Advisory Groups to Encourage Collaboration: A Case Study

Key Takeaways

• System-wide advisory groups can serve a key leadership role when seeking broad-based consensus on large initiatives.
• Establishing task groups with clear timelines and public deliverables creates a sense of urgency and yields quick results compared to typical standing committees.
• As SUNY found, a SWOT analysis and governance adjustment for a long-standing advisory group can be more productive than creating a new advisory group.

The State University of New York (SUNY), with more than 468,000 students across 64 campuses, is the largest and most comprehensive university system in the United States. Like most colleges and universities, SUNY has been responding to the ways that computers and the Internet are changing communication and information practices in higher education. The SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology (FACT²) has evolved over more than two decades to become a well-established venue to foster collaboration and consensus within this diverse university community. FACT² governance includes representatives from faculty, librarians, and IT across individual campuses from all Carnegie sectors. FACT² also serves as an umbrella organization, distributing information from other system-wide governance organizations. It provides a forum for addressing forward-thinking teaching and learning issues. Well-known and widely respected throughout the SUNY system, FACT² also has a history of working productively with SUNY system administration.

The movement of instructional technology into a new, even more disruptive stage lends increased urgency to responding to new technologies. While many campuses continue integrating desktops and laptops into their administrative and academic operations, each new generation of students arrives on campus with more powerful personal technology, expecting that content is, or should be, available on-demand via mobile devices. Smart phones, cloud computing, and simulation tools create new opportunities and challenges for education. As Phil Schubert recently pointed out, "Technology has changed the way we live; it also must change the way we learn."¹ Clearly, all educational institutions must integrate these new technologies effectively to support teaching and learning.

The situation in higher education today is much more complex than it was two decades ago, when the main concern was simply to provide faculty and students computer access.² The widespread adoption of social networking and mobile computing creates a discontinuity between the way young people normally learn and communicate, and how universities require them to work in the classroom. According to the New York Times, in 2010 about 75 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds owned a mobile phone.³ In contrast, some faculty members think mobile devices are a distraction and want to ban them from the classroom. Some administrators fail to realize how rapidly mobile systems have become commonplace among students.⁴

The disparity between student and faculty attitudes is equally wide with regard to social networks. Arthur Levine summarized the current situation when he wrote, "At the university, the clash between old and new is manifest in profound differences between institutions of higher education and the students they enroll."⁵ David Parry noted that "More and more college classes are becoming a net of multiple media streams, where the traditional lecture is augmented by e-books, videos, outside digital assignments, simulations and online supplemental readings, all organized by some kind of learning management system."⁶

Several structural factors make colleges prone to adapt more slowly today.

• During the past two decades, most campuses made significant investments in hardware and personnel to adapt to the desktop environment. Shifting some of this investment to new purposes will not be easy, especially when many campus budgets are under serious pressure.
• Critics, both internal and external, are pushing back vigorously against technology. Nicholas Carr is by no means alone in arguing that the Internet or other modern technology is having a negative impact on society.⁷
• Perhaps most insidiously, some assume that universities have already solved the technology problem, and have no need for dramatic change.

How can any university achieve consensus about responding to these rapid changes?

This article is a case study of how the provost and senior executive leadership of one large university system capitalized on a long-standing advisory group as a tool to support communication and collaboration across a broad constituency. These advisory efforts help guide both future directions and investment. It is the story of how this group has evolved and recently updated a mission to create more targeted outcomes in alignment with SUNY strategic planning.

System Advisory Roots

During the 1980s, a small group of faculty approached the SUNY provost and urgently requested funding for faculty and staff development. The state legislature had already allocated millions of dollars to support a new Student Computing Access Program (SCAP), but it did not include allocations for faculty development and support personnel. The SUNY provost later granted a very modest budget to create the Faculty Access to Computing Technology (FACT) advisory committee. Later dubbed the FACT Founders, this group created a visionary organization.

Harry Pence, one of the original FACT Founders, describes the need for and relevance of a SUNY-wide advisory group (1:36):

The FACT Founders immediately applied the funding to support both centralized and distributed (campus-hosted) professional development. The guiding principles that created the advisory group and underlay this broad collaboration remain in place today:

• The FACT advisory group should be as broad as possible, with (initially) one representative from each of the 64 campuses reporting through a smaller executive FACT Council that meets directly with the SUNY provost.
• Seed funding from the SUNY Office of the Provost should fund competitive grants to encourage campuses to host affordable one-day "mini-conferences" for discipline- or topic-specific workshops and forums.
• An annual SUNY Conference on Instructional Technologies (CIT) will sustain discussions on emerging academic technologies and pedagogy, and provide networking opportunities for SUNY and non-SUNY faculty and staff.
• FACT will assist with coordination of professional development and training opportunities.

FACT gained trust by being as inclusive and democratic as possible in its original bylaws. Community colleges, comprehensive colleges, and university centers have equal seats at the governing FACT Council, as do standing technology, library, and faculty senate constituent groups. In addition to these voting representatives, the provost can appoint ex-officio members from SUNY system administration to maximize collaborative opportunities.⁸

Over time, a comfortable pattern emerged where FACT campus representatives communicated information to the council during annual CIT meetings, bridging in between with listserv exchanges. Grant opportunities, managing annual SCAP funding, and conference proposals became routine. Occasionally, FACT would lobby for program initiatives, conduct surveys about instructional technology needs, and foster connections to groups such as the New Media Consortium (NMC), the Consortium of Colleges and University Media Centers (CCUMC), and other professional organizations.

Between 2005–2009, SUNY system administration experienced several high-level leadership changes, which shifted priorities. For a time, it reduced the advisory communications between FACT and the Office of the Provost as compared with the previous decade. The FACT Council began to openly question whether it needed a self-assessment to investigate the ongoing value of its advisory purpose, and whether FACT was still effective as a tool for system-wide communication and collaboration.

Lisa Stephens, Chair of FACT², describes the history and reorganization of FACT at the 2011 CIT (20:00):

Guided Self-Correction

The need to respond to new challenges gained special urgency when Nancy K. Zimpher became SUNY's twelfth chancellor in June 2009. Chancellor Zimpher immediately launched a four-stage strategic plan entitled The Power of SUNY⁹ to guide SUNY's next decade, placing strong emphasis on economic development and the value academic excellence creates through innovation, research, and development.

SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher provides a strategic plan update at the 2011 CIT (28:00):

The FACT Council, inspired by the launch of The Power of SUNY planning process, in 2009 conducted a brief strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis, which produced several conclusions:

• As instructional technologies evolved, chief academic officers had begun to appoint instructional staff (rather than tenured faculty) to both FACT campus and council positions. Although faculty members were still well-represented, the council decided to proactively identify and recruit faculty known to be working on the cutting edge of technology research and adoption.
• Campus representatives were confused about whether they could self-identify to represent their home campus or should petition their campus leadership. It was also unclear how FACT populated its governing council or related committees. The council sensed that this unintended lack of governance transparency muted service enthusiasm and commitment, and wanted to better articulate the personal and professional development benefits of its members' service to SUNY.
• The Office of the Provost had neither articulated the need for nor received clear communication from standing committees. The subcommittee structure had not evolved to stay out in front of emerging issues; FACT had fallen into routine conference planning and grant proposal evaluation.
• Increased budget pressures made obtaining discretionary service time to system-wide initiatives difficult. There might have been a hesitancy to expend this time without a clear understanding of campus-level or professional development benefits.

An executive committee made up of the provost's administrative liaison, the incoming and outgoing FACT Council chairs, and the director of the SUNY Center for Professional Development (a system-wide resource for training and development that also supports some FACT initiatives), outlined a new plan to respond to these concerns.

The executive committee also illustrated the themes shown in Figure 1. The provost had identified these as advisory needs, in no particular order.

Figure 1. Advisory Themes with Year One Task Group Response

FACT could best serve the university in the areas of:

• Policy issues–providing guidance for effectively responding to policy inquiries from internal and external bodies (federal, state, and various accreditation agencies), particularly when they concerned new teaching technologies and trends;
• Instructional innovation–identifying best practices and encouraging faculty and staff at the campus level to collaborate regarding instructional innovation across the entire system;
• Learning spaces–providing advice about physical and virtual environments, particularly where SUNY policies and space-planning guidelines might be out of step with new technologies and best practices that could maximize instructional facility flexibility;
• Academic software applications–receiving feedback at the local campus from instructors and staff and supporting "right sizing" of system-wide software and educational services; and
• Special task force charges–advising SUNY leadership as part of an especially charged, formal advisory process.

Next, the executive committee reviewed the past several years of FACT business cycles to create a predictable schedule of events, timelines, and benchmarks (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Annual Cycle for Advisory Meetings and Tasks

This single executive session, followed by a discussion with the FACT Council, charted a fresh course. A bylaws revision already under way addressed some of these issues as well as a name update from Faculty Access to Computing Technology to the Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology (FACT²). The name of the annual conference was also slightly updated to the Conference on Instruction and Technology. The objective was to preserve the integrity of past FACT efforts, acknowledge that "access" held different meanings to various groups, and move forward with a plan to reengage SUNY-wide campus advisors in the service of teaching, learning, and technology.

To address the issues identified in the SWOT analysis, the council agreed that future appointments should (in the short term) favor tenured or full-time teaching faculty to reinstate a balance between faculty and staff. (The council quickly accomplished this goal by filling four vacancies with faculty.) FACT also changed its bylaws to offer each campus the option of appointing two representatives, one from the faculty ranks and another from the professional staff (instructional designers or technologists in a direct faculty support role).

In addition, FACT introduced term limits at the council level to:

• Reassure local campus leadership of a commitment duration
• Provide fresh perspectives and recruit advisors with topical expertise
• Create a path of service from task groups or other FACT²-related service to a FACT² Council leadership position

FACT² also limited standing committees or replaced them with task groups that had clear charters and a timeline for deliverables mapped to the advisory themes identified by the provost.

The SWOT analysis proved both healthy and productive. It did not occur, however, without acknowledging that the bylaws update and name change might prove uncomfortable to some of the FACT Founders, many of whom remain active within SUNY and CIT.

Under the chancellor's strategic framework, SUNY Provost David Lavallee recognized that the newly renamed FACT² could explore "facts on the ground" by bringing a variety of stakeholders together to discuss system-wide challenges. He identified three priorities that required task groups (Figure 1):

• A teaching and learning task group to conduct an environmental scan to better understand (and potentially leverage) campus resources and support mechanisms to more effectively share pockets of expertise
• A digital publishing (e-Pub) task group to better understand how to best leverage the emergence of digital publishing and open learning, potentially leading to greater purchasing efficiency and digital textbook adoption
• A learning environment task group to better understand evolving learning spaces and encourage greater partnership, policies, and planning among those who design spaces and those who use them to create investment in capital facilities that enhance flexibility and adaptability over time.

FACT² put the new bylaws and processes to the test by responding to the provost's call for advisement in these areas. Council members volunteered to lead the inaugural task group efforts in the three areas. The task group chairs followed the new timeline governing activities and interim reports, and ultimately presented to the provost and their peers at CIT in May 2011.

SUNY Provost David Lavallee describes his view of the FACT² Task Group initiatives and outcomes (2:00):

Benefits Realized Through New Initiatives

In spite of being heavily populated by tech-savvy participants, the task groups agreed that none of this work was about technology use per se, but rather about providing baseline communication and collaboration channels to reach consensus on technology and teaching.

Each group reached similar conclusions regarding the mechanisms for communication and collaboration. Once formed (typically by reaching out through existing SUNY-wide e-mail lists to recruit members), the groups took advantage of phone conferencing with web software that allowed for document sharing and annotation (Elluminate or Adobe Connect). All groups found that sticking to the basics of e-mail and some type of common document sharing platform (SharePoint or Confluence) was sufficient to conduct their work. All task groups, however, thought that lacking a common, centrally supported, and well-understood sharing platform available to all participants (both within and external to SUNY) would limit progress and productivity.

A summary description of the provost's initial charge and outcomes for each of the task groups follows.

SUNY Provost David Lavallee's CIT 2011 address describes implementation of the SUNY Strategic Plan and Report Card initiative, followed by Q&A at the 2011 CIT (47:00):

Teaching and Learning Task Group

During the late 1990s, SUNY faculty teaching and learning support centers enjoyed open communication and cooperation. Over time, key personnel moved on, intra-campus communication declined, and several campus-level efforts became less clear and coordinated. Given SUNY's complexity and diversity, FACT² assumed that:

• The resources, processes, and practices associated with instructional support varied significantly from campus to campus, even within the same campus type.
• Pockets of excellence could benefit broader audiences.
• Networking and information sharing within the campus teaching and learning community was key to moving forward.
• Little information was available to enable peer benchmarking of teaching and learning centers.
• Professional development opportunities existed through shared resources.

Graham Glynn, chair of the FACT² Teaching and Learning Task Group, briefly describes this group's initiative (3:00):

Thirty-one faculty and staff members agreed to assist with the task group effort, relying on old e-mail lists, word-of-mouth, and sleuthing to identify the best points of contact within each campus to gather more information.

Significant Challenges

The task group developed a SUNY-wide survey of teaching and learning centers. Given recent and significant SUNY budget reductions, the group was concerned that survey participants would perceive a survey about resources, particularly one about staffing and funding levels, as an administrative effort to find efficiencies that did not align with local campus objectives and priorities. So the group reassured participants that this was a grassroots effort and that any reports would illustrate the data in aggregate.

The group spent significant time exploring campus websites to fill in missing contact information and determine what support organizations existed at the campuses. Survey invitations went to the people identified, with a request to forward it if the recipient was not the most appropriate person to respond. Although this process required significant effort, it preserved the perception of a sincere grassroots effort, which ultimately resulted in a higher response rate and better quality data.

Lessons Learned

In all, 39 of 64 campuses responded. The group presented its preliminary analysis at CIT, and the provost indicated that he will share the final report with stakeholders across the system.

Early feedback at CIT was encouraging; the data will enable faculty and staff to help make a case to their local administration for improving the resources allocated to faculty development. The survey made clear that SUNY has significant excellence in teaching and learning across the system, as well as a willingness to share best practices if additional communication mechanisms and resources become available.

Next Steps

The task group chair has completed a final report. Key recommendations include:

• Creation of new SUNY-wide online teaching and learning resources
• Further exploration of campus needs that could be served centrally and the resources needed to provide them
• Leveraging of contact information from the survey to create mutually supporting communities of practice for both faculty and professional staff committees in this area

Digital Publishing (e-Pub) Task Group

Commercial publishing has shifted dramatically over the past several years. E-textbooks might provide richer learning opportunities and cost savings for students, but in a flurry of innovation, little is known or understood about how to best capitalize on these resources and their learning impact.

Mary Jo Orzech, chair of the FACT² E-Pub Task Group, briefly describes this group's initiative (3:00):

The group set its initial advisory goals to:

• Collect information on e-publishing models and practices used in SUNY and other higher education systems
• Advise the SUNY Office of Library and Information Services (OLIS) on e-publishing trends and develop policy recommendations to inform business decision-making about content
• Communicate with stakeholders throughout the system about best practices regarding e-publishing, content creation, digital rights management, and so on

Significant Challenges

The E-Pub Task Group consisted of 15 teaching faculty members, emeriti, and librarians from various SUNY college sectors as well as SUNY Center for Professional Development staff. An early challenge the group faced was to ensure that their discussions represented the diverse populations in SUNY, including bookstore managers. Student representation and a member with specific interest in open educational resources (OER) also joined the team. New York legislators have taken a keen interest in the issue, providing a liaison with a legislative subcommittee.

Lessons Learned

Early work focused on review of four initiatives, from which the group drew a comparative matrix.

The group focused on two underlying issues: whether students really save money, and how e-textbooks affect student learning. Publisher representatives often cite savings of 25 to 50 percent of the cost of a new book (assuming that the students cannot purchase a used textbook). A more accurate measure is to compare e-textbook costs with a hardcopy textbook's net cost; that is, the cost of a used book minus its resale price. Also, some e-book models are rentals; students have access to a book for a limited time, and cannot sell the license to another user. This situation has significant drawbacks, especially for textbooks related to a student's major. Other important factors include the following:

• Range of choices: Faculty members should be able to pick the textbook that best matches their syllabus; students should be able to choose the format, hardcopy or electronic, that is most effective for their personal study habits; and campus bookstores should be able to choose a service model that is most efficient for them. Choice is particularly relevant when considering accessibility.
• Enhanced presentation: E-textbooks that are merely an electronic version of the print copy are often inadequate. This format is fine for pleasure reading, but an e-textbook ideally should include hyperlinks both within and outside of the text to resources like video, three-dimensional illustrations, and user-controlled simulations. True screen reading is different from page reading, and to fully use these new capabilities, students and faculty will need appropriate training to make a conversion to e-textbooks successful.

Next Steps

Some early signs of success include:

• Communication between SUNY and legislative staff to keep them informed of E-Pub task group activities in light of related legislation
• Clear interest in continuing this work, evident in the high attendance at the CIT presentation and lively group working session
• An exploratory study related to the use of e-textbooks at one SUNY campus provided initial data related to student perspectives (the task group is monitoring and encouraging additional evidence-based initiatives)¹⁰
• Announcement of a one-day conference following Open Access Week in Syracuse, New York, to share results and current best practices

The E-Pub Task Group will sponsor a study by several SUNY faculty members about how well Kno software works for education. The group is also monitoring OER use and will continue to explore further options that employ SUNY's scale and diversity to collect useful information.

Learning Environments Task Group

Design and implementation of learning environments can be particularly challenging for instructional technologists. Hardware and software update on a regular cycle, but in contrast to the facilities-based longevity of classrooms, laboratories, and conference rooms as well as other teaching, learning, and collaboration spaces, it's humbling that they often outlast an individual's employment tenure.

Chair Joseph Moreau describes the FACT² Learning Environments Task Group's initiative (2:00):

 Group representatives immediately reached out to the CCUMC and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) to seek advice on current resources for understanding flexible learning-space design. It was not surprising, given SUNY's size and complexity, that most task group members were unfamiliar with the internal mechanisms of how SUNY designs, funds, and constructs its capital facilities, so it was invaluable to have two group members from the SUNY Construction Fund.

Members shared a nearly overwhelming number of studies, documents, and websites in a SUNY-wide wiki. The wiki's limitations illustrated a clear need for a collaborative and searchable database-driven solution with an advanced taxonomy to warehouse ideas, plans, policies, and photographs of learning environments. Such a resource would be particularly valuable if it could categorize information based on discipline-specific needs. For example, it would be helpful to search for innovative chemistry lab designs that accommodate 15 to 20 students and could also serve as biology and/or physics labs with advanced imaging and display systems.

Significant Challenges

Numerous colleges and universities promote their best work on websites, including their policies and standards for design and utilization. Several higher education professional associations had developed white papers and reports on the need for highly adaptable learning environments. EDUCAUSE created a seminal work on learning environment design, the Learning Spaces e-book, which features some of the most innovative space designs in higher education. As valuable as these resources are, they are static — fixed in time and format. The group developed a vision for a dynamic reference platform that would support ongoing and evolving contributions and search on multiple criteria. It would include a rich data set including still images, video, and technical specifications, as well as learning outcomes and instructional delivery methods considered in the design. Such a resource did not appear to exist.

The group continued to gather ideas about the structure and content of what they later dubbed the Innovative Instructional Space Repository (IISR). Wiki collaboration continued collecting rich ideas for desired features. The group understood how to create the IISR database, but none of the participants had enough staff resources for such a project. Was there a commercial platform they could adapt, such as Facebook, Flickr, or Google Apps? All these options met some subset of the group's criteria, but none incorporated all the features they envisioned for IISR. The group became discouraged.

During the 2011 NorthEast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP) conference, an EDUCAUSE affiliate, some task group members saw a demonstration of ARTstor's Shared Shelf. A developer of one of the world's largest image repositories, ARTstor seemed to offer a relatively easy method to store, catalog, and publish images, videos, and documents with substantial metadata. Group members immediately recognized the synergy between their mission and Shared Shelf's objectives. Strategic discussions ensued, leading to plans for a proof-of-concept project (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. IISR Concept Map

Lessons Learned

Throughout this process, the group learned the following:

• Invest time up front to clarify needs; it's critical. The group could have moved forward with several solutions, but it was worth the time spent articulating a pie-in-the-sky solution that it could scale to meet growth. By the time the group identified a potential solution, it already shared a vision.
• Be quick to seek help once outside the group's operational comfort zone. For example, this group had plenty of experts in space and classroom technology design, but knew less about design taxonomies and the metadata to support database development. It should have recognized this shortcoming and included librarians from the start.
• Be comfortable with uncertainty. There is no guarantee that the collaborative database vision will materialize, but there was trust that the group was working toward a common goal and willing to take risks and invest time in pursuing a proof of concept.

Next Steps

The focus has quickly shifted to developing strategies to populate IISR with high-quality design samples. Scaling IISR from a few proof-of-concept campuses to a national higher education forum is relatively simple from a technical perspective. If the planned proof of concept is successful, the practicality of reaching this scale is an entirely different matter. Group members anticipate returning to their colleagues at ELI and CCUMC to explore how this SUNY task group can be the catalyst for expansion. The Learning Environments Task Group hopes that other public and private systems will be eager to collaborate on establishing IISR as an international resource.

Replicating Success

The collaborative mechanisms described here did not develop overnight. They took decades of farsighted planning by the entire SUNY system, encouraged and supported by a succession of SUNY provosts and chancellors. Any college or university that has not begun to develop well-designed processes to combine broad-based input from all stakeholders with ongoing administrative support should seriously consider beginning such an effort. The opportunity cost of introducing new technologies provides ample fodder for contentious topics that will need such a collaborative advisory mechanism.

The FACT² approach to collaboration uses task groups as an important focus. With the benefit of two decades of hindsight, FACT² offers the following as a guide to replicating successful outcomes:

• Ensure senior administrative buy-in to the advisory group from the beginning (both at the system administration and campus levels).
• Identify well-defined goals and deliverables that align with organizational goals.
• Choose team members who are results-oriented and committed to success.
• Create a supportive environment for sharing information.
• Hold members accountable with agreed upon timelines.
• Be as transparent as possible.
• Follow through to ensure recommendations fold into an organization's overall strategic planning efforts and receive full consideration.
• Market the benefits of these efforts through multiple channels. Be clear and concise about the benefits of contributing to broader efforts at the individual professional development, campus, and system-wide levels.
• Demonstrate that information is being communicated to the highest levels. (The provost's liaison and council chair play a critical role in this.)
• Ensure that effective organizational change is sustainable by linking efforts to roles rather than individuals.

Carey Hatch, Provost Liaison to FACT², reflects on the benefits of reorganization (1:00):

Perhaps the most important conclusion that other colleges can draw from the SUNY experience is that for the foreseeable future, higher education will be in a constant state of flux because of unexpected societal and technological changes. In the case of SUNY, the chancellor recently announced the creation of Campus Alliance Networks, intended to increase the level of shared services among regional campuses. This reinforces the need for solid collaboration SUNY-wide. Not only is it good politics to involve as many stakeholders as possible in decisions, it will be essential. The tempo of change is too fast for any single person or even a small group to manage. The best strategy will be to create effective governance that allows for maximum input. Even the newest faculty or staff member can offer evaluations beyond the imaginations of more experienced colleagues. Not every campus will need a FACT², but every campus does need a mechanism that allows for the maximum discussion involving a diverse set of viewpoints.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the contributions of Jared Stanley, television producer/director, and David Geasey, director, Creative Media Services, SUNY College at Oneonta, for capturing video commentary and presentations at the 2011 CIT. The authors thank Richard Lesniak, IT Policy and Communications Officer, University at Buffalo, Carey Hatch, John Schumacher, and Kim Scalzo from SUNY System Administration and Steven McIntosh, Associate Dean of Instructional Technology–Suffolk Community College for their assistance with this article.

1. Phil Schubert, "Grasping the Realities of Educating in the Digital Age," EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 46, no. 2 (March/April 2011).
2. Harry E. Pence and Steven McIntosh, "Refocusing the Vision: The Future of Instructional Technology," Journal of Educational Technology Systems, vol. 39, no. 2 (2010–2011), pp. 173–181.
3. Stephanie Olsen, "When to Buy Your Child a Cellphone," New York Times, June 9, 2010, p. B6.
4. Liz Kolb, Toys to Tools: Connecting Student Cell Phones to Education (Eugene, Oregon: International Society for Technology in Education, 2008).
5. Arthur Levine, "Digital Students, Industrial-Era Universities," Inside Higher Ed, June 14, 2010.
6. David Parry, "Mobile Perspectives: On Teaching Mobile Literacy," EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 46, no. 2 (March/April 2011).
7. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010).
8. More details are available at the FACT² website.
9. Power of SUNY Strategic Plan website.
10. Pat Maxwell, Jennifer Little, and Susan Stites-Doe, "Are Students Ready to Declare Their Independence from the Printed Text? An Explorative Study of the Use of E-Textbooks," poster session presented at ACRL, Philadelphia, PA, 2011.

© 2011 Lisa A. Stephens, Graham Glynn, David Lavallee, Joseph Moreau, Mary Jo Orzech and Harry E. Pence. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license.