Academic Technology News

Environmental Science and Policy | Environment

Over the next two weeks, the college will be conducting interviews for the Director of the Center for Geospatial Analysis–that’s the fancy name for GIS Center. Four candidates are coming to campus to interview–all have PhD’s and extensive experience in teaching, research and administration of GIS programs. I know this is ESP time, but if you’re going to break for lunch anyway you may want to stop by Room 230 in T-Hall on June 6, 13, 16 or or 18th at noon to hear the talks by the candidates. There will be some type of food at each talk.

The director will teach two sections of the introduction to GIS, and will work with faculty, undergraduate and graduate students on projects using GIS as a tool. A assistant director will be hired later on. The best information that we have now is that the Center will eventually be housed at Swem in the location currently occupied by the Copy Center. The great space hunt is going on now to find temporary space until that space opens up.

The College is continuing to consider solutions for having student develop comprehensive portfolios to capture their research experiences, evidence of civic engagement and other types of experiential and service learning. Susan Bosworth and Berni Kenny are working with Digital Measures as a potential vendor, and are bring them to campus for a presentation next week. I’ll be attending and will keep you posted on what transpires.

I had looked at this material some time ago and thought the software looked pretty good, but I wasn’t quite sure that the college was ready to commit to the level of effort that it would take to incorporate learning portfolios into the culture of the curriculum. The time may be approaching!

Faculty in the School of Education have had quite a bit of experience in working with student portfolios, and could be valuable resources if the College decides to make a commitment to this kind of learning tool.

Portfolio Resources from the School of Education

School of Education Portfolios Using Templates

E-Folios Using Wikispaces

This is what Web 2.0 looks like!

Jim Groom, who coined the term Edupunk, displays the latest in Web 2.0 fashion. Posted from the blog tool from within Flickr.

Nearly 80 students have uploaded their honors theses into the D-Space digital repository that was established at Swem as part of the spring pilot with the Charles Center. DSpace is organized around “communities” and collections. In the pilot project, we established community called Research @ William and Mary that currently is made up of four collections:

• Honors Theses
• Research Journals
• Williamsburg Documentary Projects
• Working Papers and Projects

The repository accepts just about any kind of media you want to throw at it, and the library IT staff is in the process of purchasing additional storage. Faculty or students who have need to store research products of all kinds in an organized way with rich metadata might find this a valuable resource. You can subscribe to updates in the collection by email or RSS. I’m getting using email to get a daily update of new theses and find the diversity of titles fascinating. Recent updates have ranged from A Million Little Pieces, Incorporated: How Oprah Winfrey Maintained Her (Non)Capitalist Media Empire to The Impact of Ambient Noise on Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) Nestling Begging.

I’m hoping we can continue to work together with the library staff to expand this resource.

IT Conversations | Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators | Greg Wilson

A couple of years ago, I met Jon Udell at the University of Mary Washington Faculty Academy after following his columns for a long time in Byte and Infoworld. He’s been an innovator in fields as diverse as groupware, screen casting and community uses of open software. (His documentary screencast on Wikipedia’s heavy metal umlaut page is a classic.)

Among his many current activities, Jon hosts a series of interviews with IT innovators on the T Conversations Network that includes this great discussion of some the problems inherent in providing high performance computing resources.

Greg Wilson recently, a faculty member at the university of Toronto, gave a talk entitled High-Performance Computing Considered Harmful. Wilson explains why HPC can’t be all about speed and power. Instead, we must also care, more than we have in the past, about human productivity, correctness, and reproducibility.

Well worth a listen given the potential contributions of HPC across the curriculum–and the problems investing in initiatives like this presents.