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.

Here are the extended Tech Center hours in Collins Memorial Library 018 for Reading Period and Finals week:

Reading Period

Weekend

Finals Week

Extended Library hours schedule is here.

The Director of Instructional Technology position has been vacant since Michael Nanfito left in July, 2006. Today the search has been renewed with the public posting of the description for this position.

• Higher Education Jobs listing
• UPS HR Web Site Listing

A number of sporadic problems with sending email from Blackboard to students have been reported in the last few days.

[ UPDATE: These issues have now been fixed as of Friday 4/4/08 1:30 PM.

The network team has fixed the email problem that was blocking the delivery of email from Blackboard. All the emails that were waiting to be sent will now be delivered, but it will take a couple of hours because there were several thousand of them. ]

Symptom

When sending email to All Users (Control Panel > Send Email > All Users), some of the students, or even you, do not get the email.

This has happened to several faculty in the last week, but is very irregular: it happens only in some courses and only to some students. If you are using the Send Email feature in Blackboard, be sure to check with students that the emails are arriving.

Cause

This sporadic email non-delivery is caused by our email spam filter system. It is not a Blackboard specific issue; it sometimes happens to other network applications, too. The spam filter was updated and tightened last Fall in response to complaints about increased email spam, but one of the side effects is that it sometimes blocks legitimate mail. The issue has been taken up again this week by the OIS Network staff who are looking into it.

Workaround

In the meantime, there are two workarounds: 1) use regular email, 2) instead of sending the email to the whole class (”All Users”) at once, send it in small batches to selected users only: Control Panel > Send Email > Single/Select Users and choose just a handful of names each time.

Also, you may want to post an Announcement in your Blackboard course as another way of communicating with your class.

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.