My Cascadia Orientation

MyCascadia orientation

Prepare to be disappointed

Plan is to

• Keep the good stuff
• Clear out the underbrush - the stuff that nobody looks at
• Encourage campus community to learn and play around; change it to something that works for you if you are a person that maintains content.
• Understands the limits of training to date and will be hiring an asst director for professional development. This person will be responsible for MyCascadia training, guide-by-the-side to facilitate learning
• Reorganize and redesign
• Keep taking additional steps to take advantage of the new environment; incremental steps.

MyCascadia as it currently stands is basically the same as Zocalo.

Address: My.Cascadia.edu

Same address on and off campus

Good news: no need to log in when you are on campus.

More good news: password is the same as your network login

Less good news - will need to log in for each document opened when off campus.

Another problem - when they moved Zocalo to MyCascadia, some of the permissions got broken. If you run into a document that you should be able to open but can't, send in a help desk ticket - its an easy fix.

Other good new things:

• Bread crumb navigation (will always be able to see where you are in the site structure)
• MySite - you can set up and control who sees what under Profile. Has a social networking feature to it, allowing easy searching amongst pages
• Blogging, wikis (rather awful) and RSS feeds facilitated.
• Document review workflow facilitated (saves sending document to a bunch of people to edit and tracking multiple versions)

Now what???

• If something is broken, send a helpdesk ticket for repair
• Beginning to purge un-used sites. IT will send out a list of unused sites and will delete if they don't hear otherwise. Send a helpdesk ticket to save.
• Directory updates are coming so that only current employees are listed
• Regular trainings starting in July (after training person hired)
• Class site templates with gradebook, course planning, and student messaging (August) (supported through Helpdesk, who will be supported by Microsoft's contractor)
• New templates for departments, committees, projects (July)
• Navigation structure change (possibly August)
• Calendar (possibly September)

Horizions Report

Today, I am attending a webinar on the Horizon Report. It is an annual report that tracks the the expected technologies that will be key in higher education in the coming years. It aims to identify 6 technologies that will have a significant impact on teaching and learning in the coming 5 years. My goal in attending this webinar is to find some ideas on incorporating the findings from this report in our trainings, so that you are fully equipped for what is coming.

The trends identified in the 2008 report are as follows:

• Grassroots video (for example, YouTube). Here is an example of how it can be used to illustrate a point, Moebius Transformations Revealed. Here is a showcase of student video work.
  
• Social Operating Systems - social networking, many sharing content with many. Examples include Facebook and Ning. It also includes Delicious, the tool that I use to organize our eLearning bookmarks.
  
• Collaboration Webs - I think we're already there on this one - many faculty are using wikis in their teaching and learning.
  
• Mobile Broadband -
  
• Data Mashups -
  
• Collective Intelligence -
  

This is the final cut. A list of the final 12 technologies is also worth having a look at.