Cole W. Camplese

SBU DoIT Update and Thinking

I had the chance to address University Senate last week for the first time here at Stony Brook. It gave me a chance to share my strategic priorities and observations from the first 80 days here at SBU. I included a screen shot of the five strategic priorities I am targeting in a post prior to the meeting, but have since added one other for us to consider. I thought it would be a good idea to share the six priorities with a little more context. Here are the six areas of focus for DoIT that I am proposing and that I discussed at Senate:

1. Construct a world-class teaching and learning with technology organization and an appreciation for learning design.
2. Create a competitive research computing infrastructure and services that support the needs of faculty across the research community.
3. Provide a consistently safe, secure, and compliant information technology environment for Stony Brook.
4. Provide services that greatly enhance the work of our faculty, staff, and students.
5. Enhance a culture of operational excellence at Stony Brook.
6. Encourage an agile, flexible, and forward facing staff who are leaders in their fields.

It is important that I take a minute to share at least a few sentences about each of the six items I am setting as priorities. I should also say that Stony Brook has made tremendous progress to date in several of these areas, but they are areas that I am interested in investing more organizational time, energy, and funding to strengthen. Below you can read some of my thoughts as they relate to these priorities. I could go on and on about each, but the better approach is for me to be lean in my remarks and encourage discourse ... face to face, email, or via comments below.

Construct a world-class teaching and learning with technology organization and an appreciation for learning design.

This is something that I care deeply about and is one of the reasons I really wanted to come to Stony Brook. There is already an active investment in supporting teaching and learning with technology on campus and a culture that is embracing the value it brings. What I have come to see are the many opportunities for us to extend the incredible foundation that is in place. We live in a world where both faculty and students want to have more opportunities to engage in new forms of pedagogy, appropriately utilize new technologies in and around their classrooms, teach and learn in new modalities from hybrid and blended to fully online and MOOCs, and they want a place that can give them the courage to take risks. I believe that we have the potential to create a truly world-class set of services and offerings that can engage, enrich, challenge, and support the faculty and students of this university.

Create a competitive research computing infrastructure and services that support the needs of faculty across the research community.

Work has been done in this space already, but we need a consistent and common message going forward to take us to the next level. We are in the middle of hiring 250 new faculty on this campus to strengthen and forward the teaching mission as well as radically impacting our research output. We need to continue to invest in core infrastructure, but we also need to find new ways to engage faculty who are participating in new forms of scholarship from the arts, the humanities, the liberal arts, and so on. We need to give them the tools they need as well as construct environments where we can continue to grow our investment in big data, high throughput and high performance computing, and the things that make sciences and medical researchers successful. It means faster networks, but it also means finding ways to support early stage grants and prototype building.

Provide a consistently safe, secure, and compliant information technology environment for Stony Brook.

We have only just begun to fully understand the security challenges facing IT in general and we in higher education are fully aware of our responsibilities. With that said it is imperative that we find ways to systematically address new types of threats that are both local and international. We need to not only construct forward facing policies, but we need to find new ways to help our community understand and embrace them. We must make a commitment to both protect and provide an elegant user experience for our faculty, staff, and students.

Provide services that greatly enhance the work of our faculty, staff, and students.

I know it should go without saying, but the idea that we develop services that make life easier for our customers is critical to me. I would really like to say that all we do should delight them, but I know that is pushing it a bit far. I do want DoIT to establish a way of thinking that presses us to be aware of how our products and services actually work and function. I want us to focus energy on understanding and promoting strong senses of user experience and usability. I want us to consider how what we make impacts the community.

Enhance a culture of operational excellence at Stony Brook.

I am lucky to be a member of the project management office responsible for the Project 50 Forward initiatives. Having that opportunity has afforded me insight into the outstanding work we have done at Stony Brook to become more efficient on a daily basis. This is truly the place that I have learned the most about how we operate. Through that learning I am proposing that DoIT work to adopt many of the frameworks, approaches, and tenants of the Project 50 Forward initiative internally. I believe that by focusing efforts on increasing efficiency, enhanced vendor management, campus wide IT governance, and portfolio management we can find ways to both reinvest and reinvent ourselves.

Encourage an agile, flexible, and forward facing staff who are leaders in their fields.

I cannot stress how much I believe in the staff at DoIT. I have told everyone I know how amazed I have been at the individual and collective intelligence of this organization. I think it is a critical next step for us to take stock in providing deep and systematic professional development across the board. I think we can improve our work in ways that would be unimaginable without first investing energy inwards. I am committed to finding ways to make professional development a cornerstone of DoIT and I believe that by doing it, we will be stronger and more prepared to attack issues and trends as they emerge. I fully expect Stony Brook IT to be recognized as a model in higher education.

(Virtual) Coffee with Cole

I've been enjoying the Coffee with Cole sessions I've been doing every few weeks ... so much that I intend to extend them and open some more up (so look for an invite). Since I can only do so many and that space is limited to five guests I decided to add a new channel to connect. I created an open group in the Stony Brook Yammer space called, "Coffee with Cole." Please feel free to join the group and leave comments, post questions, or suggestions. I am subscribed to the group via email, so I should see everything that gets posted there. Join the conversation!

Presentation to Stony Brook Council

This morning I had my first opportunity to address the Stony Brook Council and share with them a bit about the work we do here at the University. I didn't want to do a standard, "this is IT" update so I tried to share with them a handful of contemporary challenges we face every day across higher education and talk briefly about how we are addressing them. I wanted them to see IT in a different light, as what it really is -- an enabler of success on our campus.

To that end I focused my remarks on a few core areas that I thought they might be less likely to associated with IT -- teaching and learning, enabling access, security issues, and how we are helping to push the Operational Excellence agenda forward. I tried to keep it light, but also express how much we do to support the teaching, research, service, and administrative missions of the University. I'd be happy to share the presentation either face to face or online at some point.

The talking points for the above slide really made an impact -- people don't think of the utter scale of connectivity we manage every minute on and around our campus. I pointed out that it isn't just laptops anymore, that it is also phones, tablets, game systems, google glass, and other things consuming our connections throughout the day and night. I think it really hit home just how critical the network is when showed a slide that listed some of the other services that run on the network -- door access, ticket sales, security cameras, digital signage, and more.

The other thing that was an interesting was to see the overall reaction to our focus on teaching and learning. They were very impressed with our participation and support of the first SBU MOOC ... and I made sure to highlight bot the higher than normal completion rates and the unique local and distance students taking the course. I think it really illustrated how innovative we are. The other tidbit I made sure got in there was the rapid growth in technology supported classrooms ... I made the case that technology is truly a competitive advantage on a campus, sometimes tipping a student towards enrolling here.

All in all I felt it was a good conversation and a good way to introduce our work to the Stony Brook Council.

Location Specific Access via iBeacons

However promotion by geo-location is only one part of our concept for promotion ByPlace, we are even more excited by the potential for ByPlace promotion using the iBeacons which have been getting significant attention since Apple’s endorsement of the devices with the launch of iOS 7.

via Promotion by iBeacons | Exact Editions | Blog.

This could provide some very interesting opportunities within education ... services, apps, and content that are unlocked based on location. In this scenario, a magazine publisher sells a subscription to a pub and those who enter can freely browse an unlocked version of the digital publication on their iOS device based solely on the proximity to an iBeacon.

The same could happen here on campus someday with supplemental material for a series of lectures in classrooms, access to additional content during a show, or apps that help you do things at specific locations. An interesting step.

Addressing University Senate

Today at 3:30 I will be addressing the Stony Brook University Senate. I was invited by Senate President, Dr. Fredrick Walters to both introduce myself to the Senate and provide a brief update. I don't intend to spend more than 10-15 minutes talking, but will be sharing both my observations from the first 8o days here as well as my overall strategic priorities for DoIT.

I think it will be interesting to see if there are questions afterwards ... and know that I will either update this post or do another one after the fact. I am making an overt offer to attend department meetings and to invite the larger community to attend the Coffee with Cole sessions. Again, we shall see. At the end of the day, I am just honored to have the opportunity to represent DoIT and get to know our University Senate.

cDACT Tour

I was lucky enough to get a very interactive tour of the Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture, and Technology, or cDACT, lab by Margaret Schedel today ... she invited me over to see a bunch of the students in action.  All of them are doing such amazing things with art, music, and technology. It was an absolutely inspiring way to spend an hour and a half of my day. I highly recommend checking it out!

A Chance to Connect

I haven't updated this space in quite some time and for that I am sorry ... my intention is maintain a space that encourages engagement and discourse and that only happens when someone starts the conversation.  So while I haven't been great at writing here I have been spending a ton of time talking to people all over campus in real time.  One of the things that has come out of those many conversations is the need for me to be available for all sorts of formal and informal get togethers.  I was talking to a few colleagues the other day and I mentioned the idea of having small group discussion opportunities over coffee every now and then.

With that I've decided I'd book some time at the Hilton Garden Inn on campus and just do some small group conversations over coffee ... it pains me to call it, "Coffee with Cole" but that's what it is.  So, if you are interested in an opportunity to just get together and talk, sign up!

The idea is for six of us to just have a chance to hang out and talk.  I've booked the following days from 8:30-9:00 in the morning to get together:

• Nov. 6
• Nov. 20
• Dec. 4
• Dec. 18

If you want to be a part of it, just click the link below and sign up -- it is first come first serve.  I'd hate to sit and drink coffee alone ... no one wants to see that.  If it works I'll keep pushing the idea and schedule more dates. I hope to see you there!

http://doodle.com/d4ze3q6verzuzxm3

New Responsibilities

I recently keynoted Mount Union College's faculty fall convocation. I focused almost exclusively on the notions of digital expression as a form of scholarship, new forms of conversations, and various disruptors to higher education in general. As a part of that I do a bit of a deep dive into social computing and the social web as it relates to what we are being faced with as educators, leaders, and citizens. I mentioned at one point in passing that I had started a new blog as the Vice President for information technology and CIO at Stony Brook University and that I was struggling a bit with where to draw the line on what and when to write. I left it at that and continued along my typical path when talking to room full of faculty and didn't think again about it.

After the break, they unexpectedly asked if I would stay an extra hour to do some open question and answer. The first couple questions were typical and then I got thrown a curve ball -- "what is your responsibility as a campus leader to engage members of that community with social media tools like blogs, twitter, facebook, instagram, and others?"

I'm not sure why the question caught me off guard, but it did.

I answered it the best I could ... I told her that if you want to find ways to connect with the larger campus you need to leverage as much of the social web as possible. That means taking the step to share thoughts in the open -- and knowing the line that cannot be crossed when doing so. It means once that content is out there that it is out there and people can easily push it into other social spaces to help various members of the extended community discover it. It also means participating in new ways -- what I mean by that is taking the time to comment back when people engage, it means liking pictures on Instagram, and maybe reposting stuff on tumblr. I do think all of this is actually part of the emerging requirements if you truly want to engage your community as a leader.

Universities are tough places to drive communications effectively. There are so many varied audiences that plug into very different channels. For that reason alone, I think it is critical to understand the affordances of social platforms and leverage them to effectively reach the various people in each segment. Should I be blogging about my early days at Stony Brook? I think so. I would be curious to know what others think.

Remembering

I have to say I feel a more meaningful connection to the 9/11 victims now that I live in the state of New York. Taking extra time to reflect as I do my work at Stony Brook today.

Listening and Watching

As the new guy on campus I have been doing quite a bit of listening -- and watching.  As I mentioned in my previous post I have taken time to walk around campus a bit, albeit not nearly as much as I had hoped during these first two weeks but enough to see the beauty that has become Stony Brook University. I read an old piece in the NY Times (funny that that is my new hometown newspaper) from 11 years ago talking about the efforts underway to make the campus a source of pride. Very interesting to see the "after" without having seen the "before." Let's say I am impressed with the progress.

One of the interesting connections to that are the improvements that are underway on the technology side of the campus -- less visible from the outside, but just as impactful in my opinion to the overall satisfaction of our faculty, staff, and students. I am thrilled about the new, nearly pervasive wireless access students will be greeted with in the Javits Lecture Hall this fall -- this is just one small example of our collective work getting ready for fall 2013 and the networking upgrades that the DoIT team have been working on the last few years. This one thing is a huge deal to the nearly 60,000 students that pass through these learning spaces each week -- and it will be to faculty too as we watch them envision ways to engage their learners in this newly enabled space.  I am confident that my colleagues in Teaching and Learning with Technology will be ready with ideas on how to leverage the affordances of this space with new connectivity.

I've also spent a ton of time listening in both traditional and non traditional ways.  I've had plenty of meetings with both our own staff in DoIT and with members of our administration. Each meeting I learn more -- my Evernote app is exploding with new pages! It pushed me to do something I haven't done in a while -- I turned to Twitter to see what I could find from as many SBU channels as I could ... and I found a ton. So much so that I started a Twitter list that I am adding as many Stony Brook related accounts i can find to and I am watching it as much as possible.  It is a vibrant and connected community and I encourage you to follow along (and suggest new follows for the list).

It doesn't just stop with twitter. Our students are very active on tumblr as well and I am particularly fascinated by the sbufresh tumblr ... really quite amazing. I was impressed enough to send a note to our director of communications last night and today she reached out to the owner of this very helpful tumblr to help us find a new channel for us to share some information.

Today I walked campus as new student move in was on display. It is always humbling to watch parents take a final stroll with their children as they get ready to leave them to start their freshmen years. It is in that I hope we can all see how critical our mission really is -- to play a part in making the years they spend here an overwhelmingly positive experience. I saw so much today that filled me with pride and as the new guy, that was an emotion I wasn't sure I was expecting to have. Seeing the student volunteers, the staff ready to lend a hand, and knowing that we were working feverishly behind the scenes to make sure the IT infrastructure of campus is ready for the big day on Monday was really great. I know most of us will be on call this weekend and I know we will be ready for them.