CIO Blog - by Pablo Molina - (4437 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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!