Information technology (IT) is regarded globally as a voracious consumer of energy. According to a 2007 research paper issued by the United Kingdom's Global Action Plan, IT accounts for 10 percent of the electrical usage in the U.K. In the United States, Stanford University estimates that IT accounts for 15 percent of its overall electrical use.…

The University of Michigan (U-M) has an award-winning history of sustainability initiatives, including research and student activism as well as campus facilities-related efforts. Environmental conservation programs on campus include alternative transportation, energy audits of and improvements to campus buildings, green purchasing, use of…

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) seeks to foster a community that produces sustainable solutions in all facets of campus life: (1) teaching; (2) research; (3) service; and (4) administrative operations. The university strives to model the three tenets of sustainability (environmental preservation, economic prosperity, and social equity for…

Lourdes College is a small, private, coeducational commuter college located in northwest Ohio. In early 2009, the Lourdes College Board of Trustees ratified a new strategic plan promoting institutional strength and sustainability over the next six years. The desired outcome was to make Lourdes College a stronger, more vibrant, even more socially…

A "carbon footprint" is the "total set of greenhouse gas emissions caused directly and indirectly by an (individual, event, organization, and product) expressed as CO2" emissions. Since CO2 emissions are indicative of energy use, the higher the associated CO2 emissions, typically the greater the associated costs. A typical desktop PC system…

In January 2008, Ed Ayers, president of the University of Richmond, signed the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment. This commits the university to creating a comprehensive action plan to move toward climate neutrality. Even before "sustainability" became one of the university's overall goals, Information Services (IS)…

Technology training is a resource-intensive endeavor with inherent potential for waste. Such training is commonly offered in live, face-to-face workshops on campus, without charge, by colleges and universities who value technology skills in their faculty, staff, and students. The true cost to the institution begins with the space used for…

The growth and increasing criticality of the CIO role in higher education suggests the importance of recognizing and understanding the characteristics of successful CIOs and the environments supporting their success, with the goal of developing new leaders. Although the literature, in general, provides a rich knowledge base concerning IT…

In a time of scarce resources, it is counterproductive for an institution to artificially inflate student wages via internecine struggles between central IT services and similar, distributed services in university departments. The pressure to inflate student wages might be exacerbated by similar but opposite viewpoints on the part of supervisors,…

Clemson University implemented Condor architecture on the Blackboard learning management system (LMS) application servers in order to gain higher throughput when processing Blackboard course archives. Condor has typically been used for high-throughput research computing, not applied to non-research problems involving long processing times. This…

Institutions of higher education have a vested interest in the health of their student populations, even without the traditional strictures of "in loco parentis". Student health issues involve stress management, healthy diet and exercise, the building of healthy social lives, effective relationship management, and the development of life skills…

This article discusses the author's experiences in teaching a new course at Dickinson College, a four-year liberal arts college in Pennsylvania serving around 2,300 undergraduates. The course emphasized newer and emerging media and technologies such as satellite television, the Internet, and mobile telephony. To better understand the read-write…

Not long ago, the authors participated in EDUCAUSE 2009 in Denver. Because they were delivering a presentation on instructional uses of Twitter, their ears and eyes were wide open for other presentations mentioning social networking in general and Twitter specifically. At a lively "debate", the negative commentary focused on three things: Twitter…

Writing effectively is academically and professionally crucial for students, and helping them attain that skill is a major goal for writing instruction. The social networking site Ning offers a variety of Web 2.0 tools that can help students learn to write as well as write to learn. In this article, the authors describe their personal experiment…

In the online learning world it is easy to become so preoccupied by technology that technology solutions are mistaken for educational solutions. Long-term improvements in online departmental and university communities require an educational approach that recognizes the reduced delivery of community in the online world, just as research has shown a…