CIO at Harvey Mudd

Digital Media and Learning Competition

2010-01-28T13:32:00.000-08:00

The HASTAC initiative and MacArthur Foundation support a Digital Media and Learning Competition. They're doing an interesting thing this year: applications have been submitted, and they are not gathering public comments on each application.

When I looked, it caught my eye that the top tags in their tag cloud of comments were "engineering", "STEM", "collaboration", "education" and "science". Kind of spells Harvey Mudd College...but we don't seem to have an application in. Well, maybe next year!

2010 HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition

2010-01-05T09:42:00.000-08:00

HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation competition was recently announced. This is a really interesting competition:

"The theme of this year's Competition is Reimagining Learning and there are two types of awards: 21st Century Learning Lab Designers and Game Changers.

Aligned with National Lab Day as part of the White House's Educate to Innovate Initiative, the 21st Century Learning Lab Designer awards will range from $30,000-$200,000. Awards will be made for learning environments and digital media-based experiences that allow young people to grapple with social challenges through activities based on the social nature, contexts, and ideas of science, technology, engineering and math.

The Game Changers category—undertaken in cooperation with Sony Computer Entertainment of America (SCEA) and Electronic Arts (EA), Entertainment Software Assocation, and the Information Technology Industry Council—will award amounts ranging from $5,000-$50,000 for creative levels designed with either LittleBigPlanet™ or Spore™ Galactic Adventures that offer young people engaging game play experiences and that incorporate and leverage principles of science, technology, engineering and math for learning.

Each category will include several Best in Class awards selected by expert judges, as well as a People’s Choice Award selected by the general public. The online application system will open on January 15 and will include three rounds of submissions, with public comment at each stage.

Please see www.dmlcompetition.net for all details."

Listing every academic in the world!

2009-01-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

Recently read about Academia.edu, which, according to Dr. Richard Price, does two things:

- It shows academics around the world structured in a 'tree' format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations.

- It enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area - the latest people, papers and talks.

They are hoping that Academia.edu will eventually list every academic in the world -- Faculty Members, Post-Docs, Graduate Students, and Independent Researchers. Academics can add their departments, and themselves, to the tree by clicking on the boxes.

One of the interesting things about the site is just how simple and intuitive the interface is. Much we could learn from it. The Harvey Mudd entry is at:

http://www.academia.edu/#/Universities/Harvey_Mudd_College

Teaching and Learning Challenges of 2009

2009-01-09T16:01:00.000-08:00

Educause just released a list of the top teaching and learning challenges for 2009

http://connect.educause.edu/wiki/TLChallenges09

the list is

Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.

Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).

Reaching and engaging today's learner.

Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.

Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.

In many ways, this has always been the list of challenges (well, with the exception of the second with its reference to that special beast the 21st century learner). So it will be interesting to see how people make the issues more specific in the Educause wiki.

Status update on IT planning

2008-12-10T22:25:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow I will be presenting for the first time at a HMC faculty meeting. "Scaweee" as my two year old started saying at Halloween.

Here it is:

Teaching and Learning

2008-09-25T16:36:00.001-07:00

Today at lunch time we had the first TLC/CIS cosponsored panel on teaching and learning. Sarah Harris, Melissa O'Neill and Vatche Sahakian presented. Sarah spoke about her experiences using Tablet PCs in class, Melissa about using wikis in teaching and Vatche about screencasting.

Great stuff I learned about:

Sarah showed Classroom Presenter-- software out of the University of Washington that does some very nice things for presentations using Powerpoint. Like letting the instructor see handwritten notes on the slide (on the slide, not off to one side) that the students don't see.

Melissa described how she asks students to collaborate to create class lecture notes on a wiki. Melissa "seeds" the wiki with the text from the slides used in the lecture. She uses Twiki, but also mentioned other social collaboration tools likeHiveminder, Trac and Jottit

I had to step out and missed part of Vatche's presentation, unfortunately. He talked about the setup he put together to create screen casts of homework problem solutions. Later, I came back and he showed me his Livescribe pen, which is about the coolest thing I've seen in quite a while. It's going on my wish list.

In short, a great discussion. The turn out was small, which meant there was lots of time for questions. And there were lots of questions!

I hope that CIS (Computing and Information Services) and TLC (Teaching and Learning Committee) can sponsor more events like this in the future.

Academic Orientation

2008-09-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

Classes at HMC started today, Sep 2, so I had to work on Labor Day, but it was for a good cause. Apologies to organized labor everywhere. Apparently, this is not unusual at schools that are on a semester system. Since I lived with the quarter system at UCLA, I had no clue!

One thing I did was a brief presentation for Academic Orientation. The freshman class was introduced to topics like plagiarism, cooperation on homework, time management etc. My bit was on some Computing Services and, of course, on file sharing. In talking about file sharing, I focused on the RIAA's tactic of sending early settlement letters for the College to deliver to users whom the RIAA claims are infringing copyright.

IT Planning Overview

2008-08-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

This is a presentation I did last Spring for the Board of Trustees Educationl Planning Committee.

2008-08-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

At Harvey Mudd we're getting into an IT planning phase. The College has not had a comprehensive IT plan for some time, so creating one was high on my agenda when I came here. We have a very good start in an IT Review that Joel Smith and Ted Dodds wrote in 2007.

In my first few months, I met with a lot of people to try to get a sense of what they saw as important for IT @ HMC, how CIS (the central computing entity) could improve services, and what they hoped to have in the future. I learned a lot.

We've now launched a website to help support the IT planning process. CIS staff helped me get this up. I'm trying an experiment with Comment Press from the Institute for the Future of the Book. It is a WordPress theme that allows people to comment on a text paragraph by paragraph, so I'm hoping that it will be useful tool for the HMC community to discuss the IT Review. I hope to do the same thing with drafts of the IT Plan, once we've got some written.

I also found this very nice idea for creating a timeline, written by Bryan Croxall while he was a Woodruff Library Graduate Fellow in Emory's Center for Interactive Teaching (ECIT). It combines Google spreadsheets and MIT's Simile Timeline tool very nicely. I used it to create a timeline for the IT planning process, but it would be great for lots of different purposes. Once built, I can change the Google Docs spreadsheet and the timeline page reflects the changes within five minutes.

2008-08-15T16:54:00.000-07:00

It is hard to believe that I've been at Harvey Mudd since February 2008. The time has flown. I've wanted to start a blog since before I arrived. Finally...