Review by: Reichert, Raimond (2004-11-11)

Each year, the Educause Evolving Technologies Committee identifies evolving technologies that are having a direct impact on higher education institutions. The report reviewed here summarizes six white papers (available online at www.educause.edu/issues/etcom) on the technologies selected for 2004. What is perhaps most striking is that none of these technologies were selected for their direct impact on teaching and learning. However, they are all important to the overall ICT landscape of higher education institutions. In the following, three of these technologies are briefly summarized.

The first issue concerns legal peer-to-peer and file-sharing networks. Students come to higher education institutions expecting to be able to live their “digital lives”, i. e. using all kinds of communication tools (mobile devices, instant messaging, …) as well as accessing all kinds of content providers (streaming, file-sharing, …). This is especially true for institutions where students live on-campus. The use of these technologies will only increase in the future, so the question is how institutions should deal with it.

The second issue is learning objects. Without entering the debate on how to define learning objects, the report implies that learning objects are “rich media” materials produced by commercial and academic publishing houses, professional societies, and other consortia. The author argues that learning objects are already used on most campuses, so institutions should try to shape future creation and use of learning objects.

The third issue is the challenge of further integrating the diverse information systems in use at higher education institutions, i. e. libraries, administrative systems, web content and learning management systems. The main point here is that the increasing convergence of all these systems calls for a global institutional ICT strategy.

The need for an institutional ICT strategy is probably the main conclusion that one can draw from the report. The report nicely illustrates that the ICT landscape is growing more and more complex. Universities not only have to deal with traditional IT services such as administrative systems, web content management, digital library access, and campus computers and wired networks, but also need to address recent advances in consumer technology such as mobile devices, streaming technology, peer-to-peer systems, and wired networks. A global ICT strategy should address all these issues – and many more, in particular security and support issues.