Data. Collaboration. Mobile. Training.

These were keywords in an all-day conference on the future of information technology at Cornell, Sept. 11. The event, "IT@Cornell: Planning Our Future, Together," was convened by Ted Dodds, Cornell's chief information officer and vice president for information technologies, to provide input for the university's five-year Strategic Plan for IT. Some 300 faculty members, administrators and IT professionals packed G10 Biotech to join the discussion.

Keynote speaker Shel Waggener, senior vice president of Internet2, reminded the audience that everything is connected, not only by a worldwide network of fiber optics, but also by business and professional relationships between universities, vendors and service providers. Then, Diana Oblinger, CEO of EDUCAUSE, showed how technology has provided new, student-driven routes to education and new ways for educators to monitor and assist students.

The afternoon was devoted to breakout discussions where participants, in effect, laid out what they wanted from IT. After reviewing notes from the sessions, Walter Stewart, a Toronto-based consultant and former colleague of Dodds, offered a summary of the results.

"I saw extraordinary engagement and commitment and remarkably little griping," Stewart noted.

A major concern of researchers was data, he reported: How to store it and make it available to colleagues on and off campus. Likewise, many want tools for collaboration with local and distant colleagues. Students need collaboration tools as well, they added, including appropriate physical spaces.

More effort is needed, some said, to inform faculty about what's available in learning technologies. There was a call for consistent systems from one classroom to another and "rock-solid WiFi" to make everything available to students wherever they choose to study.

Administrators also asked for consistency in the tools used to access administrative data, and said that security is cumbersome.

Mobile technologies, Stewart noted, were discussed in almost every group. Among problems presented: How to support devices that are mostly user-owned and how to ensure that all applications are mobile compatible. Mobile apps, it was suggested, are a way to reach "technology-distracted" students.

Finally there was a call for training, perhaps better described as explaining technology to users in ways they can understand.

Stewart will submit a detailed report in a couple of weeks.

"We're not just going to come back and do this again in five years," Dodds concluded. "We'll have an ongoing conversation."