Education – Page 3 – Dr. Thompsen

NERCOMP – Exhibits and lunch

After the general session, the NERCOMP exhibit hall opened. It was larger than I expected, filling up most of a large ballroom. All of the big names were there, including Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and Blackboard. There were also quite a few more specialized vendors, including a couple of clicker companies. I had a nice chat with the folks at the iClicker booth. I’ve had a good experience using the iClickers in my large lecture class, and I was impressed with the new version of the software they are currently testing. They also have a “web clicker” version planned for release this fall, which would enable students to participate in click sessions over any internet-connected device. Since many students bring laptops to class, and many have web-enabled cell phones or iPods, the day may soon come where hardware clicker solutions will largely be replaced by a web-based service.

At lunch, tables were set up for informal “birds of a feather” chats. I sat at the “open source” table, as I’m particularly interested in Drupal, WordPress and Moodle. It was nice to hear from others who used open source software at their universities. I got the impresssion that open source solutions seem to be most popular at schools that value innovation and flexibility.

NERCOMP – General Session

This morning’s general session began with some announcements from the NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computer Program) leadership. NERCOMP is an affiliate organization of Educause, and has been for the past ten years. While Educause and NERCOMP are two separate organizations, NERCOMP serves as the regional organization for Educause in the Northeast. This year’s NERCOMP regional meeting of Educause is the best attended so far, with nearly 600 attendees from 18 states. There are also 152 vendors participating in the conference.

The general session program was a panel discussion about how college presidents view technology. Three college presidents were on the panel: Cheryl Norton, president of Southern Connecticut State University, S. Georgia Nugent, president of Kenyon College, and Susan Scrimshaw, president of Simmons College. The moderator was Joanne M. Kossuth, CIO and Associate Vice President for Development of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

Kossuth mentioned that one of the biggest challenges she sees in higher education technology is getting faculty to learn and adopt technology. Norton concurred, saying that it is a challenge to get faculty to keep up with the students in their use of technology. She said another big issue is the tendency for students to want to be connected 24/7 with cell phones and texting, and the problems this poses for some faculty. She mentioned one example of a faculty member who confiscated a student’s cell phone.

To the common complaint of faculty that students’ always “go to google first” when doing research, Scrimshaw said, “get over it…even faculty go to google first!” (Good point.) At Simmons, they have combined IT with library services, and have generally found this has helped keep IT policy more aligned with the academic mission of the college.

Norton expressed a concern with students’ understanding of intellectual property and plagiarism. Students need to understand what constitutes fair use and academic honesty. She also briefly mentioned the need to manage the cost of IT.

Should academic computing be separate from administrative computing? In most cases, probably not. Scrimshaw said that in most cases, the division is the result of personalities and traditions, rather than a particular advantage in keeping administrative computing distinct from academic computing.

IT leaders need to focus on effective communication with administration. Norton argued that too often IT leaders use overly technical language, when they really need to be communicating in plain, direct words. It’s important that an institution’s leadership have a clear understanding of the benefit of IT investments.

It was interesting to hear from this group of college presidents about how they view technology. In particular, I enjoyed their candor in talking about their own personal journey in academic leadership. All of them shared some insights into their personal strategies for dealing with the stress of their position…regular exercise, eating right, keeping job and family in balance. Nugent said the best advice she can give someone who aspires to leadership is to be honest: be honest with yourself, be honest with others, and be honest about what you can do. Norton and Kossuth concurred, saying that a leader should always take the high road. The confidence and trust people have in you are a president’s most important assets.

NERCOMP – Opensource LMS

I’m in Providence, Rhode Island today, attending NERCOMP, the Educause Northeast regional conference. Many of the attendees are blogging the sessions, and in fact, the organizers are encouraging it. So I’ll join the crowd, and blog a bit during each session. (Other blogs from participants at the conference can be found at http://blogs.nercomp.org/blogs/nac2008/.

The first session I’m attending is entitled “An Outsourced Open Source LMS and a Pot of Gold?” The presenter was Clark Shah-Nelson, the Coordinator of Online Learning at SUNY College of Technology at Delhi. Clark talked about his experience in converting his campus from a proprietary LMS (Learning Management System) to the open source LMS Moodle.

In considering the total cost of operating an LMS implementation, open source solutions can save a lot of money. In his comparative analysis of proprietary LMS solutions, like WebCT and Blackboard, versus the open source LMS Moodle, Clark found he could save hundreds of thousands of dollars over a three-year time frame. The most significant cost savings was found with a hosted Moodle implementation through MoodleRooms.

Some of the downsides of the hosted solution include a bit slower response time and some inconvenience in getting support. But upsides include the fact that the system administrator is only focused on Moodle, and campus network outages didn’t affect the availability of the hosted LMS. Perhaps more significantly, Moodle has a large user community that encourages openness and sharing. Unlike proprietary LMS offerings, Moodle is built by the community of users, so it is always evolving, and is quick to adopt new innovations.

In the early stages of the process of converting from WebCT to Moodle, the institution first established a Hostmonster account to set up multiple installations of Moodle for testing and development. During the past year, they have had WebCT and Moodle running concurrently, and this fall, they plan to pull the plug on WebCT. Importing courses from WebCT was simplified with the plug-in on http://www.moodle.org.

Faculty members found Moodle to be much easier to use, more flexible, and offers considerably more features. Clark has developed an iPod-based training program to help faculty get up to speed on Moodle. Students seemed to prefer Moodle as well. They found it easier to navigate, appreciate the social networking aspects, and found it easier to follow the discussion threads. They also liked the dog avatar Clark uses to help give the Moodle site a human touch.

Having used Moodle myself, I agree that it has much to offer. While I think it’s not quite as easy to make the transition from a proprietary LMS as Clark implied, and probably not quite as cheap, Moodle is certainly is worth considering.

More information about Clark’s experience can be found at https://snydelwd.delhi.edu:8443/display/CIS/Moodle+and+Banner. Also, SUNY Delhi is sponsoring an Open Source Conference and Moodle Moot this June 19 & 20.

I’m on Sabbatical…I think

This semester I’m officially on sabbatical leave from my faculty position at West Chester University. I’m supposed to be spending my time working on my sabbatical project, and that’s what I’ve been doing…at least part of the time. But during the first two weeks of this semester, I’ve found myself responding to a lot of situations at school that aren’t directly related to my sabbatical project.

For example, last week I spent quite a bit of time helping faculty colleagues with their computers. One of my colleagues had a computer that wouldn’t boot on the first day of class. A few had problems connecting to our departmental server. And there were a host of small issues that I was called upon for advice.

Not that I’m complaining. I appreciate being useful, and it gave me an excuse to keep in touch with my colleagues. But it was making me wonder if I was really on sabbatical…or just “sort of” on sabbatical.

This week I’m happy to say I’m making more progress on my sabbatical project. I’m hopeful that by the end of the year, I’ll see some tangible results. Much of the work I’m doing will be coordinated with our departmental intranet, which I’ve recently developed at communication.wcupa.edu/myCOM. I’m building myCOM using the open-source learning content management software Moodle, which I’ve used in the past for maintaining course web sites on our departmental web server. Eventually, however, I would like to have the content I’m creating integrated into an iTunes U site, something that West Chester University was supposed to have launched a year ago.

EndNote X1 released

Today Thomson ISI ResearchSoft released EndNote X1 for the Mac. EndNote is a bibliography program that is used by many scholars to format citations, search online databases and manage reference libraries. The Windows version of EndNote X1 was released in June.

I’ve been using EndNote since the very first version was developed by Richard Niles at Niles Scientific. The early versions of EndNote were such a pleasure to use, as they were clearly and simply designed to provide quick access to references while writing. I remember writing most of my journal articles and convention papers in the early 1990s with EndNote, and building up a massive library of references “the hard way” by entering in the data myself. While manually entering references took a lot of time, the process helped me feel much closer to the articles and authors I was citing.

My early love affair with EndNote started to fade about eight years ago. I used to be a regular upgrader, buying every new version as soon as it was released. But when EndNote was acquired by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1999, the product started to gradually deteriorate. Like many other software ventures started by a small group of passionate individuals, EndNote lost a lot of its charm when it was gobbled up by a large company with widely divergent interests.

Philadelphia-based ISI was a big company with a long history in the reference library industry, perhaps most famous for the Current Contents series of bibliographic indexes, and of particular note for communication researchers, the Social Sciences Citation Index. ISI had been purchased by publishing giant Thomson in 1992, which added another layer of management on top of an already large company. ISI had developed its own bibliographic software, Reference Manager, which used to compete with EndNote. The year before ISI acquired EndNote, it bought another popular reference program called ProCite from Personal Bibliographic Software.

So when ISI added EndNote to its software stable, the company had three different bibliographic programs: Reference Manager, ProCite, and EndNote. Rather than merge the three programs together, ISI has continued to market them as separate products to this day. During the last eight years, development of EndNote has become slow and incremental. Upgrades have became more expensive, while the value of features added to each upgrade has declined. And the Mac versions of EndNote have been particularly lackluster, consistently lagging the Windows versions.

I may begrudgingly upgrade to the latest version, if for no other reason than to see if it is any better than the rather buggy EndNote X. But sometimes I wish I could just turn back the clock to the early days of EndNote, when the program was such a joy to use, and just plain worked.

Yes! We have a contract!

Today was a happy day for faculty in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE). After five days of difficult negotiations, the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculty (APSCUF), our faculty union, has achieved a tentative collective bargaining agreement for the next four years.Our union was ready to call a strike, as our current contract ended June 30. Many were concerned that there wouldn’t be a second summer session this year. But a last-minute request from the state mediator to extend the talks gave the negotiating teams another chance to iron out their differences. I haven’t seen the contract language yet, but the basic terms seem to be fair. Hopefully, the faculty will have regained at least some of the ground lost in the last contract.I anticipate that while some faculty may raise questions about specific issues, the tentative contract will likely be approved, and we can move on to do what we like to do…teach students and pursue our scholarship.