As of July 1st, 2008, support for campus computer labs is being moved from Instructional Technology to the Technical Support group.

Mike Rivera has been hired as the Manager of Computer Labs and ResNet. Mike has been working with the Instructional Technology team since January as a contractor, doing Lab support. We fully expect the high standards of service to continue now that Mike is joining UPS as a full time employee. Congrats, Mike.

From now on, all support calls for Computer Labs, including both general access labs and academic labs, will now be routed through the HelpDesk at extension 8585.

Instructional Technology staff will no longer handle calls or support for these labs. Instructional Technology is still responsible for academic software licensing and the purchasing of enterprise level academic software, e.g. Blackboard, SPSS, though the usual budget process.

The UPS Office of Information Services is being renamed Technology Services.

A name change was proposed by new CTO Molly Tamarkin to better reflect the mission and place of technology services for the University. Several names were proposed, debated, and voted on by the OIS staff, who chose the new name Technology Services.

The name changed has been approved by the President’s Cabinet and will be implemented in documents and signage over the course of the Summer.

We have added a tutorial page and video about VoiceThread.

VoiceThread is an online voice and video enabled forum. In it, you can create “threads” for presenting sequences of pictures, videos, and text. You can then allow others to comment on your thread, so a group can produce threads together. VoiceThread can produce highly collaborative, media-rich projects, but is very simple to use, since it is based on the conversational tools from the traditional online forum.

Our work on VoiceThread is part of our participation in the Language Technology Bootcamp hosted by The Foreign Language Resource Center of Pomona College.

Dana Flaskerud, of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and Randy Thornton, Instructional Technology, represented UPS at the Bootcamp last April.

IT staff member Randy Thornton was invited to be the opening speaker at Lewis and Clark College’s annual Faculty Technology Institute on May 19th.

The topic was “Start Teaching with Web 2.0 Tools” and was an introduction for faculty who are interested in starting to add Web 2.0 tools such as tagging, blogging, wikis and social network to their teaching repertoire. Several UPS faculty sites were used as examples, including some on the Showcase.

The slides of the presentation are available here on Google Docs.

Recently, the OIS Network team expanded the coverage of the wireless network to all classrooms on the second and third floor of Jones Hall. The entire building should now have wireless access to the network.

With the expansion of wireless in Wyatt Hall over the Spring break, the two largest classroom buildings with only partial coverage now have complete coverage.  All classroom and lab spaces in all academic buildings are now fully covered, except for the remaining partial coverage in Kittredge and Music.

Please see the OIS Wireless page for wireless coverage information.