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Student email in transition

Monday, September 21st, 2009

Last week, 79 students blazed a trail to UM’s new student email system by signing up for UMConnect accounts.

UMConnect provides access to Microsoft’s Live@edu, a suite of web-based services including Outlook live email, Skydrive virtual document storage, Office Live for storing and collaborating on MS Office documents, and other collaboration and networking tools.

UM students will have the opportunity throughout fall semester to sign up for UMConnect accounts. In early January, UMConnect accounts will be created for all remaining students.

Check out Ask Monte for UMConnect FAQs.

Posted in Communication, Projects, Systems | No Comments »

And the Hugi goes to . . .

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Note: This article is included in the May issue of Bits, IT’s monthly newsletter.

UM’s Academic Planner web application has been awarded a Hugi Excellence Award by the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium (NWACC).

The academic planning tool, programmed by IT web developers Jon Adams and Tom Fite, provides an intuitive interface for students to plan course schedules and share them with academic advisers. The application was released in beta this spring, with students in the Davidson Honors College putting it to the test. New UM students attending orientations beginning in June will be the first to use the application in full production.

Loey Knapp, ACIO for Technology Support Services, said the project has received support and guidance from several UM offices, including the Registrar’s Office, Enrollment Services, the Office of Student Success, Extended Learning Services and the Davidson Honors College.

The Hugi awards are named for former University of Oregon Chief Technology Officer Joanne R. Hugi. UM’s recognition was in the category of business processes and systems.

Posted in Academic, Innovation, People, Projects, Web | 1 Comment »

The seven year switch

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Note: This is one of three articles in the February special edition of IT’s Bits newsletter.

UM classrooms to get high-tech makeover

Garry Kerr describes himself as a stone and chisel guy . . . who loves technology.

Kerr, a UM Anthropology professor, says the nearly 1,000 students he teaches each semester benefit greatly from his ability to show details of relics using a high-tech camera and projector.

“It makes a huge difference,” Kerr says. “It makes my job a lot easier when a student can see an article and feel it with their eyes. That will stick in their minds forever.”

Today, only 26 of UM’s 156 general-purpose classrooms have the technology Kerr and his students desire. But that will change.

A seven-year plan calls for installing or upgrading technology in 22 classrooms per year. That will take the percentage of high-tech classrooms from today’s 17 percent to 95-plus percent. About $200,000 a year will be spent on the installations, with an increasing amount invested each year in maintenance, equipment replacement and other support costs.

The plan emerged from the Academic IT Advisory Committee and was championed by Provost Royce Engstrom and Registrar David Micus.

“For the first time, we have alignment between the Provost, the Registrar and Information Technology on classroom technology,” says Loey Knapp, assistant CIO for Technology Support Services. “It took the sponsorship of the Provost and the Registrar to make it happen.”

It also took some help from Administration & Finance, who worked out the funding model for the project. Multiple sources of funding contribute to the $475,000 annual investment according to Rosi Keller, Associate Vice President for A&F. Keller says no current services are impacted by the commitment to classroom technology.An oversight committee will determine priorities for classroom upgrades and approve the standard equipment that will go into the rooms.

Randy Gottfried, manager of IT’s Presentation Technology Services, says that standardization will allow for discounts on equipment, make maintenance and support affordable, and end-user training much easier.

“There will be some leeway on add-ons and upgrades as long as they’re compatible with the standard package,” Gottfried says. “But the big thing is, there will be consistency for a professor using different classrooms to teach.”

“Students expect it,” Kerr says of technology in the classroom. “It’s worth its weight in gold. I think this is one of the best investments this campus has ever decided to make.”

Posted in Academic, Innovation, Projects | No Comments »

No longer isolated

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Note: This is one of three articles in the February special edition of IT’s Bits newsletter.

Montana universities lead effort to connect Northern Tier to national network

UM’s network bandwidth capacity to the outside world will jump dramatically this summer, from 300 megabits to 10 gigabits.

In planetary terms, that’s like a leap from Mercury to Jupiter.

“We’re talking about an orders of magnitude increase in Internet bandwidth at a modest cost increase,” says UM CITO Ray Ford. “Everybody at every UM network port going to the outside world will see advantages.”

The Northern Tier Network, depicted by the dashed line on the map, will tie UM and MSU into the national research network, and provide new research, educational and economic development opportunities.

The advantages come as UM and MSU tie into a national research network in collaboration with universities along the “Northern Tier” between Seattle and Chicago. Ford, a co-founder and former president of the Northern Tier Network Consortium, has worked with colleagues from Montana and 11 other states to build agreements and garner funding.

“We’ve made a capital investment to light and maintain our own fiber, giving us bandwidth at the level of a ‘bandwidth wholesaler’ rather than having to buy bandwidth in large quantities but at ‘retail prices,’” Ford says. “Buying at wholesale prices rather than retail prices allows us to increase quality and quantity, yet lower costs.”

“We’re taking some risks,” Ford admits. “For example, will we need all of this bandwidth? We think we will. In fact, we think we’ll need not just a little more bandwidth, but orders of magnitude more bandwidth to support applications we don’t currently use-either because we can’t or because the applications haven’t yet been invented. That’s what has happened in the last 20 years, and we think that will continue to happen over at least the next 10 years.

“Ford sees the increased network capacity being used for high-quality video conferencing that begins to approximate true “remote presence.” It will also aid researchers connecting to remote super computers, and provide new learning opportunities for students, like the ability to operate equipment in a remote lab through the Internet.

For more on the Northern Tier Network Consortium, go to: www.ntnc.org.

Posted in Innovation, Leadership and Management, Network, Projects | No Comments »

Mapping without boundaries

Monday, January 26th, 2009

In IT we have been working to create a mapping application for The University of Montana. And today we’ve released it to the public. map.umt.edu will take you to the new interactive campus map. It should act a lot like google maps but in addition you can toggle on different themes which you can find just to the right of the map.

Map Image

We started with very few requirements.

Make it better than the black and white PDF that is the current map.
You can’t buy any software to make the map.
And you’ve got some AutoCad files and some imagery from 2006

My partner in crime, Jamie, had read an article about creating interactive maps on the web. And having just graduated with a degree in Geographical Information Systems he was intrigued. We started working on an old development server we had and installed Ubuntu Server on it and started hacking away attempting to get all of the pieces in place. It took a lot of tinkering with different products, and arguing over the best way to implement and set up this application, but finally after trying out several different rendering engines, trying it with and without caching the tiles and tweeking the JavaScript we had something we could show to the people signing our paychecks. Since then it seems it’s been non stop development and feature implementations and UI meetings and reworks and polishes and on and on. The limitations of this tool seem to be non-existent.

This kind of application has so many uses for Higher Ed institution or even for a non-profit. It gives you so much flexibility, by allowing you to give your users spatial representations. Small scale representations of campuses or large scale representations of states or countries. Show your users exactly What you want to, and How you want to. Choose your own features show overlays to depict coverage areas in relation to different points or routes. The map we produced was taken from Auto-Cad data and pulled into arcGIS and stretched over ortho-photography. In our case we (and by we I mean Jamie) had to create and clean up the shape files that were needed to produce the map. We did a little test and were able to take files from the states web site and create a new map file, so we were running multiple maps going at once. Of course the unstyled map wasn’t much to look at it but it proves that it can be done, and with a little work those maps could be brought to life.

One last note. All of the photos we’ve used on the map we’ve found on flickr and gotten permission from their owners. So this is truly a community effort

Posted in Innovation, Media, Projects, Web | No Comments »

An update on UM’s iTunesU

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

Yesterday I responded to a Tech Partners email request for information concerning the implementation of iTunesU at the University of Montana. I would like to share this information with the larger University community via this blog.

I also would like to thank the Montana Kaimin for their recent article on iTunesU. I appreciate their coverage of our efforts to serve the students and professors.

Please feel free to call or email me with any questions you have on iTunesU.

Who is managing the iTunesU for campus?

Presentation & Technology Services is administering the implementation of iTunesU on campus.

Have professors/others been properly educated on the requirements for students to view/listen to postings?

Yes, P&TS provides instructions to professors who are having the lectures distributed through iTunesU. Currently lectures are also being co-hosted on the Mansfield’s Library eRes service. This provides access to students who do not have the iTunes application installed on their computer or are using lab computer.

Are students restricted to certain content based on their netID?

Yes, when a student logs-in to OneStop he/she is authenticated by their netID. When the student accesses iTunes (through the link within OneStop) they will see only courses in which they are enrolled, plus the UM section. The UM section contains postings of the President’s Lecture Series lectures, the State of the University address, and other content available to any member of the UM community. Please feel free to access the UM section on iTunesU to get a feel for how the service works.

To access the UM section on iTunesU start by going to onestop.umt.edu, and then select the link to iTunesU from the Quick Links. If you do not have the iTunes application installed on your computer you will be prompted to install it.

Can students download and/or stream the casts?

The students can stream the content, and/or download the podcast.

How are those of you around campus, who manage labs, allowing access to the posted podcasts, or are you?

The students can get the files off eRes without any special software. eRes works same as downloading a file from a web page.

Currently the IT managed computer labs do not have iTunesU as part of their set-up. If the requests are made for it to be installed, we may include it on the machines in the future.

Was there a seminar or memo about this on campus that I missed?

I have presented several brown bag sessions on podcasting and iTunesU, the latest one was just a few weeks ago.

Tags: audio, itunesU, podcasting
Posted in Academic, Communication, Innovation, Media, Projects, Web | 1 Comment »

One small stop for man, one giant leap . . .

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

If you are one of about 700 students, faculty and staff who have used the beta version of The University of Montana’s OneStop for more than just a password change, you’ll notice something different when you login today.

No, it hasn’t landed on the moon.

OneStop is no longer a beta service. It is in full production as of today, January 10, 2008. This is a major milestone for a project that has been in the works for four years. There have been a lot of speed bumps and roadblocks along the way, and there’s still miles left to travel, but OneStop represents a giant leap forward in technology-based services and communication for campus.

If you’ve been using OneStop, you’ll notice that all of your customizations are gone. Sorry about that. That was the price that had to be paid for upgrading to new hardware, new software and a pretty cool new interface. The customizations you’ll have to rebuild will be easier with new drag-and-drop capabilities (among other enhancements).

If you haven’t tried OneStop, please do. It’s your web space. Just go to onestop.umt.edu and log in with your NetID.

There will be much more written about OneStop in the coming months and years. We always welcome your feedback and ideas for how to make it better.

Posted in Banner, Innovation, Projects, Systems, Web | 2 Comments »

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