Campus Technology – Day 3 – Part 3

For the third session of the day, it is Building a Foundation for Integrating Rich Media on a Web 2.0 Campus presented by a panel of Adam Smeets, John Drevs, and Bruce Monte.

This is a great plus, they have added a work site that we can view as the presentation proceeds. The three gentlemen represent Loyola University in Chicago, a private Catholic university. This is the 2nd Catholic private school I have seen presenting. What is it with Catholic schools being innovative?

The goal of the session is to present an overview of how they integrated digital content onto the site. The problems they were seeking to resolve was the need to

• communicate effectively and efficiently
• support a community that already embraces Web 2.0 technologies

Web 2.o helps Loyala through marketing by providing a means to tell an authentic story. Showed a picture of a student attending an alternate break immersion to help the poor – she kept a blog to highlight what she did. This blog was distributed so we can show the public what Loyala means by championing Social Justice.

In a teaching environment professors incorporated rich media into the classroom. This allows the teacher to engage students in a medium where they are comfortable.

From an administrative perspective it provides a means of opening dialog

Tools they used meet their needs include:

• Video
• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Wikis
• and integrated currently available resources
  • iTunesU
  • Blackboard
  • PeopleSoft
  • Serena collage
  • Facebook
  • Proprietary Resources

Loyala already had Twitter and Facebook sites, blogs and wanted to bring them all together. The result is igNation an aggregator of all these data sources.

This is an interesting approach in that they are attempting to meet three distinct goals. They pulled together various administrative functions to ensure that they have obtained buy in and that they have all issues, such as copyright and privacy, covered.

From a technical perspective they performed a needs assessments they asked:

• What hardware and software constraints need to be considered
• What restrictions need to be made against file content?
• What is the current architecture/landscape?
• What financial resources are needed to extend over lifetime?