Academic Technology Notebook

COLTT Gallops Back to Boulder

By Deborah Keyek-Franssen

The Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology (COLTT) conference will be held this coming August 12 and 13 on the CU-Boulder campus, with a pre-conference workshop day on August 11. COLTT, formerly known as the Teaching with Technology Conference, gives postsecondary faculty, instructors, and staff the opportunity to explore the uses of current and emerging technologies in teaching and research, and to network with colleagues from the entire Rocky Mountain region.

Registration for the conference will open in May, with reduced rates for adjunct and part-time faculty, as well as for graduate students. Visit the conference website at www.cu.edu/coltt for more information.

Digital Humanities Initiative

By Deborah Keyek-Franssen

The Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI) is a collaborative effort to promote and foster digital humanities scholarship on the CU-Boulder campus. The initiative is supported by a group of humanities, libraries, and academic technology faculty and staff from the Center for Humanities and the Arts, the Libraries, and Academic Technology. The DHI is at the beginning stages of addressing and meeting the demands of a new form of humanities scholarship molded by digital technology, in part by developing a series of workshops and events that will educate faculty and staff in the area of the digital humanities. Potential topics for these workshops and events include digital literacy, skills acquisition, preservation and accessibility of digital works, sustainability, and publishing. Academic Technology and the Libraries are sponsoring attendance at Project Bambooworkshops, which provide national partnerships and discussion that allow us to pursue our campus digital humanities efforts. Academic Technology has also funded a Norlin Provost’s Fellow, master’s candidate Lindsey Mikash, who is helping the DHI group with funding proposals. For more information on the DHI, please contact Deborah Keyek-Franssen.

Bruises not Included

By Dave Underwood

Murderball anyone? If that leaves you scratching your head, may we recommend the movie of the same name? A powerful documentary which follows the training and competition of a team of hyper-intense wheelchair rugby players, Murderball is a deeply moving examination of human grit and determination. The movie has inspired students in Josh Kupetz' Writing and Rhetoric class to emulate its hard-hitting style in documenting the travails of Denver's own quad-rugby team, The Harlequins. Equipped with training and gear provided by the Academic Media Services labs in ATLAS, the students filmed a recent quad rugby tournament in which the Harlequins reigned supreme. Tim Riggs and Dave Underwood will be helping the students in coming weeks as they distill hours of captured footage down to a final, human look at the players and why they love this brutal game. The finished piece will enjoy a permanent home on the Harlequin's website.

The “Murderball” class is a prime example of how Academic Media Services has evolved in recent years from simply providing media service and support to acting as a vested faculty partner in planning, teaching, coaching, and even assessing class projects. With their years of combined experience in media matters, Tim Riggs and Dave Underwood now regularly visit classes to speak with students on a variety of subjects. Their guest lectures on digital-video planning and production, graphic design and typography, desktop audio production, and media copyright awareness help students hit the ground running when they embark upon media-related projects. These “pre-emptive” visits, along with “templated” recommendations for class workflow and organization, help faculty move their teaching into the dynamic world of multimedia without needlessly re-inventing the wheel. The department even makes available media-specific grading rubrics, courtesy of instructors who have gone through these doors before.

If you have an interest in assigning a media project for your class, but would like to avoid an unwanted bruising, please give Dave Underwood a call at 303 492-2672 or e-mail him at david.underwood@colorado.edu.

Decks, Why’s, and Videotape

By Dave Underwood

You know that VHS tape of yours, the one you’ve been showing in class since the Carter administration? Yes, that one. Well, it might be time to retire the old workhorse and convert its content to something more…digital.

A few factors point toward your tape’s ultimate demise. Just as with 35mm lecture slides, the electronics industry has abandoned tape, and moved on to newer, more viable formats. In fact, it’s virtually impossible now to purchase new titles on VHS tape. And along with the lack of new content goes the lack of incentive to manufacture new players. Those of you who taught using slide carousels know how this works.

So what about that tape? How much longer will you be able to show it in class? Eric Sherrill, who engineers and plans new classrooms for the ITS Educational Technology group, tells us that, for now, ITS will continue outfitting classrooms with VHS/DVD combo players. But that will surely change when manufacturers finally drop VHS completely – and that won’t be long.

The safest long-term bet for sharing your VHS materials with future students is to digitize your tapes now, before VHS decks go away. And the best place on campus to do that is in the Media Duplication Office in Norlin Library. Michael Riberdy, Norlin’s Media Services Coordinator, says that making the switch from analog to digital is surprisingly easy. And the options for playback are manifold; DVD disk and QuickTime, Flash, and Windows Media files are all available.

For more information on how it all works, please visit:
http://ucblibraries.colorado.edu/systems/mediaservices/

There’s a nominal fee.

iTunesU Coming Soon!

By Deborah Keyek-Franssen

The campus is getting closer to launching an iTunesU public site. Service partner meetings with Academic Technology, ITS, Libraries, and University Communications will begin in the next couple of weeks to determine the roles, responsibilities, and provisioning that will underlie this joint service. If you have content that you would like to contribute to CU-Boulder’s iTunesU site, please contact Deborah Keyek-Franssen.

Outside the Box: CULearn for Non-SIS Courses

By Steve Bailey

Juliette Bordier of the French Department was looking for a way to share supplementary learning materials with students in French 1000- and 2000-level classes, "a sort of sandbox with folders per grammatical themes." CULearn seemed like the ideal solution, but traditionally it had been limited to official courses. This past January, all that changed.

One of the first people to register, Bordier noted that CULearn was a great fit for her project because it is "safe and tested," "students already have access--it is a familiar product," and it doesn't require a new ID and password. So far, only a couple of instructors have access because the project is just getting off the ground, and Bordier wants to be sure she evaluates similar tools like Ning before fully committing.

If you’d like to try out CULearn for something other than an official course, just call 5-HELP to get set up or go to www.colorado.edu/its/culearn/communitycourses.html.

New LMS on its Way

By Deborah Keyek-Franssen

With the guidance of faculty from across campus, CU-Boulder is investigating the next generation of learning management systems (LMS) and hopes to begin implementation of a new CULearn environment in Spring, 2010 with both the old and new versions of CULearn available for migration throughout 2010.

A faculty team and a technical team met during this past fall semester to discuss functional requirements for a new system, including those that support participatory learning (e.g., clickers, chat), peer and team learning (e.g., collaborative spaces, blogs, wikis), and assessment (e.g., tests, quizzes, essays). These requirements form the basis of a formal RFP process, which will take place over the next few months. Faculty will sit on the 3 to 5 person RFP committee, along with a very small number of central IT staff; this committee will work with the procurement service center to choose a product from among one of several.

Once a product is chosen, technical teams will ready the platform for use on campus. Our goal is to have a slow migration period for the new LMS, with an experimentation period in fall, and initial courses in spring 2010. We plan to have the current CULearn and the new platform running in parallel, possibly for up to a year, to allow faculty to transfer their courses to the new system over a period of time.

If you have suggestions and opinions about the new LMS (or the existing one), we’d love to hear them. Just drop a line to Deborah Keyek-Franssen.