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The Spring 2003 CNI Task Force meeting, to be held in Washington, DC,
at the Capitol Hilton on April 28-29, 2003, offers a wide range of presentations
that advance and report on CNI’s programs, showcase projects underway
at Task Force member institutions, and highlight important developments
at a national and international level. This provides the customary roadmap
to the sessions at the meeting, which includes both plenary events and
an extensive series of breakout sessions focusing on current developments
in networked information.
As usual, the CNI meeting begins with an optional orientation session
for new attendees at 11:30 AM and refreshments at 12:15 PM on Monday,
April 28. The opening keynote is at 1:15 PM and will be followed by two
rounds of parallel breakout sessions. Tuesday, April 29, includes additional
rounds of parallel breakout sessions, lunch and the closing keynote, concluding
around 3:30 PM. Along with plenary and breakout sessions, the meeting
includes ample time for informal networking with colleagues and a reception
on the evening of April 28.
The CNI Spring Task Force meeting is followed by the EDUCAUSE Net 2003
meeting, covering policy issues related to networking in higher education;
CNI is a co-sponsor of this meeting. There has been a great deal of
activity on the network policy front recently in areas as diverse as
security and privacy, intellectual property, broadband competititon,
and infrastructure to support future research needs; Net 2003 offers
a timely look at these developments. Unlike some previous years, Net
2003 will not begin until the morning of April 30, so there will be
no overlapping sessions with the CNI Task Force meeting. Information
and registration materials for Net 2003 can be found at www.educause.edu;
separate (paid) registration is required for Net 2003.
As always, the CNI meeting agenda is subject to last minute changes,
particularly in the breakout sessions, and you can find the most current
information at http://www.cni.org/tfms/2003a.spring/index.html.
The Opening Plenary Session
Computer games are fascinating and valuable for several reasons. They
are an important genre of digital authorship; they also hold enormous
promise for education as well as entertainment. In the last decade or
so, the development of network-based games and more recently of the so-called
"massively multiplayer" games has added new and rich social
dimensions. We are fortunate to have J.C. Herz, one of the keenest
observers and analysts of these developments, to share her insights with
us.
J. C. Herz is the principal of Joystick Nation, Inc., a research and
design practice that applies the principles of game design to products,
services, and learning systems. Drawing from an understanding of ecology,
online social dynamics, complex systems, and information theory, Herz
focuses on human-human interaction design and systems that leverage
the intrinsic characteristics of networked communication.
J.C. sits on the National Research Council's Committee on Creativity
and Information Technology, and the Defense Advanced Research Project
Agency's study group on patterns of emergent behavior in massively multiplayer
persistent worlds. In addition to teaching a graduate course, "The
Anthropology of Massively Multiplayer Online Games," at NYU, she
has lectured at Carnegie Mellon University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab,
the University of California's Institute for Creative Technologies,
the Annenberg Center for Communications, and Yale. She is the author
of two books, Surfing on the Internet (Little Brown, 1994), an ethnography
of cyberspace before the Web, and Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate
Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Little, Brown 1997).
J.C. wrote 100 essays on the grammar and syntax of game design as a
New York Times columnist between 1998-2000 (archived online)
I’ve been following J.C.’s work since she wrote Joystick Nation,
and for those unfamiliar with her ideas I would also particularly commend
the fabulous paper that she did for the 2001 Forum on the Future of
Higher Education; her paper can be found online in PDF (5.0) format.
The Closing Plenary Session
Tim Lance is the CEO of NYSERNet; he is also a professor of mathematics
at University at Albany, State University of New York, and is someone
who has been thinking about the networked information revolution in
all its richness—from how we build and operate the physical networks
that make it all possible to how these networks change scholarly communication—for
a long time. Although many people haven’t yet realized it, the
fundamental nature of high-performance networks is changing as networking
technologies become more optical. Tim has been exploring how the economics
of networking for the research and higher education community may be
shifting given both technology changes and the post-telecomm-bubble
business environment, and has developed some of his thinking in a paper
for the EDUCAUSE Net@EDU group.
In his closing plenary Tim will explain why we may be at a point of
unprecedented opportunity in advanced networking, what the stakes are,
and the implications for higher education. This should be a compelling
and important synthesis of technical, economic and policy developments.
Highlighted Breakout Sessions
I cannot cover all of the many breakout sessions here. However, I want
to note particularly some sessions that have strong connections to the
Coalition’s 2002-2003 Program
Plan, and also a few other sessions of special interest. We have a
packed agenda of breakout sessions, and as always will try to put material
from these sessions on our Web site following the meeting.
We will have a number of breakout sessions dealing with new technology
developments: Judith Klavans from Columbia will lead a session on
applications of computational linguistics; Ray Denenberg and Ralph Levan
will report on the next generation of search and retrieval protocols;
Betsy Humphreys from NLM will cover advances in linking biomedical information
resources; a group from NITLE will cover applications of latent semantic
indexing; and we will have an update on OAI metadata harvesting and on
the Shibboleth distributed authorization system. New or newly enhanced
information services featured in breakout sessions include ARTstor, the
Electronic Cultural Atlas project, LibQUAL+, the Vanderbilt Television
News Archive, the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), and RLG’s
RedLightGreen Union Catalog on the Web. On the standards front, we will
have an update on the METS metadata work and on cross domain networked
reference.
Work in digital preservation will be well represented, with updates
on the LOCKSS project at Stanford, the effort to develop a PDF standard
oriented towards the needs of archiving, implementation strategies for
preservation metadata, the development of virtual university archives
at the University of Wisconsin, and an analysis of economic incentives
in digital archiving by Brian Lavoie of OCLC.
As part of the continuing examination of repositories and related
topics in institutional digital asset management, there will be presentations
on the Fedora- based repositories, on the DigitalWell project for video
content at the University of Washington, ongoing work at Michigan State
University, and on digital content asset management systems and their
relationship to repositories. In addition, several sessions will explore
connections between learning management systems and digital libraries,
including a presentation from Raymond Yee of U.C., Berkeley on mappings
between digital library and learning management metadata structures, and
a report on work by IUPUI, Indiana University, ExLibris, and JISC. I will
lead a session on the joint CNI-IMS work on digital libraries and learning
management systems.
Sustainability and economic models continue to be a key focus.
We will have breakouts from Columbia University on online publishing use
and costs, from AMICO on digital art resources, and the CIC on library-university
press collaborations.
We will also have sessions exploring collaboration themes in teaching
and learning from Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago, policy
developments in security and privacy, and a session from George Brett
of Internet2 focused on user experiences with high performance networks.
I look forward to seeing you in Washington this April for what promises
to be another extremely worthwhile meeting. The snow that is falling in
the DC area as I write this (on 30 March) should be long gone, and we
can hope for beautiful spring weather. Please contact me (cliff@cni.org),
or Joan Lippincott, CNI’s Associate Director (joan@cni.org) if we
can provide you with any additional information on the meeting.
Clifford Lynch
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