Click here to watch this vignette…movie1.mov
This is news from my perspective for today.
The Division of Information Resources established an internal IR Task Force charged with the mission of improving communication, not only within the division, but also with the rest of the University. The Task Force was a response to an initiative that looked to assess campus perceptions of the division. About 97% of the staff in IR participated in small group and individual discussions throughout March and April of 2008. It was determined that like any good organization, there can always be improvement to become a great organization. The key areas that the Task Force will be focusing on are (a) improving the information and connectedness to the internal activities of each unit within the division, (b) communication with the campus community, (c) review of the division’s structure , process and procedures to ensure the needs of the campus community are met, and (d) establishing clear action items and attainable goals to make this initiative meaningful.
Faculty and staff are reminded that NSS has the capability to forward your telephone’s voicemail to your Rowan e-mail inbox. In most cases, you can see the origin of the calls and you can listen to the voicemail within Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Entourage, Apple Mail or in Outlook webmail. In order to take advantage of this service, just contact the Support Desk and ask to have your voicemail forwarded to your email.
The Support Desk began using new remote desktop control software which allows the Support Desk staff to remotely and securely troubleshoot problems on a user’s computer. When using the software, the support desk staff is able to chat with a user, transfer files to a user’s computer, or view and control a user’s computer. This will help the Support Desk staff to troubleshoot a problem just as if they were right there at the user’s computer. It’s another tool to help improve the support that the Division of Information Resources is able to provide to the Rowan University community. As an example of how it works, assume a faculty member is having a problem with e-mail. The faculty member would call the Support Desk, then a Support Desk specialist would generate a session key that the faculty member enters into a webpage to initiate the session. From there, the person at the Support Desk is able to watch the faculty member’s actions to make sure they are doing all the necessary steps or the Support Desk personnel can take control of the computer to fix the problem if there is one. The Support Desk staff have been training with the NSS technicians in order to improve there level of technical expertise, so the remote desktop control software should prove extremely useful.
The Information Resources Support Desk staff has been very pleased with the performance of the new help desk software, Service Desk Plus. The software, which was installed last year allows the university community to browse problems for which solutions have been documented. The problems and solutions are kept in what’s called a knowledgebase, which is simply a database filled with problems and the solutions or steps to solve those problems. One thing that is particularly pleasing to the Support Desk staff is the ability to have correspondence through email directly from within Service Desk Plus. This negates the need for their client to always be at a phone in order to work through a problem. Of course this won’t work if someone is having problems with their email but it is another way to keep the lines of communication open with the clients.
Remember, if you’re having a problem, you can use Service Desk Plus to search for a solution or you can login and enter a request for a new work order. After that, the solution to your problem will be entered into the knowledgebase and will be available for someone else who may have the same problem. To use the Service Desk Plus system, visit http://support.rowan.edu/.
The NSS Workshop is also using Service Desk Plus. When a person comes in to have any type of service performed on their computer, they will first need to login to the Service Desk Plus kiosk near the workshop area, then give some brief information on the nature of their visit. From there, they go to the workshop window where a qualified technician will be ready to serve them.
Be on the lookout for updated online versions of the University’s Catalogs, with the undergraduate catalog due to hit the web sometime before freshman orientation. EIS is providing technical assistance to Academic Affairs and the Graduate School and part-time contract employees working on the project. With hard work by all, the new undergraduate catalog will be online before the first orientation session which begins on June 22.
Enterprise Information Systems estimates that an upgrade to Banner 8 will happen on or around the Thanksgiving holiday of 2009. In simple terms, Banner is the software that enables user’s to access much of the university’s different types of stored information. That information is stored in an Oracle database and is accessed by the Banner software. The University is currently using Banner 7. Stayed tuned for more information as we get closer to the upgrade.
A web-based tool, called DegreeWorks, that allows students and advisors to plan future academic course work and track academic progress toward graduation has been secured and will be installed and ready for use by October. DegreeWorks is like a map that would chart a student’s course from admission to graduation. DegreeWorks will show what courses a student must take and their current status. Students and advisors will be able to so “what if” scenarios to determine the credits that would be retained or lost, should a change in major be made. Various staff members (Registrar’s Office, Graduate School EIS) are currently working with the vendor to set up the system. Prior to its go-live date, faculty and students will be offered training in using DegreeWorks.
Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) is spearheading an initiative that could eventually lead to the digitization of most of the university’s forms and documents. The University purchased two document scanner workstations for the Registrar this year. Currently, both of these workstations are being used to digitize their historical documents. Digitizing documents and forms is a very important way to backup old paper documents. Once digitized, the digitized documents can then be housed at a secure remote location in case of flood or fire, or destroyed depending upon relevant state retention requirements. Without a dedicated scanning station, a project such as this could take several years but the dedicated stations are capable of scanning 60 to 120 pages per minute. Additional scanning workstations were purchased this year and will be used to digitize various documents, as well as to, in coming years to electronically create forms, capture data from completed forms, and to place it into Banner. As an example of the immediate functionality, one of the stations will be used to scan items such as University Senate records and other academic management documents. The new stations will also be used at the Camden Campus, in Financial Aid, Admissions, and EIS.
(March 26, 2009) Late in March, the well known video distribution site YouTube released a section for colleges and universities. Many institutions have been using YouTube as a way to post or distribute videos but prior to the introduction of YouTube EDU, videos weren’t actually organized into any type of educational or institutional collection. YouTube EDU now allows all content produced by educational institutions to be presented in a cohesive fashion. YouTube EDU also allows educational institutions to create a “home page”. These changes give the video services site some services that are available with Apple’s iTunes U.
(March 26, 2009) With the growing popularity of online courses and virtual collaboration, companies and the educational educations they serve have been trying to come up with ways to give students as much accessibility to course material as possible. This may be one of the reasons that Blackboard, one of the leading commercial providers of course management systems created an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Blackboard is the virtual online class environment that Rowan University uses to deliver both synchronous and asynchronous online classroom experiences. And as for the iPhone and iPod Touch, they’re the industry changing cell phone and personal media player, that in addition to playing audio and video, can be considered small mobile computers. Because they can do the things that computers can do, they can also run applications that programmers create. The program developers at Blackboard have created an application for these devices as part of Blackboard Snyc that will let “users receive notifications of changes and updates to their Blackboard courses and organizations in their iPhone or iPod touch mobile device. These include updates on new Assignments, Course Content, Study Group updates, Community Discussions, even Grades. Currently this application is only available in English and is available for download through the Apple iTunes App Store as of March 26, 2009.”
Due to budget constraints (well, not really), it is taking us longer than usual to get this spring’s version of the Tech Cast and related videos up and available to the public, but we want to let people know that it is on its way. The latest episode will be available on April 24th. You can subscribe to the podcast now or come back here to see the news and exclusive interviews with faculty and staff.
(October 27, 2008) Fantastic! If everything goes according to plan, we will have the latest episode of Rowan University’s Tech Cast up and running before any of the news becomes dated. In this episode, we talk about Rowan’s student laptop initiative to be implemented in time for the 2009 fall semester, the campus-wide wireless plan, and more. We also have the full video of the Associate Provost of Information Resources, Tony Mordosky, detailing some of the most pressing things going on with regards to the University’s technology initiatives. Also, check out the full interviews with two professors using podcasts in their classes, as featured in our Spotlight On section.[read] [subscribe] [download]
(May 29, 2008) The video from this semester’s Tech Cast show has been available since August, I just never updated the blog post. Please feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed. This episode begins a new Tech Cast episode format that is accompanied by a page with all of the current semester’s technology news. Headlines from the current semester’s news page can be found in the sidebar to the right.
(April 21, 2008) Finally, the Spring 2008 episode of Rowan University’s Tech Cast is available. That little bit of snow we had really set us back a bit.
There is plenty to enjoy in this episode. We discuss Apple’s planned iPhone (2.0) software update and it’s plans to court enterprise environments. There is also the semi-unveiling of Rowan on iTunes U where people will be able to download Rowan podcasts and other Rowan produced content from the iTunes Store. This episode also spotlights the Music Department and the College of Professional and Continuing Education. Ranks Battery provides an update in Second Life. Microsoft’s release of Office 2008 for the Macintosh is also in there, plus a whole lot more.
(February 28, 2008) The next version of Rowan Univesity’s Tech Cast was to be shot on February 22, for a March 1st release. Due to inclement (snow) weather, the University and the studio was closed. We will bring you the spring version immediately once we can nail down a new taping schedule. And we have finally got the taping schedule so, the next release of Rowan University’s Tech Cast will be on March 20th. In the meantime, check out my Rowan technology Predictions.
[subscribe] [download]
(January 22, 2008) This is the very first episode of the Rowan University Tech Cast show. The show was originally supposed to be podcast on November 1, 2007, but since this is the very first episode, we had to work through some production issues. We now think we have a better understanding of what will be needed for production so we can quickly catch up and start putting the shows out on a regular basis.
In this episode, we talk about how text messaging may improve safety on campus, computer Lab updates, the new Microsoft Office 2007, faculty using Second Life, “clickers” in the classroom, new gadgets that may prove useful for education, and more…
(January 7, 2008) Be on the look out for our long-awaited, much anticipated, unrated podcast on educational technology from Rowan University and from around the world. We’ve got campus technology updates and news relevant to technology in education. Make sure you read the previous post HELLO ROWAN UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY! it has information you may want to refer to about viewing the podcast. And remember…, “if you didn’t hear it from us, then it’s probably not news.” Or maybe it is and you should tell us about it. If you do have ideas or comments be sure to let us know.
(January 2, 2008) Welcome to Rowan University’s Tech Cast blog. This is the first post, so let me take a little time to explain a little bit about the podcast and blog site.
At the beginning each semester, Rowan University’s Tech Cast will be available for your intellectual jollification. Periodically, we will release technology morsels for your consumption and we will also throw out some tech tidbits for you to nibble on. The Tech Cast podcasts will probably be released as both an audio podcast and a video podcast (who knows?) You will be able to subscribe to a full length version of the podcast which will be an approximately 30 minute show (probably in audio and video) or you can subscribe to a video version that is released in segments so that if you’re only interested in, let’s say, the SPOTLIGHT ON segment; you won’t have to watch the entire show.
In order to have the best experience with the podcast, we suggest that you use iTunes. It will be easy to subscribe, listen, and watch the podcast. You’ll be able to experience the podcast on machines running the Mac OS or Windows. If you don’t have iTunes on your machine, you can download it from Apple’s website. If you need a quickstart on podcasting then go to our How To… page and click Podcasting.
This blog site is where we can go more in depth on the stuff that we cover or don’t cover. You can also ask questions and make suggestions. What a “win/win” situation.
Enjoy.