A little while back I wrote about finding a CIO blog. A rare find. Well I found another one today. It is by Peter Siegel, CIO at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. Because of the concentration of youths in the college and university environments (and the core mass demographics of bloggers), I find Peter's recount of a point made at the Seminars in Academic Computing conference to be very refreshing. Peter recounts:

A major "buzz" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzz, definition #3) at the conference was that we all need to put ourselves in the shoes of the "Internet generation," at least if we are going to do our jobs well. The sense was that since many of us learned about technology in a different (read: earlier) age, it was very hard for us to understand just how our students or even our newer faculty think about and assimilate new technology. Our students multitask, they are comfortable with a new tool a day, and create strong friendships and alliances in cyberspace in ways that scare us or, worse, we don't even recognize. When I watch my own kids (now 18 and 22), I think it is true they are very comfortable with new technology (though I can program better than either of them) and how they communicate with their friends still strikes me as awesome (but strange). So is what they say about us, the pre-Internet Generation, true?

Good case for not letting the generation gap (and customer/constituent gap) get too large. I am personally hoping to see more blogging by administrators and alumni in the college and university environments.

Steve Shu