Dean’s Council:
Hot Topics in Technology
Brian Green
Laura Neidert
Michael Stumpf
Kent State University
Introduction
“As technological advances are introduced
into the academy, as campuses are more and
more attracted by the promise and potential
of technology for enhancing access and
learning; faculty, staff and administrators
need to understand what technology
can and what it cannot do”
(Gilbert & Green, 1995, p.4).
Outline
Today we will be discussing 5 technological issues
concerning our University.
 Blogging
 Institutional Spam
 Going Wireless
 Data Protection
 Departmental Websites
Blogging
What and Why are Blogs Important?
A blog is an online personal diary, a collection of private thoughts.
You can write about whatever you want for the entire world to read
and for the most part, there are no rules! Entries are in a reverse
chronological order so visitors see the most up to date information
first. Visitors can do more than just read your blog, they can
comment on it for everybody to see, or send you a personal email.
Blogs are free, user friendly, and low tech making them very
appealing to the college population. Professors can use them as
open discussion boards, outside experts can become involved with
class discussions, and it is documentation of thought, growth, and
knowledge (Blogmania).
Blogging Cont.
Benefits of Blogging:
 Blogging can increase collaboration between students and professors.
 It is also serve as a low cost method of having experts interact with
students without having to bring the expert to the campus.
 Blogs are also a tool for college and university presidents to connect with
their students. Examples include: William G. Durden of Dickinson
College, R. Albert Mohler Jr. president of Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary, and Richard F. Celeste, president of Colorado College.
 As society embraces user-produced content, we can prepare students to
embrace this change as well as use blogging responsibly.
 Communicating via blog is becoming more accepted in many disciplines.
 Blogs are also a place where academia can connect with the public.
 Can provide a forum for diverse ideas, therefore teaching students how to
cope with competing views from their own.
Blogging Cont.
Problems with Blogging:
 Who decides what acceptable content is? How is content approved
before posting?
 Using the anonymity of blogs to attack the institution or specific leaders
within the institution.
 For example, if the institution decides to create blogs for the admissions
website, how are student bloggers chosen? Will they be compensated?
How do you impose any restrictions on their content? How will
comments be moderated?
 In working with students, we must also consider their personal blogging.
Like other forms of social networking, blogs are easily searchable on the
Internet, and can damage students’ reputations if they disparage
employers, faculty, or their institution.
Blogging Cont.
Examples of problems with blogging:
 Specifically, blogs have added to administrative controversy at Galludet University
and New York College of Technology at Alfred. Bloggers fanned the dissent
about the selection of Jane K. Fernandes’ and kept notes on the student protests,
providing a gathering places for like minded students and alumni (Read 3).
Fernandes’ appointment was later rescinded after massive student protests which
closed the university and resulted in the arrest of several students.
 At NYCTA, an anonymous blogger called Brewster Pennybaker took former
president Uma G. Gupta to task, harshly critiquing her management style, calling
her abysmal and incompetent, and suggested that she suffered from borderline
personality disorder (Read 1). Gupta later resigned largely due to the controversy
the blog created, and the identity of the blogger, who was a college employee, was
never discovered.
 “I think blogging is a basic form of ‘Rip, Mix, and Learn’ (RML). Just like I’m
doing now, I’m ripping an idea from Alan and others, mixing it up with my own
experience and reality, and writing about it as a way to clarify and learn. And really,
it is the writing part that forces me to organize these thoughts and give some form
to them. It’s when the learning coalesces…” (From Will Richardson, WebloggEd).
Institutional Spam
Case Study Definition: the policy under which mass communication from the
institution to student or groups of students is permitted/not permitted and
which is the proposed approval process for submitted requests.
 Examples: academic notifications, campus event notifications, campus
closures, athletic event notifications, forwards of listserv e-mails that
students have already received.
 Question to consider, and why is this important? When do students
give their consent to receive this e-mail? Is it when they matriculate as
students? Do they have an opportunity to opt out of receiving specific
communications? Increased institutional size can lead to a
depersonalization of faculty and staff from the student population. A
proactive approach of transmitting information could help close the gap.
Institutional Spam
Benefits
 Official institutional spam provides a method for the
institution to communicate the same information to all
students equally.
 The communication aspect of blanket messages to all
students can also create profitable opportunities through text
messaging services such as Mobile Campus.
 Institutional Spam is also attractive because it takes the
message to your target population in a method that is low
cost.
Institutional Spam
Problems
 Deciding what is important enough to send, and who makes
that decision. Institutional Spam must be vitally relevant to
ensure that it gets read by the recipient.
 Administrators assume that students read every e-mail that is
sent out, which can result in missed connections and lost
information as students depend less on e-mail.
 Consider the broader view. Many email accounts have a
limited amount of space and can fill up quickly with spam,
denying critical messages from faculty and administration.
Going Wireless
Why did we choose this topic?
•If technology is the Navy leading us into the 21st century its flagship would
have to be wireless capability. The demand for an unwired campus is not a perk
anymore, it is an expectation. One only has to look at institutions trumpeting
their rank in Intel’s “Most Unwired Campuses” Survey. 29% of college campus
use wireless across the entire campus and 64% have a strategic wireless plan,
according to the 2005 Campus Computing project survey.
•If we are to stay competitive we must accommodate a population that not only
utilizes technology but has never really been without it. Having an unwired
campus can change the way professors deliver lectures, students access
information, and administrators collaborate.
•We believe a reasonable observer would not dispute if your institution should
embrace this trend but how.
Going Wireless
What is it?
 Definition: “The term wireless is normally used to refer to
any type of electrical or electronic operation which is
accomplished without the use of a "hard wired" connection.”
 Wireless networks are also called WiFi or 802.11 networking.
WiFi is a radio signal, hence 802.11, that carries data on it.
The 1’s and 0’s of binary code are decoded by a computer so
users can access the internet.
 Wifi transmits at 2.4 GHz
Going Wireless
Benefits of Wireless
 The cost of using wireless is declining.
 WiFi has global standards so no student will be
disenfranchised because of the make of their computer.
 Having an unwired campus is an important selling point,
especially with the millennial generation.
 Students can access academic material on their own terms
and on their own time, such as in the coffee shop.
• By doing so, they can prepare for class in the most
effective methods for them.
Going Wireless
Problems of Wireless
 Information may not be secure even if properly encrypted.
 Students uses lap top computers might be less likely to pay
attention in class as they are doing everything from accessing
Myspace, checking email, to shopping Ebay.
 Disabling wireless access can be difficult and costly, not to
mention unpopular.
 In one case, Lakehead University in Canada banned wireless
networking because of fears that the electromagnetic field
could pose a health risk, such as cancer. This has not been a
prominent problem but the possibility does exist. One
professor compared 300 students in a lecture class using
wireless to be analogous to sitting in a low power microwave
oven.
Data Protection
Why did we choose this topic?
•Several institutions, most notably Ohio University, have been in the news recently
as a result of major hacking attacks and loss of sensitive personal data.
•Many institutions are struggling with data protection, defined as managing,
securing, and allowing appropriate access to the personally identifiable data of
students, faculty, staff, prospective students, and donors.
•Almost 60 percent of college IT officials dealt with at least one data security
incident in 2006 (Read 2).
•Ohio University had 5 separate systems hacked into, which they were unaware of
for 13 months in some cases. These incidents exposed the personal information
of almost 200,000 people.
•Institutions must secure access to data, create protocols for managing data,
reduce dependence on Social Security numbers as identifying data, unify IT
security across campus and fund technology security to a sufficient level.
Data Protection
Benefits Of Proactively Managing IT Security:
 Reduces costs in the long term: Ohio University spent $4 million to make
emergency repairs to their IT systems and network, and requested an
additional $5.5 to $8 million to fund the blueprint for greater IT security
(Sams 1). Both costs are in addition to the current budget for IT at the
university.
 Compliance with state and federal laws: Several states already have laws in
place that require disclosure to affected people when universities lose or
otherwise expose personal data. California has such a law in place, and
Senator Diane Feinstein has sponsored a similar bill in the U.S. Senate.
Currently, that bill is in committee (Feinstein 1).
 Limits an institution’s exposure to liability.
Data Protection
Problems and Issues Associated with Reactive IT Security Management:
 Can be sued by affected people: Two alumni have filed a class-action
lawsuit against Ohio University for damages as a result of the data theft
(Wasley 4). Litigation is expensive and damaging to a university’s
reputation.
 High monetary costs involved in notifying affected people as well as
creating web and phone based support; high intangible costs in terms of
lost productivity in other areas of IT and potential lost future donations
from alumni and the community, and at Ohio University, new staff
members had to be hired and trained to replace those that were fired.
 Exposure to identity theft: Ohio University has received notification that
33 alumni may have had their identities stolen, although none of the
incidents has been linked directly to the data loss at the university. By
various estimates, 33 million people in the U.S. have been victims of
identity theft. Students may be at more of a risk, as they are just
beginning to establish their credit history.
Departmental Websites
Why did we choose this topic: Since institutions began using the internet to
reach students, different departments have operated their own websites, which
have grown in size, depth and complexity over the past ten years. It seems that a
lot of people take these sites for granted. Administrators misuse them or are not
using them to their full potential. Websites can be used as a positive
supplemental tool for gathering information about a department and staying
abreast of deadlines.
Benefits:
 Mass communication, it’s an easy way to reach a majority of the student
population with a limited staff and budget.
 Online resources reduce the amount of paper handouts an office needs
to give students, and how many handouts students need to keep track of.
 Forms can be put online for easier distribution and collection.
Departmental Websites
Problems and Issues with Departmental Websites: Departmental websites have, in
some cases, become ineffective, poorly used, and a hindrance to the learning process.
 Over-reliance on website: These sites should be a supplement to the office, not
take the place of staff. Too many times the first response we hear to a students
question by an administrator is “Did you look on the website?” We are here to
help them, not send them away.
 Lack of personal communication. We want our students to be able to
communicate yet we teach them to go online instead of talking to a real person.
 No master plan for content: Every time somebody finds something they think is
important they put it on their website. These sites can grow so large they are hard
to navigate and confusing to students.
 Outdated information. Maintaining a website can be time consuming. If you put
an event or schedule of events on your site, make sure you are keeping it updated.
How embarrassing when a student wants to get involved with a program that no
longer exists, but it’s still on the website.
 Broken or bad links. If you link to another page outside the University website,
periodically check those links to make sure they are still active and accurate.
 Websites with too many visual distractions.
Departmental Websites
How to improve your department’s website:
 Minimize scrolling, especially horizontally.
 Less is more. Don’t lose touch with your students by letting your website
outshine you!
 Don’t overwhelm users by shoveling all of your handouts and resources
online. It’s not meant to be an archive!
 Visual consistency between pages. Ask your IT department if your
institution has a Content Management System.
 Assign a staff member to regularly visit the site and ensure that content is
up to date and relevant.
 Speed, Speed, Speed: Don’t overload your site with videos or slideshows
that take a long time to load.
In Conclusion
Our perspective is that we should discuss how to
embrace technology, not whether or not to do so. The
millennial generation is accustomed to technology being
readily available and while some of us consider email new,
millennial consider email to be an old form of
communication.
We must plan strategically in order to satisfy our
student population, stay at the cutting edge, and budget
wisely to keep pace with new technologies.
References
Blogmania!, (n.d.), Innovative learning and teaching. Retrieved February 15, 2007, from the Ohio Learning Network
Web site: http://www.oln.org/ILT/blogmania.php
Farell, H., (2005, October 5). The blogosphere as a carnival of ideas. The Chronicle of Higher Education. v. 57, no 7,
p. B14
Feinstein, D. (January 2007). A bill to require federal agencies, and persons engaged in interstate commerce, in
possession of data containing sensitive personally identifiable information, to disclose any breach of such
information. U.S. Senate Bill 239, retrieved February 14, 2007 from http://thomas.loc.gov.
Gilbert, S. W., Green, K. C. (1995). Information technology: A road to the future?. Retrieved February 15, 2007, from
National Education Association Web site: http://www2.nea.org/he/aje/infotech/pdf
Hupprich, L., Bumatay, M. (2003, February) Global Internet Population Grows An Average Of 4 Percent Year-Over-Year.
Retrieved February 15, 2007, from NielsenNetRatings.com http://nielsennetratings.com/
Read, B. (2006, September 15). Attack of the blog: When disenchanted faculty members take to the web,
presidents should worry. The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp A35.
Read, B. (2007, January 5). UCLA warns 800,000 that a hacker may have obtained personal information. The
Chronicle of Higher Education, pp A31.
Richardson, W. (2005, October 3) Rip, mix, and learn. Retrieved February 18, 2007 from Webblogg-ed website:
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/2004/10/03
Sams, W. (2006, July 25). Blueprint for building a world-class IT function at Ohio University. Retrieved February 14
2007 from www.ohio.edu/outlook/05-06/July/611-056a.cfm.
Schemo, D. J., (2006, November). Erasing divide, college leaders take to blogging. Retrieved February 16, 2007, from The
New York Times Web site:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/22/education/22blogs.html?ex=1171774800&en=e746ad88d707b00c&e
i=5070
Wasley, P. (2006, September 29). ‘More holes than a pound of Swiss cheese’: Computer-protection problems at
Ohio U. spark complaints from alumni—and firings. The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp A39.
Young, J. R. (2006, June 30). Human trails in cyberspace: Social scientists create maps of online interactions. The
Chronicle of Higher Education, v. 52, no. 43, p. A18