or a visit to the Alpha House, feel free to drop me a line. Circle May 6th for another update on the Beta Block here at Case Western Reserve during our Community CollabTech and then a series of public demonstrations as part of the annual Hessler Street Fair.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
March 21, 2010

Below is the original, unabridged version. As always, thank you in advance for your comments and feedback.

Futures

Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, Wisdom is not truth, Truth is not beauty, Beauty is not love, Love is not music, and Music is the best. Wisdom is the domain of Wis (which is extinct)

Frank Zappa – Packard Goose from Joe’s Garage: Act II and III (Tower Records, 1979)

I want to refract on futures. What will the enterprise we call post-secondary education portend for over the next 25 years, the next chapter of the interaction between challenge, discovery, scholarship, learning, teaching, and technology? The four parts of the prism I will exam through this column are student experiences, staff contributions, the role of faculty, and finally the emergence of learning communities.

Ours is an era of abundance. History, until the mid-20th century, has largely been told as a series of philosophies about the human condition in which everything from the mundane to the metaphysical has been constrained by a world and a worldview informed by scarcity. The explosion of data and information catalyzed by Metcalfe’s Law (http://vcmike.wordpress.com/2006/08/18/metcalfe-social-networks/) positions intelligent search, network affinities, and the prospects for a personalized, customizable semantic web as the conduit for knowledge development and sharing wisdom.

To provide some perspective, writing in the early 1960s, French philosopher, theologian and technology skeptic, Jacques Ellul notes with some evident disdain (The Technological Society, Vintage Books, NY, 1964: pg. 432] the fanciful predictions of American and Russian futurists published in the Paris weekly, L’express regarding science, technology, and society in the year 2000.

“The most remarkable predictions concerns the transformation of educational methods … Knowledge (according to the Futurists) will be accumulated in “electronic banks” and transmitted directly to the human nervous system by mean of coded electronic messages. There will no longer be any need of reading or learning mountains of useless information; everything will be received and registered according to the needs of the moment.” Ellul shares his skeptical view that “What is needed will pass directly from the machine to the brain without going through consciousness.”

Autonomous thinking machines are no longer purely rhetorical vehicles for futurists. And while one can debate the prescient insights of the collection cited by Ellul, his framing of the challenge facing students foreshadows the single most important issue for the next generation of learners. The learning enterprise for students is changing, most likely forever. A long historical epoch of scarce knowledge and the pursuit of mastery of relevant domains is nearing its final dusk. Competency is less about comprehensive recall, a function that machines and search engines do pretty well. The emerging learning enterprise is about designing and creating experiences that provide opportunities to discover and gain 21st century competencies based on assembly, synthesis, perspective, critique, and inter-connected systems thinking. The mechanisms for certifying competency, along with what I will refer to as emergent learning communities, are the value and brand of traditional universities in the 21st century. Once a near monopoly producer of a certain set of valued and relevant skills in the post-war era, the traditional university’s market role has given way to a growing number of providers of valued and relevant skills and education in the maturing connected learning era.

Four broad categories of student learners and learning approaches occupy the remainder of this column. They face new challenges and opportunities as they embark on their journey of discovery, securing relevant competencies and experiences for the connected learning era.

1. Open Learning

“Open education” refers to the emergence of a growing repository of nonproprietary, structured learning materials and experiences. Most of these open educational resources originate online, but over time student use of this content will blend both synchronous and asynchronous online use along with self-directed learning and a multiplicity of face-to-face learning environments. Today tens of millions of students are experimenting with first-generation open content. Within a relatively short time more than 100 million open educational learners will find compelling motives to access the single largest, dynamic body of student-centered learning materials available. Lest anyone dismiss this renaissance of learning as having down-market value only, MIT President Emeritus Charles Vest noted just four years ago:

My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university — 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. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure.1

2. Global Learning

The Internet enabled a worldwide connected infrastructure that supported acceleration of the global economy and a variously described flat or flat-with-some-bumps world. Scholars from peripheral outposts, far from pre-Internet knowledge clusters, gained equal access to scholarly research materials and near real-time interaction with colleagues at the most prestigious institutions. This dramatic reframing of scholarship has not been accompanied by a parallel transformation in the student experience, represented by scalable, cross-national collaborations between students of diverse backgrounds. Even though a mountain of data extending back to the Peace Corps era suggests the significant impact of cross-cultural exchanges, relatively few global initiatives support sustained student learning about the world around them.

The single most important student-related experience leveraging the Internet in an international context has been keeping in touch with friends and family via e-mail, blogs, Flickr, or Skype. Many students, especially those from the United States, inherit parochial views of the world until and unless they become engaged in structured experiences to expand their horizons. Along with an imperative to give students a better understanding of their role in a highly interdependent, if still significantly uneven, world economy, there is also a tendency to view Internet-based exchanges as supporting a homogenization of learning and culture. As we gain a more nuanced understanding of cultures, politics, gender relations, and the different kinds of impact technology can have on the relationship between peoples and their governments, the time is ripe to develop a more integrated approach to the student experience and the world stage upon which they can and should play an active role. Deans for Global Experiences and the Internet could facilitate structured engagement among international affinity groups. The subject matter of the Global Experience and the Internet curriculum can itself be a long-tail program enabled through thoughtful design leveraging the global Internet. Ongoing, multi-institutional projects that include discovery, data gathering, cross-cultural training, cross-cultural exchanges, and project work represent a unique opportunity to link relevant challenges to the pervasive global resources of the Internet.

3. Lifelong Learning

The breadth and depth of change occasioned by the Internet and the global economy has been profound. Setting aside the question of whether academic disciplines have kept up with the new realities, the dislocation associated with these structural changes has significantly affected higher education. During economic downturns, universities call upon their offices for continuing and professional education to meet increased need with increased capacity in response to a whole new cohort of learners whose jobs, careers, and skills sets have been negatively impacted. The Obama administration places significant emphasis on building capacity to position community colleges to develop 21st century job skills among students. Likewise, education czars in state capitols across the nation realize that economic development and sustainable recovery are intimately connected to the performance of the postsecondary education sector.

Less obvious is how, if at all, the higher education sector is working with the federal and state higher education bureaucracies to leverage the networked economy in educating millions of workers seeking new, high-paying, clean jobs for the 21st century. A distinct risk exists that recovery will come on top of a service economy, with all the economic weaknesses entailed. The challenge is to create a robust, generative digital economy with a well-developed pipeline of talent and clear articulation of relevant skills.

We need a new master plan for educating today’s students, more than 15 percent of whom are single parents and 75 percent of whom are nontraditional students (nearly forty percent over the age of 25),2 that covers the millions of people seriously impacted by the structural collapse of the economy. The new market for university students is significant by its size, demographic profile, and disinclination to physically attend a traditional college, even if there were enough physically available. Nor should a new national plan for 21st century postsecondary education be built on the artificial segmentation imposed by traditional Carnegie classifications. We should also be wary of unfettered market responses that see opportunities to maximize profit with short-term fixes to structural challenges. We need an integrated approach that leverages the scalable platforms harnessing the Internet to create this generation’s 21st Century Higher Education Opportunity Act.

4. Informal Learning

Finally, while demographic trends are shifting away from the traditional, on-campus residential student, the needs of this important group of learners warrants examination. Choosing to live on campus as part of the collegiate experience represents the value placed on student life and informal learning. For many students, the informal learning moments before or after the formal class or lab remain their most vivid memories. In addition, the innovations generated by students in residence shed light on the value and quality of informal learning. Consider, for example, college startups from Facebook to Corkshare, or the dormcubator program called VeloCity at the University of Waterloo, which focuses on a wide range of initiatives from women and entrepreneurship to mobile and gaming startup ventures. Students apply to join the dormcubator to combine their academic studies with their interests and passions in software innovation.

Residential college experiences have often led on-campus learning innovation at the intersection of science and technology, as well. Experimentation with video, virtual worlds, massive online player games, iPhone apps development, and hundreds of other experiences make life in the dorms a beehive of activity. Within the interstices of a relatively slow-moving curriculum, the innovation associated with the Internet and information technology unfolding in the residence halls of college campuses bears witness to the data, information, knowledge, wisdom hierarchy (not to mention love and music).

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
March 4, 2010

While it would have been even more dramatic had the announcement come from President Barak Obama, last week's Google blog launching the nation's first gigabit fiber to the home broadband roll out was as bold as it was audacious. Set aside the tired and predictable cynics, industry apologists, and inside beltway naysayers. The move was a stroke of genius. In one blog posting Google has provided framers of the so-called National Broadband Plan with our generation's moon-shot aspirational policy goal. The Google Gigabit Fiber to the Home broadband research project serves to re-frame and provide the most compelling platform yet for 21st century science, technology, and innovation. The posting encapsulates one of the country's most unique historic qualities, to frame 'the moon shot'. While Washington itself is paralyzed with snow and partisan gridlock, from the left coast comes a vision of a new era of innovation and a platform for leveraging advanced 21st century technologies to attend to the most pressing challenges facing America, including neighborhood safety, health and wellness, energy sustainability, and relevant education to prepare a 21st century workforce.

There have been thousands of articles published and blogs posted about the Google Fiber to the Home announcement in the past week (check out the growing list of links from the original posting). Over the next couple of weeks as City Halls across the land line up to submit proposals to Google (the deadline is March 26, 2010), it is time to provide some insights on how such a pilot could be architected and made into a sustainable program. Three and half years ago, in the middle of all the hype about muni wi-fi, Google entered the fray with a well publicized effort to light up its home town of Mountain View. By September 2007, along with others, I was prepared to announce the well deserved death of the first wave of muni-wireless. There was then, as there is now, the need to carefully architect a technical framework for end-to-end services that has a viable business logic for operating and maintaining the infrastructure beyond its first lighting.

There may well be multiple paths to such an undertaking. For the past five years other cities, states, and national governments around the world have been working on the challenge. The international gold standard for broadband is 1000 mb/s (1 Gig) for 21st century netizenship. Here are five lessons that I think would stand the test of more academic rigor and analysis.

(1) This is a design project that needs to be framed as our 30 year infrastructure plan for the future. Incremental design and incremental resource investments will be the death of the "think big" approach. Imagine if we had planned for a refilling stop on the way to the moon.

(2) Technical standards exist for making 1 gigabit (indeed, 10 and 40 gigabit/sec) networking work today. Think about the build-out of the national network of railways. With a commitment to a common rail gauge in the nineteenth century, it was possible to build out a series of regional networks that were tied together by a relatively modest investment in a national railway 'backbone' (as compared to trying to design, build, and operate from a clean sheet of paper). The lesson for today is that we need to agree on the common gauge, not the way to build it out. The national policy should be enable national backbones that allow neighborhood, local, regional, and mega regional optical networks to connect to one another and to end points across the Internet. Leverage common standards, keep the barriers to use and adoption as low as possible, maintain a commitment to openness and keep governance as light weight as possible. These principles should help this moon shot be launched.

(3) Don't leave the work to inter-state highway builders. Over the past 25 years, those building amazing network infrastructure have toiled at the 'core' of the network, connecting huge rings of connectivity to each other. There is an insatiable capacity of those building the inter-state backbones/highways to consume over 100% of all the available resources, whatever they are. The design constraint needs to framed 180 degrees the other way. Exactly the way Google imagines, start with the end of the network, hundreds, if not thousands, of communities connecting each residence at 1000 mb/sec. Each dwelling should have two fiber pairs that terminate at a panel joining power and other utilities entering the premise. The technical specifications need to be built on top of the requirements of the edge of the network. The very edge of the network is the single unit in a public housing unit in the inner city or a barn in the rural countryside. To be sure, building inter-state highways looks easy compared to the challenge ahead. The Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969 was an order of magnitude more complex, yet leveraged, John Glenn's first orbit of earth in Friendship 7 in 1962.

(4) As tempting as it might be to imagine connecting a really creative, imaginative, desirable district, or an at-risk, needy, impoverished neighborhood at gigabit speeds, there are important technical considerations to layering connectivity. The challenge for wireless services or fiber to the home is the 'end to end' analysis of how the pieces of the network are built and connect to one another. There is rarely an economically viable long term plan that emerges from short cutting the end to end analysis. Communities that have large amounts of so-called middle mile capacity present the most cost efficient and technically viable approach to delivering fiber to the home. Think about this as a hub and spoke system like the airline industry is supposed to operate. The spokes are the the connectivity that carries the gigabit network to the very edge of the network (the last house on the last block or the furthest farm house). To efficiently build out this kind of next generation network, the challenge is to build hubs (let's call them middle mile hubs) that serve to aggregate all the activity on the spokes. In addition, the middle mile hubs connect to one another in what might be called an aggregation strategy. All that traffic needs to ultimately drain into very very big pipes to the Internet. The technical answer to pulling off this fantastic engineering challenge is a lot of fiber and leveraging next generation lighting technology that takes a single piece of glass (fiber optic) and shoots separate color light through the glass creating 32 or even 64 separate networks on a single piece of fiber capable of carrying 10-40 Gigs of network traffic.

(5) Building a neighborhood gigabit fiber to the home project needs to be "mayor proof". We need our elected officials to embrace the vision of 21st century infrastructure that enables desirable jobs, education, health, and innovation. The challenge is so big, so important, so challenging that we can't leave it to our politicians alone to conceive, legislate, and implement this type of project. Think about this as creating a port authority for 21st century transportation in each cluster of communities across the country. The other reason that a community gigabit fiber optical network needs to be 'mayor proof' is that building out the network enables a fundamentally different infrastructure for decision making, community organizing, democratic and civic work. Many traditional centers of power, like some city halls (legislatures, regional commissioners), are poorly positioned to surrender their traditional forms of hierarchical power to unleash the real power of netizenship.

Back in November 2009, Case Western Reserve University announced a 104 household gigabit network research program led by a partnership of more than 40 community partners and a dozen leading technology vendors. A proto-type of a 21st century integrated public services platform, our 'beta block' project seeks to deliver (on an opt-in basis) neighborhood safety, health and wellness, science education, and energy sustainability to the 250 residents in Cleveland's historic Hessler Street. Connecting the 104 residences to a community anchor middle mile organizations (in this case Case Western Reserve University) serves as an archetypal and use case for four additional neighborhood gigabit fiber project being planned for distinct neighborhoods around our University Circle (see this short YouTube clip to learn a bit more about the current challenges and opportunities ahead in an inner city, urban context). Each of the proposed beta blocks will be wired back to a middle mile anchor institution. Perhaps unique, in Northeast Ohio some 1800 public sector institutions like K-12 schools, universities, health care providers, governments, museums and libraries leverage an award winning, 22 county, community non-profit Internet Service Provider built on gigabit fiber optics, called OneCommunity. The product of six years of collaboration and inspired technical leadership, OneCommunity is a model for building a regional community network as a 21st century community asset.

An architected smart home grid, these beta block projects will help undergird a 21st century sense of place and neighborhood as services are developed to attend to hyper local priorities. An "alpha house" is already up and online. Perhaps America's first inner city gigabit fiber optically connected home at 11300 Juniper Rd is now online. The upstairs of this University Circle coffee shop and meeting place is being retrofitted as a community visitor's center and technology demonstration facility. More than a dozen interactive HD video conferences can been conducted with health care professionals, peers or science mentors from NASA, the Great Lakes Science Center, or Case Western Reserve University, and public safety officers. Wireless enabled sensors send real-time data to health care professionals and will soon be mapped to electronic medical records. Wireless integrated medical cuffs and other devices enable real-time monitoring of key vitals associated with chronic health challenges in the inner city. Environmental health projects have been proposed to monitor air quality related to house-bound seniors. Those same seniors will be able to take weekly Tai-Chi classes from the comfort of their apartments with instructors from Case Western Reserve's 1:1 fitness without having to navigate a cold Cleveland winter. To be sure, the portfolio of applications that will ultimately evolve from our effort to design an integrated public services platform is likely to be much different from our first set of ideas currently being designed and to be reviewed by our IRB (institutional research board).

As the communities around University Circle in Cleveland think about how to respond to the Google moon shot challenge, think about building on our strengths. Cleveland is a mosaic of distinct neighborhoods and cultural communities. Let's design our future by embracing common technical standards, leverage our local middle mile assets, and challenging our technology leaders to join our civic, philanthropic, and other community leaders to help re-imagine, re-invent, and re-invigorate our region. Google's challenge is a clarion call to resist the temptation to design a 25 year graceful decline as the 'best we can hope for.'

Back in 1962, President Kennedy reminded his audience of how breathtaking the pace of change had been. The road ahead will be full of naysayers and predictable vested interests with tired cliches about what will we do with all that bandwidth and about how this is America and we believe in the exclusive ability of the marketplace as the provider of bandwidth. A slightly abridged extended quote from President Kennedy seems like an appropriate way to conclude this (very long) blog entry.

No [one] can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of [human] recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power. [We reached the moon at five minutes to midnight tonight. If we build out an internationally competitive Gigabit Fiber Optic network to address the most pressing needs of Americans and enable and unlock the potential for new inventiveness and discovery, we will have literally lit that fiber at a fraction of a second before midnight tonight]. This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely [a new economy based on gigabit network services, including health and wellness, education, safety, and energy sustainability] promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio
February 14, 2010

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

Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH

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

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

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

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

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