UPS Chief Technology Officer Molly Tamarkin announced today the appointment of Cindy Riche as the new Director of Instructional Technology.  In her email to the campus community, she writes:

Dear Campus Community,

At the conclusion of a national search, I am pleased to announce that Dr. Cynthia Riche has accepted the position of Director of Instructional Technology.  Cindy will lead our instructional technology team and will develop academic technology services, an area of strategic importance as it addresses our core mission to support teaching and learning.  We had a wonderful application pool and received over 50 applications from many strong candidates.  Many thanks to Diane Kelley and Lori Ricigliano for their service on the interview committee, and to Theresa Duhart and Randy Thornton for their help providing interim leadership.

Read the rest of this entry »

[UPDATE: As of Mon 9/15, this problem seems to have been fully fixed with all external mail. If you do encounter a further issue with email to a specific email provider, report it to the HelpDesk x8585.]

>> See the Help Desk page for more information and a status update <<

[UPDATE: As of Tues 9/9 email delivery to many external email systems is working again, including to hotmail.com, msn.com, and comcast.com. Some others are not however. This should be fixed in 24-48 hours.]

There is a problem with emails sent to addresses outside of UPS (ie non ups.edu) bouncing back and not being delivered.

This will affect sending emails to student via Blackboard and Moodle to any student who has a NON-UPS email address, or has set their UPS email address to forward to a non-UPS address, such as hotmail, gmail, or yahoo.  This does not affect any internal UPS email or emails from outside sent to UPS addresses.

This problem started yesterday Thursday Sept 4th afternoon. It has been caused by an instance of inadvertent blacklisting of UPS mail as a spam source by various spam detection systems on the Net.

The network group in Technology Services is working on this, and estimates it will take about 72 hours until all outside email delivery is back to normal.

Until then be aware that email sent to non-UPS addresses using any these will probably not be properly delivered.

• Blackboard Mail Tool
• Blackboard Forgotten Password messages
• Moodle Forum notifications and digests
• Moodle QuickMail

Gordon Gilbert of the Instructional Technology staff has announced his resignation. His last day will be September 30th.

Gordon has worked at UPS for 8 years, as a media specialist working in digital audio and video, as technical manager of our Digital Collections, as manager of the Media desk and its small army of work study students.

Gordon has been the primary support for many departments’ digital media needs, including large and extensive projects for Art, Music, and the Theatre Arts departments.  He has been instrumental in helping move digital media into the curriculum, and building a strong tradition in media services at The University.

Gordon also served as the Interim Director of Instructional Technology during the 2006-2007 academic year, after the departure of Michael Nanfito.

The IT staff wishes our friend and colleague Gordon all the best.

IT wishes all the students, faculty and staff of the Pac-Rim program the best and safest of travel as they leave today for their ten month odyssey in Asia.

We have been working with Pac-Rim faculty and students to set up online sites to help them to chronicle their experience and stay connected during their journey.

One of the technologies we are experimenting with is Ning, the “make-your-own-social-network” site.  For security reasons during the trip, the Ning site is private to the participants and invited guests. It allows the group to collect and upload photos, videos, make blog posts, have forum discussions, make maps, read RSS feeds, and share information with each other as they travel.

Prof. Douglas Edwards made the front page of this morning’s News 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.