a busy lab
Students fill the Wilson Media Lab in the Davis Family Library, completing media projects for the end of the semester. A good number of students in this picture are finishing up posters for their theses.
Digital Media is looking for students who are interested in learning how to work with digital images, audio, video and animation.
Current openings:
Multimedia Lab Tutor Trainee
This is an introductory position where we teach you the nuts and bolts of digital media development. Learn how to create high quality images, starting with the scanning of slides and photographs, and moving into editing for print and web delivery. Learn how to capture, edit and render video for DVD and web. Create digital animations with Flash.
Previous experience is not required. This position is a pre-requisite for the Multimedia Lab Tutor position.
Position: http://middlebury.peopleadmin.com/postings/6564
Summer Opportunities:
Multimedia Lab Tutor
Spend your summer creating websites, animations, and digital video. Projects include media collections, course website development, 3d scientific imaging and virtual world development.
Position: http://middlebury.peopleadmin.com/postings/6557
For more information, contact Joe Antonioli (jantonio@middlebury.edu), Manager of Web and Interactive Media Technologies in the Davis Family Library, for an interview appointment.
We have received a message from Remote-Learner, our Moodle hosting company, that they will be doing some maintenance to improve the security of the service. Expect disruptions in service between 1-6am on Saturday, February 16th.
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Dear Valued Client,
In order to install new security upgrades and additional security features, Remote-Learner’s IT technical support division has planned a five-hour maintenance. During the maintenance period internet connectivity may be briefly disrupted several times on February 16th from 1:00 am EST to 6:00 am EST.
The new upgrades and security features will provide additional hosting security for clients. Ultimately, we believe that you will be pleased with the security updates, and we ask in advance that you accept our apologies for any inconvenience you may experience. We welcome your feedback on our efforts to continue to provide quality customer service and we request that you direct any questions and concerns related to this scheduled maintenance to Remote-Learner’s support division.
Sincerely,
The Remote-Learner Team
Owners of blogs & web sites on Middlebury’s WordPress site were asked their opinion on a proposed change in the URL (address) of the site from “sites.middlebury.edu” to “sites.middlebury.edu”. The change was proposed to the Web Prioritization Committee as a way “…to provide faculty (and others) using WP as a content management system, personal website, research portfolio, conference proceedings, or other collection of information with a more neutral-sounding domain name than “sites.middlebury.edu.””
We’ve had 179 responses to our two-question survey, which went out to 929 WP users.
The response to first question shows a 63% agreement rate (or an 85% non-disagree rate).
The second question was an optional “Why?” “Why not?” comment, and many respondents took the opportunity to explain their choices. There were 79 comments.
Typical of the “yes” respondents’ comments:
“Absolutely agree. While this does not change the essence of the thing, what something is called still carries a great weight – “sites” is a much more versatile term and lends greater freedom to this URL series. “
“ A blog has a reputation as something homegrown, of someone writing their thoughts on a particular topic. Sites sounds more like a neutral label as just something listed online. I like it.”
“I do not like to think of my site as a blog, as it has a lot of information that is not chronologically-ordered. This would be a terrific change!”
Some comments expressed valid concerns, here they are with an explanation of the impact:
“I think we might need to update every single go link for all the middgoal posts and middstart posts we have out there. Who knows what links the students have been promoting… Seems like a major pain for what really is a minor change. If there is a workaround for this that I don’t know about, then go for it.”
“I have been working for a long time at having people connect to my blog. If you change it, all those links will be broken, and with it I will lose readership.”
There will be a permanent redirect for the new URLs, anyone clicking on the old URL will still visit your site. Also, sites with their own URL (http://southchinasea.org, http://middstart.middlebury.edu, etc.) without “blogs” in the URL will not see a change.
“…will this mess up google rankings, searching, etc.?”
There may be a minor impact on rankings, but factors like credible resources linking to your site have a higher impact. In addition, because of the change we made last January, you can still track your site in Google Analytics.
The Web Prioritization Committee approved this change at the January 24th meeting, we will let you know when the change will take place.
Q: What do these three things have in common?
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.
MiddSTART, a network of microphilanthropy that supports Middlebury students.
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 Middlebury community has a strong culture of creating and sharing, whether it is a story on the homepage, an exhibition at the museum or a project in MiddLab. These sites balance visual appeal to keep our visitors engaged with what we are doing, with organization that makes the the abundance of information easy to find. Aligned with these goals is integration of social media elements that allow internal and external visitors provide comments and additional information and we push content to audiences in Twitter and Facebook.
We have been tracking activity across our web sites since January, giving us some good information on how our web sites are being used. Here are some high level stats based on data collected from January 1 – June 30 2012 across over 550,000 pages.
Visits: 3,933,170
Unique Visitors: 2,236,190
Page Views: 12,227,234
We are averaging over 3 pages per visit, with the average visit lasting over 3 minutes.
No surprise that the most visited page in our web presence is the homepage, receiving over 2,000,000 visits during the 6 month period. Placement can change based on the time of year, but the other top pages include academics, athletics, the portal pages, the online directory, and our login page.
To support these types of web sites and pages we have a number of platforms that we use.
Middlebury Web Presence – Presentation
Drupal – an application framework that we use to build CMS applications for the Midd and MIIS main sites, Davis United World College Scholars, Davis Projects for Peace and the Museum. Content is a mix of static (text, images and media stay the same until someone changes it) and dynamic (feeds of information update from other sources, like 25Live and blog rss feeds).
WordPress – self-service and flexible platform, supporting over one thousand sites. Provide the ability of the site owner to change the look and feel through a number of themes, and turn functionality on and off as needed. WP allows for the display of dynamic and static content. A number of plugins allow for pushing content to social media platforms, as well as pulling in content from resources like Google Maps.
Kurogo – modular framework for adding condensed views of content throughout our web presence, currently drives the mobile dashboard, the portal and the constituent gateways. The service contains very little content, almost all of the text, images and media are pulled from other sources.
There are other platforms that either support the presentation of web content, or provide a presentation for information that lives in another system.
Calendar: 25Live – generates the main calendar view, as well as spuds for individual departments. Provides a presentation layer for information in R25.
Course Catalog – Presentation layer of course information stored in Banner. Also provides course listings for academic departments and faculty.
Dining Menus – Presentation layer for our menu system
GO – a shortcut service and a way to keep persistent urls as web sites change. The addition of QR codes for every shortcut has made this a valuable tool for our print media.
Mediawiki – rarely used to build a web site because it is not easy for a wiki owner to provide an appealing look and feel, but the tracking and discussion features are useful for a site that requires a lot of collaborative editing for all content. This is the same platform that runs Wikipedia.
Middmedia – an interface to media storage, it provides embed code for audio and video streaming as well as direct links for download.
This post is a follow up from the Middlebury’s Web Presence – A Few High Level Snapshots post. Next up will be an overview of our curricular platforms.
Digital Media is looking for students who are interested in learning how to work with digital images, audio, video and animation.
Current openings:
Multimedia Lab Tutor Trainee
This is an introductory position where we teach you the nuts and bolts of digital media development. Learn how to create high quality images, starting with the scanning of slides and photographs, and moving into editing for print and web delivery. Learn how to capture, edit and render video for DVD and web. Create digital animations with Flash.
Previous experience is not required. This position is a pre-requisite for the Multimedia Lab Tutor position.
Position: http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/business/seo/toolbox/descriptions/a/lis/node/253902
Summer Opportunities:
Multimedia Lab Tutor
Spend your summer creating websites, animations, and digital video. Projects include media collections, course website development, 3d scientific imaging and virtual world development.
Position: http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/business/seo/toolbox/descriptions/b/lis/node/254014
Multimedia Lab Tutor Supervisor
Manage the Multimedia Lab Tutors and projects developed over the summer. Responsibilities include training, scheduling, and maintaining the equipment in the lab. Some development is required.
Position: http://www.middlebury.edu/offices/business/seo/toolbox/descriptions/c/lis/node/254090
For more information, contact Joe Antonioli (jantonio@middlebury.edu), Manager of Web and Interactive Media Technologies in the Davis Family Library, for an interview appointment.
