Prof. Douglas Edwards made the front page of this morning’s New Tribune, in an article about his work using videoconferencing to participate in this Summer’s archeological digs in Khirbet Cana, in Israel. Due to his illness, he was unable to be on site, but used video tools to connect daily with staff on site.

Puget Sound hosts the complete collection of images from the digs in its Digital Image Collections. The advantage of having all the information online is:

…the new technology allows interested parties to receive bits of information as on-site teams update an online database, rather than waiting five to 10 years for a comprehensive paper to be published.

IT Staff member Gordon Gilbert and Mark Young, Director of Network Server and Services Group at UPS, have worked closely with Doug on the technology to make the data collections from the digs available to students, faculty, scholars and the public.

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.

The Instructional Technology group is proud to acknowledge our part in both of the front page stories in today’s edition of The Trail.

The Trail’s Best of Special Edition has awarded Best Event of the year to the visit of Senator Hillary Clinton, who spoke at the UPS Field House on February 8th. IT Staff member Walter Andrews was an instrumental part of the negotiations to bring Senator Clinton to campus and coordinated the audio-visual media needs for the event. Bravo, Walter!

We are also proud of our connection with the Trail’s other front page Best of the 2007-2008 academic year: Best Place to Have Sex on Campus. Though the number one item was the baseball dugout, the Media Carrels in the Library followed up.

The Media Services arm of Instructional Technology purchase and maintain the media equipment in these carrels and we are gratified to know students have found multiple uses for them. If there is anything we can do to make this equipment more conducive for widespread use, please send us some Feedback.

We’ve released the latest addition to the Digital Teaching Showcase: Geoff Proehl on Oberon, the Theatre Arts wiki. Click here to see the video or go to the Showcase tab on the navigation bar above!

We’ve released the latest addition to the Digital Teaching Showcase: Lotus Perry on YackPack. Click here to see the video or go to the Showcase tab on the navigation bar above!