Yesterday afternoon the Faculty Senate voted unanimously to approve the LMIS Committee recommendation that UPS adopt Moodle as our new Learning Management System.

New UPS Chief Technology Officer Molly Tamarkin has proposed we adopt the name “Move To Moodle” for the project of rolling out Moodle over the next year to two years. The move will be gradual. Over the summer, OIS will form a technical team to plan and manage the conversion process.

For more information please visit the Moodle page.

Instructional Technology has worked over the last two years to respond to faculty input from the LMIS Committee to evaluate our Learning Management System needs. Many thanks to all Moodle testers, faculty and students (over 350 of you), for your hard work and willingness to take the lead, to experiment, and to put up with the inevitable difficulties that come with pioneering.

What’s a blog? Do you blog? What would you write there? Why would you use one for class? Why do you like having a blog?

Here are the answers by 2nd and 3rd grade students who blog and here is the site where they blog.

They will be college freshman in about 12 years.

Professor Patrick Winston of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers tips on how to give an effective talk, in series of short video clips that illustrate his points by doing them.

Technology involved: writing, chalk, a blackboard, and of course, video.

The New York Times network must be getting slow, too. They note in a recent article that:

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

Note that cause of this is Video, and lots of it: video downloading, media filesharing, multimedia rich games, and increasingly, Internet based television.

In 2007, YouTube alone accounted for more traffic than the entire Internet carried in the year 2000.

And projections are video traffic will grow more than 50% annually over the near future. All this despite the fact that editing video on a computer is still hard, still slow, and still something that most people don’t do very well even when they do it. Imagine if video editing were as easy as PowerPoint? One day, it will be.

Now online at the Nobel Prize web site is a series of Educational Games, designed for younger children, but still fascinating as an example of how basic concepts in science, economics, and literature can be easily imparted by using a visual narrative and a directed simulation to teach interactively.

I used it to make some plastics with the help of a talking rubber duck and learned about monomers, polymers, thermosets, and why nylon stockings run so easily. You can also help stop nuclear arms proliferation and join a tribe on The Lord of Flies.

There are other games which academics have helped to design that accurately reflect scholarship. Professor Katherine Smith of the History Department recommends the Museum of London’s online game The Medieval Game of Life, which helps students get a historically accurate appreciation for the range of life and career choices available in those times.

There are signs that both the study and use of computer simulations and gaming are entering the academic mainstream, including a number of academic journals on the topic. And computer gamers are beginning to return the favor.

The University’s own Professor Andrew Nierman’s Java Instructional Gaming Project is one of these efforts, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.