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Yesterday Giz, Kevin, and I went to UNCG to participate in the Spring Tri-IT Meeting. We went to present on “Situating Blogs and Wikis: The Value Added Proposition of the Library as Service Provider.” The meeting was a nice one. It was small enough that you could meet people, but big enough so that you didn’t have to learn everyone’s name. Everyone there seemed to work at the intersection of education and technology, whether their position was located in a library, teaching and learning center, or an academic department. As I’ve been trying to do, I took most of my notes in my own blog so that I wouldn’t go into too much detail for you here. š If you want to see some details, I’ve posted on the introduction, getting connected with Google Apps, imagining an interdisciplinary game, and what the UNCG library is doing with Blackboard.
As is often the case, one session particularly stood out to me as useful for my thinking at this point in time, and that’s the library/Blackboard project. The librarians at UNCG are doing some really interesting work! It seemed to me that they’re seeing some of the same trends that we’re seeing, but approaching the problem solving from a different perspective. Where our energies tend to be around creating multiple open places that we have to tie together (like pulling video into the wiki or toolkit), they tend work from one portal (Blackboard), putting everything there to start with. The open/disparate vs. closed/centralized issue is one I have been thinking about a little bit, and it was really nice to see a good example of the strengths of a closed/centralized system. Great session!
Great meeting, too!
1 Comment on ‘Tri-IT Meeting’
This was the largest TRI-IT I have attended. I counted 55 attendees before the first session began and about 30 attendees at the wrap-up session at the end of the day. In addition to the ZSR Library staff who attended, five of the ITGs came to the event: Jolie Tingen, Richard King, Wayland Caldwell, Jeff Muday, and Scott Claybrook
As is the custom at these events, each school represented had an opportunity at the start of the day to say a few words about any recent initiatives or projects! Ray Purdom, from our host institution UNCG, gave an update on their laptop initiative, and how it led to some extensive classroom furniture updates. Additionally, he discussed new communications technology in the electronic classrooms that allowed the instructor direct voice connections to IT support or campus security. Neal Caidin and Amy Campbell from Duke described a āLibrarians in Blackboardā program and their pending upgrade from Blackboard 6.3 to 8. Like many schools Duke is looking at other CMS products like Moodle and Sakai. They also have a new programs called the āduke digital initiativeā or DDI, which are experiments that can be rolled out to the faculty at large if successful. The current focus is on video content at the moment. They also mentioned it is the 10 year anniversary of the CIT at Duke. Bob Henshaw from UNC-CH mentioned their Sakai pilot and Greensboro College is in year three of using Moodle! A&T is developing sandbox for faculty to test new tools, and NC State has a formal pilot of Moodle and is considering a move away from Blackboard Vista.
At the wrap-up session it was announced that NC State had agreed to host the Fall 2008 TRI-IT and Elon had agreed to host the event in Spring 2009.