| Thursday, May 13 |
| 9:30 am |
The Trinity of Open Source: Open
standards, Open source and Open content
Phil Long, MIT
How do open specifications, open archives, open systems, open source
tools and open content apply to scholarship and educational technology. There
are profound ramifications about how we, as educators, researchers
and scholars, look at the meaning of knowledge creation, organization,
dissemination and revision. These issues are not bounded by size
of institution, magnitude of IT budgets, or the presence (or absence)
of world-class research projects. These are issues about choice,
flexibility, sustainability, and scholarship within the methodologies
-- within the practices -- by which we pursue our work. It's about
the freedom to derive new meaning from existing ideas (as code or
as concepts) without being forced to pay for the privilege (through
licensing fees) or being stymied altogether by intellectual property
ownership. Open Source has the promise to be liberating -- or crushed
by excess. I will review some projects currently underway that reflect
aspects of the Open Source approach and ways to engage with them.
>>Download the PowerPoint version
|
| 11:00 |
How many digital assets were there in 1974? Hard to know, but consider
the state of hard drive technology 30 years ago. Consider that the
web was just emerging only ten years ago, and that today, a gigabyte
of mass storage costs less than one dollar. The explosive ubiquity
of things digital is challenging the human inclination to organize
our world. We’re running (or being pushed) from filing cabinets
and shoeboxes to the SAN and digital repository…and nearly
anything qualifies as a digital asset: images, documents, video
clips, transcripts, course components and even entire courses. So
what is a digital asset management system in this broad context?
Is digital asset management unique, or is it another database with
multiple views? Perhaps we have here the opportunity to tear down,
or should I say connect, disparate silos of information.
>>Link to the
web version |
| 1:30 |
Live from the Front: Implementing a Content
Management System
Chris Weaver, Franklin & Marshall College
During the past year, F&M investigated and began implementation
of a Content Management System. With the goals of brand consistency
and code-free updating in mind, we embarked on this major revision
to our web operation in the spring of 2003. After research into
various in-house, commercial and open-source possibilities, we decided
to purchase a new product, the Ingeniux CMS. As with any major IT
project, there were a few "bumps" in the road. Some resulted
from our inexperience working with this new product, and some from
the new product working with us (i.e., this is a new Mac version
from a company that until now had primarily produced only a Windows
product). We are now in the thick of end-user training, ongoing
page migration, and campus buy-in. The purpose of this session is
to share insights about product selection, implementation strategy,
and most of all, "war stories," that may be valuable to
others who are considering content management systems or who are
already in the throes of their own implementation.
>>Link to
the web version
|
| 3:00 pm |
Course management systems, content management systems, digital
asset management systems, and portals. Apparently, we have a lot
of digital materials to deliver via the web and no end in sight
to the systems we need to install to manage them. Of course, there
are obvious benefits to integrating the overlapping features of
these systems into seamless user experiences, but are we really
on a course to do so? Best-of-breed selection of these systems will
likely result in isolated interfaces. Meanwhile, Blackboard seems
to be positioning itself as a soup-to-nuts vertical solutions provider
for higher ed. Single vendor solutions have less flexibility and
large price tags. What's a small school to do?
>>Download the PowerPoint version |
| Friday, May 14 |
| 8:30 am |
An Architecture for Web Based ad hoc reporting
for Institutional Advancement
Tom Slobko, Occidental College
Delivering ad-hoc reports for a modern Institutional Advancement
office, often on short notice, is a serious challenge to the resources
of IS and Advancement operational staffs. Using the web to deliver
these reports directly to users has great promise but there are
serious obstacles to overcome. With the support of the Mellon WISP
grant, Occidental has designed and built an ad-hoc reporting tool
designed to meet 80% of the ad-hoc reporting needs of Institutional
Advancement. The tool can be used by professional and administrative
staff to generate reports and spreadsheets quickly and correctly.
The design allows the IS staff to modify fields and selection logic
without programming. This talk will center on the architecture of
and the requirements for building such a web based reporting tool.
>>Download the PowerPoint version
|
| 9:45 |
Our increasing dependence on web applications and services, and
our quest for sustainable web strategies, often leads us to the
"buy vs. build" dilemma. Some institutions avoid home-grown
solutions at all costs. At the other end of the spectrum are schools
that always prefer to build their own - embodying the "not
invented here" syndrome. When it comes to web applications,
what are the pros and cons of buying versus building? What decision-making
processes or accidents of history push us in one direction or another?
This session will present some case studies of different web application
strategies and how they have succeeded (or not).
>>Download the PowerPoint
version |
11:00
|
WISP: Lessons Learned
Tom Warger, Vassar College
To make information sustainable, we have revisited some familiar
aspects of information technology-infrastructure, tools and methods,
staff, and work processes -- and discovered important new perspectives.
Networked resources need to be robust, interoperable, and capacious.
We have to build outward from our hard-won database expertise to
connect with the web and newer technologies. We need greater flexibility
in staffing: to bring in specialists temporarily from outside, but
also to help the core staff acquire new skills. And, perhaps most
important and most difficult, to re-open discussions of work methods
with the campus community.
>>Download the PowerPoint version |
|
