DIIA Blog

DIIA Faculty Development Specialist Leslie Jarmon received a grant from the Transforming Undergraduate Education program to support a University of Texas System innovative teaching initiative based in Second Life. Dr. Jarmon leads the nation’s first system-wide program to stimulate creative approaches to instruction, increase student access and success, and manage or reduce instructional costs.

The program will “use the virtual world environment to cultivate working communities of learning and discovery transcending the complex, interdisciplinary UT System, empowering students to become innovators and thought leaders throughout Texas, the U.S., and the world,” according to this week’s DIIA spotlight article by Michael Barrett.

The Chronicle of Higher Education picked up on the project here, and Dr. Jarmon was featured in a UT-Austin OnCampus accolade here.

Even after posting approximately 60 entries, clearing 2,364 spam comments, and live-blogging SXSWi and AccessU, I still can hardly believe it has been a whole year since the DIIA Blog came online.  The experts say that a blog is only as good as its content, and I sincerely hope that readers found the DIIA Blog to be a rich source of up-to-date information, insight, amusement, resources, and perspective.

It was personally gratifying to see page hits approaching the 100,000 mark while live-blogging at SXSWi, knowing that we were spreading the word about DIIA among the industry movers and shakers.

AccessU, although smaller in scale, brought attention to the vital importance of accessibility to everyone who uses the World Wide Web. It was there that I coined my mantra, “Curb cuts for computers!” as an analogy for how accessible design benefits all of us. Glenda Sims (UT), Sharron Rush (Knowbility), and all the caring geniuses who developed the standards have made me a life-long advocate of designing for usability. We will all most likely face obstacles in communicating via the Internet as we age, so why not plan ahead?

Most of all, I have enjoyed learning more about the world we live in–from my blogging colleagues, and from the research I’ve engaged in to find something worth blogging about. I hope to hear from more DIIA voices in the years ahead, bringing wider-ranging, thought-provoking information to our attention, and engaging in dialogue through comments–although not the spammy ones, please!

If you use a Mac platform, Amy Miller has developed some nifty widgets to ping you when a new post goes up. Dana DeLoca, DIIA’s creative videographer and photographer has added a rich visual dimension through the “Photo of the Day” to complement our wordy posts, along with her fantastic sidekick AJ Landeros (Mr. iPhone). Truly, it takes a village…

My birthday wish for the DIIA Blog is to see it expand and grow, touching more lives, enhancing the University of Texas at Austin experience for faculty, staff, and students, and drawing in a wider circle of commenters to challenge and engage us in fruitful dialogue.

Blog on!

A tip of the hat to Amy Miller for this suggestion. Amy says, “TED Talks are just really cool–I’ve listened to many of them, some when I was stranded in airports, waiting for flights, and they never fail to inspire, educate, or delight.”

When Amy says something, I listen. Especially when inspiration, education, and delight are concerned. TED: Ideas worth spreading is an annual conference where brilliant people give short talks, demonstrations, and live musical and dance performances on Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED). Videos of these talks are available online, and the group recently added the volunteer-powered translation service dotSUB (Any Video Any Language) to spread those jaw-dropping ideas around the world.

The New York Times commented on the TED Talks new translation feature in a recent Technology section article–TED Talks Now Mind Blowing in 40+ Languages. A May 13 story on NPR reveals more details on the history and process of the feature.

So the next time you’re waiting in line at the DMV, or at the gym, or languishing in an airport, tune in to TED Talks. You’ll be glad you did. Oh, and did I mention they’re free?

TED Talks Visualization by Lilly.

Want to see, touch, and hear about the future of higher education? Then you definitely won’t want to miss the Innovative Instructional Technology Awards Program (IITAP) ceremony this afternoon from 2:00-4:00 p.m. in the Texas Union Ballroom. Exemplars in instructional technology from across the UT-Austin campus will be featured in a new “See and Touch” environment, available for your browsing pleasure. Supported by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost, top winners are recognized with cash prizes and iPod Touch devices, (mobile devices courtesy of Apple, Inc.).

DIIA staff have been working extra hard to create an exciting celebration, complete with interactive media, avatars, and the opportunity to discuss this year’s eye-opening projects in depth with the faculty and student developers. Oh, and did I mention groovy refreshments?

For a taste of amazing classroom technology that has evolved into nationally-recognized, ongoing, fully-supported projects, check out our past winners.

The IITAP Awards ceremony is the place to be–hope to see you there!

One of my early charges when I began working for the now defunct Faculty Computer Committee and Multimedia Instruction Committee was to gather the Information Technology Advisory Committee (ITAC) Vision Plans. One funding criteria that was encouraged among academic units was collaboration. Specifically, there was a higher likelihood that a funding request would be approved if multiple academic entities were working together to address instructional technology needs and solutions. In part, this approach was encouraged to address what had been, and to some extent still is, a “silo” approach to providing instructional technology support. My sense is that given where we started, given the survival mindset that seemed to be prevalent during the mid-90s, and given the newness of conceptualizing enterprise solutions to address disparate and undiscovered needs, we’ve come a long way.

That said, the “silo” mentality is still prevalent among us. The prevalence may no longer reside with those who make funding decisions, but rather with those that provide instructional support within and for the various academic units. This is not to say that there is intention behind this continued isolation, but rather that we haven’t yet figured out how to speak to one another about what it is we do and what we want to do. My hope is that continued discussions, online and face-to-face, coupled with intentional awareness of existing support and support models, will help routinize dialogue among the various support entities.

To that end, within the last week or so, I met with the following people, or attended the following events:

• Sean McCarthy, a representative of the Pedagogy Group, who is associated with the Department of Rhetoric and Writing’s Computer Writing and Research Lab
• Joey Lopez, Sandy Stone & Dustin Younse, associated with the ACTLAb
• A Discovery Learning Project Luncheon at which Uri Treisman, founder and executive director of the University’s Charles A. Dana Center, spoke about, among other things, “strategies for motivating students to persist in courses that present high levels of challenge.”
• A DIIA Horizon Team presentation on netvibes, a personalized homepage tool that is being used by faculty for instructional purposes.

What became abundantly clear as I processed my interactions, is that there is a lot of great work occurring throughout campus, work that should at a minimum be disseminated, and optimally, will become part of a shared process of support.

My hope is that shared intent among the various support entities across campus will begin the process of more collaborative support activities and processes — that we will not (continue to) merely highlight what it is that we, or those we support, do, but that we will consciously examine ways to share how the faculty and students we support might be able to take this distributed knowledge and not only make it common knowledge, but also routinize best practices — those that are known and those yet to be discovered.

Oh yeah, this is about changing the silo mentality, or as the folks at the ACTLab referred to it, “the rock garden with high stone walls.”