SBU DoIT Update and Thinking

I had the chance to address University Senate last week for the first time here at Stony Brook. It gave me a chance to share my strategic priorities and observations from the first 80 days here at SBU. I included a screen shot of the five strategic priorities I am targeting in a post prior to the meeting, but have since added one other for us to consider. I thought it would be a good idea to share the six priorities with a little more context. Here are the six areas of focus for DoIT that I am proposing and that I discussed at Senate:

  1. Construct a world-class teaching and learning with technology organization and an appreciation for learning design.
  2. Create a competitive research computing infrastructure and services that support the needs of faculty across the research community.
  3. Provide a consistently safe, secure, and compliant information technology environment for Stony Brook.
  4. Provide services that greatly enhance the work of our faculty, staff, and students.
  5. Enhance a culture of operational excellence at Stony Brook.
  6. Encourage an agile, flexible, and forward facing staff who are leaders in their fields.

It is important that I take a minute to share at least a few sentences about each of the six items I am setting as priorities. I should also say that Stony Brook has made tremendous progress to date in several of these areas, but they are areas that I am interested in investing more organizational time, energy, and funding to strengthen. Below you can read some of my thoughts as they relate to these priorities. I could go on and on about each, but the better approach is for me to be lean in my remarks and encourage discourse … face to face, email, or via comments below.

Construct a world-class teaching and learning with technology organization and an appreciation for learning design.

This is something that I care deeply about and is one of the reasons I really wanted to come to Stony Brook. There is already an active investment in supporting teaching and learning with technology on campus and a culture that is embracing the value it brings. What I have come to see are the many opportunities for us to extend the incredible foundation that is in place. We live in a world where both faculty and students want to have more opportunities to engage in new forms of pedagogy, appropriately utilize new technologies in and around their classrooms, teach and learn in new modalities from hybrid and blended to fully online and MOOCs, and they want a place that can give them the courage to take risks. I believe that we have the potential to create a truly world-class set of services and offerings that can engage, enrich, challenge, and support the faculty and students of this university.

Create a competitive research computing infrastructure and services that support the needs of faculty across the research community.

Work has been done in this space already, but we need a consistent and common message going forward to take us to the next level. We are in the middle of hiring 250 new faculty on this campus to strengthen and forward the teaching mission as well as radically impacting our research output. We need to continue to invest in core infrastructure, but we also need to find new ways to engage faculty who are participating in new forms of scholarship from the arts, the humanities, the liberal arts, and so on. We need to give them the tools they need as well as construct environments where we can continue to grow our investment in big data, high throughput and high performance computing, and the things that make sciences and medical researchers successful. It means faster networks, but it also means finding ways to support early stage grants and prototype building.

Provide a consistently safe, secure, and compliant information technology environment for Stony Brook.

We have only just begun to fully understand the security challenges facing IT in general and we in higher education are fully aware of our responsibilities. With that said it is imperative that we find ways to systematically address new types of threats that are both local and international. We need to not only construct forward facing policies, but we need to find new ways to help our community understand and embrace them. We must make a commitment to both protect and provide an elegant user experience for our faculty, staff, and students.

Provide services that greatly enhance the work of our faculty, staff, and students.

I know it should go without saying, but the idea that we develop services that make life easier for our customers is critical to me. I would really like to say that all we do should delight them, but I know that is pushing it a bit far. I do want DoIT to establish a way of thinking that presses us to be aware of how our products and services actually work and function. I want us to focus energy on understanding and promoting strong senses of user experience and usability. I want us to consider how what we make impacts the community.

Enhance a culture of operational excellence at Stony Brook.

I am lucky to be a member of the project management office responsible for the Project 50 Forward initiatives. Having that opportunity has afforded me insight into the outstanding work we have done at Stony Brook to become more efficient on a daily basis. This is truly the place that I have learned the most about how we operate. Through that learning I am proposing that DoIT work to adopt many of the frameworks, approaches, and tenants of the Project 50 Forward initiative internally. I believe that by focusing efforts on increasing efficiency, enhanced vendor management, campus wide IT governance, and portfolio management we can find ways to both reinvest and reinvent ourselves.

Encourage an agile, flexible, and forward facing staff who are leaders in their fields.

I cannot stress how much I believe in the staff at DoIT. I have told everyone I know how amazed I have been at the individual and collective intelligence of this organization. I think it is a critical next step for us to take stock in providing deep and systematic professional development across the board. I think we can improve our work in ways that would be unimaginable without first investing energy inwards. I am committed to finding ways to make professional development a cornerstone of DoIT and I believe that by doing it, we will be stronger and more prepared to attack issues and trends as they emerge. I fully expect Stony Brook IT to be recognized as a model in higher education.

Location Specific Access via iBeacons

However promotion by geo-location is only one part of our concept for promotion ByPlace, we are even more excited by the potential for ByPlace promotion using the iBeacons which have been getting significant attention since Apple’s endorsement of the devices with the launch of iOS 7.

via Promotion by iBeacons | Exact Editions | Blog.

This could provide some very interesting opportunities within education … services, apps, and content that are unlocked based on location. In this scenario, a magazine publisher sells a subscription to a pub and those who enter can freely browse an unlocked version of the digital publication on their iOS device based solely on the proximity to an iBeacon.

iBeacon

The same could happen here on campus someday with supplemental material for a series of lectures in classrooms, access to additional content during a show, or apps that help you do things at specific locations. An interesting step.

Becoming a New Object

Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app. GarageBand isn’t a musical app running on an iPad. It turns an iPad into a musical instrument.

via daringfireball.net

This is John Gruber talking about GarageBand from the iPad 2 reveal earlier this week. This thought, that the best apps turn the iPad into a whole new device is something we discussed when it first arrived last year. Scott McDonlad and I took our iPads into our Disruptive Technology class a day after it shipped to share with our students … that single point was what many of the students marveled at — that a device like the iPad becomes something new each time you launch a new app, at least when you launch a good app.

I like that notion a lot. It is still what separates the iPad from my laptop — it is the app I am running.

Adoption?

The other day I got an email from my my friend and colleague, Brad Kozlek about something that has happened to the usage data in the last month within the Blogs at Penn State platofrm … In the last 4 weeks, there have been 10,000 new entries posted to blogs at PSU, including over 8,000 files uploaded and 2,000 more active users. Here is where is gets weird … during the same time last year there was same increase in users, but only half as many entries and less than half as many files uploaded.

Mind blowing.

Wesch Rethinking Education

Michael Wesch was the keynote at our TLT Symposium and he was truly a wonderful participant. Humble and quietly brilliant, his talk resonated with the entire audience in ways I hadn’t seen previously. His new video above doesn’t share the same pace as his previous work, but it demands attention none the less. What is interesting to me is that he didn’t push the video’s message as an agenda item last year, but it was clear it was in him. What I wonder is how long has he been thinking about creating this new narrative?