To give our colleagues a better idea of what’s changed in our web applications each week, we’ll be preparing this quick list for publication each Friday. Not all of the details of each change are included below, but we’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in the comments. Continue reading
The Monterey Institute of International Studies is hosting a Tedx event. TED refers to the wildly successful annual conferences that bring together people from technology, entertainment and design to give short talks about their lives. Tedx events are community organized programs that following a similar format to the TED conferences.
TedxMonterey is happening on April 15 and will be livestreamed and live-interpreted to the web. Speakers will include dancers (including Middelbury’s Andrea Olsen), drummers, environmentalists, researchers, entrepreneurs and artists.
Yesterday, we updated WordPress to v3.1. Most noticeable change in this update is the introduction of a new “admin” bar that appears after you log in. This admin bar includes quick links to all sites in which you are a registered user. Site authors will also see links to add new posts and editors will have quick links to comments. The other notable new feature is a “link browser” that allows you to search and quickly link to other posts/pages on your site.
Most importantly, this release includes over 800 bug fixes by over 180 developers from around the world. It has been downloaded over 1 million times in the last week.
Let us know if you have any questions about this update or experience any problems.
I’ll be doing a couple of workshops on WordPress this month, showing some of the ways this platform has been used for blogging, courses, research, projects and initiatives. Will give an overview of what’s possible with WordPress and then open up for discussion and questions.
Dates/Times/Location
For more information, see: WordPress @ Middlebury
What follows is a report on the state of notable web applications and sites in use at Middlebury including the College website, the Middlebury instance of WordPress (i.e. sites.middlebury.edu) and a variety of key web applications that provide services widely used by faculty, students and staff. Continue reading
Our first priority with the Segue from Segue project is to make sure there are technology solutions available to meet the needs of as many faculty, students and staff as possible. That said, we would like to also be able to support innovative uses of technology, particularly those innovations that may eventually be useful to the broader community.
To this end, the Curricular Technology team invited a number of faculty who are innovators to show us how they have been using technology and tell us what they need. Faculty who participated included Jeff Byers (Chemistry and Biochemistry), Hector Vila (CTLR), Enrique Garcia (Spanish), Hope Tucker (Film and Media Culture) and Roberto Veguez (Spanish). A number of academic liaisons also participated in this session. To learn more about what these faculty have been doing, see:
The Curricular Technology Team has been focused nearly exclusively on the Segue from Segue project for the last few months. A Segue from Segue Advisory group consisting of faculty and students has been formed to help the team engage the College community and the LIS Area Directors have also provided input and guidance.
In March, the team ran focus group sessions to find out more about how faculty are currently using technology, what technologies they would like to have and what technologies they feel do not meet their needs. Focus group topics included “online discussion”, “assignments and assessment” and “websites and media.”
These focus group sessions helped the team draft surveys for both faculty and students. The faculty survey has already been distributed and will remain active until the end of April. We will be sending out a student survey sometime next week and will publish a report once all responses are in.
The team is committed to making initial recommendations for alternatives to Segue by the end of the spring semester and final recommendations in late August after gathering information about technology usage by the Language Schools and Breadloaf. For updates on the project, see: Segue from Segue
Carrie Macfarlane has recently added two new posts to the Teaching with Technology blog on case studies she has done with faculty in the Biology department. The first is on an evolution simulation model developed by Matt Landis for his course on “Ecology and Evolution” (BIOL0140). The other is on the use of wireless projection by Chris Watters in his class on “Human Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective” (BIOL0222).