Registration is now open for NERCOMP's October 10th workshop: "Library-IT Mergers: Is a Merger in My Future?"

Registration is now open for NERCOMP's upcoming workshop "Lecture Capturing."

Registration open for NERCOMP workshop: "P(V)odcasting - Digital Media On-Demand"

Faculty are familiar with teaching in classrooms, but put them in a virtual classroom and they are often lost and unsure of how to proceed. The planning required to offer a quality online course is new to many faculty, as well as all of the delivery, communication, collaboration, assessment, and class management issues they will encounter. How can we prepare faculty to teach an online course? What are the obstacles to getting faculty to participate in preparation programs and how can they be overcome?

Registration is now open for NERCOMP's upcoming workshop:  "Pen-based Technologies for Teaching and Learning."

Seats are still available for NERCOMP's upcoming workshop:
"Technology for Accessibility" 

The following set of links/announcements from CNI's Clifford Lynch help to frame many of our recent posts about the future of publishing, scholarly communications, and our course management platforms in the context of cyberinfrastructure.

Even though these documents have been out for a few days already, I wanted to be sure that CNI-announce readers were aware of them, as they are very important.

 Blackboard today announced that the US Patent Office had awarded it a patent "for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods." Things covered by this patent include client-server online courses in which users are defined as either students or instructors, the use of online drop boxes in an instructional setting, online grade books, online assessments, and many other common systems and methods that folks in higher education have utilized for years before the June 30, 2000 filing date of Blackboard's patent request.

After purchasing and killing Prometheus in 2002 and WebCT last year (and many other companies, though not strictly speaking CMS/LMS companies), Blackboard seems to have a long-term strategy of not developing good or original technology but buying competitors and, now it is clear, trying to keep others out of the field by getting an absurdly broad patent for common uses of technology if that technology is employed in the context of education. Not only do we need to worry about the future of open source initiatives such as Moodle and Sakai, but we also need to worry about using a blog or wiki with a class of students. In fact, simple networking protocols, authentication practices, and the like, if undertaken by a school could well be jeapordized by this patent

NITLE's Bryan Alexander is running an upcoming workshop to develop plans for launching enterprise-wide roll-outs of Web 2.0 applications such as blogging, wikis, social bookmarking and podcasting. Wesleyan University, Trinity College and Connecticut College have developed some tagging conventions within del.icio.us to share both examples of how these tools are being used in academic contexts, and lists of candidate tools for implementation. The list of tags can be found at http://wiki.academiccommons.org/wiki/TagSet. You can also find instructions there on how to subscribe to RSS feeds that del.icio.us generates to keep track of this initiative. And of course, if you have an account on del.icio.us, you are encouraged to contribute your own links to the pile. 

David Green's study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of the digital format for images. While the core of the study involved changes in the teaching-learning dynamic and the teacher-student relationship, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric. In addition to the report, the site contains a set of one-on one-interviews with faculty on how digital changes everything.