June 24, 2008
Freedom Is .. National Underground Railroad+Apple+U
The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is teaming up with Apple to provide college students across the United States with the opportunity to share how they define freedom. Teams of college students can create and submit a short video (3 minutes or less) expressing the qualities, importance, and impact of freedom in their lives, today.
Through their submissions, students will connect with people around the world to share their ideas about Freedom and become facilitators in a very important, global dialogue concerning some of society’s most critical issues. Creating Freedom Awareness—at a time when we need it most—is, perhaps, the 21st Century’s greatest challenge.
Please let faculty- and student directly- know about this amazing opportunity.
The deadline for teams to register for the contest is July 6th. Thanks for getting out the word in the next week.
The contest info and rules can be found at:
http://edcommunity.apple.com/freedomcontest/
Posted by lsg8 at 07:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 10, 2008
Blogging ECAR Summer Symposium III -- Students and Social Networking
Each year, Educause's ECAR group conducts a national survey of students and IT. The 27,317 respondents to this year's survey were asked (for the first time) about their experience in the social networking world. Later this summer/fall, ECAR Fellows Judy Caruso and Gail Salaway will release their general findings. In the meantime, the data shared confirms broad expectations that students are significantly time shifting in favor of social networking. Understanding this situation and student self-reporting that they are interacting with one another for course-related efforts is an important insight.
For students, course management systems are really convenient ways of gathering access to formative grading and other related conveniences. Most are rather critical of their faculty colleagues use and knowledge of the technology. As the social networking platforms emerge as a major portion of the student experience and course management systems become management utilities, its important to begin asking whether we should move more and more of the 'learning' to their platform rather than demanding that they conform to ours. Knowing full well that students may well resist the convergence of spaces, over the next year or two, I suspect we will see leading edge faculty and organizations bringing value to student social networks that will begin to blur the boundaries.
Eighty-two percent of students self-reported that they spend time in the social networking world. A significant number of students report that they are spending 20 hours or more a week! in their social networks.
Eighty-nine percent have a presence in FaceBook (with only 48% having MySpace accounts).
Students report that they are using these platform technologies to keep in touch with friends (97%), sharing photos, videos and the like (67%), finding out more about people (51%), communicating with classmates about course-related activities (50%) and event and scheduling (48%).
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
June 10, 2008
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Blogging ECAR Summer Symposium II
B. Robert Franza is the Executive Scientific Director of the Seattle Science Foundation. Franza is a quantitative systems biologist with extensive experience managing successful collaborative and entrepreneurial start up companies. Franza was recognized by Science Watch as among the top three most referenced molecular biologists in the world. A University of Washington bio-engineer, Bob Franza addressed the ECAR Summer Symposium with the provocation that basic life science education needs to be re-invented.
Franza chose to make the case that the 3-D virtual web is an infinitely creative pedagogical learning space that allows co-creation of learning materials by students and faculty members. Immersive spaces like Second Life also make it possible for hundreds of retired science educators around the world to engage as mentors. Bob also made the case that the economics of the inherited educational institutional framwork for learning is non-sustainable in both dollar and cents terms (in terms of the waste of overbuild) and in terms of ecological sustainability. When asked about limits to this approach, Franza pushed back and suggested that its a matter of will to re-invent and make relevant the education of the next generation of life scientists.
The Seattle Science Foundation itself is an immersive convening collaboration space for physicians, scientists, technologists, engineers, and educators, fostering in a world class training facility, to improve healthcare through professional education. As we think about modeling, event-based collaborative research and learning spaces, the Seattle Science Foundation is an intriguing model of active researchers and educators engaged in important and pressing activities.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
June 10, 2008
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Greening IT in NEOhio
We are long overdue in having a broad regional conversation about a consolidated or even cloud-based approach to "Greening IT in Northeast Ohio". Our IT data centers produce more CO2 then our airline industry. The silence in our region has been deafening.
In the release of its path breaking report released last week, the Brooking's Institute "Shrinking Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America" calls on Washington to develop a new policy framework to create incentives to reduce the country's carbon footprint. I have pasted below the profile of NEOhio.
According to the study,
Federal policy could play a powerful role in helping metropolitan areas—and so the nation—shrink their carbon footprint further. In addition to economy-wide policies to motivate action, five targeted policies are particularly important within metro areas and for the nation as a whole:
* Promote more transportation choices to expand transit and compact development options
* Introduce more energy-efficient freight operations with regional freight planning
* Require home energy cost disclosure when selling and “on-bill” financing to stimulate and scale up energy-efficient retrofitting of residential housing
* Use federal housing policy to create incentives for energy- and location-efficient decisions
* Issue a metropolitan challenge to develop innovative solutions that integrate multiple policy areas
It's this last recommendation that peaked my interest and I want to share with other technology and facilities leaders in NEOhio. Can we architect a common Green IT approach for NEOhio following the successful model we developed 5 years ago for connecting NEOhio with ultra broadband through OneCommunity? Later this summer, I'd like to invite those interested to a working session on the topic with an eye to issuing some principles for further exploration on a regional basis.
Here is the report synopsis for our community...
Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America
Metro Area Profile: Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OHThe report “Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America” quantifies for the first time the amount and most significant sources of carbon emitted—from highway transportation and residential
energy consumption—by the 100 largest metropolitan areas in 2000 and 2005. Substantial variation exists among these “carbon footprints” of metro areas, due in part to their development patterns, rail
transit, freight traffic, carbon content of electricity sources, electricity prices, and weather.To access the entire report, see www.blueprintprosperity.org
Per Capita Carbon Footprints, 2000-2005
Trends. Metropolitan Cleveland’s per capita footprint from transportation and residential energy use increased 4.28 percent between 2000 and 2005. The average per capita footprint of the 100 largest metro areas and of the nation increased 1.1 percent and 2.2 percent during this time, respectively.
The transportation portion of Cleveland’s per capita footprint increased 3.1 percent between 2000 and 2005, compared to an increase of 2.4 percent in the 100 largest metro areas. The residential portion of Cleveland’s per capita footprint increased 5.4 percent between 2000 and 2005, compared to a slight decrease of 0.7 percent in the 100 largest metro areas.
Snapshot = 2005. The average resident in metropolitan Cleveland emitted 2.235 tons of carbon from highway transportation and residential energy in 2005 (rank 31st). This compares with 2.24 tons of carbon emitted by the average 100-metro resident and 2.60 tons of carbon emitted by the average American from transportation and residential energy.
From highway transportation. The average Cleveland resident emitted 1.072 tons of carbon from highway transportation (rank 12th). The average 100-metro resident emitted 1.310 tons and the average American emitted 1.44 tons from highway transportation.
The average Cleveland resident emitted 0.842 tons from autos (rank 11th) and 0.230 tons from trucks (rank 21st), compared to 1.004 tons from autos and 0.305 tons from trucks from the average 100-metro resident.
From residential energy use. The average Cleveland resident emitted 1.163 tons of carbon from residential energy use (rank 74th). The average 100-metro resident emitted 0.925 tons and the average American emitted 1.16 tons of carbon from residential energy use.
The average Cleveland resident emitted 0.694 tons from electricity (rank 52nd) and 0.468 tons from residential fuels (rank 73rd). This compares to 0.611 tons from electricity and 0.314 tons from fuels from the average 100-metro resident.
There's an opportunity for the IT community to lead the region in raising the challenge of greening our industry.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
June 10, 2008
Posted by lsg8 at 11:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Blogging ECAR Summer Symposium
Richard Katz, Educause VP opened this year's ECAR Summer Symposium with a quote from R.D. Laing:
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
What are the challenges and opportunities for the 21st century university to at once be relevant to the grand challenges of confronting the human conditions of tomorrow at the same time not be locked-in to infrastructure and question-sets that we only conceive of today. From an IT-centric view of the world, the challenge can be framed in terms of the question as to whether are we building tomorrow's technology for yesterday's world?
Among the many many challenges facing the 21st century university, IT leaders gathering at this year's summer symposium where challenged to think about the issues facing us as not only be external to the IT world. Of course the litany includes challenges like rising costs, privatization, increasing pressures on revenues, increasing pressures to account for student success and institutional performance.
Our (IT world's) relative success in bringing network technologies to the world of higher education has succeeded in aiding in the democratization of access to university research and learning. At the same time, the logical extension of our success challenges our traditional roles within the landscape of the higher education eco-system. At the same time as higher education is in many ways more important than ever before and the key gateway to the wealth of nations in the 21st century, the network effect challenges our identities as educators, the rewards and recognitions, and even the manner in which scientific knowledge is created and disseminated.
How is the (Internet) cloud growing to envelop the University?
How is the University using the cloud to extend its presence?
How does 'cloudliness' alter the form of our social institutions.
How do we look at the cloud as either a competitor that threatens to disintermediate our attention.
It's time to extend these forward looking challenges and contradictions as part of both our IT strategic planning as well as Case Western Reserve University's strategic plan.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
June 10, 2008
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May 29, 2008
Reflecting on the Impact of Blogging on the Work of a CIO
I have been blogging in this space since November 2004. At various professional meetings like the CIO Executive Council and Educause gatherings I have had the opportunity to share thoughts on the impact of blogging in the workspace. Sometimes the panel conversation is framed in terms of 'whether' we (as CIOs) should support workplace blogging. Alternatively, we've discussed the impact of blogging in the world of higher education. A good example of the later is captured in Inside Higher Education writer Andy Guess' blog on Case Western Reserve University's Collaboration Technology and Campus Engagement Summit.
Yesterday, Heidi Cool in her blog posed the question "how has blogging impacted your work?".
Over the past four years or so, I have tried to use Bytes From Lev as a platform for three arcs of activities that I see as germane to my work as University CIO. First, I have attempted to use the blog as a vehicle for raising issues and offering commentary to the professional technology community at Case Western Reserve University. Most every CIO in Higher Education will share that not withstanding the explosion of electronic communication one can never communicate too much, especially to one's colleagues in the IT organization(s) across the campus. IT organizations remain largely hierarchical in their nature and is as often the case, communication does not flow as naturally as I might want across and down the organization. Using the blog is not a substitution for various face-to-face exchanges but I hope that the community of IT professional at our university who care to read my blog from time to time will have a sense of the 'big' issues that help frame my daily work and possible derivative impact on the lives of other IT professionals. I think leading by example and using the blog as a communication device is an attempt to 'lead from the front'. I have encouraged others to consider the same approach.
Second, our University has an important role in the life and aspirations of the broader community in Northeast Ohio. Through various activities, including the use of Bytes from Lev, I have attempted to reach out to the community around NEOhio to share in the development of a vision of a "connected community." My underlying conviction has been and remains that the long term health and well being of Case Western Reserve University is inextricably linked to the health and well being of Northeast Ohio. The future of NEOhio is intimately connected to the process of re-imaging, re-inventing, and re-invigorating what we want to be in the 21st century. An intelligent, innovative, creative, connected, and educated community capable of charting its own future in the digital age is an important part of our future. I have used my blog as a platform for advancing insights and attempting to provoke dialog where I can on this portfolio of topics.
Finally, I have long believed that an additional piece of advocacy and leadership that CIOs are compelled to engage in as part of our professional obligation is to educate the public and our civic leaders. In particular, I have used this blog to advance my work as CIO to comment (sometimes at length ;-) on the importance of next generation broadband connectivity and advanced technologies as part of a critical strategy for American competitiveness and for support for the vital role of higher education in a wide range of public goods from basic science to educating critically reflective citizens. CIOs have a tendency to bemoan the lack of knowledge and sophistication of the public and our civic leaders around technology and public investment in technological infrastructure. I've tried, in a very modest way, to use Bytes From Lev as a platform to invite readers to glean insights on issues that might inform their work in various settings. A week doesn't go by in which a church committee, a civic organization, a staffer for an elected official or a journalist or analyst doesn't contact me for follow up on topics raised in the blog.
Blogging is one important tool in the professional repertoire of the CIO. The blog is a symbolic representation of my personal conviction to try and be transparent in my communication and management style. It is an invitation to collaboration whether here on campus, in the geographic regional of Northeast Ohio or beyond national borders. I also lend my voice through the blog to the public education and leadership advocacy work that I think we CIOs have an obligation to attend to in an effort to frame discourse and decision making on campus, in the region, and around the country and regarding the future direction and responsibility of higher education.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
May 29, 2008
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May 22, 2008
When Wikinomics Hits the College Campus
Anthony Williams, co-author of Wikinomics provides a provocative and engaging analysis of where the University Campus is going in a lecture titled: Mass Collaboration and the Future of Education. Williams provided the keynote address at our recent summit on Collaborative Technology and Campus Engagement. President Barbara Snyder's comments follow the keynote and provide insight on the 'state of Case Western Reserve University.'
Williams presentation outlines the plausible impact of web 2.0 technologies on the administration of universities, the governance of universities, the nature of future collaborative research, teaching, and of course the manner in which collaboration technologies render obsolete the notion that learning is a spectator sport.
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
May 22, 2008
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