@Boone: you make a good point about the hold the history of “IT” has on CUNY’s imagination, a point Tom Harbison made yesterday, and which I think Dean Spalter also delineated while introducing the Ribaudo. As Joe’s linked post and work attest, we’ve made some real progress in this regard over the past few years, but there’s much more to do. I don’t think we’ve even yet gotten to the point where there’s been real, open, honest conversations about this tension within the power structures of the University or the campuses. George Otte has done much to bring that conversation out, so kudos to him for that. Yet it’s still incumbent upon those working on this stuff at the “grassroots” to keep on pushing the point. Once the conversations are constant (and the allocation of the resources reflect those conversations and the most pressing and forward looking needs of our communities), we’ll know we’re getting there.

@Matt: thanks for the comment! Honestly, I struggled with the openness question, because I’m uneasy about the implications of confessing vulnerability on a project so young. Philosophically, I’m all for it. Politically, it’s a bit dangerous. Ultimately, though, if we’re going to talk the talk we gotta walk the walk, and try our best to do this thing the right way. That, and Jim Groom made me do it.

The larger tension you detail in the post — the twined moments of accepting a nice award and having the entire kit and caboodle crash around you — nicely captures so many of the rewards and frustrations of this kind of work. Well done.

Thanks for the kind words about the Ribaudo Award. Certainly, I cannot imagine better co-winners than the Communications Institute team. I’m so proud to be part of this movement within CUNY and within higher ed more generally. Here’s to continued collaborations!

http://www.mountebank.org/blog/361/the-i-in-it/

It was long before I was in (or even really imagining) the position I’m in now, but I think that in terms of Educause (the prompt for that post), and the CUNY IT Conference, and I and T in higher ed more generally, it’s still fairly relevant.

More importantly, you do a nice job drawing a distinction between the two meanings of ‘IT’. Making the higher-ups in university administrations come to understand the distinction is arguably one of the most important tasks facing the instructional technologist. As you and I have discussed, there may have been a time when the use of computer technology at the university was mainly administrative, which justifies, at least in a historical sense, some confusion about what truly *academic* computing can be. But to continue to countenance the conflation is to do a diservice to the core goal of the institution. You might even argue that such confusion contributes to the risk of marginalization of the university, as authentic real-world education happens more and more extensively online, while the academy remains stuck in an outdated mindset about what computers mean in the context of learning.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by lwaltzer: New Cacophony Post: Blogs@ Baruch Semester Review, Part 1: Triumph and Tribulation (inc. detail on last week’s outage) http://is.gd/5nBT7...