Tuesday, August 23, 2005| Working Blogs and Wikis into our Faculty Website workflow In the moments when I am not working on trying to fit new Educational Technologies into Higher Ed institutions, I run The Learning Centre in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at UBC. My unit handles faculty development, educational technology, pedagogy as well as the IT for the Faculty. Given my exposure to emerging technologies, it is often a challenge to take the lessons learned at conferences and apply them to day to day business practices. My Faculty changed its name earlier this year and has almost completed its re-branding. Along with the name change (going from Agricultural Sciences to Land and Food Systems), we also have a brand new website and the opportunity to introduce some improved ways of creating, processing and sharing our information. With the help of The Learning Centre, the webteam has been trying to use weblogs to author some of the more regularly updated pages. We are also playing with the JotSpot wiki and wondering how we might use this to add flexibility to the website.  Getting our constituents to buy in has been a surprisingly difficult task - mostly because I don't know where to start (or more likely where to stop) when explaining the advantages of blogs, RSS, newsreaders or wikis. Luckily, Kirsten Bole has been helping us out with the website and is doing a marvelous job modeling the use of the technologies in the appropriate way to encourage their adoption. It seems like we probably have a long way to go before we have a website that gets away from a 'marketing' device to one that balances authentic student and faculty input with the official university policy that we must communicate, but hopefully blogs and other devices will be present in one form or another. Getting there one small step at at time! 12:34:16 AM | # | |
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2005
Cyprien Lomas
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Last update: 9/7/05; 4:53:01 PM .
Last update: 9/7/05; 4:53:01 PM .
