Week Ending March 23, 2012

I’m writing this post with 1 eye closed because I have something in it and I can’t seem to get it out. I realize that has nothing to do with my weekly update, but I have a feeling that this post is going to take longer with 1 working eye.I know that I skipped my update last week. I’m not really sure why, but I did. And I’m sure you didn’t notice. If you did happen to notice, I’m sure you didn’t lose any sleep over it. Enough with the stalling, let’s get to the updates.iTunes U – Things have been moving pretty slowly with this project, which I’m not too bent out-of-shape about. We’ve been having a hard time finding out who has the admin rights to the service and until that happens, we are at a standstill. I’ve looked at and printed out the marketing information that Apple provides. It’s pretty basic and boring, but I wanted to at least make sure I’ve read through it. I’ve also realized that the documentation doesn’t apply to classes, because instructional uses of iTunes U most likely won’t be worried about marketing the service. I have our social media specialist working on tracking down the University admin for the service and until then, it’s a waiting game…WordPress – As stagnant as a flooded sidewalk after a rain, this project is going nowhere fast. We have made small updates the system to help with spam comments, but other than that, it’s pretty slow-going. The pilot users are underway and I haven’t heard from them in quite some time. My plan is to send the pilot users a survey at the end of the term about their use of the service so that we can make some modifications before letting the entire University into it. Since I haven’t heard from the users in a while, I’m hoping that means that WordPress is satisfying their needs, and not that they’ve chosen to stop using the service. As for being able to roll out WordPress to the entire institution – we are still waiting on the social media policies to be approved by University Communications and General Counsel. I’ve sent my latest thoughts/questions back to the authors and I’m hoping that the policies are approved in the near future.Video Exploration – This is a new committee working group that I’ve been asked to not only participate in, but also spearhead. Basically, a study was done in Fall 2010 that looked at the numerous tools that support video at our university. From what I’ve seen in the results of that study, there are close to 36 different technologies to support video. Talk about overload! This working group consists of people from Classroom Technology Services, Networking, University Libraries, and myself. We’ll be talking about use cases for video and ensuring that there are easy-to-use technologies that can support the use cases. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know a ton about all of the technologies that we implement, but you know what they say… “fake it ’til you make it.” And that’s what I plan to do.I can’t remember any other projects that require an update at this point. If I remember something else, I’ll be sure to include it next week.Ciao!