How can online resources help campus committees?

Wendy Duckering
former Administrative Assistant, Dean of Faculty

Overview - A discussion of scanning evaluation from professors worldwide and from former and current students into PDF files and then putting them into Sakai so that the professors on the APT Committee can look at them each week from the convenience of their computers before discussing the promotion/contract renewal case at weekly meetings.

As the recording secretary for the campus APT committee, Wendy Duckering has seen the shift to using Sakai, the college's online collaboration and learning environment. When she started in 2006, computers were not used at all because of concerns about confidentiality related to contracts, appointments, promotions, tenure, renewals, leaves, etc.

How confidential APT materials are secured in Sakai

• All documents are scanned into secure PDF documents before they are put into Sakai. They can only be read online. They cannot be printed, nor can excerpts be copied and pasted into another document. These are features related to Adobe Acrobat.
  
• Only the Dean of Faculty, members of the APT committee, and the committee's recording secretary (Duckering) are member of the Sakai APT site and can access it.

Advantages

• Convenience: using Sakai, committee members can read and prepare for weekly meeting from anywhere with Internet access (vs. the Dean's Office from 8-5).
• The site materials can be undated continuously. Members can be notified automatically and have immediate access to newly uploaded documents.

Duckering noted that once the committee members figured out how to use Sakai, they loved it because it gave them better access to materials. Agendas and minutes are also sent by email and can be archived in Sakai. More campus committees are using Sakai, for example, CORE review and the Intercollegiate Women's Studies review.

Online Resources

• Introduction to Sakai at Scripps
• Sakai portal at the Claremont Colleges
  
• More about the Sakai project
  

Moving the image: screen-based art & technology

T. Kim-Trang Tran, Associate Professor of Art

Overview - Someone once said to Prof. Tran, "We have the media we deserve." Indeed, now that video and computer technology have enabled us all to be producers as well as consumers, what kind of do-it-yourself media do we have? Come see some of the tools students learn in order to be critical producers of art and media and how they've used them. Featuring non-linear video editing with Final Cut Pro, motion graphics with After Effects, and computer animation and interactivity with Flash.

Tran showed several innovative video projects produced by students in her video editing courses, and discussed the software that her students use: Final Cut Pro for non-linear editing in her Introduction to Video course, After Effects for motion graphics for video in her Intermediate Video course, and Flash for animation and visual effects for the web in her Advanced Web Projects course.

Video editing software has changed the way Tran teaches. It enables students to "work portable," to develop their video projects in the Scripps computer labs or on their own computers. This mobility opens up class time to discuss media history, theory and concepts with students.

Tran challenges students to not only learn new tools, but to apply their knowledge in conceptually interesting ways. She emphasized that her teaching is not about software mastery as much as about art history, conceptual thinking skills, and creative problem solving.

Related link

Video Data Bank - T. Kim-Trang Tran: Blindness Series

Accessing history: technology in teaching and research

Tony Crowley, Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities

Overview - How can online resources be used to enhance teaching and research? Read about one professor's work with the Claremont Colleges Digital Library to facilitate teaching and using online databases for research.

Research

Eighteenth Century Collections Online, a library database with nearly 150,000 English-language primary source documents, provided a missing link in Tony's current research on the history of Liverpool's vernacular language. His quest to find the first edition of "The Sailor's Farewell," a British play published in 1768, proved unsuccessful via on-site visits to major libraries in the United Kingdom. The online database was the only way to find out that there was a first edition of the play still in existence, and where it is located.
The online library database provided a printable, full-text image of the first edition of the play. It proved to be a fantastic resource for different representations of vernacular speech during the mid-eighteenth century: characters speak in Irish, Lancashire, and Liverpool dialects. The play puts eighty years into the perceived history of Liverpool dialect and overturns the history of vernacular Liverpool dialect as we know it today. Significantly, the full citation accompanying the play provided the physical location of what may be the only first edition of this play-the Huntington Library.

Teaching

Tony contributed photographs of nearly 600 murals from Northern Ireland to the Claremont Colleges Digital Library (CCDL). The murals, painted between 1979 and 2004 during the recent period of Troubles, are an important political history resource because there are very few other mural images from 1979-1996. As the CCDL collection indicates, "The images are records which include historical representation, political standpoints, community concerns, forms of ideological address. They range from overtly political declaration, to brutal depictions of the conflict, to humour and irony."

It took Tony many hours to annotate the murals with keywords for each image so that the collection is searchable by non-experts who might not recognize the people or other reference in the murals. The images are scanned in high enough quality to allow online magnification of details.
Tony asks his students to do research projects with this primary source image collection. Students might explore a key moment, for instance Easter 1916, or a significant location or year. He finds that students produce interesting analyses of these historical materials. This public collection allows students anywhere to examine the murals as representations of history.

Online Resources

• Claremont Colleges Digital Library
• CCDL Mural of Northern Ireland Collection
• Tony Crowley' presentation: "Speaking through walls: political murals in Northern Ireland" (QuickTime)
• Electronic Journals
• Databases
• Tony Crowley's Scripps faculty biography

Student clubs: use of campus IT resources for communication and collaboration

Cindy Ballon '10 and Elisa Villarreal '09

Overview - Two students share how Cafe Con Leche uses Sakai to organize themselves for events, organize their subcommittees, and have resources available to all their members. Cafe Con Leche provides a forum for the discussion of past and present social, political and economic topics that affect women, particularly those of Chicana/Latina descent. The goal of all discussions is to educate the Scripps community while promoting an understanding of significant issues concerning the awareness of diversity on our campus.

In Fall 2007, Café Con Leche set up a private Sakai project site to explore how the Claremont Colleges' online collaboration and learning environment could help their club members. Current Café Con Leche's Sakai site has twenty-nine student participants, five with privileges to maintain the site. Cindy and Elisa noted that everyone in Café Con Leche likes Sakai and that using it has had a good impact overall. Club members are still experimenting with ways to use Sakai.

How does Café Con Leche use Sakai?

• The Announcement tool is used extensively because announcements are not only archived in Sakai but also emailed to members. Meeting times and changes, deadlines, and events are announced via this tool, and reminders to check mailboxes are announced.
• The Resources area is handy. It is convenient to keep Café Con Leche's member contact information spreadsheet where it can be easily updated and downloaded by members; all members downloaded this spreadsheet with information about where members live, their mailbox, cell number, and birthday. Other resources available to members in Sakai include meeting minutes, logos, Dream Act information, etc.
• Polls have been to select a logo for the organization and find out which day members are available for a group dinner. All club members participated in the polls.
• The Calendar lets members know about meeting times.
• The Forum tool allows for discussion about what committees should talk about when they meet.
• The Chat Room is used infrequently. Members find that the phone is easier for synchronous communication.

Two of Café Con Leche's members work for Scripps IT in the IT-FITS (Faculty In-office Technology Support) program and took the initiative to use this campus IT resource for their club. Cindy and Elisa noted that they never use Sakai in their other clubs-probably because most students do not know that they can create their own Sakai project sites. Anyone with an existing Sakai account can set up a Sakai project site. Students in the IT-FITS are available to help any Scripps club get started with Sakai!

Café Con Leche provides a forum for the discussion of past and present social, political and economic topics that affect women, particularly those of Chicana/Latina descent. The goal of all discussions is to educate the Scripps community while promoting an understanding of significant issues concerning the awareness of diversity on our campus.

Online Resource - Introduction to Sakai