Tag Archives: Philosophy

Overview of Projects and Priorities

The Curricular Technology team did a lot of brainstorming over the summer.  This seems like a good time to step back and compare what we have done to what our priorities are:

ct-team-project-diagram03

We have a lot of projects started whose focus is to find one or more replacements for Segue including a CT feature matrix, a CT needs “knowledge grid” (i.e. what do we know and not know about technologies that faculty and students need), course site platform survey questions.

Eating our own dogfood… yum

The current tagline for the Curricular Technology blog is “eating our own dogfood… yum.” I recently changed this from “That’s Team with a capital T, baby!” in consultation with Bryan Carson.

The phrase, eating one’s own dogfood is frequently used by technology companies to indicate that employees in these companies use the software they are developing.  This is done for various reasons including helping to test the software, gain familarity with the products being developed, expressing confidence in the product and so on.

Responding to the Curricular Technology Blog Tagline survey is a good example of eating one’s own dogfood.  The survey was created with Google Apps which we have used quite a bit in our team work.  The survey is essentially a form that is linked to a spreadsheet.  It’s a great way to quickly gather information from others and can evolve as responses come in.  For example, as others submit tagline suggestions, the form can be updated to include these new suggestions and also people to rate them.

Fall 2009 Course Website Recommendations

The Curricular Technology team is making the following recommendations to LIS on the platforms available for creating course sites. – Alex Chapin

A number of technology tools and services are available to faculty to use in their teaching and for their courses including applications for creating course sites, blogs, collaborative spaces and presentations. What follows are recommendations that focus primarily on platforms for creating course sites over the next academic year. These recommendations take into consideration the recent decision by LIS to decommission Segue and the impact the Web Makeover project will have on available resources and technologies.

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What should we use this blog for? – a proposal

I propose we use this blog to collect and discuss CT Team tasks.  Further, I propose we organize these blog posts/task into categories and tag them.  I think would be great if posts/tasks were highly granular, representing stuff anyone of us might be able to take on and complete without too much work…

For example, we could have a research category which might include posts such as:

  1. What is the best way to distribute presentation slides?
  2. Can a Google Doc be embedded in a WordPress blog?
  3. What is the best podcasting plugin for WordPress?
  4. What tools/services are available for web-based capture?
  5. Does Drupal have a UI for moving/copying content?

Here are categories I am thinking of:

Research (e.g. Is Moodle 2.0 ready for production?)
Review (e.g. WordPress 2.8)
Case Studies (e.g. Arabic School curricular resources)

I guess I am recommending we NOT use this blog for describing:
Proposals
Projects
Initiatives
Recommendations (except in the form of positive reviews)

I think these sorts of things may be better tackled via team-based “collaborative peer production” using tools like Google Docs

Alex