After attending a conference, I usually think, “Wow, we’re so far ahead here at Middlebury!” Not this time! DrupalCon was incredibly helpful in demonstrating all of the ways we can improve our site with better performance, better search, better content, and better code. I’m also really excited about the upcoming release of Drupal 7 and both confident we can move our site onto this new version and eager to use all the new features.
Here are the highlights from the last day: Continue reading
Are you ready for excitement? Intrigue? Adventure? Stop reading now. But, if you want to know what I did as one of the 1075 attendees of IUG in Chicago, carry on with the reading. Continue reading
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
VERMONT DAYS is coming up June 12th and 13th. All Vermont State Park day areas, state-owned historic sites, and Vermont’s History Museum will be open and free to the public. Saturday, June 12th is free fishing day – the one day in the year when residents and non-residents may go fishing without a license.
Middlebury is evaluating Google Apps for Education as a possible replacement for Microsoft Exchange as its platform for email and calendaring. We’ve set up a website about this evaluation process that includes a summary of the process and the key questions we are asking. We will host an open session on this evaluation in early May in order to ensure that there are opportunities for the entire community to learn more about Google Apps for Education, to understand the evaluation process, and to provide input and feedback. The website is Google Apps @ Middlebury Project. You can ask questions and make comments via this site, or feel free to contact Michael Roy (mdroy@middlebury.edu) .
Just thought I’d share this opportunity for those interested.
“The Future is mobile, is your library ready?”
May 20, 2010 1 – 4pm
The future of information services and mobile technology is tightly intertwined. That’s why OCLC and Library Journal have come together to present a free online symposium on the future of mobile.
Join our panel of mobile industry experts and librarians and find out.
Register today at: http://www.oclc.org/innovation
Here is an overview and some notes from day 2 of the DrupalCon conference that Ian and I are attending in San Francisco. As Ian mentioned in yesterday’s report, day 1 of DrupalCon was mostly focused on the future of Drupal, specifically on the changes and improvements in the upcoming Drupal 7. Today’s sessions dealt much more with the current Drupal release, as well as with version-neutral topics.
Read on for more on the following topics:
Here is an overview and some notes from the Drupal Scalability and Performance Workshop I attended before the start of the DrupalCon conference that Ian and I are attending in San Francisco. As the title suggests, this workshop was focused on making Drupal (and web-applications in general) run fast. Really fast. I hope to apply the techniques learned in this workshop over the next weeks and months to make our sites run fast enough to handle any traffic load that might be thrown at them, even were an event to occur that would send major public traffic to our sites.
Read on if you are interested in the performance and scalability of Drupal, MySQL databases, and web applications in general.