The Tower and The Cloud Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing © 2008 EDUCAUSE All rights reserved. Authors retain the rights to their individual essays under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0). This book is available online in PDF and HTML formats on the EDUCAUSE website (http://www.educause.edu/books/). Printed in the United States of America on recycled paper. ISBN 978-0-9672853-9-9 Cover and interior paintings by Elizabeth Black Book design and production by Anita Kocourek Illustrations: Campanile, University of California, Berkeley, cover, p. iv King’s College, Cambridge, p. xxii Cairo University, p. 62 Trinity College, Dublin, p. 88 Rajabai Clock Tower, University of Mumbai, p. 106 University of Melbourne, p. 138 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, p.170 To Julia A. Rudy, extraordinary editor, colleague, and friend Campanile, University of California, Berkeley The Tower and The Cloud Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing Richard N. Katz Editor Table of Contents Foreword Diana G. Oblinger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix Preface Richard N. Katz xi About the Authors xix Higher Education and Information Technology 1 The Gathering Cloud: Is This the End of the Middle? Richard N. Katz 2 A Matter of Mission: Information Technology and the Future of Higher Education Cliord A. Lynch 43 The University in the Networked Economy and Society: Challenges and Opportunities Yochai Benkler 51 The Globalization of Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 Growing in Esteem: Positioning the University of Melbourne in the Global Knowledge Economy Glyn Davis, Linda O’Brien, and Pat McLean 64 Higher Education and the Future of U.S. Competitiveness David Attis 81 Accountability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88 The Social Compact of Higher Education and Its Public Larry Faulkner 90 Accountability, Demands for Information, and the Role of the Campus IT Organization Brian L. Hawkins 98 IT Governance 106 E-Research Is a Fad: Scholarship 2.0, Cyberinfrastructure, and IT Governance Brad Wheeler 108 Beyond the False Dichotomy of Centralized and Decentralized IT Deployment Jim Davis 118 From Users to Choosers: The Cloud and the Changing Shape of Enterprise Authority Ronald Yanosky 126 Open Information, Open Content, Open Source 138 Cultural and Organizational Drivers of Open Educational Content Malcolm Read 140 Challenges and Opportunities of Open Source in Higher Education Ira H. Fuchs 150 Who Puts the Education into Open Educational Content? Andy Lane 158 Scholarship in a Cloudy World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .170 The Tower, the Cloud, and Posterity Richard N. Katz and Paul B. Gandel 172 From the Library to the Laboratory: A New Future for the Science Librarian Mary Marlino and Tamara Sumner 190 Social Networking in Higher Education Bryan Alexander 197 Scholarship: The Wave of the Future in the Digital Age Paul N. Courant 202 Where Is the New Learning? Kristina Woolsey 212 Teaching and Learning Unleashed with Web 2.0 and Open Educational Resources Christine Geith 219 University 2.0 John Unsworth 227 The Tower, the Cloud, and the IT Leader and Workforce Philip Goldstein 238 Afterword Andy Cooley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .263 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .264 Foreword ix Foreword By now, we’ve all heard, read, or said enough about the rapid pace of technological change for it to become cliché. We may have grown numb to the recitation of Moore’s law and the sweeping social and economic impact of technological advances. Continuous, rapid, technology-based change, along with persistent, simultaneous eorts within the academy to both embrace and combat it, has become an assumed feature of our universelike the existence of the university. However, in The Tower and the Cloud, Richard Katz and his fellow authors remind us that the emergence of this technology “cloud” and its ever-increasing impact on usindividually and collectivelyhas signif- icant implications for higher education as we know it. Only by looking past the cliché and carefully reecting on the truth behind it can we appreciate the potential shape and direction of the change colleges and universities face. The Tower and the Cloud tackles questions such as “How are ‘cloud’ technologies and applications already aecting us?” “What does that say about how they are likely to evolve and impact us in the future?” “What might colleges, universities, and higher education overall look like as a result?” The book explores a wide range of topics, beginning with the interplay of history, tradition, and technology that denes the modern academythe “tower.” Authors address what the academy must do to maintain the coherence of its mission—if not necessarily all of the forms through which it pursues that mission—as it moves forward. Given the geographically unbounded nature of the cloud, the discussion turns to the promise and challenge of the truly global higher education community— and market—which the network increasingly makes possible. In the face of these trends, institutions must also cope with rising demands for accountability, even as the cloud aects the nature and meaning of the relationships among institutions, faculty, students, alumni, and government. The Tower and the Cloud looks at those issues in light of institutional capacities and asks, “What role should technology play in meeting these shifting demands?” It posits at least part of the answer through essays that take a fresh look at institutional governance of IT and encourage realignment of those structures with the reality of a networked world (and institution). The collection then turns to the heart of the academy—scholarship and teaching, and the principle of openness that underlies them both. The open source and open educational resources movements are examined to illustrate how higher education’s core commitment to the free exchange x The Tower and the Cloud of ideas and information is nding renewed expression in the cloud environment. By leveraging the ease of collaboration, publication, and distribution that digital networks make possible, these movements are allowing communities of scholars, technology professionals, and institutions to come together to more eectively meet their needs and the needs of their students while contributing to the greater good. The concluding essays highlight a diverse array of ways in which teaching, learning, and scholarship might evolve as a result of the cloud’s impact. For example, digital media and broadband networks continue to change the form and amount of knowledge institutions can store and share, as well as who they can share them with. Yet the rapid evolution of digital media raises concerns about sustaining access—and the cost of doing so—over the long term. The cloud raises other questions, such as what impact the breathtaking rise of online social networking will have for building and sustaining community in higher education. As teaching, learning, and scholarship come to increasingly rely on networked services and resources beyond the institution’s physical (and virtual) walls, how must IT leadership change to guide institutions through new realities while safeguarding the community’s varied (and sometimes conicting) interests? These are just some of the major issues The Tower and the Cloud addresses as it illustrates the promise, pitfalls, and potential evolution of the academy in a network-based world. While not oering a crystal ball, it does provide a series of reasoned, analytical perspectives on how current trends may unfold, altering our institutions and the higher education landscape in a future that may arrive faster than we expect. In reading it, we are all challenged to move beyond acknowledging the pace of technological change to envisioning all that the tower can be if we embrace the cloud. Diana G. Oblinger President, EDUCAUSE [...]... device and the Internet and web, a mass medium 9 10 The Tower and the Cloud Logical Connectivity The extraordinary proliferation of computers in the 50 years between their invention and the middle of the 1990s, and the emergence of a global data communication network linking hundreds of thousands of users, created the possibility of doing things “anytime and anywhere.” In the United States, the NASDAQ... the virtualization of service delivery, the “opening” of software and academic course content, and globalization through the lens of the empowered individual The contributors raise, but rarely answer, questions about the roles of place, expertise, the library, and governance in the virtualized and distributed world of the network cloud The elephant in the room is the question: If a 300-year-old institution... for their tuition.2 The 11th and 12th centuries represent a turning point in the history of higher education, with the founding of the College de Sorbonne, Oxford University, the University of Salamanca, the University of Bologna, and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia Universities in the West assumed the physical form that we recognize today and operated under papal or royal charters The Western... intellect to one another and to the scarce raw materials of scholarship (books, laboratories, surgical theaters) These were not humble beginnings In keeping with their papal or royal charters, early univer- 3 4 The Tower and the Cloud sities were often beautiful places The medieval idea of the university as a majestic and cloistered place designed to foster fellowship, collegiality, relection, and independence... years to raise the tower of higher education, it has taken only 60 years to launch the digital computing and communications revolution And while the history of computing and communications is faster moving and more boisterous than the history of higher education, it is less subtle and therefore easier to tell At the most fundamental level, The End of the Middle? Table 1 Key Trends in the History of... history of the university has also long been characterized by autonomy and by the separation of utilitarian and nonutilitarian education.7 The metaphors of the ivory tower, gated city, sheltered grove, and city-on -the- hill continue to ind substance in campus plans and architecture Finally, and more recently, the university mission and organization were enlarged to recognize the intimate and complex... and (4) standardization of computing across the Internet are leading to what some describe as the democratization and industrialization of IT.22 Philosophizing about the cloud and the possible dematerialization of things can lead one to end-of-time ideas about the “big switch,” the “digital enterprise,” and the “end of corporate computing”23 or to incapacitating confusion and inaction This volume and. .. Technology 2 The Tower and the Cloud The Gathering Cloud: Is This the End of the Middle? Richard N Katz “… it is clear that technology allows institutions to blur, if not erase, institutional boundaries once clear and distinct.” —Steven Crow, former president, Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools H G Wells described human history as a race between education and. .. switching, and others resulted in the remarkable proliferation of networks and interconnection of computers and other devices By 1971, 23 host computers were connected by networks, and by 1973, University College London became the irst international host to be connected to the DOD’s ARPAnet By 1984, the increasing adoption of Internet Protocol (IP) and other innovations fueled the accelerating growth of the. .. revolution, and other upheavals Universities and colleges have themselves been empowered Colleges and universities were chartered originally by popes and kings as places where elites and experts were sequestered Over time, their governance evolved and the dominion of priests and clerics, or that of government ministers, yielded to shared governance by rectors and academics Fueled by the Renaissance, the invention . appreciate the potential shape and direction of the change colleges and universities face. The Tower and the Cloud tackles questions such as “How are cloud . as the cloud aects the nature and meaning of the relationships among institutions, faculty, students, alumni, and government. The Tower and the Cloud