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.