Higher Education in the Ultra-Connected Age

April 25, 2013, 1:00pm EDT.

New forms of scholarship, new educational pathways, and new interconnections and dependencies characterize the digitally rich landscape of higher education today. We are living and working in an age in which connections are blends of unique relationships and new social mores, crisscrossing an eclectic panorama of technology solutions and smart devices. In today’s world, planning and delivering IT services for residential and virtual campuses entails creative reexamination of all our premises, from partnerships and collaborations, to business models and processes, to services and service delivery.

This session will define and explore the new, connected landscape we all must gingerly yet strategically navigate. It also will examine how traditional higher education, whether large research or small liberal arts, should be adapting to the opportunities and challenges presented by the ubiquity and pervasiveness of connectivity.

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Moving Faculty and Staff to Google Apps

Tuesday, April 12, 1:00pm EDT.

Google Apps is a collection of web-based programs and file storage that run in a web browser. The applications include communication tools (Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar), productivity tools (Google Docs: text files, spreadsheets, and presentations), a customizable start page (iGoogle), and Google Sites (to develop web pages). Google stores all of the files and content centrally and keeps a record of the different versions of a file. With Google Apps, sharing content is as simple as granting someone access, which facilitates collaboration, peer review of academic materials, and the collective generation of knowledge.

The decision to move Boise State University employees to Google Apps for Education was initially proposed within Boise State's Office of Information Technology in 2008. We saw an opportunity to extract ourselves from the business of administering an e-mail system, allowing us to focus on other projects and activities and provide a higher value to our institution. Not only was this the opportunity to advance from an e-mail system to a collaboration platform; the move enabled us to more closely align our IT organization with Boise State University's strategic plan.

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