Mistaken Goal: Where Higher Education & Technology Meet

Three documents have been released over the past couple of days that are important and interesting:

• The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2009 is the latest report from EDUCAUSE’s research arm focusing on undergraduate students and their use and perceptions of technology.  It’s always a well-done study and EDUCAUSE makes the full study (2.7 MB pdf) freely available to everyone so you should take a few minutes to glance over at least the Key Findings (330 KB pdf).
• The EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report is another report released by EDUCAUSE this week.  As the name implies, it’s a summary of results from the last round of data collection in the Core Data Service, EDUCAUSE’s database of educational technology information.  This document is one of the best (and often the only) publicly-available empirical source of information on technology in higher education, particularly if you’re looking for campus-based statistics such as how much money is spent on technology, how many people are employed to support it, and what kinds of practices and technologies are being used.
• The Department of Education has released its final rules (2.12 MB pdf; search for “copyright” to find the specific areas of interest) specifying how to interpret the laws passed this summer requiring (Title IV-participating) colleges and universities to actively combat online copyright infringement.  At first glance, the final rules do not appear to differ from the proposed rules.

I hope to find time to dig into all three of these documents in the next couple of days.  I recommend that you do the same.

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Several of our professional organizations are continuing to innovate, spurred in part by the economy.

EDUCAUSE, the 900 pound gorilla of higher education technology organizations, has created an online component of their annual conference to be held in November in Denver.  Not only are several events in Denver being simulcast online but they’ve created several events exclusive to the online conference.  This is a wonderful option for those whose travel budgets have been adversely impacted by the economy.  I wish that many other organizations would make similar offerings but I also recognize the infrastructure and expertise necessary to put this together, resources that EDUCAUSE has but many other organizations do not.  However, many of the necessary technical resources are cheap and easily available so hopefully other smaller and less-technically-inclined organizations will pursue similar creative options.

NASPA is changing its official journal from the NASPA Journal to the Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.  I’m not privy to all of the details of the change and the reasons for it.  But one of the changes is that they are broadening the scope of the review section to include resources other than just books.  Specifically:

Media Reviews summarize and analyze the full range of resources (e.g., blogs, websites, video, books, reports) available to student affairs educators. Media Review manuscripts, informative and critical, allow student affairs educators to learn of media useful to their work. Media reviews, invited and solicited by the Editor, should not exceed 1,200 words, and are to be discussed with the Associate Editor for Media Reviews in advance of submission. NASPA members are invited to suggest cutting edge and novel media to be reviewed in JSARP.

The new editors are actively soliciting reviews so feel free to submit one.

Finally, ACUHO-I is also changing its journal.  As with the change at NASPA, I’m not privy to all of the details but I’m excited about what I know.  The changes being made by ACUHO-I, however, are not near as big the changes made by NASPA.  The Journal of College and University Student Housing has previously been published twice a year but beginning next year it will only be published once a year.  Content won’t be reduced, however, so each issue will be twice as large as previous issues.  Most interesting is that the editors will be including a “study guide” aimed at helping practitioners make use of each article.  Research conducted by my colleagues in the ResNet Applied Research Group should be included in the next issue of this journal.

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