From our Moodle host:

Good afternoon,

I am writing to notify you of a pending planned downtime to enable Remote-Learner’s technical support team to upgrade the configuration of your Moodle Private Cloud Service (MPCS).  Please be aware of the following:

• Planned downtime window for your site(s) is Saturday, May 4, 2013 – 3am to 7am EDT.

• Your site(s) will be unavailable for four (4) hours while the MPCS upgrade occurs.

The MPCS upgrade will enhance our ability to provide effective support and maintenance of your Moodle server.  We will not be upgrading or changing the version of your Moodle or ELIS site(s) during this process.  Thank you in advance for your cooperation and understanding as we continue to improve our ability to provide you the best service possible.

Sincerely,

Rod Deter, Vice- President of Client Services

Yes, I went there, but dancing houseware aside we are very happy to announce the launch of our new Guest System for Middlebury College. This service will allow people who do not already have a relationship with the college to create a username and password that can be used to access some of our web services.

Now a guest lecturer can be added to a Moodle course. Collaboration with colleagues from other institutions can happen in a WordPress site. A resident of Middlebury can create a page that shows them the latest athletic scores next to a list of on campus events.

What guests will have access to
Course Scheduler (can create schedules, but not email them)
Portal (can customize their layout)
Commenting on WordPress (sites.middlebury.edu)
Moodle sites open to anyone with a Middlebury login (placement tests)
Can submit and track their tickets in Web Helpdesk

What guests can be given access to
Can be made contributors/authors/editors of WordPress sites (sites.middlebury.edu)
Can be made teacher/students of Moodle sites.
Can be made editors of wikis (mediawiki.middlebury.edu)

What guests will not have access to
Editing in Drupal (www.middlebury.edu, www.miis.edu, museum.middlebury.edu)
Creating GO links
Creating a WordPress site
Public computers
Wireless internet
Printing
Course Hub
MiddFiles
Uploading to MiddMedia
Ride Board

This list may change over time as new services are added and new needs are identified.

You may test the new Guest System yourself by browsing to https://middguests.middlebury.edu/ and using a non-middlebury.edu or non-miis.edu email account.

Dear Faculty,

I’m writing to invite you to participate in this summer’s digital media tutor program. Each summer, LIS hires students to help faculty prepare curricular materials for upcoming courses and projects.  Under the direction of Joe Antonioli and Mack Roark, the digital media tutor program offers faculty an opportunity to collaborate with a tutor and other people in LIS. Students will be available to work with you from May 28th through August 30th.

Projects have included:

• One on one instruction in a variety of software applications, including, but not limited to: images and document creation (including posters and diagrams); audio (podcasting, voiceovers); video (digital stories, other video applications); and social software (blogs, wikis, LMS).
• Consultations to to discuss what is possible, and help you decide what technologies would best suit your needs
• Development of course web sites in WordPress or Moodle
• Digitization of audio or video for use in a course or series of courses
• 3D simulations and virtual worlds
• Conversations and planning around innovative ideas you may have

If you are interested in participating in this program, please send an email to Joe Antonioli (jantonio@middlebury.edu) with a short description of your project. Over the next two months we will be making plans to allocate resources, so even a sentence about an idea is helpful. Thank you.

–
First Year Seminar

If you are teaching a first year seminar next year and are planning to use a resource team, you have the option of working with a tutor over the summer and then having the tutor act as your resource team technologist in the fall or spring. This has proven to be very effective for courses that include media and/or technology assignments.

MiddLab

LIS has brought together a small team of librarians and technologists to provide support and consultation services focused on digital scholarship. In collaboration with hands-on support offered by the Wilson Media Lab tutors, MiddLab can provide research and support for a variety of areas including digital publishing, copyright advice, digital archive and data management, textual analysis, and geo-spatial and geo-temporal analysis. To learn how LIS can support your digital projects and scholarship contact Rebekah Irwin (rirwin@middlebury.edu).

Thank you, again, and we look forward to seeing some of you over the summer.

Q: What do these three things have in common?

• Decommissioning of Segue
• Shel Sax’s birthday
• A blue moon

Imagine yourself back in the 2002-2003 academic year. There is no MySpace yet, let alone Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Most websites are being created by typing HTML markup or using desktop programs like Dreamweaver. WordPress doesn’t exist yet and won’t support more than a single blog for another three years. Moveable Type and Manilla (early blogging systems) are available, but don’t support the unicode character set needed to properly display text in foreign languages. Each summer numerous faculty would work with students in LIS to build a class website, a process that required many meetings as the faculty member developed the content, then gave it to the student to put on the web. Changes to the content required yet more meetings.

In June 2003 after about a year of development we launched Segue, a content management system that has supported our learning environment for almost a decade. Segue was designed to meet two specific needs. It allowed faculty to create and update their own course websites on their own schedule without requiring a continuous back and forth with support staff. It also allowed web content to be created in all of the languages taught at Middlebury, even Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Arabic.

Years later unicode support has become common and there now exist a plethora of learning management systems to choose from. In May of 2009, Middlebury decided that Segue had completed it’s tour of duty and that it was time for decommissioning. Today, August 31st, 2012, Segue has served its last page and is now offline.

We want to take this moment to thank Alex Chapin, Adam Franco, Gabe Schine, Christopher Shubert, and Dobromir Radichkov, who developed Segue over the years and supported the service as a resource for our curricular environment.

A: All three occur today.

The Digital Media Tutors are finishing up another busy summer helping faculty get ready for the Fall. Our veteran Tutors (Christian, CIre, Erik, and Eshetu) helped out part of the summer or from a distance, while our new Tutors (Adam, David, Graciela, Harry, Jeff, Max, Mugo, Tran) ramped up their skills quickly to help over 40 faculty complete 90+ projects. Most of the projects involved migrating courses and course resources out of Segue to WordPress and Moodle. Some of these sites are available to the public, while others are limited to a Midd or MIIS login. Some of these sites are new personal sites for faculty, places where research and publication information can be collected. Here are some examples: http://sites.middlebury.edu/vwoolf2/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/latabladeflandes/el-curso/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/middjazz/ http://sites.middlebury.edu/alisonbyerly/ In addition to digitization projects, the new Tutors also stepped up to the plate and offered iMovie workshops for Language School classes, as well as research and conversations around media, animation and eBook development. One of the more interesting challenges the Tutors had this summer was figuring out how we were going to manage the space on Middlebury’s new island in Second Life. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Middlebury%20SL/229/198/21/?title=Middlebury%27s%20Middleverse As you can see from the pictures below, the space is under development to support language conversation space, as well as government role play. Guided tours will be available by request.

Andy Shaindlin is the current AVP for Alumni Relations & Annual Giving at Carnegie Mellon, and has mentioned MiddSTART on his Alumni Futures blog – 21 Examples of Crowdsourced Fundraising Platforms. MiddSTART is our microphilanthropy program that runs on a WordPress site. Thanks goes to Ian McBride, Chris Norris and our colleagues at College Advancement and the Project on Creativity & Innovation for making this project happen.

The Wayback Machine can give us a  glimpse into the world wide web of the past, and there you can see snapshots of Middlebury’s early web sites as far back as 1997 with some data on web traffic as far back as 1995. If you go to the Web Application Development group’s web site, you will see a slide-show of how our main site has changed visually over the years.

In those days, most of the content was delivered using html pages, content that stood alone on a single file, maybe pulling in some images or linking to a clever cgi script that powered a guestbook. Over the last seventeen years Middlebury College has seen this grow from many linked pages to many linked platforms, sharing information across many sites and systems, making up our web presence.

This picture is a high-level snapshot of the make up of our web applications at this time. The diagram uses categories to group web applications based on a common purpose or activity.

• Presentation – the goal is to get information to as broad an audience as possible.
• Curricular Activity – tied directly to teaching and learning activities, may be associated with a grade.
• Database – primary purpose is to organize collections of content using metatdata and some type of search functionality, may be displayed in a different way using Presentation or Curricular applications.
• E-commerce – a financial transaction is taking place, security and accuracy are important.
• Administration – tied to transfer of data and information workflow.

Some of the applications land in multiple categories, these are colored for easy finding. Some support multiple sites (+), and examples have been added to give us a broader picture of the use of these applications. More sites will be added as we drill down into each category in future posts.

The diagrams are meant to be information and visuals to help people understand what applications we have available and what they do, and help us make decisions on the growth of our web presence and how we support it. Note that these diagrams do not list applications installed in personal spaces on community and middfiles. If you feel that an application is missing, please email me and let me know. Comments and thoughts are also welcome.

(If you would like to see the live file, download the software HERE and then download the file HERE)

Segue’s decommissioning will culminate on Friday August 31st, 2012 when Segue is taken offline.  In preparation for this deadline, as of January 1st, 2012, faculty will no longer be able to create Segue websites. We recommend that all new sites be created in either Moodle or WordPress.  Segue migration workshops will begin in Winter Term and continue into the Spring and Summer 2012 semesters.

Our curricular web tools can be found via the Course Hub, a starting point for access to online resources. From the Course Hub instructors can create sites in Moodle and WordPress as well as make links to ERES and resources around the Internet.

Options for Migration and Archiving

Segue site owners are encouraged to migrate sites they wish to continue working with to Moodle, WordPress or ERES.  LIS has tools and workshops for assisting with migration, and can help you archive sites.

If you need help deciding platform best fits your pedagogical needs, please contact your liaison.

Segue Migration Workshops

The Curricular Technology team will provide a number of workshops and work sessions to help faculty migrate from Segue.

Segue Migration Sessions

These sessions will be focused on migrating Segue sites to other platforms.

• 1-2 pm, Tues, Jan 10th, Library 105  (sign up)
• 2-3 pm, Wed, Jan 11th, Library 105  (sign up)
• 1-2 pm, Wed, Jan 18th, Library 105  (sign up)

 

Curricular Technology Work Sessions

These sessions will be open work sessions where faculty can get support for any curricular use of technology including using Moodle and WordPress and also migrating Segue sites

• 2-3 pm, Jan 12th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 3-4 pm, Jan 19th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 11 am-12 pm, Jan 24th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 2-3 pm, Jan 26th, Library 105 (sign up)

 

Introduction to Moodle Workshops – Prepare your courses for the Spring Semester

These workshops will give an overview of Moodle for faculty interested in migrating their Segue sites to Moodle

• 3-4pm, Jan 11th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 2-3pm, Jan 18th, Library 105 (sign up)

 

Introduction to WordPress Workshops – Prepare your courses for the Spring Semester

These workshops will give an overview of WordPress for faculty interested in migrating their Segue sites to WordPress

• 4-5pm, Jan 11th, Library 105 (sign up)
• 4-5pm, Jan 18th, Library 105 (sign up)

If these dates/times are not convenient for you, please contact your liaison, who may be able to provide you with enough information to get you started via a phone call or a house call to your office.

Over the summer, Communications and Web Application Development have been working together to bring Middlebury a service that will bring news, events and other information into one location. It began as a mobile project, a way to address the cumbersome browsing of our main site in smartphone browsers, and grew into a way that faculty, students and staff could find a wide breadth of information no matter what device they are using. This is Middlebury’s first big push into portal and mobile technology, so we are asking anyone and everyone to browse these sites from all of their devices and use the FEEDBACK link to share their experience. We would like this to be the place where the Middlebury Community goes to find information about what is happening on campus, so all thoughts are welcome. The Portal – Desktop and Laptop version Choose your favorite browser and point it to http://portal.middlebury.edu or go/portal. Browse the page to see snippets of information, or click on the blue icons to find full articles, stories, events, dining menus, etc. The CUSTOMIZE icon will give you a preview of things to come, allowing you to add and remove features.   The Portal – on a Smartphone Open your phone’s browser and point it to http://m.middlebury.edu or go/m or go/mobile.Click on the icons to see streams of information optimized for mobile devices. Use the same CUSTOMIZE button to make changes on the home screen. Again, please click on the FEEDBACK icon to share your experience. Thank you for taking the time to try this new service out!