Month: December 2013


Dec
2013

Happy Holidays!

categories: Uncategorized
From: https://www.edx.org/course/mitx/mitx-7-00x-introduction-biology-secret-1014
From: https://www.edx.org/course/mitx/mitx-7-00x-introduction-biology-secret-1014

I had a couple of pretty busy weeks. I traveled to Washington DC for a gathering of fellow CIOs from merged IT-Library organizations. Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) had organized this and a few of us from small liberal arts colleges gathered to discuss organizational makeup, challenges now and going forward. It was a very useful exercise and we all had a great time. There were the usual mixture of agreements and disagreements. My flights were delayed in both directions, which was annoying, but I think this has become the norm. Talking about delays being the norm, it happened again with my doctor who I went to see my physical. He is such a nice person that it didn’t matter much.

The MOOC controversy continues – “After Setbacks, Online Courses are Rethought” and “Speaking Up for the Creditless MOOC” are worthy of reading if you are interested. Wellesley’s first MOOC,  “Introduction to Human Evolution” by Adam van Arsdale, will be wrapping up shortly and there has been a constant flow of rave reviews about the course from the students in this class.

I completed my third MOOC – “Introduction to Biology – Secret of Life” taught by Eric Lander. As I have written before, I learned so much in the class and I thoroughly enjoyed it though it was a hard class. I have signed up for my next class “Relativity and Astrophysics” which is slated to begin in February. I am looking forward to it.

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Dec
2013

Innovations and the Delivery Drones

categories: Uncategorized
From Washington Post. http://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2013/12/03/Editorial-Opinion/Graphics/toles12042013.jpg

Hope you enjoyed Thanksgiving with your family and friends. We had a fabulous time, celebrating with family and friends over multiple days. Lots of calories were consumed and now comes the hard part of trying to shed them. The incentives to go and exercise is proving harder and harder. I just came back from the second town hall meeting where we all got to hear about the plans for the facilities renovations and how paying for them will result in a serious belt tightening. It will not be easy, but this is the reality.

It is at these times that one should not forget that innovations are critical to what we do and that we should continue to find the strength to keep going despite the morale issue that will try to pull us down. So, what is innovation? Merriam-Webster says ” the act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods”.  Wikipedia says “Innovation is the application of better solutions that meet new requirements, inarticulated needs, or existing market needs.”  The first definition is in the right spirit of innovation. You innovate without thinking about an end goal. The second one is more goal oriented. You innovate to meet some new requirements or existing “market” needs. For us, the market is our faculty, students, staff and alumnae.

By  the second definition, I am proud to say that LTS has introduced several “innovations” in all areas that we support. Patron driven acquisition,  creative and innovative use of the resources in special collections by faculty from all disciplines, the many ways in which we are collaborating with the faculty on the use of instructional technologies to enhance teaching, learning and research (such as digital storytelling, the use of maps, and multimedia annotations), many ways in which we have extended the use of Drupal to accommodate the needs of community as well as improve efficiencies (such as automating the feeding of data and eliminating manual updates), and a whole list of web applications that have simplified many of the administrative tasks, and the use of document imaging systems and data warehouses. The list is long and can go on and on!

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