One More Year, and 'The Technology is [Still] the Easy Part!'

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Opinion

One More Year, and 'The Technology is [Still] the Easy Part!'

8/30/2007

By Terry Calhoun

1963 Corvair Monza convertible. Okay, maybe that's my No. 1 car, just because it's fun, and mine's not for sale. But, I digress.

Each of the IT-related items listed above has been and/or continues to be an issue for campus staff. Interestingly, each one has primarily been a problem not because the IT part of it was difficult, or even technically challenging for us, but for other reasons. Each tends to prove Terry's First Law of Campus IT: "The technology is the easy part."

No. 13
"'Off the hook' has never had anything to do with a telephone." Does one human being even have enough fingers to tick off the issues that have been presented to us by the evolution in telephone communications over the years? Ever had to deal with any of this short list of issues?

Students whining about a residence hall not having good satellite communication;
Losing money on your phone system because the students are calling home on their cell phones and not using your service, or paying for it; and
Coping with VoIP demands on unprepared networks.

No. 14
"Music has always been 'unplugged.'" OMG, I don't really even have to go into server loads and network traffic, all I have to do is say "RIAA" and, right away, you understand that for this one it really isn't the technology that has been the hard part:

Can you say "Napster"; or
"RIAA"; and what about
Third-party agreements for provision of music services now considered essential, but so redundant to what the students already have that it's maddening to have to spend time on it!

Now, where did any of that cause us significant challenges that it took technology to solve, as opposed to serious thinking, policies, lawyers, dollars, and, oh, I said "lawyers," so more dollars.

No. 44
"Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time." I think that no one will deny that we're still dealing with this. And what we're dealing with is not the technology; it's what the students are doing with it. Frankly, I think we're incapable of ever replicating this kind of stuff in house for, say, our alums. I think we should be providing it, and we're behind on that, but that's not a technology issue; it's an issue of understanding expectations, value, and paying the price.

I've been spending more and more time in MySpace, Facebook, and now LinkedIn, and the more time I spend in LinkedIn, the more I feel that colleges and universities are missing a bet that someone else is going to make a bundle on, and we'll be paying the dollars for the bundle. One example is Epsilen, the online environment that The New York Times