Campus Computing Survey 2006

This is the 17^th year of the survey, with 540 respondents this year. The big themes this year are security and services – CIOs are worried about how to enhance the services offered to the clients. There is not strong evidence of increasing attacks or identity management violations - in the main firewalls etc are sorting it out, but distributed systems are the ones being attacked, typically research groups who want to be independent. Social networking sites such as myspace etc have led to security issues but this could be about user education

Wireless in half the classrooms, but Faculty are not happy – especially when the students find something more up to date than what the teacher is talking about

Affirmative ambivalence (yes, but….) about open source with about a third looking at open source, but not widespread adoption. Not about things like apache, but about desktop applications such as e-portfolio and Sakai.

Portals are still moving up the agenda, and moving faster than usual in academia. Green’s report includes popular features of portals such as e commerce, transcripts, course materials etc but the main growth is enabling student movement across campus, institutions, courses. Students enrolled in 2 and 3 institutions, so articulation (what credit have I got and what does it mean) a key feature for future..

E-portfolios are up again, in the big universities – part of a broader conversation about assessment and outcomes being stimulated by the Spellings Report (as sort of US equivalent of the Dearing Report). Minnesota has state wide e portfolio system, involving employers as well as education.

All campuses have a site licence for a Learning Management System, Blackboard is the market leader with 75%

Other snippets:

• No one is really doing anything about data warehousing and analytics
• US universities think the technologies that matter include things like content management, blogging, podcasting, acrobat
• Green has done the survey for 17 years and says the main question for him every year, including this, is: “why don’t faculty make more use of technology?”

Answers on a postcard….