In addition to the always excellent program of presentations, the IT Chairs Forum, and interaction with the IT education community; this year’s conference will feature:

• Keynote lecture by IBM on Watson
• Tour of the USMA including a demonstration by the Drill Team
• Cruise on the Hudson River

The conference, program, and sponsorship chairs have done an excellent job pulling everything together, I hope you can join us in New York.

More information on the upcoming conference can always be found on the conference website (http://sigite2011.sigite.org).

Mark

http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e4ae3tf3gpsmsg2o/start

Here is the Draft

http://www.sigite.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Compiled-Chapters-Draft-Guidelines-Final.pdf

And a note from the lead author Deborah Boisvert:

We are requesting feedback on a companion document that can be used in conjunction with the Association for Computing Machinery’s Information Technology Volume published in December 2009.  Because Two-Year Colleges are very active players in the IT arena, a special SIGITE committee was brought together that partnered faculty from two- and four-year schools across the country.  This committee focused on identifying the core information technology knowledge, skills and attributes that would be representative of the first two years in an IT degree, whether it is at a two or four-year institution.  It is hoped that this can not only play a role in program development, but also in transfer conversations. The resultant document is being offered for review. Thank you for your time and assistance!

Hello everyone. I just wanted to remind you that the Friday June 3, 2011 deadline for the 12th Annual ACM Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education (SIGITE) conference at West Point, New York on October 20-22, 2011 is fast approaching.

This conference promises to be the absolute finest SIGITE to date. It will, I’m sure, be a flawlessly organized conference in a beautiful and historical location with New York City just around the corner.

Flipping through my handy desktop Shakespeare, I found the perfect motivational speech …

We few, we happy few, we band of professors;
For those to-day that PowerPoint with me
Shall be my brother/sister; be he/she ne’er so junior,
This day shall improve his/her rank;
And professors in America now-in-offices
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their ACM memberships cheap wiles any speaks
That presented with us upon SIGITE conference day

http://www.ncwit.org/pdf/WhichComputingMajorsRightMe_WEB.pdf

The deadline for papers, panels, and posters for the 12th Annual ACM Special Interest Group on Information Technology Education (SIGITE) conference at West Point, New York on October 20-22, 2011 has been extended to Friday June 3, 2011.

Notification of acceptance/rejection with reviewer comments will be around July 18, 2011.

Camera-ready versions of papers will be due to Sheridan, the conference proceedings publisher around September 7, 2011.

Since we are providing conference attendees with electronic proceedings rather than paper proceedings, we discovered that our original deadlines were unnecessarily early. So now, you have no excuse for not preparing a paper for what promises to be one of the best SIGITE conferences yet.

The SIGITE conference provides a forum for sharing and developing ideas relating to Information Technology research, education, applications, IT-industry-academia relationships and our roles as professionals, educators, and advocates for the effective use of Information Technology.

The campus of the West Point United States Military Academy is only 40 miles north of New York City. Rich in history, nearly 3 million people a year visit the picturesque campus and its visitor’s center, museum, musical concerts, or any of the many historic sites in the nearby vicinity of the campus.

Call for Papers

Information about Conference

Site for submitting Panel, Paper, and Posters

One of the interesting experiences of being a conference Program Chair is discovering that professors ask for extensions more frequently than students. Evidently, all across the world, ultra-critical dogs have been consuming first drafts of SIGITE papers …

Seriously, I know that for those on a semester system, the end of April is a busy time. Thus, I have extended the paper deadline to midnight Friday May 13.

Edit: The new deadline is now Friday June 3, 2011. That’s it: no more extensions!

Hello everyone. I just wanted to remind you that the April 30 deadline for the 2011 SIGITE in New York is fast approaching. This conference promises to be the absolute finest SIGITE to date. It will, I’m sure, be a flawlessly organized conference in a beautiful and historical location with New York City just around the corner. What more could you ask for in a conference?

Now I’m sure many of you had pledged to give up writing conference papers for Lent, but with Easter just around the corner, you now have no excuse. So next week, start writing that conference paper, poster, or panel idea and have it ready for their respective deadlines.

The URL for submissions

To see the call for papers

The SRII (Service Research and Innovation Institute) Conference was a real eye opener to me and presented an exciting future in which we IT educators and professionals can be vitally important towards creating.  The overriding theme of SRII and this initiative is that IT can/should be a driver to the betterment of our society by creating efficiencies in delivery of services.

Robert Morris (Vice President Services Research & Global Labs, IBM Research and Fortune Magazine’s “Smartest Scientist”) summed it up best for me in his keynote.  He described how while manufacturing and even agriculture have done a decent job at leveraging information technology for productivity, for the most part service industries (healthcare, education, energy, etc.) have not and thus continue to be wasteful in their business processes.  He went on to discuss that innovations like the IBM Watson project (from which the SIGITE 2011 keynote will come) are not simply fun exercises but in fact will be a driver in enhancing human-computer interactions.  The technology being developed for Watson will create a new mechanism for computing systems to learn from one another and be able to properly interpret human communication, describing one use of such a technology to dramatically improve healthcare in the world.

As a professional organization dedicated to the field of information technology, this is where SIGITE can be sure that curriculum stays relevant and also be a driver for IT research.  Our graduate degree programs and research can be directed towards leveraging information technology to deliver huge boosts for service industry verticals.  Alas we are already starting to see this naturally emerge within academic IT departments developing specialties around these industries; health informatics, criminal justice, instructional technology, etc.

As academics in IT we also need to work closely with our computing brethren as the solutions to these needs require effort from each of us.  Computer scientists will develop new systems like Watson above, information systems researchers will help organizations re-engineer their business processes to leverage technologies, and we information technology researchers can work towards finding out how to best implement these technologies into the new business practices in such a way that the systems are secure, manageable, and scalable.