Web Apps in Higher Education

March 25th, 2008

Yesterday I was chatting with my colleague Cory Cone (about Bodyworlds, painting, and a bit of work) and he asked me why we weren’t using more web apps across our enterprise — or if we had thought of doing that. (When I say “web apps” here I am talking about web apps offered to higher education institutions by folks like Google and Microsoft.) My lame answer was that yes, we have been thinking about it and, well, there are some complicated reasons why we haven’t done more of it. (When higher ed administrators don’t have a good answer, you know, we say that the answers are many and complex.) Some of those complex answers have been hashed out thoughtfully over at the CIO forum at EDUCAUSE.

This morning I was reading a post by Floyd Teter over at ORCLville about an experiment he is conducting this month “of attempting to go an entire month without using locally-based apps for anything.” (Speaking of web apps and Oracle: my wife told me the other day that when I say “I was talking to Oracle the other day . . .” she imagines that I am having a serious work chat with the LinkedIn wizard guy at right.)

I still don’t know the answer(s) to Cory’s question. We are pushing so much of our administrative work to web based systems that we host, could/should some of that go to free-ish web apps that we don’t host? I don’t want to open up a new debate (see the EDUCAUSE link above for many reasons why and why not to do it), but I do think it is a good question to keep asking and keep trying to answer it.

Thanks Cory for asking the question (again), thanks Floyd for sharing with us (again), and thank you all for reading.
Ted Simpson
March Guest Blogger

Director, Technologist, Dragoman & Project Manager
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu

Entry Filed under: eduWeb Conference, Web Development, Web Apps