ORLANDO, Fla.
At the final national conference held here last
month under the venerable name of Educom, David A. Staudt, along with
hundreds of college and university information technology
professionals, began charting a course for higher education’s new
information technology organization, Educause.
Educause was officially born this summer of a merger between Educom
and CAUSE. Under the old regime, CAUSE was an association that helped
its members to focus on the school administrative side of managing and
using information resources and technology. CAUSE had members from
1,400 colleges and universities, and more than eighty corporations.
Educom, which was also a non-profit consortium of colleges,
universities, and other organizations, focused on academic computing
issues through the application of information technologies. In addition
to 600 institutional members, Educom had nearly 100 corporate
associates.
Last summer, Staudt became Educause’s networking outreach director.
During the Educom conference, he expressed Educause’s interest in
reaching out to minority-serving institutions, financially strapped
schools, and geographically remote institutions.
“What are underserved institutions?,” he said. “They are
essentially all the higher education institutions that want
high-performance computing networks, but can’t get them for some reason
or another.”
Staudt told the audience that Educause is undertaking a consulting
role to help institutions find low-cost information technology
infrastructure solutions. Part of that effort is to help schools build
high-speed and high-capacity campus computer networks.
“High-performance networking is an exclusive club in higher education,” Staudt added.
