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The last session I attended at NERCOMP was a presentation on the use of wikis at Bridgewater State College. Eric LePage and Timothy Wenson showed off their “BSCwiki” to a rather large audience (perhaps owing to the fact that the last time slot of the day only offered three breakout sessions).
The BSCwiki was built [...]

Northeastern University (Boston) has developed a CRM (customer resource management) application to help increase student retention, by improving communication with faculty, students and advisors. This session was a demonstration of this application and a discussion of its impact. Kostia Bergman, Director of Undergraduate Education in Biology at Northeastern, began the presentation by presenting [...]

Blended learning, which combines traditional face-to-face classroom instruction with online learning, appears to be growing in popularity at many colleges. This session explores the effort at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth to help faculty develop the skills needed to be effective in a blended learning environment.
Faculty training faculty is one of the strategies [...]

This morning’s general session was a presentation by Scott Kirsner, a columnist and contributing writer to a variety of publications, including Wired, Business Week, Boston Globe, New York Times and Variety. He is also the author of “Inventing the Movies” and “The Future of Web Video.”
Scott showed an 1894 kinetoscope clip (Ciecedo with Pepe) [...]

So it’s day two of the NERCOMP conference, and I began the day by attending a demonstration session of Tegrity. The title of the session was “Recruiting, Retention and Relevance (the 3Rs): Leveraging New Learning Technologies for Competitive Advantage.” The main presenter was Alan MacDougall, Director of Academic Computing at the University of [...]

The last session I attended today was a thought-provoking presentation on improving the design of overhead visuals, such as the “slides” produced by PowerPoint and Keynote. Russell L. Kahn, Director of the MS in Information Design and Technology program at the SUNY Institute of Technology, shared some of the key ideas from his forthcoming [...]

Stephen Ragalevsky from Apple was the first speaker at the next session I attended. Stephen showed off Podcast Producer, one of the new features of Mac OS X 10.5 Server. Since I will most likely be upgrading to 10.5 Server sometime in early summer, I found this session to be particularly valuable.
Three new [...]

The first afternoon session I attended focused on developing the skills needed to be an effective IT manager in higher education. Dwight Fischer, the CIO of Plymouth State University, shared some of his experience in managing IT at his institution.
Meeting management skills are vital. Managers must convene and attend a wide variety of [...]