On Tuesday and Wednesday July 29th and 30th, the two final candidates for the Director of Instructional Technology position will be on campus.

Each day, there will be a public presentation and Q&A session by each candidate at 1:30-2:30 in the Presentation Room (Lib 020) to be followed by a reception next door in the Tech Center.  We will be streaming each presentation live at our Ustream site at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/upsitech for those who cannot attend in person.

Details are in the email invitation from CTO Molly Tamarkin which was sent to the campus community. Contact the HelpDesk at x8585 for more information if you did not receive the email.

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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 be handling the direct 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, through 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 change 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.