Communication

For the past decade, campuses in the United States have been offering comprehensive communications services in campus dorms that include high-speed Internet, cable television, and telephone services (local line, long distance, and voice mail in some cases). With students migrating to other forms of personal communications such as cell phones and text messaging, campuses are reevaluating the need for telephone lines in the dorms.

In this free July 1 EDUCAUSE Live! web seminar, Meeting Communications Needs in Campus Dorms, presenters Dewitt Latimer, deputy CIO & chief technology officer, University of Notre Dame, and Walt Magnussen, director of telecommunications, Texas A&M University, will discuss the implementations at both of their institutions. Included in the discussion will be student opinion polls, wireless alternatives, and E911 and other safety considerations.

EDUCAUSE invites subscribers to join two new constituent groups: IT Communications, led by Mur Muchane and Lisa Trubitt, and Virtual Worlds, led by AJ Kelton. Browse the full list of constituent and discussion groups at EDUCAUSE.

This 45-minute podcast recorded during the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference features Mur Muchane, Executive Director of Information Technology Services, Davidson College and Lisa Trubitt, Assistant to the CIO for Policy & Communications, University at Albany, SUNY. Their session was titled "In Plain English, Please: Effective IT Communications."

The session abstract:

The University at Albany and Davidson College will discuss the strategies they use to convey information about IT services to their respective user communities. Both institutions have developed a protocol for communicating about IT to non-technical audiences in user-friendly ways.

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on project communication tools!  As
we have been researching tools and recommendations, the institutional needs
for these systems has started growing.  In addition to project management we
are wondering about how collaboration tools can also meet communication
needs within our department:

• as a repository for documentation (how to install...)
• to provide an overview of what is going on in the department (this
• week...this month)
• as a place where all the bits of information can be brought together into
• a big snapshot

I have no expectations that technology will provide us with the sole
solution to improving communication and workflow, but I¹d really like to
hear more ideas and stories about how other institutions are effectively
using collaboration applications.  We narrowed down our list of possible
solutions to four:  mediaWiki, drupal, typepad and Teams.

And since drupal consolidates many kinds of content (wiki, blog, RSS, etc.)
we felt that it was the product most worth looking at.  Yeah...simple,
right? 

In the recent article "Learning the Hard Way" (EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Volume 29, Number 4, 2006), Security Task Force Co-Chair Joy R. Hughes and co-author Keith R. Bushey discuss strategic improvements in George Mason University's emergency response.

Three EDUCAUSE constituent groups have recently bade farewell to outgoing leaders, and EDUCAUSE thanks them for their service:

Business Schools and IT Officers

• Mark P. Hale, Jr., The University of Iowa
• Maggie Jesse, The University of Iowa
• Donald A. Krueger, University of Minnesota Duluth

Learning Space Design

• Christopher G. Johnson, The University of Arizona

Research Mission Support

• William B. Decker, The University of Iowa (retired)

EDUCAUSE welcomes the following new leaders: 

Business Schools and IT Officers

• Lloyd Goad, Washington and Lee University
• Carol A. Henry, West Virginia University
• Donna C. Johnson, University of Florida

Learning Space Design

• Dan Gilbert, Stanford University

ResearchMission Support

• Donald Z. Spicer, ECAR Fellow and University System of Maryland

All constituent groups are scheduled to meet at EDUCAUSE 2006.

 

I've been working as the student communications expert for about a year now. (I came to the position from a journalism perspective, so expert is a term I use loosely.) The more I look into different ways to communicate with students about security policies and security awareness, the more I find that a good poster is a pretty effective form of quick communication. However, when cruising around the Web to find security based posters I am always a bit disappointed with the offerings. Here's my opinion: A well shot photograph with a security saying pasted on top does not make an effective communication. The image used should have something to do with the message being promoted. (I bet any first year advertising student could have told me this a year ago.) But that is what I'm finding available for sale. After designing some text intensive posters last year, (my first ever attempt at a poster as a security message) I've created a few news ones that hopefully get to the point without too much distraction. Here's one of them:

One of the faculty members at my university teaches large classes of students (in Accounting and Management), and he's eager to implement Active Learning into these courses. An obvious challenge, however, is that the students themselves tend to be skeptical of Active Learning; they are familiar with the Sage on the Stage approach, and thus they are often reluctant to embrace a teaching strategy that is not a straight lecture. To help address this challenge, I've offered to attend the instructor's course (at the beginning of the term) with a view to making a presentation (and facilitating a discussion or debate) about Active Learning. Essentially, I want to persuade the students that Active Learning can improve their performance, and therefore they should welcome their instructor's Active Learning teaching strategies. In preparation for this, I reviewed a number of studies of the efficacy of Active Learning, extracted the most salient passages, and pulled them together into a single document. That document is attached.

RateMyHeuristic.Com

Mark Morton, Instructional Program Manager, Centre for Learning and Teaching Through Technology

Everyone loves a heuristic: a handy, tidy, bulleted, get-down-to-brass-tacks distillation of the best practices for navigating your way through a complex system or situation. In higher education, one of the best known heuristics must surely be the “Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education,” devised in 1987 by Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson. As you probably know, Chickering and Gamson’s seven principles encourage things like “student/faculty contact,” “prompt feedback,” and so on. Other heuristics have also been proposed as alternatives to that of Chickering and Gamson. For example, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) advocates “Five Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice,” such as “level of academic challenge” and “active and collaborative learning.” Likewise, Patrick Terenzini, the author of the award-winning How College Affects Students, identifies “Six Characteristics of Learning and Development,” including “real world activities” and “unbounded by time or place.”