|
|
VP for Information Services and CIO
cio@uoregon.edu
A little over a year ago I took part in a retreat where at one point we were asked to envision what the University of Oregon might be like in ten or fifteen years. My first thought was that many of our faculty and students might not do much of their work on the home campus. "In ten or fifteen years," I predicted, "faculty and students will spend a significant amount of time doing their research and teaching in the field, perhaps only returning to Eugene to write about their findings and plan their next adventure." Needless to say, my vision wasn't shared by some of my colleagues who had spent their careers in the traditional classroom.
In this edition of IT Connections, we are introduced to several faculty and students who conduct their research and teaching outside the traditional classroom, some halfway around the world, some underground in specialized labs. They do this, not because they love to travel to exotic places (okay...maybe there is a little of that), but because the things they are studying are located far away, or--in the case of nanoscience--in places that can only be studied with electron microscopes sitting on solid bedrock. What is common to these and many other academic projects is that information technology plays a prominent part, not only in their research work, but also in communicating with colleagues and in making their findings accessible to others.
The projects described in this issue give us insight into the ways the university must adapt to serve the needs of our faculty and students in the years to come. In the InfoGraphics Lab's collaborative project with Esther Jacobson-Tepfer in the Mongolian Altai, we see the use of handheld geographic positioning systems, geographic information systems, and other specialized software for cataloging and mapping. The Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) has its own set of sophisticated scientific instruments to generate data that is stored, and later analyzed, by specialized software--some of which was developed by the Oregon team themselves to address their specific needs. And even in the Bhutan project, acoustical and linguistic analysis is done using specialized software and other IT resources.
Yet one notices something else in these stories that speak to our need to develop IT resources to support academic programs, and that is the degree to which research depends on collaboration with colleagues. In the Mongolian Altai project, collaboration might extend to a team of Russian archaeologists or the director of the Mongolian Institute of Archaeology. For ONAMI, it could include colleagues at UC Berkeley or other world-class research centers. And for Linguistics, it will likely involve people in the culture being studied. In each of these situations, building human partnerships is vital, but so too is developing the IT support infrastructure and services that will facilitate research and teaching/learning.
Eugene is a wonderful place to have as a home base for an academic life dedicated to research and teaching. Yet much of what we need to study is not in the classroom, but in distant lands, or it is observable only with specialized instruments. Not just in the years ahead, but today, we must provide IT resources to support this work.