Cynthia Shearer and John Schott

There is general recognition that the original 21stCentury Committee report did not capture the centrality of technology in nearly every aspect of education--whether in providing curricular tools for teaching, learning and research, in managing the environments within our campus buildings, or in supporting the communication forms that shape our lives as a community. The digital revolution, broadly defined, has transformed higher education, particularly in the last decade, and the rate of change, new technologies, and attendant issues that we will encounter in the next decades will certainly continue to grow.

One of the important ways in which Carleton has defined itself is in terms of its excellence in teaching. Yet the new technological resources available in many fields are changing the very terms and expectations of excellent teaching. We should not expect that the defining feature of great teaching--direct engagement between outstanding teachers and learners in small groups or as individuals--will change in the future. Yet we can assume that the tools used by these teachers and learners are and will continue to change dramatically. We should proceed with an understanding that technology does not replace, or threaten, great teaching--it augments, leverages and amplifies it. And because it empowers students to engage a wide variety of resources directly, rather than only through their instructor, it will undoubtedly change how students learn as much as how we teach. Carleton will always be dedicated to great teaching; but the tools and techniques of great teaching are changing in most fields. The question, "How will this directly enhance better teaching and leaning?" should be our guiding principle in technology adoption; along with the parallel question: "How can we enhance teaching and learning through the deployment of the very best technological resources?" which should define our objectives.

These questions are but a subset of the much larger question of how to deploy technological resources efficiently within all areas of the College. What is required is a systems-wide approach – one in which technology is well integrated and that places us in a nimble position to adopt new technologies as our institutional needs dictate. Recognizing that the work of the College is ever more dependent upon the quality of our technology and of our ITS staff that supports it, it follows that our top ranking among selective colleges can only be maintained by advancing our lead in IT. This may demand of us a greater willingness to move ever closer to technology’s leading edge. In a future equation, which will assume that the very best teaching and learning will necessarily utilize the very best tools, this move toward technology’s leading edge positions us to remain a national leader in liberal arts education. This committee invites the College to re-imagine itself, to recognize that teaching, learning and technology are now so tightly interlinked that to stay at the forefront of one is necessarily to stay at the forefront of the other. Technology no longer augments teaching and learning; it informs it. To be a leader would galvanize faculty, students, and staff, give us an exciting focus, excite and attract students, invite new national partnerships, among other benefits.

Providing a first-rate liberal education in a residential setting remains one of the fixed points that, along with the College’s statement of purpose (cited below), should ground our vision of information technologies.

At its simplest, a liberal education teaches the basic skills upon which higher achievements rest: to read perceptively, to write and speak clearly, and to think analytically. Carleton draws upon these skills to foster a critical appreciation of our intellectual, aesthetic, and moral heritage and to encourage original thought. A Carleton student not only masters certain information and techniques, but also acquires a sense of curiosity and intellectual adventure, an awareness of method and purpose in a variety of fields, and an affinity for quality and integrity wherever they may be found.

The Purpose Of the College,
Carleton College Academic Catalog 2002-2003

A decade ago, we pioneered what is now recognized as one of the most effective client-centered ITS models in the country. Central to the coordinator-faculty/coordinator-staff relationship is its personal delivery of services that remains true to the best of Carleton traditions – the one-on-one relationships that characterize the Carleton experience. Throughout the 1990s Carleton made tremendous progress in assessing institutional needs, particularly curricular ones, and providing carefully selected tools and services to support their adoption. For example, with funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Carleton established curricular computing grant programs in 1993 and 1995. In the past 10 years Carleton has awarded 121 grants and 90 faculty have participated in this program. This is just one indicator of the ongoing institutional conversations about the appropriate uses of information technology in support of our institutional mission.

Another major change occurred within IT at Carleton in 2001, when Academic and Administrative Computing were combined to create Information Technology Services. This organizational restructuring has enabled us to treat the campus technology needs more holistically, resulting in greater support for collaborative work between and among the divisions of the College. The scope and number of these campus-wide initiatives require that we sometimes stretch our service model a bit, but the results have been very positive. Prior to restructuring IT, the College provided usernames, passwords, accounts, and personalized access to information services for approximately 2,500 people, including students, faculty, staff, and a few alumni. Within scarcely two years, this number has risen to approximately 200,000. We have extended services additionally to prospective students, newly enrolled students, and a far greater number of alums.

In the summer of 2001, we began Web-based online directory service for alumni. The number of alumni accounts increased from 2,500 to 22,500. Thousands of alums have since reconnected with the College through the Alumni Directory Service pages. In the spring of 2002 newly enrolled students received Carleton accounts, usernames, and passwords and began registering for classes via the Web as they arrived on campus last August. The fall of 2002 marked the beginning of the Admissions Search Project. This required creating a personalized Web portal and accounts for approximately 180,000 prospective students. Their account information accompanied the first letter they received from the College. The Admissions Search Project has enabled Admissions to improve significantly the overall quality of its service and most notably its response rate.

Carleton has achieved major goals in technology. We now manage accounts for and provide information services to 200,000 clients – an increase by two orders of magnitude over the figures from two years ago. Nevertheless, much work lies ahead. Our strategic direction must be to integrate the College’s information systems with the Web and provide a rich suite of information services tailored to the needs of a diverse population of users within the campus community and beyond. This will enable us to manage Carleton's information resources much more efficiently and effectively, provide high quality information services to all constituencies, and position ourselves well for the future. The important steps we have taken were made possible through commensurate growth in our technical infrastructure. The act of providing reliable tools and infrastructure made it possible for members of the Carleton community to engage in the kind of critical analysis necessary to matching tools and resources to our institutional needs. This is a lesson that has served Carleton well, gained us a prestigious award in recognition of our achievements, and will serve as a guidepost for our future efforts.

Benefiting from Past Strengths and Positioning Carleton for the Coming Era

Carleton’s successes have propelled us into national conversations about the appropriate uses of information technologies in higher education.

In just the past two years, Carleton has been a leader in both national and regional contexts.

• The New Media Center consortia honored Carleton with an inaugural “Center of Excellence” award from the New Media Centers in recognition of our successful computing support model.
• Through our participation on EDUCAUSE committees, Carleton has helped identify best practices nationally for both networking and systemic progress in teaching and learning. EDUCAUSE is the premier organization focused on the promotion of higher education through intelligent uses of information technologies.
• Carleton highlighted effective teaching strategies, tools and classroom design for language instruction at liberal arts colleges at a national conference titled “Focusing on Change: Language Instruction in a Digital World”, jointly sponsored by Information Technology Services, The Language Center, and Carleton’s departments of languages and literatures.
• Carleton was invited to share its forward-thinking uses of administrative data to facilitate the work students, faculty and staff at the prestigious “Middleware Boot Camp” for the Internet2 community. This community is largely made up of software developers at research universities.
• Carleton’s The Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, Information Technology Services, and the Laurence McKinley Gould Library created a discussion series titled “Learning in a Digital World.” This series sustained a term-long discussion between speakers drawn nationally and Carleton community members on issues such as: gender and technology, scholarly communication and the liberal arts college, digital futures: projects and prospects for multimedia, and placing liberal arts learning in a geographic context: examples from the earth and social sciences.
• Carleton has been awarded a grant from the Mellon foundation to explore information literacy in a liberal arts context. The library is heading this initiative in partnership with five academic departments.

As a leader among higher institutions of learning, Carleton must continue to play a prominent role in national conversations. We are poised to take an even greater lead in these discussions in the future. There are many benefits to our being present at the tables were national discussions about the future of IT are taking place, not the least of which is our continued ability to attract outside funding for new IT initiatives. Current trends suggest that Mellon, Bush, and other foundations that have historically supported Carleton towards becoming a community of information articulate individuals --are shifting their support away from single institutions in favor of regional centers and multi-institutional collaborations. More than ever, our ability to attract outside funding for technology will largely depend on our recognition as a participant in national and international dialogues that help shape the future of IT and public policy – conversations in which liberal arts colleges are largely under represented. As we pursue outside funding for IT through Mellon and other corporate foundations, we must anticipate that their push toward inter-institutional collaborations will make it increasingly more difficult for the College to follow its own agendas and time lines.

New technologies are transformative, and they will have a crucial impact not simply on how we do our scholarly work, but also upon the life of our community. We have moved from the '70's paradigm of computers as number crunchers and word processors to one in which digital technology offers a pervasive new communications environment that shoots through and links nearly every aspect of our lives. And if, as sociologists claim, "communication is culture," then these new technologies play a key role in shaping how we work, share and communicate with one another both on and off campus. If residential and community life are to remain a defining feature of the Carleton experience, we need continually to attend to the social aspects and implications of new technologies.

Carleton has prided itself on emphasizing strong writing and communication skills for its students. Technology, however, is expanding the terms and tools of self-expression, and it is important that we make these new audio-visual tools available to our students and encourage their use. These new resources will not displace writing--indeed, they often demonstrate that writing is at the center of virtually every new technology. We should undertake a reasoned plan to make available the full complement of new audio and video resources for knowledge gathering, synthesis, production and publication for all of our students and faculty so that they may become a regular part of classroom and fieldwork.

Among the key issues for the future will be integration and coordination of disparate technologies. We will need to develop a "systems approach" which insures integration, compatibility, inter-operability. We must think of the College as a single system, rather than a set of discrete technologies implemented bottom-up by individual units. At the same time, we must honor the necessary explorative, experimental imperatives of individual academic programs, where developing novel technologies as ends or means may be a crucial part of their mission.

Recommendations:

Carleton should maintain its position as a leader in integrating technology and outstanding teaching in a liberal arts context, recognizing that the best learning and teaching require the best tools. We should:

• Continue to encourage and support innovative projects integrating technology and teaching, continuing our program of curricular computing grants for faculty and students, and modeling collaborative work and project development.
• Continue to play a role in national conversations about technology in education.
• Continue aggressively to seek funding for a wide range of activities, capitalizing on recognition of our leadership position.
• Support campus-wide conversations about all manner of IT issues, engaging the community in vigorous and informed debate.
• Develop a plan to insure that those faculty and student members of our community who remain unconfident in their skills will find resources and help needed to achieve technological competency.
• Continue to enhance collaborative relationships among the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, Information Technology Services, the Lawrence McKinley Gould Library, and Institutional Research. These organizations collectively provide the means, data and tools used to create, store, and transmit scholarly and curricular materials as well as the ability to assess the effectiveness of our efforts.

We should institute a continuing conversation about the role of technology in the life of our campus, to insure that we purposefully create and maintain the humane social fabric that defines the essential Carleton experience.

We should create a nimble, system-wide technical infrastructure that supports our institutional objectives, including:

• Insuring that our technology installations are flexible and adaptable to the rapidly changing technology horizon.
• Developing a clearly coordinated strategy and agreed upon plans for campus wiring and connectivity reflecting the best in current technology, but also recognizing coming technology integration and likely changes in the future such as wireless communication and VoIP.
• Insuring that we have well-designed and integrated control technologies across our physical infrastructure.
• Supporting projects that deploy, test and invite debate about technologies such as wind power and green buildings.
• Acknowledge that users will adopt new technologies only when they are confident in their reliability, and make reliability a key goal.

We must maintain our leadership position in Information Technology services by insuring appropriate staff and resources, which requires:

• Maintaining strong commitment to our nationally recognized client-centered IT model.
• Giving high priority to maintaining Carleton’s aggressive technology replacement cycle.
• Continuing support professional development of staff and faculty on IT-related subjects.

We should explore vigorously and adopt when appropriate and affordable the new generation of technology resources that is on the horizon.

• We should work aggressively to participate in Internet2.
• We should consider technologies like satellite-based communication in education, voice/image intranets, wireless communication, streaming media, and geographical information systems, and the like.
• The College should plan for and implement the next step in IT technologies that involve visualization, imaging, multi-media, communication and similar kinds of data.

We should use the full range of new IT communication resources to engage our vital off-campus constituencies. This includes:

• Pursuing innovative ways to use the internet, streaming-media, and similar tools to engage our alumni in the life of the college.
• Becoming leading innovators in using the internet to communicate with prospective students.

We should regularly consider IT issues from the student point of view, recognizing the importance of self-directed learning and the essential role of technology in student life apart from the classroom, by:

• Insuring easy access to a rich array of tools, and providing training and support where necessary.
• Supporting collaborative models of learning by creating work spaces oriented to group collaboration.
• Continuing to focus on student development in curricular and co-curricular areas.
• Supporting valuable and appropriate technologies that enhance student leisure activities.

We should maintain and build on the several recent outstanding projects that support essential administrative activities with IT resources.

New technologies offer students and faculty a host of new ways to gather, evaluate, assemble, shape and publish knowledge, and to pursue self-expression. We should be a leader in making these new media-based tools available and encourage their use, by:

• Increasing opportunities for projects that explore novel ways of producing knowledge, and working to make these successes visible to a wider audience.
• Insuring that we have the necessary technical infrastructure in place.
• Explore new uses of media technology to encourage students and faculty to publish and otherwise share their research with the larger world.

Develop a coordinated program among Academic Computing, Media Services, and Media Studies to insure that students have the necessary instruction and support to bring media projects to successful completion.