The session was not a presentation, but a discussion.

Brown was one of the first institutions to implement Google Apps for faculty, staff, and students.

Question: Why consider Google Apps? (versus Microsoft Live, etc.).

Discussion: One school is using Exchange but is thinking about switching.  Customization capabilities depth and breadth seems to deliver more than Microsoft’s product.  Google has been pushing toward the cloud for much longer.  Rick Matthews CIO at Wake Forest: this is what they asked for.  Now they’re hearing this from faculty who want to use the collaborative features with the tools.  Microsoft’s solution seems focused on having desktop software, Google seems more in the cloud.  Microsoft seems to be about a year behind Google.  For Brown, there are business continuity reasons for Google (MS didn’t have redundant data centers a year ago, but they do now).  Some things in Google Apps aren’t robust enough yet. 18,000 accounts moved over to Google.  Does everyone like it?  No.  And it slows down at times.

Question: How has it gone for schools who switched?

Discussion: It’s terrific.  We’re considering Faculty & Staff and are interested to hear more.  Brown: the big stepping stone for Fac/Staff had to do with the calendar and threaded conversations.  Small changes in the interface from Outlook to the web browser, but a big deal for admins.  Miserable for two weeks, and then you’ll be fine.  Lessons learned at Brown: a problem to solve: need to move off of Exchange or upgrade.  Did a full cost analysis.  Looking for: significantly more quota (over 2GB).  Standards-based implementation.  Looking for something that would work with POP, IMAP, etc.  Calendar being caldav compliant is good.  Secure access from anywhere is also a benefit.  Saving money: BOT said to find every way to save money and not layoff people.  $700K-$1M to upgrade.  But it’s not a slam dunk or a sure thing that this is a smart thing to do.  There’s so much freedom that you can get into trouble.  Multiple accounts cause havoc on his phone sometimes, but Safari looks good.  Chrome is perfect.  A discussion of quirky interfaces followed.

Question: Have administrative users switched over from Outlook as a client to using the web interface.

Discussion: it’s a real mixed bag.  They push the native interface for a week.

Question: Recovery, archiving, restoration.

Discussion: Native Google – no restoration short of a legal requirement.  Postini for discovery.  Archiving is not in place today, but they (Brown) will soon.

Question: Policy issues for faculty/staff

Discussion: Don’t do this without support from President / Provost.  There’s a lot of bad information out there.  There are compromises, though.  Most of the questions were based on bad information.  Concerns about scanning e-mail and privacy.  Esoteric questions: ITAR export restrictions.  Health information doesn’t belong in GMail.

Question: How do you handle new features coming unnanounced?

Discussion: We are told to embrace change.  Google gives you a ton of things out of the box.  If you have to wrestle with turning them on and off, it will be tough.  We went as open as we could be with new features.  Labs.  Cool, but be careful.  Set expectations correctly.  It depends on your culture at your campus.  These can be dangerous things, but they put power in the hands of the people on campus.  Departments clamored for access.  IT just got out of the way.  Not a traditional roll out for most people.  Admins were different.

Question: Were legacy messages converted?

Discussion: Yes. With an outside vendor, though most was done internally.  Exchange access was turned off and about 1,000 people who had moved on who hadn’t been in for a while that hadn’t converted.  They had to agree to Brown’s user policies.  These 1,000 were moved, but access was cut off until they agreed to the policies.

Question: Speed/performance?

Discussion: Some things appear to be slow, some are faster.  It varies.  Some things are puzzling within our network configuration.  Wireless vendor product making a difference for performance compared to wired.  Search is so much better in Google.

Questions; Legal Issues?

Discussion: Legal counsel was involved, as was legal counsel from Rhode Island School of Design.  No show stoppers.  Everything has risk.  Lesson learned: You need to talk to people about what’s good and bad. What won’t be as good.  Can you live with it?  Legal Counsel was in the 1st round, right after the president.

Question: accessibility for users with disabilities. Supposedly high on Google’s priority list.

Discussion: No pushback.

Question: How are accounts handled as students become alumni?

Discussion: We have distinct e-mail addresses that aren’t ever reused.

Question: What is the exit strategy.

Discussion: You can pop them out and delete messages.  It’s doable.  The contract says that you own your data.

Question: Expunging data?

Discussion: The won’t keep your data, but the contract is changing.

Question: Campus Agreement: we pay for office suite?  Did you save any money on licensing or staffing?

Discussion: No staff were laid off.  They were repurposed.  Google Apps is not a replacement for MS Office.

Question: Increased bandwidth costs?

Discussion: Negligible.  Even with attachments moving from 10MB to 20 MB.

Question: Google Sites?  Policing them?

Discussion: We don’t know enough to do that.  But we’re worried.

Question: We have no control over how people share, and we can’t take things away from them when they no longer work for us.

Discussion: When you leave the University, you account terminates.  Sharing documents is a real one.  There are worries, but they focus on communication.  What if faculty put grades in GDocs and shared them with TA’s?  No legal issue there, but don’t be stupid and make it public.

Question: Yale: When is a good time to roll out?

Discussion: Students at beginning of fall term last year.  Fac/Staff in February.  Piloted departments over 2 months, big push in May.  Most over by early June.  New features come out once a week.  Intel, Motorola, etc. use it.

Question: Blackberry Enterprise Server?

Discussion: Ditched it.  Calendar nowhere near as functional.  5 people went back.  Droids work well too.

Questions: Data storage outside the US?

Discussion: Google has a white paper.  Data not stored in unfriendly countries.  Messages in Google are obfuscated over 5 servers in different data centers.  That makes it hard to reassemble the letter.  But there is redundancy.

Question: compromised accounts – how do you know what’s happened?

Discussion: they’ve helped confirm last login.  What’s been accessed?

Question: Were contacts migrated?

Discussion: yes, for those saved on the server.

Middlebury was under no illusion that they would ever have a single source for image information, but their goals were:

• Reduce number of systems to a more reasonable number
• Establish methods for exchange within campus & collaborative platform across campuses
• Provide multiple interfaces to same data store for specific uses: curricular use, museum collections, research

Governance is distributed, with different parts of campus managing their own collections.

About ArtSTOR

Founded by Mellon, now stand-alone.  People feel comfortable using ArtSTOR because they have legal indemnity.  ArtSTOR recognized early on that there was local content at institutions looking for a place to store their collections.

History

The request came in early after ArtSTOR’s launch to provide this functionality.  Originally a very labor-intensive process to map to ArtSTOR’s database model.  150 participants.

A lesson learned: Manual hosting is hard & expensive.

Many institutions had multiple systems that were difficult to integrate.

Shared Shelf

Accommodates simple or complex data schemes.  Fields are customizable by type and fields can be added.  Standard schema facilitate cross-campus sharing.

Three vocabularies:

• ULAN
• TGN
• CONA (in development)

Creating new authorities such as teh Built Work Registry (awarded IMLS grant 2010)

Focusing for now on digital still images.  They want to do this well first, and then move on.

Publishing & Exporting

Sharing content internally, among a small group of schools, etc.

“Shared Shelf” as a concept: moving outward as IP and legal issues are addressed.

Faceted search coming in 2 months.

What’s Next

Moving from 9 schools to add 25 more.  These schools will work out many of the data integration questions that lie ahead.

Questions

Questions about whether you have to be an ArtSTOR customer to participate in Shared Shelf (yes), whether ArtSTOR will be more interoperable with others like Flickr (yes, if they would not only ingest data but send some back out — they don’t).  A question about when there’s a system at home and ArtSTOR housing collections, which system is in control (Mike Roy says ArtSTOR becomes the system of record so you’re not constantly crosswalking batches of data).  What’s the financial model (For Middlebury, they fronted the money to get in on the specifications.  In time, this money will be helped to defray the cost of the subscription to the service.)

Much research has been done on how students, faculty, and staff use the library site, and the new design reflects both an effort to help our community access the content they need as efficiently as possible as well as an effor to engage with our community however they want to connect.

One of my favorite features on the new site is the all-in-one search bar at the top of every web page.  From one tabbed interface you can search our catalog, our journals, our databases, our research guides, or the library site itself.  Just click on a tab and either enter your search terms.  It’s a significant step toward the dream of an integrated search across all resources, and I know a lot of work went into the design and functions of this feature.

The new site is more visual than any of our prior library sites, highlighting the library’s services and some of the resources they’ve created.  Search through the Richmond Daily Dispatch to read newspaper articles from 1860-1865.  Check out our campus paper, The Collegian, with archives online from 1914-2003.  Visit Amarica at War 1941-1945 and view documents from the Federal Depository Colelction at UR.

Our library is connected to the social network.  Check out Boatwright Everywhere on the library home page to discover links to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter.  Boatwright Library is at the center of our university’s academic life and you can keep up with what’s going on through these links.

Data from the MISO Survey indicate that the frequency of use and importance of library web sites is going down.  I will be curious to see how the revisions we’ve made to our web site change the way our community interacts with library resources and services.

The MISO Survey is “a Web-based quantitative survey designed to measure how students, faculty, and staff use and evaluate the services and resources of colleges and universities with merged library and computing units”. We’ve had some non-merged institutions participate along the way, since the survey is a useful measure of how these often complimentary services are received.

With so many services and resources to measure, the MISO Survey takes a while to answer.  Some questions are optional, but the core questions on use, importance, and satisfaction.  The average time to complete the survey is 18 minutes, and that’s been a problem for some institutions.

In response to concerns about time to complete the survey, we’re going to give institutions more options on which sections or even specific questions are included in the survey.  For example, while the questions about frequency of use are interesting, we’ve found over the last few years that there’s more interest on how important faculty, staff, and students consider our resources and services, and how satisfied they are.  So the section on use will be optional going forward: available to institutions who would like to know this information, but not required of all institutions.  We’re confident that enough institutions will continue to ask these questions that the validity of the responses across institutions will persist.

We’ve also made some changes that correct duplication in the survey.  There is a section in the survey that asks whether you use a particular technology, such as course management system, blogs, etc.  Several of the items in this list duplicate questions in the frequency of use section of the survey.  Since institutions can look at frequency of use to determine overall use, we can remove items from our “use of tools” section like the course management system, making fewer options for each respondent to use.

One challenge we haven’t yet figured out is how to ask questions about support for faculty research.  At all of our institutions, faculty across the disciplines have a variety of computing needs at both the desktop and server levels.  Few of our organizations have a research computing unit, and so we respond to each new research opportunity with an ad hoc group comprised of the people with the expertise to support the required technology.  The challenge is to find a way to ask questions about this support that aren’t interpreted in as many ways as there are respondents.  Do we focus on the word “research”?  “Grants”?  Something else?

The survey has one question that asks “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with support for your specialized computing needs?”.   But I’m not sure “specialized” is the right word either.

I’m going to take the next week or so to try and come up with wording for questions that get at support for research/grant/specialized computing.  In the meantime, we will be preparing an updated version of the survey so it can be tested at each of the five sponsoring institutions.  We’ll be testing the revised questions with faculty, students, and staff over the summer so that the new survey is ready to go when the next survey cycle begins in the fall.

This reasoning seems contrary to the pervasive use of public machines I see here at Richmond.  It also runs contrary to data from the MISO Survey, a quantitative measure of faculty, student use and satisfaction with higher education IT and Library resources and services (disclaimer: I am a member of the MISO Survey team).

This past year was the first year that institutions took the survey for a second time, giving us our first longitudinal look at students, faculty, and staff.  Within a 3-year period, students reported a 9% increase in laptop ownership (from 84.4% to 93.6%).  In that same period, use of public computing labs on campus rose at a statistically significant rate (Time 1 mean 3.59 on a 1-4 scale, n=2617, STD 1.25; Time 2 mean 3.66, n=1949, STD=1.21).

It would be interesting to research the reason for an increase in public computing at the same time as a rise in laptop ownership.  Is it specialty software?  The social aspects of public labs?  Insufficient power support for laptops on campuses?

I agree with the cost concerns around public computing.  At Richmond, we’re concluding a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure proof-of-concept project, with the hope that we will be able to make software available to students on their own computers (similar to NCSU’s VCL) or at least via a thin client solution.  There will always be a need for fat clients in some spaces, but these alternatives will make our environment easier to manage and our resources more ubiquitous.  But UVA’s move seems unsupported by the data, and I will be curious to see what the long-term impact is for their students.

“The law provides a four-point test for the fair use of copyrighted works, taking into account things like the purpose, the size of an exerpt and the effect the use might have on the commerical value of the actual work.”

The deal between Warner and Google seems to be that any content merits a take-down if it has any identifiable copyrighted material in it, whether it’s a sign language teacher using a bit of Foreigner in the background or a family video that has some music playing in the background.  The argument seems to be that while YouTube users are noncommercial, Google is profiting from site traffic, and the media companies arguing that all content is thus commercial.

At Richmond, we’re researching copyright and fair use with a goal to more liberally interpret fair use so that the video work our students do – which often includes snippets from commercial music – can see the light of day.  I’m encouraged by the report from The Center for Social Media, which argues that transfomative uses, like the ones our students have for copyrighted material, are legal.

What today’s article in the Times tells me is that while transformative uses may be legal, we’ll need to host the content ourselves rather than host it on a for-profit service like YouTube.  While it’s disappointing to lose the opportunities that YouTube offers in terms of letting more people see our student’s work, I still find hope that we will someday soon have a policy that allows student scholarship to be seen beyond the classroom.

Someday Second Life or its successor might be like this.

Thanks to NMC Virtual Worlds for calling attention to this video.

Joe has always been an advocate.  He was there when we owned a parcel on the mainland (every now and then I visit the old landmark – it’s currently a furniture sky mall). He brought his class in world in the fall of 2006, and was one of our biggest reasons for moving to a private estate.

Sharon has been involved too, from participating in NITLE events to recent work starting a Global Studio on the island.  Sharon has been particularly good at encouraging our Second Life to be free of the conventions of our First Life.  We don’t need more brick buildings, though having some visual cues connecting our virtual space to the campus is nice.

We met to discuss the future of our island.  Things have grown organically, and all of us agreed that we could do it better if we started from scratch.  So what’s coming?  We see the need for five kinds of spaces at Richmond:

• Orientation space: A landing zone for the island, with information on what’s there and how to find it.
• Sandbox spaces: A place where anyone associated with the University of Richmond can test, play, create. We plan on making several spaces available vertically so individuals or groups can work in a specific space if they don’t want to work in the general sandbox at ground level.
• Project spaces: When classes or other projects want an ongoing space, we’ll have several. At the ground level will be projects that are expected to persist. This might include Sharon’s Global Studio, and our 3D version of the Voting America project, which will be restarting this term with help from students in our Technology Learning Center. Term-based projects will be up in the sky, and can be as big or little as the projects require.
• Showcase spaces: For presentation of research, or as archives of the best work done in classes, we’ll have space for work to be preserved and shared. One example will be posters from our Arts & Sciences Symposium, held each April. We’ll also link in to videos that students have created for Symposium.
• Meeting spaces: We need a variety of environments for groups to meet and collaborate. This will include an amphitheater for large groups, but also smaller spaces for work groups. I think we’ll have many opportunities for thinking differently about space for these environments.

It will take some time for us to reconfigure the island, but some things are already beginning.  The group has agreed to meet regularly to fine-tune our use of our virtual space.

All of this has me looking for alternatives. I don’t think I could stand Pownce again. I never liked the design and their AIR client was too buggy.

Jaiku was worth another look, though. It’s missing my social network, but overall it wasn’t as awkward as Pownce. My biggest problem with Jaiku was that I kept getting redundant Twitter feeds hours after the fact.  A Tweet from D’Arcy would echo from Alan and Andy long after I’d seen it, with the attribution confused. It was like an echo chamber, with no way to stop. So I stopped watching.

But with Twitter in trouble I thought it was worth another look. And I’m glad I stopped by.

First thing I noticed was a note from Jaiku itself (1 month, 2 weeks ago no less):

Jaiku will be moving to the new Google App Engine. More on the Jaiku blog: http://tinyurl.com/3o2kkr

I figured by this point the move would be done. So what had changed? The first thing I checked was if I could use SMS on my iPhone to send Jaikus. Back in the day, it just didn’t work. My only choice was to have a Safari bookmark, which I didn’t like. Now? The test message went through, I was able to reply, and now I can use SMS to sent to Jaiku.

More importantly, as I started browsing my friends, I noticed an option for each feed they send to Jaiku: I can unsubscribe from just that feed. So now I can get Alan’s Jaikus, his Flickr stream, but not his Twitter feed or CogDogBlog if I don’t want.

That’s exactly the kind of control I would need for Jaiku to work. And so I’m back. Not giving up on Twitter yet – I’ve been playing with brightkite lately and like the ability to send posts to Twitter – but I am going to post to Jaiku more, just to see what happens.

“The construction of the course syllabus, a natural beginning point for most instructors, is a good example of how the software imposes limitations.  When they first enter a CMS, new instructors see the default buttons of the course menu, which are based on type rather than purpose: Announcements, Course Content, Discussion, even Syllabus.  The buttons link to pages that simply provide a place to upload a document, which is exactly what most instructors do: upload a word-processed file of their in-class syllabus.  It would be more natural for novice instructors to see a blank schedule in which they could create each week’s (or unit’s) activities.  Most professors think in terms of the semester and how their pedagogical goals can be achieved within the context of time rather than space.  The default organization of the CMS forces them to think in terms of content types instead, breaking the natural structure of the semester.”

Lane suggests that constructivist, learner-centered, or inquiry-based approaches are better supported by Web 2.0 applications, or by learning management systems that focus more on pedagogy than content management.

We’re exploring these tools at Richmond now, but at this point we’re connecting with our early adopters, not the majority.  I wonder what it will take for most faculty to embrace social tools: they require more consideration up front, and if they want to use more than one tool, it’s multiple logins for them and their students.  The effort has to be justified, and I think we’ll see that as early adopters share compelling stories of transformed learning.  But is there something more we need to do, either to be sure the stories are communicated effectively or the administrivia streamlined?

I guess I’m trying to step into our learners’ shoes, to be sure our plans are effective.  I can be patient, as social technologies work their way into instructor toolboxes, but I also want to be sure I’m not missing any opportunities.