e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: SUNY

  • Time, Ownership, and the VLE

    This is the first of several posts I’ll be making about stuff I learned at yesterday’s conference at FIT–which was excellent. It’s not often that I go to a conference where I find every single speaker to be interesting, but this was certainly the case here. (Raymond Yee apparently live-blogged…er…live-wiki’ed the first part of the day.)

    Anyway, keynote speaker Rachel Smith pointed out a great little project called Dracula Blogged. Basically, the author, noting that Dracula is written as a series of dated journal entries, decided it might be cool to republish the novel as a weblog, posting each entry on the same calendar day (e.g, October 6th) as the dated entry in the novel. I think the success of this experiment underlines a couple of attributes that we need to think about for next-generation VLE’s. (more…)

  • A Couple of More Speaking Gigs

    I’ll be presenting at a couple of SUNY conferences during the first week of October. Both of them are Conferences on Computing in the Disciplines (COCIDs) sponsored by the SUNY Faculty Access to Computing Technology (FACT) Council.

    The first one, on Monday, October 3rd, is called Application of Mobile Technology Tools in the Online Learning Experience and will be at Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY. My particular talk will be called “A Movable Feast: Teaching and Learning When the World is Your Classroom.” I honestly don’t know much about the conference details beyond what is on the web site, but the speaker list looks interesting.

    The second one, on Friday, October 7th, is called Small Tools/Big Ideas and will be at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in lower Manhattan. I know a bit more about this one. The focus is on teaching with digital images, and the structure is to look at digital content/image repositories in the morning (hence the “big ideas”) and specialized content tools that sit on top of those repositories in the afternoon (hence the “small tools”), with a session of case studies and general conversation to wrap up the day. I’ll be moderating the “small tools” session in the afternoon. The speaker list looks absolutely stellar (pun intended; one of the speakers is Ben Brophy, a programmer who works on MIT’s STELLAR, the DSpace content repository, and Sakai , and who occasionally comments here on e-Literate). The panels will be covering some extremely interesting projects; I expect to learn a lot from the day.

    It’s possible that one or both of the conferences will be webcast. If I find out that they will, I’ll post the URL(s) here.

  • SUNY Offering Online, Cross-Campus Electrical Engineering Degree

    Update: Here is a press release with a little more information.

    Well, it’s official. Three of SUNY’s 4 university centers (University at Buffalo, Stony Brook University, and Binghamton University) will jointly offer a fully online degree in electrical engineering. I’m told that this is the first degree of its kind. The program is being funded by Sloan-C.

    Congrats to my SUNY colleagues for pulling this together.

  • Small Tools/Big Ideas: Integrating Technologies for Teaching Art and Art History

    FIT will be hosting a great conference this October on teaching visual topics online using tools that afford social learning. The conference is just a bit of a misnomer, since much of the content will be relevant and valuable to a more general audience than just art and art history instructors; it’s really about teaching visually and socially at the same time. Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, the conference coordinators, have done a great job of assembling a stellar program. If you can possibly make it to NYC this Fall, I highly recommend attending.

  • SUNY's Learning Environments Task Force Report

    One of the projects at work that has been keeping me very busy is finally finished and in shape that I can talk about it publicly. The SUNY Learning Network is in the process of planning a transition to a new learning management platform, yet to be identified. We took this opportunity to get some input from the broader SUNY community on their needs, goals, and preferences.

    A little background about that community: (more…)

  • Looking for a Fun Job in Higher Ed?

    SUNY is hiring for a position at the Training Center in Syracuse (technically associated with the Upstate Medical University) to think Big Thoughts about teaching, learning and technology, and to run some enrichment programs. It looks to be a pretty juicy position.

    Here’s the description: (more…)

  • Lean Clients, Plump Clients, and Chubby Clients for Learning Management Systems

    As I mentioned in a previous post the SUNY Learning Network currently uses a home-grown learning management system built on top of Lotus Notes. And while there is a web interface to the system, many of the current users are quite attached to their fat client.

    This may sound quaintly outdated at the moment. However, I strongly suspect that we’ll see fat(ter) LMS clients in the near future. There are some wonderful affordances that come with a more robust client-side component to the system. Up until now, those affordances have come with the relatively steep price of having to develop, install and maintain fairly heavy-duty (and often cross-platform) client-side software. But that’s changing. These days, the browser and the operating system themselves are increasingly able to function as client-side platforms for richer functionality. Add to this the blossoming of web services and the small, simple client-side tools that they enable, and we have the potential for what I would call “lean clients,” “plump clients” and “chubby clients.” (more…)