I work at a university with slow servers, a bad e-mail client, an outdated version of a terrible LMS (which starts with “Black” and ends with “board”), frightfully old computers in the offices and the classrooms and not nearly enough tech support for any of these things. What I’d like to see/hear/do at THATCampAHA is figure out how I can gather all the tech I need to do my job and keep these tools under my control rather than my employer’s. I’m not just talking about teaching paperless, I’m talking about finding everything needed to become essentially a technological free agent, no longer dependent on edtech help that isn’t there.
While I’m not sure if I have much to contribute to this session beyond the idea, I’ll certainly do everything I can to explain what I’m thinking once we all arrive in Chicago.
One approach I’ve heard about in the corporate world is to use cloud computing to completely circumvent IT-department restrictions. In one throwaway comment at the beginning of the Amazon Web Services book, the author suggests that if you can’t install the clients needed to run interact with their services on your own machine due to IT policy or machine lock-downs, you just spin up a windows machine on EC2, connect to it using a terminal server (which is likely built in to your OS), then install all the development tools there.
I certainly haven’t tried this, but in theory you and your students and/or collaborators would only need to be able to connect to the net from the on-campus machines, and all the rest would be under your control and at your cost.