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Join the Portal Generation
Web Portals and Higher Education: Technologies to Make IT Personal
 Do you remember when being online meant queuing up with a whole bunch of people to get tickets to a Stones concert? Remember when a Web site was a spot in a corner of the room that hadn't received quite enough house-cleaning attention? I realize that I'm getting dangerously close to going totally Andy Rooney on you, but do you also remember when a portal was a grand, imposing gateway to a parallel universe in science fiction movies?Well, nostalgia ain't what it used to be! "Portal" is now the common term among information technologists to describe...what? If you want to find out, you'll be hard-pressed to locate a better resource than Web Portals & Higher Education: Technologies to Make IT Personal, by Richard N. Katz and Associates. It's not that this particular volume manages to avoid the inevitable spate of acronyms that techno-doofuses and language-lovers among us find daunting or dismaying: the book has its share of VEPs, HEPs, CPADs, ERPs, and CRMs. Reading about "Aggregators" and "Configurators" still makes me think of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And I can't resist mentioning the charming, albeit oxymoronic, something-or-other called "Forms Nirvana" that shows up in article number five. That aside, this book gave me a better understanding that "portal" is now the common term among information technologists to describe a site that welcomes you onto the Web and provides one-stop shopping for all the online resources you use most. How, you may ask, does it do this? And how is it different from any other Web site? The key is personalization. When you visit a standard Web site, you basically navigate within the framework and set of predetermined options. In a portal, you, the user, get to choose which items, links, and information will show up when you log in. Portals allow you to constantly customize the site to fit your needs, changing them around anytime you want, eliminating those no longer useful to you and adding new items to the mix. Today you can organize your portal to include getting your email, checking on your stocks, finding out about the weather, and paying your bills. Tomorrow, should your needs change, you can rearrange the items on your portal to get rid of the stock quotes (it's too depressing to read anyway!), and add a joke-of-the-day update! This "user-centric" approach is intended to help all of us sort through the daily deluge of electronic data by allowing each of us to focus on only those items that are most important to us. And that can make campus computing a lot more convenient. As one of the articles in Web Portals and Higher Education notes, the user-friendliness of campus Web portals will play a key role in the ability of colleges and universities to "…attract, retain, and serve customers [faculty, staff, students, et al.], of all types." You may already have heard about the New Business Architecture (NBA). No, it's not a sport associated with unusually tall people, but rather a long-term UC-wide initiative to improve the working and learning environment on all the UC campuses. And portal technology will be integral to implementation of the NBA. So log on to MyUCDavis at http://my.ucdavis.edu/ to see our campus Web portal, and while you're at it, read this book. As a result, you'll be a better-educated campus citizen who knows a lot more about some of the impacts that portal technology is expected to have on campus life: for students, ease of access to information and professors; for faculty, ability to identify which technology resources actually make a difference in student learning; for staff, a breakdown of the organizational stovepipes to allow more streamlined administrative processes; and for each of us, power to the individual. The book is fairly accessible even to the layperson. Sure, there's some tech-talk involved, but you can get through (or past, or around) it and reasonably garner the basics about portals and their use in higher education. Am I saying you'll want to substitute this volume for those bodice-rippers and murder mysteries you've got slated for beach reading this summer? Absolutely not!!! But if you want more information on how portal technology is expected to improve campus life, this is the book for you! Nancy Harrington is the Human Resources Coordinator in IET. |
