Higher education, is entering a period in which it is the "connections" between everything and everyone that are of importance. This development is most conspicuous in teaching and learning and is enabled by information technology, social media, and mobile devices. This advent of "connected learning" is having an impact on all…

The EDUCAUSE Awards Program, under the guidance of the EDUCAUSE Recognition Committee, has announced the three 2012 winners who are recognized for their peer endorsement and distinction to professional accomplishments in higher education information technology. Winner Melissa Woo is recognized as a strong leader and one who is expected to achieve…

While recognizing that digital access is not evenly distributed in the United States, which is to say nothing of the global distribution, one can safely say that this transformation is already here; people are already at the moment in which the ability to use social media, and particularly social media as amplified through the power of the mobile…

Mobile use of the Internet is on target to surpass fixed use by 2014. Three-fourths of all college/university students have purchased or intend to purchase an Internet-enabled handheld device within the next year. The smartphone market is changing almost monthly. Attempting to manage even just one or a few "devices" is becoming a lost…

Mobile technology is a favorite discussion topic among senior IT leaders and higher education administrators. Mobile is the future for content delivery. Colleges and universities need to establish a strategy now and make the decisions necessary to take advantage of this communication opportunity. In this article, the author recommends making…

Higher education's interest in digital content, especially e-books, has gone off the charts. With the rapid acceptance of e-books for pleasure reading, attention has now shifted to e-textbooks and their promise of significant cost savings and cutting-edge features. But getting a good grasp on the fast-moving realm of digital content for higher…

Along with their students, faculty have become co-learners and pioneers in the classroom. With no models to work from, they have had to explore, practice, and discover the iPad's potential for expanding learning. Given the recent and rapidly growing access to a dazzling array of intellectual technologies, faculty and staff at Seton Hill, a liberal…

Once upon a time, there was the mainframe. Only a handful of applications were available on this great big computer. A few hearty users took advantage of these applications, often accessing them one at a time. Folks generally did not expect to use any application with another. Why would they? Now, of course, the world is very different. College…

A year ago, my colleague Charles Grisham and I wrote an EDUCAUSE Review article entitled "Why IT Has Not Paid Off As We Hoped (Yet)." In short, we argued that information technology has not yet transformed higher education because the areas of teaching and scholarship, the "heart" of colleges and universities, have remained relatively untouched by…

The concept of convergence has evolved significantly during recent years. Today, "convergence" refers to the integration of the communications and computing resources and services that seamlessly traverse multiple infrastructures and deliver content to multiple platforms or appliances. Convergence is real. Those in higher education, and especially…

The EDUCAUSE Current Issues Committee, whose members review and recommend the set of IT issues to be presented each year, conducted a Web-based survey in December 2006 to identify the five of thirty-one IT issues in each of four areas: (1) issues that are critical for strategic success; (2) issues that are expected to increase in significance; (3)…

In the spring of 2005, the author, the retiring president of EDUCAUSE, was asked to be the keynote speaker at the EDUCAUSE Western Regional Conference. The conference theme was "Winds of Change: Charting the Course for Technology in Challenging Times." What that brought to his mind was the era of the great sailing ships of the eighteenth and…

Educational institutions should be actively rethinking how they are accessing and using copyrighted visual arts images, and they should be exploring an approach that seeks to address copyright owners' interests, as well as users' needs, in an environment that encourages increased, shared access to these images for teaching and study. (Contains 23…

In responding to internal and external pressures for accountability in higher education, especially in the areas of improved learning outcomes and student success, IT leaders may soon become critical partners with academic and student affairs. IT can help answer this call for accountability through "academic analytics," which is emerging…