UCIT Committee

Newcomb Hall, Room 481
April 6, 2007

James Hilton gave a presentation on the "state of information technology (IT) at UVa" that he had given recently for the President's Cabinet. The presentation focused on where IT is going and where UVa is positioned:

Although IT has made a disruptive/transformational impact in many areas - and James gave examples from banking, broadcast media, publishing, and the music industry - the format/structure of higher education has remained recognizably the same for at least the past 100 years. However there are signs that IT is fundamentally changing how scholarship and research get done. For example:

  • Visualization - used in chemistry and the natural sciences, and architecture - and now being used to explore the relationships between physical place and social movement, and shaping how history is understood.
  • Computation - e.g. data coming from the new super-collider at CERN and bio-informatics.
  • Simulation - that allows disciplines that have relied on observation to shift to experimentation using simulation.
  • Communication - that changes in real time how research proceeds collaboratively and globally - that also changes scholarly communication over time and brings with it new problems for its preservation, and opportunities for capturing and leveraging the digital-ness of material that is born-digital.

Another disruptive force is the potential commoditization of the undergraduate education via commoditizing/standardizing the curriculum.

So, given the hand-crafted nature of an UVa education, what is the value of this education? And how does UVa position itself? How can we work with the disruption of IT and leverage the disruption in scholarship and research to provide an education that is "hand-crafted to scale" aided by IT and collaboration (similar to the original Academical Village) so that the UVa experience is exceptional? We can move aggressively to make the undergraduate classroom education to be more like a graduate education.

What are we doing today to get there?

  • Organizational work to make sure that we have high performing teams energized about the challenge.
  • New thinking about sourcing and economies of scale to make sure we are using existing resources wisely and recognize differences between "essential" and "strategic."
  • Hardening and securing the infrastructure.
  • Building and aligning academic communities.
  • Working to expand network, machine room, support, and computational capacity in synch with the rising demand from the academic side.

Broad Challenges to achieving the Academical Village of the 21st century include:

  • Flipping the relationship between academic computing and administrative computing
  • Meeting the resource needs that are likely to rival buildings in their cost/scope.

The presentation was followed by some questions and discussions - particularly about making some "sourcing" decisions (e.g. open-source vs. proprietary, departmental vs. university-wide "deals") - and the lack of a strong culture in computational science at UVa.

Kirk gave a summary of the topics that have been covered and discussed during this year's UCIT meetings, and offered that UCIT should provide James and Milton Adams with a two page executive summary for the end of the year. So what should that say? What message do we want to convey?

For example, although there has been measurable progress in raising the base level of laptop use, tech support has not progressed at the same pace - so do we want to advocate for more/better tech support and more different kinds of tech support? There was discussion about needing a range of tech support people - particularly those who can help bring faculty into the 21st century and those who can help with the best way to go about a particular task.

Also recognize, as the pilot laptop program illustrated, that technology programs have the potential to build intellectual communities.

In our decentralized university where IT-related faculty support is distributed, the Scholars' Lab (in Alderman Library) has the potential to be the provider of concierge services.

The TTI program had high visibility, but limited dissemination - illustrating the need for mechanisms to support faculty who what to adopt/adapt TTI concepts (or other methods).

Some of the consequences of putting wireless access in classrooms illustrate the need to include non-technical organizations in developing solutions - and to avoid digital segregation.

Other observations from this year's activities include:

  • Important to reward faculty dissemination
  • The loss of our Development connections from last year
  • Do not forget about scheduling faculty presentations for James Hilton
  • The potential of collaboration tools (illustrated by David Germano's work, and the growing participation in Collab)

Next Meeting (Friday, May 4) - agenda will focus on:

  • What should UCIT do next year (as an advisory committee)?
  • Should there be a UCIT (i.e. a general purpose computing committee) next year?

James added some thoughts on committees vs. communities - how they are nurtured - and asked: what should be the charge to a University-wide advisory committee?

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