Student Affairs and Technology

Ellucian has announced a new initiative called the "Ellucian Inspire Awards." With the goal of recognizing their customers who have made "measurable improvements" at their institutions using Ellucian's solutions or services, the new award offers a $3,000 prize. The new awards program focuses on projects that "achieved measurable results during the past two years in any of three categories:"

Three years ago when I uploaded a slide deck to SlideShare, it was the go-to site for presentation sharing. In the years following that initial upload, I've shared a handful of my slides. Unfortunately, the SlideShare interface has suffered from feature creep. The interface has gone from being simple and user-friendly to feeling clunky. Sharing slides with SlideShare just wasn't worth my time. I had to find an alternative…and then I stumbled upon Speaker Deck.

A new year has begun and it's time to get back on the blogging horse. Per my usual habit of taking stock of the previous year's posts, here are the top ten most-commented posts from last year. The "radical" post garnered more comments than any post in the history of this blog...

My context-ridden attempt to answer a question about blogging from a reader.

When I showed up at the EDUCAUSE exhibit hall last month to speak with Adrian Sannier, I knew that I had no idea where our conversation would go. Sannier, SVP of Product for Pearson Education, is the primary evangelist and lightning rod for Pearson's OpenClass Learning Management System (LMS). Sitting and chatting with Sannier on bright orange ottomans was an experience. Eating orange (there's a theme here) M&M candies and moving his hands at the speed of light, Sannier explained the current state of affairs with OpenClass.

Google+ is my favorite platform for collaboration. While it's been touted by Google as a social network on par with Facebook, the feature that makes Google+ shine is Hangouts. And, the best part is that Google keeps increasing the capabilities of Hangouts. Most people are familiar with the feature set of Hangouts: 10 person video/audio, chat, YouTube sharing, screen sharing, and Google Drive/Docs integration. Google is giving away a phenomenal array of functionality.

My initial response to an invitation to review the new Livescribe Sky wifi smartpen began with a polite rejection: "Thanks for the email. I have to be honest, I'm just not that interested in this technology." The reason for my pushback was that I am already fairly entrenched in my note-taking habits. A classic Moleskine with a Uni-Ball Signo is my preferred method for jotting down ideas, notes, etc. When I'm sans paper and pen, I tend to use my iPad with a Bamboo stylus and either Paper (by FiftyThree) or the Bamboo Paper app. I outlined this to a very nice public relations rep. Undeterred, she informed me that the new smartpen allows notes to be automatically synced (via wifi) to Evernote which makes them readily available on tablets and smartphones.

When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Northern Iowa, I had my first experience with Adobe's creative solutions. Photoshop, Illustrator, Pagemaker (the predecessor to InDesign), and the now defunct web editors PageMill and GoLive, were wonderful creative tools that enabled me to engage in all sorts of artistic endeavors. The pricing for these applications was fairly high even in the late 90s. Academic pricing certainly helped, but the pathways to upgrades were costly. Thankfully, in 2012, Adobe has gone to the cloud.