Initial Experience in Moving Key Academic Department Functions to Social Networking Sites

We discuss our initial experience with the transition from conventional technology to social networking sites and other cloud-backed sites for three core business functions of two academic departments, of computer science and history, at a mid-size private university: course management, research and administrative collaboration, and community engagement. We first discuss the social/cultural context that informs our technology choices, as well as the evolution of the technology choices themselves. Then, we identify the targeted department functions and their actors. Next, we describe the past and present technical architectures used to support these functions. We conclude with a discussion of our preliminary experience with this transition and to what extent our experience can be generalized into a blueprint that can be adopted by other organizations.