New Faces Introducing Charles Wachira, Brian Gall, Ivan Dryanovski Charles Wachira has joined the ATS staff as Instructional Technologist/Designer. In this position, Charles supports the integration of technology in teaching and learning at the College. In addition to collaborating and consulting with faculty and students, Charles is responsible for the daily operational support of Blackboard, the College's Learning Management System. Charles, who was born in Nyeri, Kenya, speaks three languages; Kikuyu, Swahili, and English. He has an MS in Instructional Technology from Bloomsburg University and a BS in Business Administration, also from Bloomsburg University. Prior to working for ATS, Charles was a curriculum development specialist, project manager, and Blackboard systems administrator for Keystone National High School a division of Knowledge Learning Corporation. You can contact Charles at 4672 and charles.wachira@fandm.edu or in his office in Stager 025. Brian Gall has joined the ATS staff as Instructional Technologist/ Designer. In this position, Brian supports the integration of technology in teaching and learning at the College. In addition to collaborating and consulting with faculty and students, Brian is responsible for the daily operational support of instructional media production spaces in ATS. A Lancaster County native, Brian has a MS in Instructional Systems/Leadership in Technology Integration and Instructional Technology Specialist Certificate from Penn State University and a BS in Business Education from Shippensburg University. Prior to working for ATS, he taught high school computer science and business education and worked as an instructional technologist at Philadelphia University. You can contact Brian at 4339 and brian.gall@fandm.edu or in his office in Stager 024. Ivan Dryanovski, '07, has joined the ATS staff as a Media Services Intern. In this position, Ivan supports technology-enhanced classrooms at the College. A native of Bulgaria, Ivan has an BS in Physics from Franklin & Marshall. You can contact him at 3808 and ivan.dryanovski@fandm.edu or in his office in Stager 009. Sharing presentations online A free service for publishing slideshows on the Internet SlideShare is a free service for sharing presentations and slideshows. You can upload your PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Keynote or PDF presentations, tag them, embed them into your Blackborad course, blog or website, browse others' presentations, and comment on individual slides. What's more, the transcripts of your presentation will be indexed by internet search engines and show up in search results. It's a great way to share your ideas with others, or to learn from other people. And it's free! The Darwin Correspondence Project An Online Archive Collects Charles Darwin's Letters Whether they’re studying his groundbreaking research, his correspondence with pigeon breeders, or even his personal-hygiene habits, scholars interested in Charles Darwin will find plenty of grist in a new online archive. The Darwin Correspondence Project, run byarchivists at the University of Cambridge, makes almost 5,000 of Darwin’s personal letters available online. And the site provides summaries of an additional 9,000 missives — including some that Darwin wrote when he was just 12 years old. Cambridge actually started the correspondence project in 1974, and the university has already published 15 books’ worth of the scientist’s letters, according to BBC News. But now that the database is going digital, archivists say they will put heretofore unpublished letters up on the Web site four years before they include the material in books. More... The Good, the Bad, And the 'Web 2.0' Is the Web a Cure for Scholarly Isolation? Life for scholars was lonely before the Web, says the philosopher David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Times Books, 2007). In a debate with Andrew Keen, a Web 2.0 critic and author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing our Culture (Doubleday/Currency, 2007) reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Weinberger says that before the Web grew ubiquitous, “ideas were scarce…because space, time, and the limitations of paper made it hard to hear what others were saying and well nigh impossible to talk with them about it.” JOIN THE DISCUSSION   What do you think? Has the Internet become overrun with useless noise? Or does Web 2.0 give citizens access to a depth of information never available before? Join the discussion... Now, he writes, “I am in contact with people who come up with ideas I’d never have encountered, who are sources of wide expertise.” The explosion of blogs, social networks and video-sharing sites has allowed any Internet user to become a journalist or filmmaker or music star. But is this democratization of information -- often called Web 2.0 -- the future of the Internet or a looming disaster? What do you think? Around the Web A snapshot of what's going on around the World Wide Web The Movies Meet Web 2.0: Lance Weiler on the New Economic Model for Independent Cinema Producing a feature-length motion picture is a daunting task, especially if you do it without the support of a major studio using money you have raised yourself. But according to independent filmmaker Lance Weiler, "the real struggle" comes after the film is completed. Distributing a theatrical feature -- and doing so profitably -- poses an even greater challenge. As Weiler noted during a recent interview with Knowledge @ Wharton, "making the film is easy in comparison." Yet Weiler believes he has a solution. By expanding the movie into an interactive theatrical event, Weiler has carved out a niche that he believes offers an economically viable model for independent cinema. Knowledge @ Wharton University publishing in a digital age Publishing in the future will look very different than it has looked in the past. Consumption patterns have already changed dramatically, as many scholars have increasingly begun to rely on electronic resources to get information that is useful to their research and teaching. Transformation on the creation and production sides is taking longer, but ultimately may have an even more profound impact on the way scholars work. Ithaka Top Tech Innovators Come From Academe Twenty-two of the 35 “young innovators” cited in the new issue of Technology Review are at universities. In its September/October issue, the magazine honors 35 young people whose work “is changing our world” with inventions and research that the editors found “most exciting” in fields including communications, computing, electronics, medicine, and nanotechnology. MIT Technology Review

New Faces in ATS Sharing Presentations Online Darwin Correspondence Project The Good, the Bad, And the 'Web 2.0:' Around the Web How much communications cable is in the new Barshinger Life Sciences and Philosophy Building? Contractors installed 103,000 feet of communications cable. That's 19.5 miles! The way the telecomm industry records such things, it's 412,000 Pair Feet or 78 Pair Miles. So if you strung out each pair end to end, you'd just about make it to Baltimore! All that wire is terminated on 189 voice jacks and 1145 data jacks. Source: Tom Mahoney Network Manager Computing Services Enrollment Options in Blackboard Faculty using Blackboard courses at the College currently have three options for "populating," or enrolling students within a course – self enrollment, manual enrollment, or batch enrollment. ATS QuickStarts are designed to provide short, concise instructions for using hardware, software, and facilities managed by ATS. Google Notebook If you spend a lot of time online, chances are you've come across information you wish you could revisit later, whether to digest it more slowly, investigate it further, or share it with a friend or colleague. With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that's accessible from any computer. Crafting a lesson plan? Researching a topic? Just add clippings to your notebook. You don't even have to leave your browser window. For step-by-step instructions, take a look at the Google Notebook tour. Sharing Course Materials Online An overview of the opportunities for sharing course materials online at F&M via Blackboard and eDisk August 24 and August 24 TEC-Room Training Sessions in the use of technology-enhanced classrooms August 20-24, 27-28 Student Technology Demonstrations By students for students: How to use Blackboard and eDisk September 10-12 More information about upcoming ATS Events is available online. Professor Lisa Gasbarrone, French, leading students in a discussion in one of the College’s Technology Enhanced Classrooms. Professor Gasbarrone provides her students with a variety of web-based instructional materials. ATS eNews September, 2007 Volume 3, Issue 1 Tips, techniques, and tools for using technology to enhance teaching and research ATS eNews is published by Academic Technology Services. http://ats.fandm.edu/enews/