Just when I’d stopped opening doors,
Finally knowing the one that I wanted was yours,
Making my entrance again with my usual flair,
Sure of my lines,
No one is there.
Newer, faster, better! If there’s one difference between higher education and state government, it is that higher education wants the latest technology, while state government seems more content to use current systems, even if cumbersome or unwieldy.
Don’t worry if higher education doesn’t yet have a good practical use for Internet II; institutions want it because no right-thinking research faculty member would come to a school that didn’t have it. Don’t worry if higher education doesn’t know what on earth to do with Blackboard WebCT Vista’s enterprise distance learning solution; just spend $750K for the license, and distance learning will take off like gangbusters. Don’t worry if you don’t have a plan to use new technology that West Virginia University is using. If West Virginia University needs it, so does Glenville State College and Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College.
What’s the only thing higher education loves better than technology? Someone else to pay for it, of course. So you can imagine the excitement in higher education Chief Technology Officers’ offices in the late 1990s when Verizon came calling with a too-good-to-be-true deal on telecommunications circuits that would be doing everything from supporting distance learning to handling back office data traffic to managing telephone systems to cooking students’ meals over the next few years.
The too-good-to-be-true part? Higher education and others could have all of this technology for free thanks to a little ole $1.5 million appropriation from the West Virginia Legislature in the West Virginia Department of Education and Arts’ budget. Every school from West Virginia University to Shepherd College (now University) to West Virginia Northern Community College got hooked up faster than Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire on double coupon day at the local BALCO store.
Surely students benefited from these expenditures, didn’t they? Well, not at some institutions. You’ve heard of the “Road to Nowhere.” At several of our higher education institutions, we had “Circuits to Nowhere.” Shepherd College, for example, acquired two circuits, to the tune of $600 per circuit per month, over which there was no telecommunications traffic for several years. And West Virginia Northern Community College was so enamored by these “free circuits” that they didn’t “buy” the cheap kind that Shepherd was buying. No, they wanted the top-of-the-line DS-3 circuits (cost: $3,800 per month), and they wanted one for each of their three campuses (cost: $11,400 per month/ $136,800 per year). Did West Virginia Northern need these expensive circuits? Let just say they dropped them like laundered nickels from a casino slot machine as soon as they learned they had to pay for them.
How did I discover these things? I certainly didn’t learn about them from Verizon, which must have known there was little or no telecommunications traffic crossing some of these “free circuits.” I certainly didn’t learn about them from IS&C, which couldn’t even find the bills, much less the circuits. No, I learned them from two WVNET employees who drove to Flatwoods (ironically WVNET’s future home?) one day to educate me about shared facilities.
Operating in higher education, WVNET has always had to adapt more quickly and be more aware of technological changes than its state government counterpart. WVNET was the first with mainframe, the first with internet, and its staff were the first to tell me what really was occurring with the WV2001 Project….
Making my entrance again with my usual flair…. Sure of my lines…. No one is there….
Technology people are generally always ahead of the curve. It is one of the few professions where they have the luxury of pure expertise. Ironically, it is somewhat like the weatherman at a local news station – they get to specialize.
I am sure that WVNET thinks we are all nothing but luddites – and to a degree, they are right. This is just another case in government were an agency does good and few people think about it.
Media does not cover government when it works well – only when it is bad. And, subsequently, government agencies have a very small and tight communications budget (which would explain why some agencies are always in crisis communications mode.) Only Tourism gets money to market.
WVNET seems like a good company that does good things. I hope it continues to be – whether in Charleston or at its home in Morgantown.