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TechTalks Event

Campus and Student Portals: Where Are We Today?

with guest experts
Michael Handberg of PricewaterhouseCoopers;
Oren Sreebny of the University of Washington; and
Pennie S. Turgeon of Worcester Polytechnic Institute�

October 12, 2000

Audio
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Transcript

This was one of our best and most entertaining sessions! What is a portal? (Are we still asking that?) How are institutions tackling the portal issue? Who's doing what? Does the "academic" model portal differ from the "business" model portal? Build your own or buy off the shelf? Where should you start and what should you do? CREN interviewed three portal experts for you. They represent a great depth and a vast range of expertise and you can listen to the archived audio at your leisure.

Guest Experts

Michael HandbergMichael Handberg is a Principal Consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, in Minneapolis. He was formerly with the University of Minnesota where, among many other roles, he was Director of Enterprise Web Development. He's been an active presenter at EDUCAUSE and WebDev annual conferences, and has received the WebdevShare Sallie Mae Prestige Award. He's a member of the Minnesota team which was named a "best practice" partner by IBM's Innovation in Student Services Forum for being innovative in student service delivery and addressing the fundamental change elements of people, process, and technology.

Oren SreebnyOren Sreebny is Assistant Director of Computing & Communications (C&C) at the University of Washington. He oversees the Client Services functions, including responsibility for consulting, help desk, computer training, account management, desktop support, and policy issues. Oren has been involved in the award winning UWired collaboration, which promotes innovation in teaching and learning through technology, since its inception in 1994. He is a member of C&C's Security Infrastructure Team, which is grappling with thorny issues of secure architectures for widely distributed computing. Lately, Oren has been participating in the rollout and design of MyUW, the UW's portal system, where he is currently herding the cats towards a design of a portal view for teaching faculty.

Oren had ten years experience in database and software development in the commercial sector prior to coming to the UW in 1994. Before getting professionally involved in technology he had a ten-year career in the music world, playing bass in blues, R&B, and jazz groups and doing sound engineering, which allows him to be highly opinionated on the topics of digital distribution of music and other art forms.

Pennie TurgeonPennie Turgeon is the Director of Instructional Media and Distance Learnin for the division of Information Technology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Turgeon, who also received her MBA from WPI in 1991, is responsible for promoting, developing and supporting the use of information technology in teaching, learning and scholarship. Over her tenure at WPI, she has worked on a variety of educational technology initiatives including the design, build and ongoing support of the University's satellite and videoconferencing facilities, electronic classrooms, multimedia resource lab and various other media production, editing and conversion services in support of the faculty at WPI. She also has overall responsibility for the University's distance learning operation - the Advanced Distance Learning Network. More recently, she was the team leader for the selection and implementation of WPI's course management system and is currently the project manager for the ongoing implementation of the University's information and learning portal - myWPI.

Co-Hosts

Howard Strauss, Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton University and all-around Web and portal guru, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.

Co-Host Terry Calhoun is the Director of Electronic Communications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) and owner of the University Web Developer's List (UWEBD). Together, Howard and Terry will ask the really tough questions—and relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.

Background & Resources

Previously-archived CREN Tech Talks, with streaming audio, transcribed audio to read, and hyperlinked resource lists, are great, bookmarkable resources. Here are a couple of earlier CREN events about campus portals: What Is a Portal? (01/00) (linked as part of this resource are 28 Questions and Brief Answers on Portals by Howard Strauss); and Preparing for Campus Portals with Christine Geith and Collette Wagner (03/30/00)

Howard thinks we may want you to visit "MyHarvard" and has ferreted out "dummy" passwords to get you in there both as a student and as a faculty member. To go in as a student, user name (HUID): 00000000 and password (PIN): 000000. To go in as a faculty member, user name (HUID): 11111111 and password (PIN): 000000.

Pennie has also supplied us with some of her favorite "portal" hyperlinks. They include:

Oren will refer to: