The eleventh annual EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey shows some very familiar themes among the top-ten IT issues of strategic importance to technology leaders in higher education. Indeed, all ten of the issues from the 2009 survey are back, albeit in a slightly different order. In addition, Strategic Planning returns as an issue of renewed…

Some of the most significant changes in information technology are those that have given the individual user greater power to choose. The first of these changes was the development of the personal computer. The PC liberated the individual user from the limitations of the mainframe and minicomputers and from the rules and regulations of centralized…

Cyberinfrastructure permits a new kind of scholarly inquiry and education, empowering communities to innovate and to revolutionize what they do, how they do it, and who participates. (Contains 6 notes.)

The concept of today's cloud computing may date back to 1961, when John McCarthy, retired Stanford professor and Turing Award winner, delivered a speech at MIT's Centennial. In that speech, he predicted that in the future, computing would become a "public utility." Yet for colleges and universities, the recent growth of pervasive, very high speed…

Drawn from a recent ECAR research study, this article addresses the importance of five CI technologies to various academic areas in research and in teaching and learning at present and how survey respondents think the importance of these technologies might change in the near future. (Contains 2 figures, 2 tables and 7 notes.)

Providing an evolving foundation for 21st-century research and education, cyberinfrastructure is both a focus for invention and an accelerator of innovation, linked through a trajectory that begins with design and evolves to broad-based use. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 11 notes.)

This article presents the top-ten IT-related issues in terms of strategic importance to the institution, as revealed by the tenth annual EDUCAUSE Current Issues Survey. These IT-related issues include: (1) Funding IT; (2) Administrative/ERP Information Systems; (3) Security; (4) Infrastructure/Cyberinfrastructure; (5) Teaching and Learning with…

What is the current thinking about cyberinfrastructure for the liberal arts, what models for transinstitutional collaboration and institution building are emerging, and what steps can campuses take to move this agenda forward? (Contains 23 notes.)

In this column, the author discusses the four key questions related to the National LambdaRail (NLR) networking technology. NLR uses Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) to enable multiple networks to coexist on a national fiber footprint, and is owned and operated not by carriers, but by the research and education community. The NLR Board…

In "Thinking Ahead: A Vision of the Role of ICT in Education and Research in the Future, 2007-2010," the higher education institutions in the Netherlands agreed on future strategy. Under the direction of SURF, the Dutch national organization, a collaborative strategy for the application of information and communications technology (ICT)…

In this article, the author looks to the past for trends in hardware, software, networking, and education and attempt to extrapolate where they are going and what their broad implications might be. However, there are many different ways that trends can be interpreted, and it is easy to pick trends that support one's thesis and ignore ones that…

With increasing frequency, communities are seeing the arrival of a new class of noncommercial broadband providers: community wireless networks (CWNs). Utilizing the same wireless technologies that many colleges and universities have used to create wireless networks on campus, CWNs are creating broadband access for free or at costs well below…

Starting in the late 1960s, data networks were created to connect supercomputers and, later, other intelligent devices. A revolution in communications was in the making. By the late 1970s, computing and communications technologies were leading us from a world of local markets trading in capital goods to one of global markets trading in capital…

Describes a planning framework that provides the technical foundation necessary to support Web-based relationships and applications in higher education. The framework enables delivery of information, tools, and services to all of a university's constituents. (EV)

The Homepage column in the March/April 2003 issue of "EDUCAUSE Review" explained the national implication of security vulnerabilities in higher education and the role of the EDUCAUSE/Internet2 Computer and Network Security Task Force in representing the higher education sector in the development of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Among…