Instruction and IT Working Together
Here’s my first REAL podcast on injenuity.com. It’s unedited, do be gentle on me!
I mention “Technology Task Force” in the podcast. The correct title is Technology Transformation Task Force.
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Licensing
@injenuity by Jennifer D. Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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April 23rd, 2008 at 11:57 am
Great podcast! No need to edit IMO
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Great first podcast and well produced for a one-shot take.
As someone who spent his whole college career working toward a degree in education and then found himself with a career in IT, I’m not sure I agree that the current role of IT is changing. I think the fundamentals still exist. Those who work in IT wear several different hats: the developer, the engineer, the overseer, the administrator and ultimately, the janitor. One of the hardest things to address for an IT department is how to keep up with everything you need to know and keep everyone who uses the systems and network infrastructure happy. It’s a balancing act, to be sure.
Depending on the nature of your organization’s IT department, they may or may not be willing to allow anyone outside of IT to manage applications or services on their own. In a large systems environment, letting people manage their own devices can let security and maintenance get out of hand very quickly. In a smaller environment, it may work to an IT department’s advantage to let a few applications be handled by those who intend to use them, with some superficial understanding of what’s going on in case they break.
For my part, I’d like to see that anyone who uses our infrastructure gets to do it in all the ways they’d like, but unfortunately that usually poses huge security risks. Protocols that use dynamic ports, servers and applications that communicate on dynamic ports and content that is rendered dynamically all pose security risks, and they have to be assessed and mitigated whenever possible.
I believe it’s possible and probable that a satisfactory and equitable balance can be reached between security and functionality, but it may come at some sacrifice from both sides, and it may take a considerable amount of time to achieve. Good dialog is always valuable, and understanding and sharing each others views will make for a great foundation for both instruction and information technology to rest on.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Thank you so much for such a thoughtful, informative, and well-composed response! I truly appreciate your insight. My impression has been that IT departments will be moving away from building up server space and tending to storage and will start outsourcing much of that. I also understand bandwidth management will become a primary focus of attention. Maybe, rather than focusing on particular tools, we should agree on types of applications we need and then work together to find secure options.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
This is a very important topic. I’ve also blogged about it - most recently about who gets to decide. I looked at content filtering but that is only one example of the issue. What is important is that decisions are made by the right group at the right time.
Recently I was quoted in CIO Canada. My key message is the role of IT in finding the balance with providing a reliable platform and supporting flexibility.
I am both a believer and an example of the benefits of immersing IT staff in social learning tools. The IT professional knows the importance of understanding their work environment in order to deliver the optimal technology environment. Your suggestion of involving IT staff in educational conferences is a good one. It has been my experience (I’ve been holding sessions with IT staff to introduce them to social learning tools) that even the most technically savvy staff don’t necessarily understand Web 2.0 and its impact for themselves and for students. My latest slide deck starts the immersion and speaks to understanding what the security work is and how it should seek not interfere with the learning work as long the environment can be secured.
I also blogged about Redefining Technical Support, describing my personal mission to help teachers talk to their tech staff, support professional development for tech staff, and evangelize the design technical architectures that find the balance for learning and availability.
Thanks for your great post. Looks like we’re on the same mission from different perspectives. There is much we can learn from each other.
April 26th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Great podcast, you’re a natural Jen!
I enjoyed what you had to say, only had one minor disagreement. Well, maybe not a disagreement, but my mind went a different direction early in the podcast when you talked about certain policies that we “need to follow”. I guess, yes it’s true … to an extent. But, how about a podcast on challenging policies, creating policies that make sense, that are not tech-driven or overly paranoid or based on impossible or next-to-impossible scenarios. There is way to much fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) informing policies and many IT staff. How about some critique of existing policies in our institutions? Or, let’s begin to find places where IT policy is liberal enough where we don’t continue to hear and experience so many issues with educators being blocked when trying to be innovative.
We shouldn’t have to educate our administrators and IT before we can really educate our students. Unfortunately, this is often the case before we can remove or change policies that are detrimental to student learning. I’m not asking for revolution … yet. My approach would be to carefully critique and question ALL existing IT policies that affect learning, divide the facts from fear, and begin at a place where student learning drives policy.
April 26th, 2008 at 5:32 am
Cindy, thank you for the great resources! I’ve followed your struggle as well. I can’t wait to immerse myself more in your projects and see how I can learn from your experiences!
Alec, thank you for bringing up the heart of the matter, and the piece that probably scares many of us from even posting things like this. I’m sitting on my work laptop now, paranoid because I’m working on my personal blog! I agree that policy needs to change. I’m lucky to be in regular contact with people at the state board, so I hear when things are being discussed. IT is a bit comforting, but also frustrating when my institution doesn’t keep up. I transferred from another institution in the state system that had a completely different interpretation of the state policies. I think the thing I want to be most cautious about is going ahead with the revolution, but without hostility. I don’t want to participate in discussions where we make generalizations about IT. We need to remember there are people behind the pain.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:05 am
I view the role of IT as supporting the activities of teaching and learning. When they start getting in the way of those activities, they are worse than irrelevant - they become an obstacle to be overcome. That’s no way to run an institution. In a perfect world, IT would be working with the individuals and groups that are exploring the edges of what’s possible in an institutional context, and trying to find ways to make things work better for the entire institution - not just trying to provide a list of “approved” applications and resource for faculty and instructors to restrict their activities to.
Of course, this position is a good part of the reason why I’m convinced my own IT department isn’t such a fan of me, or my activities. Whatever. Somebody needs to be experimenting with “unapproved” applications, or we’d still be using stone tablets…
April 26th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Timely discussion - I’ve just finished the first draft of Tips for Teachers: How to Talk to IT Staff. This is the first in a series of helpful hints for both sides in working together.
Would welcome comments and feedback to make this a useful tool, and set the stage for future tools.
April 26th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Very timely podcast indeed, Jen, and thanks to everyone who responded. I’ll take your thoughts along to my meeting with our IT Services team this week to talk about a Service Level Agreement with our department. This is to determine an SLA for our full department of which e-learning is only a small part. IT Services are undertaking these conversations with every department/school at our institution to make sure needs are met, which is a really positive step.
However, I’m wondering if that is the level at which e-learning/educational technology units and IT Services departments should be working together? It seems to relegate e-learning to just one of say 30 end-clients. Whereas the collaboration and service level agreed upon by an ed tech unit and IT services, influences the level for those other 29 clients as well. I guess that is one of the first points I’ll need to bring up in the discussion.
The Australian Flexible Framework recently shared an interesting article on Security v Access which you might find interesting.
http://tinyurl.com/59wcou
May 9th, 2008 at 9:27 am
I believe the role of IT in higher education has to change from managing applications to managing information. Where by managing, I mean facilitating the use of.
In the past, data was specialized and usually only the application that created them could edit and display their contents. This placed the focus on supporting applications (eg: Microsoft Word) and the platforms that they run on (eg: Windows). Availability and upkeep of these applications and platforms were key.
With the advent of the web, the use of specific applications is no longer required. Multiple vendors provide tools that can work with data, whose formats are either well known by now or exchange protocols have been developed. There’s multiple ways to generate a blog, edit photos, or even work with Word documents. I believe the focus should then be on the data, with a platform that has yet to be clearly defined. Availability and access to data so that multiple applications can be aggregated and used is should be the driving factor for educational IT.
It is no longer fatal for an application to fail. An inconvenience perhaps, but good data management would mean being able to easily move on to different tools, or using multiple ones simultaneously. IT departments that don’t evolve past the old model of evaluating and selecting singular applications to support in an institution are doomed to failure, given the extremely fast-paced development cycles and plethora of options enabled by the modern web.