CIC recently announced a new initiative in cooperation with EDUCAUSE to provide enhanced professional development opportunities for campus information technology (IT) staffs. CIC and EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology, are working to make current and future workshops under the auspices of EDUCAUSE increasingly useful to CIC member institutions.
    For the past 12 years, CIC and EDUCAUSE (previously CAUSE and Educom), have held a spring Information Technologies Workshop in Pittsburgh, tailored expressly for the needs of small to medium-sized independent institutions. This year, instead of sponsoring that particular workshop, CIC and EDUCAUSE will provide opportunities for individuals from independent colleges and universities to work together at other EDUCAUSE conferences designed for a broader higher education audience. The initiative seeks to increase access to up-to-date information, provide more in-depth coverage of certain topics of importance to CIC campuses, and connect individuals from smaller institutions so that they can learn more from one another.
    The initial such event was NERCOMP (The Northeast Regional Computing Program), held on March 17-19, in Worcester, MA.
    Additional upcoming events and meetings that will be of particular interest to CIC campus IT staffs, include:

• CUMREC (the Higher Education Administrative Technology Conference), May 12-15 in Minneapolis, MN
• EDUCAUSE Southeast Regional Conference, June 17-19 in Charleston, SC
  
• EDUCAUSE Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference, January 2003 in Baltimore, MD

    In beginning this new joint effort, CIC President Richard Ekman said "building on these EDUCAUSE workshops is part of a broader effort to assist presidents and other institutional leaders in making decisions about the purchase and use of information technologies." Ekman noted that other facets of CIC’s emerging overall strategy to address IT issues include:

• For presidents—an Information Technology Advisory Service, now being developed, as well as sessions at the Presidents Institute;
• For chief academic officers—sessions at the annual Institute for Chief Academic Officers;
• For faculty members—an electronic library of curricular resources (MERLOT) and state-by-state faculty development collaboratives, both in conjunction with the Foundation for Independent Higher Education (see related story);
• For library directors—a workshop in fall 2002 on changes in library technology and roles in instruction, in cooperation with the Council on Library and Information Resources.

For more information on the CIC/EDUCAUSE initiative, visit www.cic.edu/conferenceces
or contact CIC Senior Advisor Ed Barboni at (202) 466-7230 or ebarboni@msn.com.

Independent
The Council of Independent Colleges
One Dupont Circle NW, Suite 320 • Washington, DC 20036
tel: (202) 466-7230 • Fax: (202) 466-7238 • e-mail: cic@cic.nche.edu • www.cic.edu

Last updated: April 12, 2002
Copyright © 2002 The Council of Independent Colleges