CIO Blog - by Pablo Molina - (4439 Visitors)

The annual Law Center staff technology retreat takes place on June 3 from 9:30am to 11:00am in McDonough 200. A light breakfast buffet helps to promote attendance. The session is an overview of technology trends.
For faculty members, the Law Center faculty technology retreat takes place on June 4 from 11:00am to 12:00pm. It starts with a discussion of Macs vs. PCs in Hotung 2000, followed by lunch and an overview of technology trends in the Hotung Dining Room from 12:00pm to 1:30pm.

I have just published a piece on EDUCAUSE Review about diversity in the work place. Basically, I believe that the diversity of the people in my team make us an efficient, creative, and resourceful organization. Also, I extol the values of organizations promoting diversity in technology leadership like the Hispanic Technology Council and the Information Technology Senior Management Forum. In the same piece, I issue a call to arms for educators worldwide to increase their diversity efforts.

I recently became a Certified Information Privacy Professional. I strongly recommend that technology executives responsible for the management of personal and private information educate themselves in privacy issues through EPIC, IAPP, and other organizations with an interest in this field.

Did the recent decision by Facebook to seek users input on policies originate in a Georgetown University Law Center classroom? Adjunct faculty member and Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Marc Rotenberg put the videoconferencing technologies in classroom Hotung 1000 to good use last Tuesday. On February 24, 2009, Marc set up a discussion between Facebook's privacy counsel and Anne Kathrine Yojana Petteroe, an organizer of a Facebook protest organizer. Ann Katherine was on a Skype call from Norway, and was able to interact with the students because of all the microphones in the room. Marc was quoted in USA Today: "We actually played out in my class with the head of Facebook and with the head of the organizer of the protest, how to make changes to the terms of service. I actually saw things today that we had talked about in class. One of the ideas that came up on Tuesday...(was) giving people a chance to vote. And that was in the new statement of principles." Below is the link to the full article.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2009-02-26-facebook_N.htm

If you would like to use videoconferencing technology at the Law Center, to invite remote speakers or to participate in away meetings without leaving a carbon footprint or a hole in your budget, please contact the audiovisual department at audiovis@law.georgetown.edu or 202-6629284.

In 2008, 349 students answered the questions of the annual technology survey. Please show that you care about making the Georgetown University Law Center a better place and take a couple of minutes to answer a handful of multiple choice questions, with or without comments, by clicking on http://www.law.georgetown.edu/forms/?formid=269. In 2001, I founded the Law CIO Group for technology officers from the top law schools in the US and the UK. This year some of these schools are adopting the same survey questions as Georgetown Law so that we can compare results. The survey is critical to encourage school administrators to support technology initiatives benefitting the students. It also provides team members with student feedback and helps ups improve technology services. The survey closes on Friday, February 6, 2009, at 2:00pm. I also would like to encourage faculty and staff members to provide direct feedback by email, over the phone, or in person to any member of the technology team.

January 28, 2009 is International Privacy Day. Designated by the Council of Europe three years ago, this day is meant to raise awareness and educate the public about the importance of privacy in every context. In line with my work on the Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center at www.epic.org and my commitment to privacy at Georgetown University, I would like to encourage all community members and visitors to be mindful of privacy and to support privacy efforts worldwide personally, professionally, and financially.

Millions of Windows computers worldwide are being infected with the Downadup or Conficker computer worm. The worm infects computers located on the same network or through the use of infected USB drives. Thousands of faculty, staff, students, and visitors who connect their computers to our campus networks may be at risk of contracting the worm. To be safe, please follow our advice of patching your computers regularly and using up-to-date antivirus software. As usual, our Technology Reference Desk is ready to help those who would like to learn how to take care of their computers.

I would like to share with you the news about two major technology initiatives impacting the Georgetown University Law Center Campus in the near future. The first one is the upgrade of our student information system. The student information system is used by students to register for courses and to check grades, by faculty as one of the many ways to contact the students in a course, and by staff members to conduct academic administration tasks. After years of planning and preparation, several components of the new system will go live at different points in time during the 2009 calendar year. Expect disruptions. The second major technology initiative is an ambitious web site redesign process which will culminate with a new web presence for the institution in the summer of 2010. Elissa Free in the Communications department and I are managing the process and welcome your comments and suggestions via the webmaster@law.georgetown.edu email account or in person. Finally, I would like to remind all community members to remain vigilant about information security and privacy issues. In spite of the success of our spam management service and firewalls in blocking most fraudulent messages and attacks, online theft, identity theft, phishing scams, and data leaks are threats to all Internet users.

Many law schools stream their conferences and academic events to the world. The Georgetown University Law Center web site, for example, receives over one million visitors per year, most of them coming to watch videoclips or listen to podcasts. To make it easier for Internet users anywhere in the world to watch legal education videos, we have created a channel called LegalEducation on YouTube, available on-line at http://www.youtube.com/legaleducation. Please subscribe to the channel and contribute your own video materials.

For more than twenty years, the Law Center has recorded classes under special circumstances with the approval of the academic administration. In 2007, the Information Systems and Technology department switched from using antiquated cassette tapes to an all-digital recording and secure delivery system. Besides being more convenient to the students and incurring lower labor costs, the new system saved the Law Center and its student population from having to purchase and dispose of 4,000 cassette tapes during its first year of operation.

In 2005, the Information Systems and Technology department upgraded the cooling and electrical systems in the data center of the campus. The project received an APC InfraStruXure award. It also translated into significant on-going power savings.

On April, 28, 2008, the Georgetown University Law Center hosted a panel of European Parlament representatives and professor to discus Emerging Privacy Issues Between the US and EU: Bridging the Transatlantic Gap. Watch the video of the session at

http://www.law.georgetown.edu/webcast/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=557

The United States and the European Union are confronting many common privacy challenges - promoting trust and confidence for Internet commerce, developing safeguards for behavioral targeting and search histories, security breach notification and identity theft. There are also areas - identification requirements, border control and passenger record transfers - where national security requirements appear to conflict with privacy laws. The panelists discussed current efforts to address these challenges.

Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University Law Center Sophia in't Veld, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (Netherlands) Baroness Sarah Ludford, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (United Kingdom) Alexander Alvaro, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (Germany) Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (Netherlands) Ignasi Guardans Cambo, Member of European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (Spain) Adam Levitin, Professor, Georgetown University Law Center

With the increasing cost of energy and declining environmental health of the planet, it is everybody's duty to use resources more efficiently. The Georgetown University Law Center Information Systems and Technology team has worked with community members to reduce the negative environmental impact of using technology. Three of our most successful initiatives are: setting up double-side printing by default, abandoning audiotapes and videotapes in favor of digital recordings, and consuming less energy by using flat panel monitors insteada of old ones.

When the Information Systems and Technology department started replacing old monitors with flat panel monitors at the Law Center in 2003, it made sense not only in ergonomic terms but also in economic and environmental ones. We reduced by $50,000 per year the Law Center electrical bill and are using 82% less electricity, from 460,000 Kilowatts to 80,000 Kilowatts, per year. A standard 17” monitor consumes 204 Watts per hour, that is, 2.04 Kilowatts per day using a conservative estimate of 10 hours of usage per day. At a cost of 13 cents per Kilowatt, it costs about 27 cents per monitor per day. With 247 working days in the calendar, that comes out to about 504 Kilowatts or $67 per monitor per year. Because there are about 907 monitors in the Law Center Campus, it would take about 457,128 Kilowatts or about $60,679 to operate them per year. A flat panel LCD monitor consumes 36 Watts per hour, that is, .360 Kilowatts per day using a conservative estimate of 10 hours of usage per day. At a cost of 13 cents per Kilowatt, it costs about 5 cents per monitor per day. With 247 working days in the calendar, that comes out to about 89 Kilowatts or $12 per monitor per year. Because there are 907 flat panel monitors in the Law Center Campus, it takes about 80,723 Kilowatts and it costs about $10,494 to operate them per year.

An interesting corollary to conserve resources is for community members to turn off their computers every time they step out of the office for more than two hours.

Computerworld's Robert L. Mitchell writes about the arrival of Macs in the enterprise and cites interesting developments at Georgetown University. Click on Apple: Kicking Down a Back Door to the Enterprise to read this fascinating news piece.

On January 3, 2008 an external computer hard drive was reported stolen from a locked office within the Office of Student Affairs on the Georgetown University Main Campus. The hard drive may have contained social security numbers and other information about approximately 38,000 Georgetown University community members, most of them alumni and students. Almost a month later, the University informed potentially affected individuals, the community at large, and the world about the incident. At the same time, the President of the University, Jack DeGioia asked all University employees to conduct a new information security and privacy campaign.

The purpose of the campaign is to identify and control the management of confidential information within the institution. Technology solutions for content monitoring and filtering and for data loss prevention have come a long way but are still in their infancy. Their effectiveness is limited in the open computing environments of higher education. In my opinion, awareness and training ought to be our primary focus. We should help alumni, faculty, staff, students, and other community members guard their privacy and that of others by providing periodic communications and training sessions. In general, we should rely on common sense when handling confidential information. If we must store confidential information, let us do so in locked spaces for physical records, and on network or encrypted drives for electronic records.

I have the pleasure of serving on the Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, EPIC. The EPIC Executive Director and Georgetown University adjunct faculty member, Marc Rotenberg recently challenged the institution in a public forum to rise to the occasion. He proposed, and I agree, that universities should join other organizations in advocating for simpler and more affordable ways for students and the general public to safeguard our privacy, and to protect preemptively and to monitor our credit histories. By all accounts, data losses and identity theft are on the rise and every person needs reasonable protections against them. For more information, please visit the Information Systems and Technology Privacy web site at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/ist/privacy. Feel free to contact any of my team members or me with questions and comments.

I have recently joined the Advisory Board of one of the most influential privacy organizations in the world: the Electronic Privacy Information Center led by Marc Rotenberg. The web site is located at http://www.epic.org. Every technologist, and every person, must become aware of privacy issues. I encourage you to vist the EPIC site periodically and subscribe to the newsletter.

ED TECH Magazine recently published an interesting story on the Georgetown University Law Center's efforts, particularly those of my team members, to adopt early new technologies for the benefit of faculty, staff, students, and other community members. The piece covers Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, Apple Leopard, and Microsoft Office 2008 for Macs.

http://www.edtechmag.com/higher/september-october-2007/index.php

Incidentally, I must say that it takes real talent to make an ugly person like me look nice on the cover of a magazine. If you need a good photographer, I may know of one...

The July 9, 2007 issue of ComputerWorld quotes some Georgetown University Law Center team members and covers some of our latest initiatives.

Thanks to the hard work of my team members, I was recognized as one of the Top 40 Under 40 IT Innovators. There is even a nice picture of me, taken by my dear friend Holly Eaton.

National Correspondent for Computerworld, Robert L. Mitchell, quotes me regarding the growth of Mac use on our campus. Three years ago less than one percent of the students owned a Mac. Today the percentage of students using Macs is more than 25%.

http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/5497

Go, get a Mac!

On June 15 and 16 of 2007, I joined several talented Hispanic technology executives from across the nation in New York City for the founding summit of an interesting non-profit organization devoted to promoting the role of Hispanics in technology leadership.

http://www.hitecglobal.org/

If you are interested in this project or know of anybody who may be, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I was recently honored with a couple of information security award nominations: 2007 Information Security Executive of the Year National Award Nominee and 2007 Information Security Executive of the Year Mid-Atlantic Award Nominee. The credit for these nominations belongs to all of my team members and the institutional commitment to educate community members, and the public at large, about information security issues. Lately, we have been encouraging everybody to use encrypted USB keys, so that the information contain in them is not exposed in case of theft or loss, and privacy screen filters for laptop computers, to reduce both distractions while in class and unwelcomed glances.

I have recently learned that our Information Security Officer, Dimo Michailov, runs a fascinating web site at http://www.cybercrimelaw.org. Check it out!

With the release of Vista, and soon a new version of Microsoft Office, we begin an aggressive deployment schedule. We continue to test how well the systems that we use work on Vista, examine the spread of Vista in higher education and the general market, scrutinize reports from technology experts, listen to the recommendations of our strategic software and hardware vendors, and start planning the rollout of Vista. Although we follow a standard replacement cycle for computers at the institution, we must ensure that new community members, particularly new generations of students, find that our public computers have the latest technologies. I was quoted recently on Bloomberg News about adopting Vista.

Bloomberg News Vista Quote

A key component of the new strategic plan for technology at the Law Center is how legal education will be transformed in the next two decades, partly because of technology developments. Some of our faculty members envision walking into a classroom where they can request aloud that the system show the Godfather film clip in which Don Vito Corleone makes an offer you cannot refuse. Others would like to type their names or those of their colleagues and have their entire intellectual production one-click away. Some students dream about laptop computers without hard disks that can operate for many hours on their batteries. Others believe that sophisticated mobile phones with voice-recognition will make computers obsolete. Administrators envision teaching sessions in which students and faculty members seat in different continents. How do you see the future of legal education?

The link below will take you to an interesting two-page article on leadership that I have just published in the May issue of EDUCAUSE Review.

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0535.pdf

The high-tech courtrooms here at the Law Center are the subject of a story that aired in Hispanics Today on NBC affiliates in April. The five-minute segment features interviews with several people at the Law Center and demonstrates how faculty and students use the technology.

The video clip is also available on-line, in Real Player format, at:

http://media.law.georgetown.edu:8080/ramgen/ballantyne/mootcourt.rm