Happy 2nd Anniversary, CSUMB and Google Apps!

It's been two years since CSU Monterey Bay took Google Apps to be its lawfully wedded cyber-spouse. (Aren't June weddings wonderful?)

CSUMB kept one relative in the attic for about a year: FirstClass was our departing e-mail client/server system and we kept it in the background to be able to access our old messages. (MeetingMaker, the campus's official scheduling software, simply disappeared like an angry ex not invited to the nuptials.) Meanwhile, Google brought a passel of its own kids into the relationship. But only three were invited right into the house and given their own bedrooms: Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.

Other Apps such as Sites were left to fend for themselves at first. Instead of prominent CSUMB dashboard links, for example, there would be smaller links on our Gmail page, that sort of thing. Over these two years, most of my students had never even clicked on the Sites link until required to do so for my class. (That's not a complaint, just an observation that you get the behavior you design for.)

Google Docs may finally be in early majority stage, beyond the early adopters. After a year or so of "But we need Microsoft for everything" and about 50 other excuses, I'm seeing it used more for collaboration by known non-techie faculty members.

Here's an interesting commentary on how the first two years went (but nothing about a 2nd Anniversary Celebraganza??) by Greg Pool, who is CSUMB's Lead Web Publishing Coordinator. Greg has some intriguing comments about Google Moderator. I thought I would be one of the first to use it on campus next fall, but apparently somebody snuck by me!

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/06/csu-monterey-bay-offers-dozens-of-new.html
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(Google Logo Generator is at: http://neswork.com/logo-generator/google-font)

National Academies Press: All PDF books free all the time

This is huge. My condolences to the commercial publishers who can now sell me even less.

Press release here.

Main site here.

Enjoy. Don't forget to tell your students.

What educators spend their spare time thinking about

Even on this fine Memorial Day weekend, a couple of interesting online conversations are in progress, led by people I have deemed to be in my personal learning network (PLN) whether they know it or not. Rather than try to reproduce them here, I've given a brief lead-in and link to each.

Conversation #1 is at Ferdinand von Prondzynski's "A University Blog" and starts with what looks like a publicity stunt by Peter Thiel, Paypal's co-founder. As usual, though it's really about the very nature of higher education itself, and whether $100,000 is a fair trade to abandon (or delay) a liberal education.

Conversation #2 is at CSU Dominguez Hills colleague Larry Press's blog for his CIS 471 (Network-Based Applications) class. It starts innocently enough with a short review of the text Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2009). But it's really about the clandestine PowerPoint wars that have been going on ever since Microsoft's business software invaded the world of teaching and learning. If you love or hate either Edward Tufte or Sherry Turkle you should drop by Larry's blog and check it out.

One good thing comes out of every meeting

With your consent, gentle reader, I'll condense and "chunk" my impressions from a week chock-full of faculty meetings, instead of doing one long post. There's still a follow-up with just me and CSUMB's School of ITCD chair on Friday afternoon and I'm running out of steam.

Yesterday in our full session I suggested holding a funeral/wake for our old, maligned, rather hoary one-size-fits-all technology curriculum, CST101 (Technology Tools). It has about a year left in its current incarnation, because our campus is unveiling a new academic model in Fall 2012. The concept of the funeral/wake was only mildly amusing to the room-- as there are (to put it mildly) mixed feelings among the long-term lecturers, a reluctance to put our formerly robust horse-- er, course-- out to pasture. But I'll bring it up again in the fall. A ceremony w/ blue hearse and church ladies serving congealed salad seems a great idea. And I'm the course coordinator, so there.

Meanwhile, there came another idea from a computer science colleague. She wanted the 101 lecturers to acknowledge that the course's reputation on campus would not be getting any better, nor would our department's reputation by continued association with it. Indeed, our clinging to it was akin to rural Pennsylvanians clinging to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them. (I think that's what a couple of people in the room heard, anyway.)

So I thought, why not go all the way? Why not declare a full moratorium on use of the term "Tech Tools"? This, unlike the wake idea, got a little play in the room. Even our esteemed Dean seemed to go along. I have therefore established "the kitty," which is for the moment a paper cup. Twenty-five cents goes in with each mention of [the course that shall not be named]. We have already heard it called [the Voldemort course] so we may be on a roll.

ETA: Hm, this recent Tom Schimmer post called "Envision the 'Best-Case' Scenario" seems to be pertinent. Canadians. Hm.

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*Blue hearse courtesy of braintoad's Flickr photostream