2 days ago

As one of the premier Web 2.0 tools in existence, wikis are wonderfully useful tools for collaboration, communication, and the serving of information. They’re also fun to play with, explore, and learn. However, for those of us used to a Web 1.0 age, it’s difficult to fully wrap our minds around the functionality and possibility of these tools.

The best way to learn about these things is to brainstorm and tinker, in my opinion, and therefore we want to offer the opportunity for people to learn and discuss together. In preparation for MITC, Missouri State University is founding a Wiki Users Group that will continue long after MITC 2008.

A Space on our Confluence wiki has been setup to host this WUG, and I invite everyone interested to create an account and send me an email so I can give you access to this space. Here you can learn more about Confluence, get a feel for how it works, and discover some of the features of this phenomenal wiki.

For more information on Confluence in general, visit Atlassian’s website to learn more, or dive right in and let us know what you think.

Matthew Stublefield is a Centralized User Support Specialist at Missouri State University. He will be presenting F098: Confluence Wiki: Merging Information Services and Beautiful Functionality at MITC.

6 days ago

My name is Ben Colley, and I’ll be hosting the Research Roundtable session. My official role at MOREnet is Director of Strategic Technologies. Somehow folks think I must have a crystal ball that allows me to see the future and chart a course through the maze. Let me tell you, nothing is further from the truth.

This session is one of the ways I try to find the path through the maze. At this session we’ll talk about what you are doing at your organization about research. Now, I don’t mean white-coat lab kinds of research, I mean what technologies are you ‘researching’ as part of your technology future. What technologies do you think you should be looking into that maybe you just don’t have time to? What have you researched lately that others might find useful?

Come join the discussions at the Research Roundtable. But let me warn you, I’ll mostly be questioning the crowd and moderating the conversations. This will be a highly interactive session — no PowerPoint from me!

8 days ago

One of the greatest challenges of Web 2.0 is simply information management. It is easy to get overwhelmed with the volume of websites, blogs, wikis and so on that you get bombarded with on a daily basis. Your Bookmarks menu can quickly become overloaded and useless. And in this era of mobility in computing, what if you REALLY need that bookmark but you are not at your computer?

This session introduces a great new concept called social bookmarking. Like a portable bookmarks folder on the web, tools like Del.icio.us, Diigo and Ma.gnolia allow you to save, annotate, tag, organize and share bookmarks as you find them. Demonstrations will be given of these tools and how easy it is to create, save and share your lists with colleagues, friends and students.

Bob Martin is a Technical Trainer with MOREnet.

12 days ago

I began working in User Support at Missouri State University just a year and a half ago, in January of 2007. Because our Technical Trainer was on his way out (his fiancée had enrolled in a grad school in Colorado so, of course, he was headed west), a great deal of my time was devoted to working with his office and learning enough about his projects to keep things going until a new Technical Trainer could be hired.

One of these projects was a wiki, a pet project he had begun to demonstrate their value. There was no mandate for this project, and he built the server for it on an old desktop computer he had lying around his office. Once he had it stable and integrated with some of our systems, it went “live” and we began dumping content into it, trying to get the word out a bit and hoping the project would reach critical mass.

In a variety of online projects, “critical mass” means the point at which user participation is such that the project keeps rolling on its own without the originator having to do anything. If it was a forum, then critical mass would be the point at which enough people are talking and discussing via that medium that the forum owner doesn’t have to be online all the time, responding to every comment. In a wiki, it means end-users are generating the content.

Until that point was reached, however, we wrote. And wrote. Our student workers were plagued for months to write wiki articles about anything they could think of, so long as it was technology related. Before long, we had a decent collection of tech articles to help both our call center and end-users.

And finally, the project attracted the attention of the administration and the review was positive. Wikis had been tried at Missouri State before, but never to much acclaim. For whatever reason, this one caught on.

Have you ever tried a pilot project sans mandate or even suggestion (or perhaps knowledge) of your superiors? How did it turn out?

Matthew Stublefield is a Centralized User Support Specialist at Missouri State University. He will be presenting F098: Confluence Wiki: Merging Information Services and Beautiful Functionality at MITC.

14 days ago

Well, not exactly. We do have a beauty, literally…Lindsay Caesmer, Miss Missouri 2007 will be on hand to talk about her experience with a cyberstalker while a student in college. And, we have Chris Pickering of the Missouri Attorney General’s office. Not exactly a beast, but I won’t be picking any fights with him! He will be setting the record straight on illegal downloads and other questions that keep parents and teachers awake at night.

If you are around kids, you know they are continually texting, chatting, e-mailing, surfing and who-knows-what-elseing with their computer, phone, BlackBerry or other device. Kids inherently gravitate towards the technology, and they seem to know more about it without reading the manual than we do after reading the manual 2 or 3 times. I have often wondered if it helps to read it in the other 7 languages printed in the manual. One of them surely has to be the native language of the author. :)

• Is Facebook really that dangerous?
• How do we know that our students are making wise choices with the time they spend on the Internet?
• Is it legal to download music on-line?

The Postscript session Keeping Kids Safe Online: The Biggest Risks and How to Talk About Them with Chris and Lindsay will be an awesome opportunity to have students and teachers sit down and have a lively and interactive discussion about these topics and others. They are a great team and really interact well with the kids. This will be a great way to learn how to keep your kids safe, learn about signs that someone is being cyberbullied and how you can help your kids make good choices as they use the Internet.

Oh yeah, we will be connecting up students and teachers from across the nation as we use video streaming and video conferencing technology to really expand the walls of our classroom. Come see firsthand the Teaching and Learning 2.0 technology. You might even be able to get an autographed picture with our presenters.

One more thing, my name is Randy Raw and I manage the Network Security group at MOREnet. I am passionate about keeping kids safe on-line and this is one of the ways we are working to help your kids be safe. Visit our website at besafe.more.net for more resources.