Information Resources Council
March 28, 2006
Attendees:
Next meeting topic will be Online Learning and GIS (4/11/06); Justin volunteered to
scribe.
The topic for 4/25/06 will be Copyright. Sarah will recruit a faculty member to take
minutes.
Focus topic for today’s discussion is Academic Technologies at Skidmore with Justin
Sipher leading the conversation.
Justin began with updates on the IT Instructional Technologist Search. A subset of the
search committee reviewed the pool of 25 candidates and selected 7 to bring forward to
the committee. The search committee then agreed to remove one of the 7 candidates from
the list and Beth will now arrange telephone interviews with the 6 remaining candidates.
Both faculty and IT staff will be present for each of the phone interviews.
Justin also mentioned to the committee that the IT leadership team is visiting 4 different
colleges to see how they are organized, and generally how they operate. It’s an initiative
to get IT thinking out of the box about our organization. Colleges to be visited: St.
Lawrence, Hamilton, Bowdoin, and Bucknell.
Academic Technologies Conversation:
Justin presented 3 guiding principles in Academic Technologies: Infrastructure,
Experimentation, and Faculty Awareness
Infrastructure – To provide a highly reliable and predictable set of core services.
Minimize technology-based disruptions. Better prepare ourselves (IT) to minimize down
time. Justin commented that it is something we need to work on.
Experimentation – Pushing the envelope in new directions. Experimentation consists of
research and development efforts, which put high reliability at risk. Realistic expectations
need to be recognized when using newer technologies. IT can’t guarantee the same level
of functionality in this area as they can for core services.
Faculty Awareness – Improving processes for implementing new technologies. Academic
Technologies needs to make faculty better aware of the possibilities and implement a
process for determining what gets explored and supported. Academic Technologies also
needs to continue increasing awareness of NITLE possibilities and ELI studies.
It was stated that ultimately it is the institution’s responsibility to determine how or to
what extent instructional technology (academic technologies) resources need to be
supported. It was suggested by one attendee that there is an imbalance between academic
and administrative resources. This imbalance is not healthy, and there is not enough
knowledge redundancy. Justin noted this came to a head this past fall semester with
WebCT failures we experienced. IT has increased awareness within the department of the
importance of academic servers. There are current plans under way to augment the IT
server group to better address the issue and strive for balance. Another attendee
commented that there is a good brain trust of Oracle and Coldfusion support in IT. He
asked if there are plans to broaden support for other applications such as MYSQL and
PHP, to which Justin agreed that IT needs a broader knowledge base. The department
needs to continue looking broadly and not relying too heavily on a few single
technologies.
It was pointed out by another IRC member that flexibility and reliability cost money, and
that Skidmore is getting too technology savvy to ignore the costs. The conversation then
turned to the challenges inherent with priorities and resources.
One IRC member asked, “What proportion of the IT budget is going to redundancy, as
opposed to creativity?” Justin replied that probably 10% of the IT budget goes toward
creativity, and that the biggest challenge with creativity is not budgetary, but staffing
oriented. In order to maximize the efficiency of the present IT staff, the department has to
make conscious decisions to stop doing some things, and to not explore in areas that can’t
be reliably supported.
Scribe: Beth Dupont