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 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.

I’m now ready to take the web site to the next level, allowing the community of Milton scholars to contribute events, publication notices and more to the site.  It’s my hope that the site will become as useful as the discussion list has been.

The current site is on a static (i.e. non-cgi enabled) web server.  This server is slated for some big changes and I know the web address for the site is going to change.  A few months back I purchased the johnmilton.org domain, and I plan to use this domain for the new site.

When I first started with hosted servers, I looked at several of the open source content management systems. I settled on Joomla! because both the front end and back end were intelligible not only to me but to the community that will use the site.  I also liked the theme templates that are available.

In the back of my mind, though, Drupal has always been lurking as the best solution.  D’Arcy loves it. NMC switched to it.  It seems infinitely configurable, but that makes it seem infinitely complex, to me and the community.  Unless I could wrap my brain around it all and architect the site well.

The most recent upgrade of Joomla! broke both of the installations I was using.  Users can no longer log in on the front end.  So now I’m really looking at Drupal.  Here are my questions:

• What’s the state of spam and spam protection for Drupal?  Is there a Spam Karma 2 equivalent to keep me safe with a minimum of effort?  I plan to create user roles carefully, but I’d love to have a good security system in place.
• What are the best plug-in modules for Drupal?  I’m already looking at the Events module, since I need to have that kind of content on my site.  But what are the best plug ins overall?  I’ve always appreciated blog entries listing WordPress plug ins – love to see a Drupal list too.
• Do you have any theme recommendations?  I want to keep things simple, but Drupal’s default themes are a little plain.
• Other than Drupal.org, what are some good web sites for Drupal admins to follow?
• What am I not asking that I should?

Technorati Tags: blog, drupal, humanities, JohnMilton, learning, Milton, Joomla!, socialsoftware, teaching, web, WordPress

The article includes comments from Travis Berkley, supervisor of LAN support services at the University of Kansas.  Faculty, staff and students generate an average of 20,000 visits a day.  Kansas didn’t have to update their DNS servers, though.  They’re running BIND version 9 software, which  apparently handles the load comfortably.  The article also notes that Kansas limits how much internet bandwidth students can consume from their rooms, which probably also helps.  Does limiting bandwidth reduce the number of DNS lookups?  Other than slowing the rate at which pages are loading, I would think this would be true only if the limited bandwidth caused students to use the internet less.

The challenge is that more social networking sites are coming, many integrating new kinds of media.  Just yesterday I received an invite from Intellagirl (thanks!) to Pownce, yet another social networking site.  Pownce is like Twitter: you create a network of friends, all of whom can read and respond to short messages, or microcontent as Bryan Alexander calls it.  Twitter restricts you to 140 characters; I’ve never made use of TinyURL until I met Twitter.  Pownce seems to allow longer messages.  They also allow for other types of microcontent, including links, events and files. 

I’m waiting for my social network to sign up for Pownce.  At this moment I have fewer than five friends there, and that’s not enough to sustain conversation.  If you’d like an invite to Pownce, let me know and I’ll send an invite so long as I have any left.

One annoying bit about Pownce is the inline advertising.  Pownce inserts advertising messages at random points in your message stream.  Not good.  I can pay $20/year to make the ads stop, but unless my social network decides to use Pownce over Twitter, I’m more likely to abandon Pownce.

Another bit about Pownce that I’m not crazy about is the Pownce client.  They’ve built an application to deliver Pownce content to my desktop, but it runs on a new Adobe technology called AIR.  I don’t know why I had to install the AIR framework to get my Pownce content, but the real issue is that Pownce doesn’t seem to be opening their APIs.  That means there won’t be any innovation around the site other than what the company comes up with itself.

Hopefully they’ll get smart and open up their APIs.  In the meantime I’m keeping an eye open, hoping to be impressed, but ready to walk away if it doesn’t tip.

Technorati Tags: Pownce, social software, socialsoftware, technology, Twitter, web

I’m always looking for an easier way for faculty and students to blog.  Blojsom’s interface is difficult for anyone who doesn’t know HTML.  WordPress has a pretty easy interface but I’m always looking for another, easier way.

I’ve purchased ecto for my Mac.  It’s a nice tool for writing and managing blog posts.  It’s what I use on those all-too-rare occasions that I find the time to blog.  It’s a simple WYSIWYG interface for editing, and it works well with images.

Yesterday I decided to search through Firefox extensions and I came across Deepest Sender.  As a free extension, the price is right and the tool is cross platform (though I admit I haven’t installed it on my tablet yet).

It works with most API-enabled blogs, has a simple WYSIWYG editing interface, and apparently knows how to handle music files.  I just went through my preferences and saw options (turned off by default) to automatically detect music.  So it’s possible that Deepest Sender can handle podcasts.

In addition to the Normal editing tab, there’s a Source tab where I can easily muck around with the code and a Preview tab.  I log in before editing and all of my blog categories are in a drop down box in the upper right corner.  I can post as a draft or make the post live right away.

What I don’t see is anything that supports tagging.  And I didn’t think there was a way to see what’s been posted to my site but I’m wrong – there is a Post History option in the File menu.

Deepest Sender has just made it to the top of my list as an entry-level blog editing tool for faculty and students.  It gets them to use Firefox and makes posting most entries easy.

Brown points out that the current generation of students learns more through interaction – experiential and social – than through standard lecture experiences.  It’s also helpful to ground learning in the real world: have architecture students do their work in public settings.

Of course as you discover technology that can transform the learning process, it means you’re going to have to adapt your teaching to use the technology effectively.  Too often we start with new software, hardware or web service by using it while we do what we’ve always done.  This is rarely effective.

For example, if you are interested in virtual worlds, like Second Life or Croquet, you shouldn’t be thinking about having your avatar stand up in front of a virtual classroom full of other avatars for a standard lecture.  An immersive multimedia environment is magic, but you’ve got to use the magic.  Instead of a standard lecture, think about the possibilities for interactions that aren’t possible in the real world.  Gardner has suggested that he’d like to have students stage a period Shakespeare production in a virtual world.  Perhaps in Second Life or in Arden such a thing would be possible.  Some students would build the stage, others could create the costumes, while others script avatars and perform the different characters.  Add someone else using their in-world camera could capture the performance creating machinma (a movie created in a virtual world).  Over time you could build a library of these perfomances. 

That’s the kind of experience that technology can bring, and teaching should change to take advantage of the opportunities for active learning, with students building their understanding of a subject rather than waiting passively to be filled with knowledge.

Technorati Tags: learning, SecondLife, teaching, virtualworlds, Web 2.0

I’m just getting started with the service but I connected with the idea of this site immediately and I look forward to connecting with other people’s libraries.

Technorati Tags: reading, Web 2.0

The seminar has a web site where all of the materials for the class have been placed.

Barbara began by grounding the conversation in teaching and learning – this is the focus of today’s seminar.  She reminded us that Dewey said that learning is a social activity.  She suggests that we consider the learner as a node in a network.  Doing the discipline unites learning the discipline and learning new literacies.  Social software puts the students in the center; the dynamic of the class changes.

Bryan pointed out that students have used the technology but have not reflected on the implications and possibilities about the software.  He described blogs as blobs of microcontent presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs are not new, they are old, established and huge in size.  Technorati says there are 50 million blogs in the world.  Even if you doubt the specific number, there are a lot of blogs.

Bryan talked about community blogs, specifically ErieBlogs.com, where everyone in the community can blog.  There’s even competition between the community blog site and the local newspaper.  Baghdad Burning blogs the war in progress – something unparalleled in history.

Warblogs: Blogs devoted to a conflict.  The Command Post is an example of this.  A Blog Carnival is a blog post that aggregates various blog posts on a specific topic.

Barbara suggests that a blogger starts writing, but then communities form around that person, connecting as nodes in a network.  If one blogger vanishes from such a network, the network can survive.

Bryan showed a Middlebury blog that aggregates blog posts from Middlebury students studying abroad.  Barbara says blogs are about conversation, reflection and linking.

What about blogs as a permanent record of someone’s mistakes?  Barbara says that education is a cycle of disruption and repair, not some neat and tidy experience with no errors.  Class-based blogs are webbed, with students commenting and reflecting.  Thought evolves over the course of the class and it’s good for the blog to record that progress.

Once the faculty posts a comment to a blog, it effectively ends conversation.  So Barbara holds off on posting comments so she can let the students build the conversation themselves.

Blogging allows for informal learning to merge with formal learning.

My note-taking was poorer this afternoon:

Wikipedia as a source: faculty generally don’t accept encyclopedia entries as sources in research.  Wikipedia is a starting point, not a destination.

Barbara has the students create their own guide to using the wiki.  She also finds PBWiki to have very easy templates.

Unless someone starts a wiki page, it’s very hard for others to start.

Del.icio.us for classes, especially social science classes.  Penn State’s library has a tag page for books in their library.

Student-produced podcasting is much better than “prof-casting”.

Barbara made a good point about modeling student performance in first-year vs. third-year courses.  We explain the grading system but don’t explain the level of the content we expect them to be able to review and produce.

More on this if I get the time to reflect.

Technorati Tags: blogging, EDUCAUSE2006, learning, E06SEM02F, social software, teaching, wikis