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Rick Matthews, Associate Provost for Information Systems, and I are attending the Technology Forum sponsored by the Chronicle of HIgher Education. I am one of only a handful of librarians. There are more CIO types, along with a smattering of provosts, presidents and lots of vendors from the technology industry.

This is the first conference that I have Twittered. I’m fairly new to Twitter to start with, so this was baptism by fire. The hashtag is #chetf09 if you’re interested. At one point, the Twitter feed showed up behind the panel of speakers and the snarkiness factor went down immediately!

Ironically, the opening keynote was about Twitter and other new social networking technologies. The representative from iTunesU talked about his 2 year old’s prowess on his iTouch and how he worried that his son’s fearless creativity would be “educated out of him” by the time he got to college. The speaker from Penn State summarized student’s expectations as “wanting to be able to do what I do out there,” namely connect with content and with each other with free use of images, video and text. Instead, we give them discussion boards on Blackboard. To meet these expectations, Penn State created a digital platform for blogging, video, and all the tools students are used to from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The next speaker is four months overdue on writing a book called the Googlization of Everything. He said he was not out to either praise or criticise Google, but he did little of the first and a lot of the second. He cited as “public failure” that Google has taken over information commodities on a number of campuses such as email, calendaring, document management, etc. However, the following breakout session featured two institutions as different as Notre Dame and the Virgina Community College system who described their switchover to gmail and other Google Apps as seamless, beautifully engineered and well supported. The debate on Google remains: are they evil or not?

The luncheon speaker was Ed Ayers, President of the University of Richmond and creator of Valley of the Shadow, a groundbreaking site. This was my favorite presentation of the conference (so far). Ayers was at UVA when he created Valley and is now bringing his passion for digital humanities with him to Richmond. He quipped that scholarship has been open source even before the digital era. He and his colleague demonstrated some amazing examples of digital scholarship; check them out: History Engine, the Texas Slavery Project,and Voting America. He emphasized that these projects do not require multimillion dollar grants or huge technology infrastructure. They accomplished them at Richmond with a couple of smart graduate students and a lot of imagination.

I suffered through a discussion of the Georgia State v AAUP lawsuit over copyright violations with digital reserves. Georgia State was described as at the far left of fair use interpretation and really seemed to be out on a limb, but the prevailing opinion in the room was to solve the problem through licensing and royalty payment, abandoning fair use altogether.

There was a very interesting discussion of how to manage the student life cycle from eager applicant to generous graduate donor. Social networking software is being used throughout, perhaps most effectively by Admissions because they have the youngest (and therefore the savviest) audience. The most common question asked by applicants is, “are you going to look at my Facebook page?” Universities have to adapt to the fact that they have lost control of the message to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

The most disappointing session was “Library Design in Changing Times.” Maybe it was because library as place issues are so familiar to us in libraries that it surprising to hear people being shocked at the idea of coffee shops! Paradigm shifts have been around as long as there have been libraries! Still, I did get a wicked idea for ZSR that I will sleep on overnight….

The last talk of the day was from John Markoff, a New York Times reporter giving an insider’s view of Silicone Valley and playing to about half of the original audience. He said there really haven’t been that many big ideas, just the original personal computer and ubiquitous computing. Then, each new generation of technology devours the previous one. Otherwise, Silicon Valley will become the next Detroit (depressing to a native Detroiter…)