Crossroads, Connections, and Creativity: Musselman Library Strategic Plan

The Musselman Library Strategic Plan grew out of two all-staff meetings held in January 2007. During the first, library staff identified areas of strength and weakness, as well as opportunities for improvement and growth. Maureen Sullivan, an organization development consultant for libraries, led the next meeting. Ms. Sullivan helped to deepen the analysis begun during the previous meeting and encouraged the staff to begin envisioning the future of the Library. In late January, Robin Wagner, Director of Library Services, formed the Strategic Planning Committee (see list of participants below). The committee’s initial tasks were to complete an environmental scan and to identify upcoming trends and best practices in library services, while formulating mission and vision statements for Musselman Library. These were presented to the rest of the staff for feedback during meetings in March and April. Also in April, the Strategic Planning Committee invited other library staff to serve on task forces charged with creating goals and action items for the plan’s four core issues (see Appendix C). Maureen Sullivan facilitated the launching of these task forces, and each group, led by a member of the Strategic Planning Committee, then met independently numerous times during the next few weeks. The final task force reports were completed in early May and shared with the entire library staff. On May 21, Maureen Sullivan led an all-staff meeting to discuss the task force recommendations. Ms. Sullivan then met with the Strategic Planning Committee and Robin Wagner to begin the process of revising, prioritizing, and incorporating the goals and action items into one cohesive strategic plan. Crossroads, Connections, and Creativity: Musselman Library Strategic Plan was submitted to Robin Wagner, on June 12, 2007. [excerpt

The Web-Based Online Virtual Language Center

The Web-based virtual language center (VLC) has become areality for language learning on many campuses. It offersstudents obvious convenience of time and location. Theycan attend lab at any time they want (it is open 24 hours aday, 7 days a week) and from any location where they havea networked multimedia computer.However, the decision about which language center servicesshould migrate to Web-based delivery is a difficult onebecause the VLC is "self-service" without lab assistants andis based on emulating the existing physical languagelearning environment. There are many open theoretical andpractical issues concerning its validity as a languagelearning environment and its establishment andmaintenance. Furthermore, it has not yet proven to be anideal learning environment for oral communication activitiesbetween students and the instructor and among the students.This article will attempt to address some of these basicissues. Although it is not intended to give the reader a readymademodel of the VLC, the author hopes to be able toprovide those who are interested in setting up a Web-basedlanguage center with some practical suggestions. It is alsothe author's desire that this article stimulate those who areexperienced with the VLC to open a broader discussion ofrelated issues, such as aspects that must be considered forsetting up such a center and the ways in which existingVLCs could be further improved

Playing with Play: Machinima in the Classroom

“So, machinima is really a genre, and not a medium?” The students in my Digital Media and Rhetoric course are grappling with both how to define machinima and how to evaluate whether one is “good” or not. I frustrate them by refusing to provide a definitive answer to this and other similar questions they have asked about the form. This intentional frustration continues as, after watching a few examples they ask me what grade I would give those machinima, if they were turned in for this assignment. Rather than providing a simple answer I redirect, asking them what criteria they would use to evaluate machinima and how the examples we’ve seen in class stand up to this scrutiny. At the beginning of this particular unit, when I announced that we wouldn’t be writing another research paper, they were exuberant. Now, however, the complexity of the task before them is slowly unveiling itself. While a majority of these students are gamers, few of them have experience in video production. None of them have previously looked at fan culture as a source of meaning and knowledge production. We are in unfamiliar territory, and they are getting restless

Using Technology To Leverage Your Lectures Stickiness

Increasingly, universities are scrambling to take advantage of online technologies.  This article describes one such technology that can be used to capture the video and audio of a PowerPoint lecture.  The specific technology is a software program called Camtasia.  With Camtasia one can simultaneously capture in a movie file everything that is occurring on a computer screen along with the audio narration.  Once captured, the video and audio can be produced as a streaming video and uploaded to a web server for online viewing

Supporting synchronous communication services and delivering SCORM lessons in the Greek language through open source LMSs

Nowadays, open source e-learning applications are complete and reliable solutions that are in no case inferior to the commercial ones. Though gratis, they offer unique advantages such as support of various operating systems and the chance to experiment with their source code. Additionally, there is a vast community of developers willing to aid users in installing or using these systems. Besides the fact that they are of excellent quality, open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) such as Dokeos, Moodle, ILIAS and ATutor can be easily adapted to new demands and challenges thus gaining popularity. This paper initially presents an authoring methodology of SCORM lessons in the Greek language which can be applicable to any of the aforementioned systems. Moreover, it focuses on Dokeos and proposes a new extension of this system in order to meet synchronous communication requirements such as videoconferencing and streaming video

Connecting Students by Integrating the 3D Virtual and Real Worlds: We Need 3D Open Source Spaces to Keep Socialization, Communication and Collaboration Alive

Picture a world where imagination is the only limit; a world that stimulates students to learn, communicate, play and grow. The emergence of 3D Virtual Worlds has made this a virtual reality. Until recently this virtual experience has been separated from the real world by the limitations of software (proprietary systems), and constraints of hardware and networks (stationary consoles and network connections). Such separation limits the pedagogical utility that 3D Spaces can offer students. This article peeks around the corner of innovation by exploring a number of emergent open source developments that integrate the 3D Virtual and Real Worlds into a seamless reality, one that enhances pedagogical opportunities by integrating the practical and vocational actuality of the real world with the technical and imaginable possibilities of the Virtual Worlds. These possibilities are explored with reference to recent developments, pedagogical theory, and case studies in various open source 3D Virtual Worlds

noteEd - A web-based lecture capture system

Electronic capture and playback of lectures has long been the aim of many academic projects. Synote is an application developed under MACFoB (Multimedia Annotation and Community Folksonomy Building) project to synchronise the playback of lecture materials. However, Synote provides no functionality to capture such multimedia. This project involves the creation of a system called noteEd, which will capture a range of multimedia from lectures and make them available to Synote. This report describes the evolution of the noteEd project throughout the design and implementation of the proposed system. The performance of the system was checked in a user acceptance test with the customer, which is discussed after screenshots of our solution. Finally, the project management is presented containing a final project evaluation