Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Webcast: In the Google Apps Cloud: How to Achieve Your Business Objectives
Dec 3rd, '09, 1 - 2 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council member Brent Hoag, Director, Global IT, at JohnsonDiversey, as he discusses the adoption of Google Apps which has helped meet four corporate goals; sustainability, simplification, increased employee productivity and global collaboration.
Webcast: Collaboration Initiatives: Benchmarks & Best Practices
Dec 15th, '09, 4 - 5 pm US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Council members Ruth Thorpe, VP & CIO at the U.S. Pharmaceutical Operations of Sanofi-Aventis, and Gary Kuyper, CIO at Bethany Christian Services, as they speak about their collaboration initiatives and experiences in how and why they chose the social networking and collaboration tools they are using and their business goals for collaboration, and facing culture change challenges.
Data Overview: Collaboration Initiatives Field Guide: Benchmarks & Best Practices
This appendix to the Council Field Guide provides an analysis which discusses benchmarks for collaboration IT implementation costs, adoption rates and payoffs. The overview identifies top IT and business goals and satisfaction rates for collaboration initiatives as well as best practices and lessons learned for implementing collaboration IT.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »September 01, 2001 — CIO —
Videoconferencing hasn’t exactly fulfilled its promise in the corporate world ("What’s that, Bob? You want to plan a corporate takeover? I can’t hear you with all this static....Oh, a corporate makeover?"), but a few universities are putting the put-upon technology to innovative uses.
Last semester at the University of Washington in Seattle, geology professor Elizabeth Nesbitt used videoconferencing to teach students in six area high schools. The students, many of whom are minorities from rural areas who might not otherwise get to take classes for college credit, gathered once a week at their respective schools for videoconferencing classes that Nesbitt taught from Seattle. Nesbitt sent materials in advance, including boxes of rocks and minerals (actual, not virtual), and each school had a science teacher on hand during the classes.
At first, the classes suffered from some technology glitches?"The main problem seemed to be the network we were hooked into," Nesbitt says?but by the end, things were flowing like lava. The university plans to continue the program this fall.
Meanwhile, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., the Purdue Program for Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology, or P3T3 (tongue twisters, anyone?), allows education students to use videoconferencing to observe and communicate with K-12 classrooms in urban East Chicago, Ind. P3T3 is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The purpose of the videoconferencing initiative is twofold: to allow Purdue students to observe diverse urban classroom settings and to increase their familiarity with technology in the classroom. The classes employ Polycom videoconferencing equipment via the Internet, which allows teachers in training to present interactive lessons and even pan out or zoom in on specific students.
So far about 25 students from two classes in professor JoAnn Phillion’s introductory teacher education course have participated in the program. Some snafus, such as shaky audio and distracting background noise, have proven unavoidable. And not all the K-12 schools have enough bandwidth to support the videoconferencing. "The biggest problem has actually been getting the schools’ technical support personnel to work with our technical support people to punch a hole in the school’s firewall," says James Lehman, codirector of the project and a professor of educational technology at Purdue. Nevertheless, the university is considering allowing all student teachers at Purdue to take part in similar projects.