UIT Highlights

Tufts faculty and staff can get an early start this summer getting comfortable with Trunk, the new online learning environment powered by Sakai and developed for the Tufts community by UIT. Slated for an August 1st roll-out, Trunk will replace Blackboard, which has been in use at Tufts since 1997.

Sakai is an open source collaboration and learning environment developed by the educational community and its customized versions, such as Trunk, are running at more than 350 schools worldwide, explained David Bragg, a Senior Trainer and Curriculum Specialist with UIT. “Trunk is more user-friendly than Blackboard,” he added, saying that it offers many streamlined features, such as the ability to import class rosters directly from the Student Information System (SIS).

Trunk also supports project sites that can be accessed by users from around the world and, as such, was developed with both privacy and IT security concerns in mind. Workspace owners have the ability to open or restrict access to course sites, projects sites, and resources at a very granular level, making it ideally suited as a secure partner for other cloud-based tools. Trunk log in uses the Tufts Username (UTLN) and Tufts Password (same as email).

To get started, new users can either follow the step-by-step instructions on the Trunk web site or attend a two hour training, such as the May 25th class led by Chris Strauber, Humanities Reference Librarian at Tisch Library. The diverse group of attendees at that session hailed from eight different A&S disciplines and the Fletcher Schools.

Class participants receive the 12 page Trunk Common Tasks handout and the Quick Start Guide for Instructors, both of which were developed by a team that included Mélanie St. James, Manager of the Design and Usability Services group for UIT. St. James said that the Quick Start Guide, an attractive tri-fold printed on card stock, was designed to be inviting to both those well-versed in academic technology tools as well as novices. To ease the transition from Blackboard to Trunk, the Quick Start Guide will be distributed to every instructor at Tufts three campuses.

To learn more about Trunk or to enroll in a training class, visit https://trunk.tufts.edu/.

It took a year of hard work and planning with a phenomenal cross-institutional team, but for Gina Siesing, Director, Educational & Scholarly Technology Services, chairing the NERCOMP 2011 Annual Conference was very worthwhile.

“It’s a phenomenally vibrant community of colleagues in the area,” Siesing said of the NorthEast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP), the event host. “Everyone comes together to grapple with today’s IT challenges and opportunities on campus.”

The theme of this year’s conference, held March 28-30 in Providence, RI, was “Developing Our Strengths, Leveraging Our Talents, Inspiring Our Campuses.” The various keynotes, workshops and roundtables looked at how to continue to meet increased expectations of IT service and delivery during a challenging economic climate.

Siesing said her colleagues also addressed the perception of whether the evolving role of IT–and the IT organization–on campus is as a commodity service provider, strategic partner in academic and administrative planning and leadership, or some balance of the two. Also, how can emerging technology opportunities and organizational capabilities inspire meaningful changes to the way our schools deliver on their core missions?

What is NERCOMP?

In 1956, 20 New England colleges and universities were invited to share the second shift of the IBM-704 computer installed at MIT. For many institutions, the affiliation with NERCC constituted their first exposure to a large computer and they continued to make extensive use of the facilities until they were able to obtain their own equipment. The collaboration had a lasting impact on computing in New England and launched a cooperative effort that continues to this day as NERCOMP. (The organization has undergone a number of name changes through the years as detailed in its organizational history.)

As institutions adopted their first personal computers in the mid-to-late 1980s, NERCOMP’s educational conferences became a showcase of new technology, while also providing a platform for much-needed training. In 1997, NERCOMP became an association partner of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. EDUCAUSE partners with NERCOMP on the annual conference, providing significant infrastructure support and working with the conference Chair and Vice Chair on planning throughout the year.

Today, NERCOMP enables the informed use of information technology by providing affordable access to educational opportunities, software licensing discount programs, professional networking and collaborative opportunities to its member network. When the 240-member organization gets together for its annual conference, Siesing said the keynote addresses serve as a collective “State of the Union” for what’s happening in IT at educational institutions around the region.  The various workshops and roundtables cover the most pressing issues facing IT professionals in every category, including security, enterprise applications and infrastructure, educational and research tools and leadership, client support, and organizational development.

Siesing led a roundtable on Women in Technology: Leadership and in years past has moderated discussions in the area of instructional technology and strategic planning for large-scale projects, her areas of expertise at Tufts as head of UIT’s Educational & Scholarly Technology Services.

“A primary focus of my position is communication and collaboration with academic deans, faculty, and other academic resource colleagues to understand academic technology goals and to envision best approaches to meeting these goals,” she said. Working with colleagues at Tufts and beyond, Siesing researches trends in teaching, learning, and scholarly technology and makes determinations about the best places to introduce new resources and initiatives.

Prior to Tufts, Siesing worked for six years with the Instructional Computing Group in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as Associate Director for the Computer Writing and Research Labs.

Her current professional interests focus on cultivating robust communication channels and collaborations among faculty, educational technology specialists, and university colleagues to support work toward shared academic technology goals. From 2008-2011, she served as a member of the Board of Trustees of NERCOMP and served on the Annual Conference Program Committee, the SIG Committee, and the Membership/Institutional Representatives Committee. She worked with a core team of Board members to articulate the most recent NERCOMP strategic plan based on a planning process that was critical for the Board of Trustees in a period of drastic economic changes and evolution in the vendor licensing arena.

As for next year’s NERCOMP conference, Siesing said she looks forward to attending alongside other colleagues from Tufts. She will participate on the Program Committee ex-officio, providing support to the new annual conference Program Chair. Representing UIT at this year’s conference were Janet Hill, Manager LMS Services, and Kara Bilotta, Client Relationship Manager. Bilotta echoed Siesing’s assessment that the conference is one of the best professional IT forums in which all the relevant information is presented through the filter of higher education.

“It’s a place where you are surrounded by colleagues from peer institutions who are facing similar challenges. We all benefit from sharing our collective knowledge,” Bilotta said.

Please join us for a campus-wide exposition of the Geographic Information System (GIS) work being done at Tufts.  Students will present their work along with Tufts faculty and staff at Tufts Seventh Annual GIS Poster Exposition. This will be our largest yet with around 100 entries.  Everyone is welcome to attend. Cash awards will be given to the top student entries. Refreshments will be provided.

2011 GIS POSTER EXPO
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Alumnae Lounge (Hall), Aidekman Arts Center,
Talbot Ave., Medford Campus

Hosted by Tufts GIS Center, UIT
http://gis.tufts.edu
poster expo link:  https://wikis.uit.tufts.edu/confluence/display/GISatTufts/Tufts+GIS+Poster+Expo

UIT would like to congratulate the winners of the first Visualizing Research@Tufts Awards Program!  First, second and third place winners were selected for each of the three categories – photography, illustration, and non-interactive media.  A special jury prize was also awarded by the committee.

Photography

1st Place: Bull’s Eye
April D. Jewell, Graduate Student, Chemistry, School of Arts and Sciences
Charles H. Sykes, Chemistry, School of Arts and Sciences

2nd Place: Digital single lens reflex camera adaptor for anterior and posterior segment photography

Chris Pirie, Assistant Professor, Clinical Science, Division of Ophthalmology, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine3rd Place: InfoBiology: Steganography by Printed Arrays of Microbes (SPAM)

Manuel A. Palacios, Postdoctoral Associate, Chemistry, School of Arts and Sciences
Elena Benito-Peña, Chemistry,  School of Arts and Sciences
Mael Manesse, Postdoctoral Associate, Chemistry, School of Arts and Sciences
David R. Walt, Professor, Chemistry, School of Arts and Sciences

Illustrations

1st Place: Tangled Agents: Socio�]Political Power Struggles in Present�]Day Thailand
R. Jordan Crouser, Doctoral Candidate, Computer Science, School of Arts and Sciences
Remco Chang, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, School of Arts and Sciences

2nd Place: Loop emission from a cosmic string
Ken Olum, Research Associate Professor, Physics and Astronomy, School of Arts and Sciences

3rd Place: Nosoi’s Quilt: Visualizing large comorbidity data
Kenneth Chui, Public Health and Community Medicine, School of Medicine

Non-Interactive Multimedia

1st Place: Urban Absorption in New Bedford, MA (1888-2010)
Justin Hollander, Assistant Professor, Urban and Environmental Policy, School of Arts and Sciences
Rui Guo, Graduate Student, Urban and Environmental Policy, School of Arts and Sciences

2nd Place: XROMM Pony
Bronwen A. Childs, Graduate Student, Comparative Medical Sciences, Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine

3rd Place: Heapviz: A Programmer’s Tool for Data Structure Visualization
Edward Aftandilian, Graduate Student, Computer Science, School of Arts and Sciences
Sean Kelley, Undergraduate Student, School of Arts and Sciences
Connor Gramazio, Undergraduate Student, School of Arts and Sciences
Nathan Ricci, Graduate Student, Computer Science Dept, School of Arts and Sciences
Sara Su, Visiting Assistant Professor, Computer Science , School of Arts and Sciences
Samuel Guyer, Assistant Professor, Computer Science, School of Arts and Sciences

To see the winning entries or to learn more about research at Tufts, visit our website.

Please join us for the awards ceremony where all the entries will be showcased:

When: 2-4 pm, Friday, April 29

Where: 51 Winthrop Street on the Medford campus

Prior to the Awards Ceremony, all the submissions will be shown from 12 to 2 pm, April 19 through April 28, at the Tufts Center for Scientific Visualization.

Just a reminder that the deadline for the Visualizing Research@Tufts Awards is next Monday, March 15, 2011. A program overview is provided below and an entry form and complete information can be found at http://sites.tufts.edu/vrta. If you have questions, please contact vis-awards@tufts.edu.

Visualizing Research@Tufts Awards 2011 Program Goals

• To showcase Tufts research projects
• To enable opportunities for collaboration
• To promote the use of visualization as a research tool at Tufts University.

Definition of Visualization
Visualization is an important research tool that is not reserved for the hard- sciences. Visualization has wide applications and has been used to help understand data, processes, structures, and concepts in fields ranging from engineering to humanities and from health sciences to social sciences. For visualization examples, please visit http://sites.tufts.edu/vrta.

Submission Guidelines
This competition will accept submissions from Tufts faculty whose appointment includes research activities and students involved in these activities. Materials can be submitted in 3 different categories: photography, illustrations and non-interactive media. Submitted materials must:

• be copyright compliant
• be from a research project whose principal investigator is a Tufts University faculty member
• use visualization to express the message included in the data/information they are visualizing
• not be a work of art

Please do not hesitate to contact us at vis-awards@tufts.edu to inquire if your material qualifies for the competition.

Awards
A panel of seven judges selected from across the university will evaluate the submissions based on creativity, ability to communicate the research context effectively and clearly, and visual impact. Three prizes will be awarded for each category – 1st prize, $100; 2nd prize, $50; 3rd prize, $25. The winners will be announced on April 14 with an awards event being held on April 28. All the submissions will be showcased at the Tufts Center for Scientific Visualization from May 1 – 15th.
Learn how to enter your application now at http://sites.tufts.edu/vrta.

Tufts students, faculty and staff memorize a number of passwords to access Tufts’ various IT systems. In order to both simplify your experience and increase data security, UIT has implemented a solution that eliminates one of the passwords currently used in our IT environment. In the future we hope to consolidate several additional passwords used by our community members to access Tufts systems into one “Tufts password.” This project is called “Tufts Simplified Sign-on.”
Who does this affect? Within the next several months, this will affect all faculty, staff and students on all campuses.
Which passwords are changing? Tufts Simplified Sign-on eliminates the need for what has been known as the “Trumpeter password,” the password that is used to access Trumpeter email, Tufts library services, Spark, Elists, TUSK and many other systems. Click here for a partial list of services that use the Trumpeter password.
In the future, users will access all systems that now use the Trumpeter password with their Active Directory (AD) password. The AD password is currently used for logging into MS Windows computers, Microsoft Exchange, Tufts VPN, and network storage (e.g. P:, Q:, and R: drives). Going forward, your AD password will be called your “Tufts password” because it will cover so many systems.
When will I start using my “Tufts password” to access systems I previously accessed using my Trumpeter password? Community members will begin to use Tufts Simplified Sign-On in a phased approach. You will receive an email about a week before you are scheduled to start using your “Tufts password” to access systems you previously accessed with the Trumpeter password.
What about other systems that don’t use either of these passwords? At this point, only systems that currently rely on Active Directory (AD) and Trumpeter passwords are affected. Systems like SIS, PeopleSoft, Kenexa, eServe, Blackboard or other applications that use unique passwords will still use their current authentication method. In the future we hope to add many more applications to the list of those using the “Tufts password.”
I’m not sure if I have an Active Directory password. What do I need to do? There are some members of the Tufts community who do not have AD passwords and some who have them, but have never needed to use them. As part of this project, we are creating Active Directory accounts for everyone and creating methods to help those who can’t remember their AD password to reset it themselves. If you fall into either of these categories, you will receive an email with specific instructions about what you need to do. Once you receive your instructions and start using the Tufts password, you will no longer need to remember your Trumpeter password.
I have an Active Directory password, what do I need to do? Users who currently have an Active Directory password will simply start using it to access Trumpeter systems on the date appointed for them. They don’t need to do anything else!
Implementation of the “Tufts password” will take place over the next several months. If you have questions or concerns, please contact the UIT Support Center via email at uitsc@tufts.edu via phone at 7-3376 or contact your local support organization.

Esri Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are used by more than 350,000 organizations worldwide including most U.S. federal agencies and national mapping agencies, 45 of the top 50 petroleum companies, all 50 U.S. state health departments, most forestry companies, and many others in dozens of industries. In the Winter 2011 edition of “ARC News,” Esri’s corporate publication, Esri profiles how UIT’s GIS professionals are helping the University to plan resources and space using Geographical Information Systems.
Tufts’ GIS Center is a teaching and research facility funded, maintained, and supported by University Information Technology to promote and facilitate GIS, remote sensing, cartography, and geographic research and analysis.
The center is equipped with a range of specialized hardware and software to enable users to input, analyze, and display spatial data. It is staffed with senior GIS staff and student lab assistants to aid GIS users from across the University. The GIS Center offers a wide range of services to Tufts students, faculty, and staff. Please see GIS Center Services for a complete description.

Faculty are showing increased interest in the use of Spark wordPress sites to support creation of student work. This past fall, AT staff worked with several faculty to combine the use of wordPress sites with software for creating digital stories to have students create video content for assignments in their courses.
Faculty in German, Russian and Asian Languages used a wordPress site to host material for their course and to link to student blogs written in German. Students were required to blog weekly and to comment on their peers’ blogs. The faculty members then reflected upon student work in the main site created for the course. For a final project in the course, students created a digital story using a free account in VoiceThread, and linked these directly to their personal blogs. German 21, the Changing Faces of Germany site can be viewed here.
AT staff also collaborated with colleagues from Tisch library and the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning on a digital storytelling project for Biology 7, Environmental Biology in which students were required to create a short, research based ”infomercial” on a topic related to environmental change. The project was designed to increase students’ skills in science communication by asking them to integrate scholarly research with images, narrative and music and to use knowledge gained via lectures, assigned readings and independent research to become science “teachers.”
The Bio 7 project also made use of a wordPress site to provide details for and structure around the assignment and to post student work. Students then used iMovie to create their stories. The Bio 7 project and student videos can be viewed here.

You are invited to join the UIT Training and Documentation Department and an expert from Adobe for a full-day workshop that will cover the ins and outs of some of Adobe’s most popular tools, including Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Elements, Adobe Connect, and Adobe Photoshop CS5. Each of the products featured in the workshop is supported at Tufts. This could be your introduction to a tool you’ve always wanted to use or your opportunity to learn something new about a software you use every day.
Date: Thursday, January 6, 2011
Time: 10:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. (or any individual session you wish to attend)
Location: Sophia Gordon Hall, Medford
Register by visiting the UIT Training and Documentation website at http://training.uit.tufts.edu/calendar.asp?month=1&year=2011
If you have questions, please call or email David Bragg at 617-627-4057 or david.bragg@tufts.edu.
Adobe Day Program
10:00 -11:00 a.m.: Acrobat X in Education
Adobe Acrobat PDF for the business of educating
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is more than just a digital piece of paper. With Acrobat, you can create a fully-interactive documents that contain both PDF and non-PDF files as a way to show off your work, tell a digital story, or collect documents for a class—all without any coding or Flash skills. This session will show some examples of portfolios and demonstrate the ease with which you can create your own. Plus, as a data-collection tool Acrobat X allows you to create a data collection workflow—from form to spreadsheet—right from your desktop using Adobe Acrobat, PDF, and the free Adobe Reader.
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.: Adobe Connect for Virtual and eLearning
Adobe Connect 8 and eLearning
Distance and eLearning is a great way to augment in-class and traditional learning methods, and Adobe has a robust toolset that allows you to create and distribute eLearning projects. Adobe Connect, our real-time meeting and portal solution allows you to present to any student any where. All they need is a browser and the Flash player and they are ready to learn. What is more, you can bring them into the experience and allow them to participate in ways that will make the eLearning project more than just a way to replicate the in-class experience but allow it to augment or even surpass it.
12:00 – 12:30 p.m.: Lunch break
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.: Photoshop Elements
Photoshop for the beginner with Elements 9
Even though you might not be a professional photographer, Adobe has a solution for you. If you want to join the crush of people using images to communicate, then Adobe Photoshop Elements is for you. Although you’ll see how to create amazing compositing effects like the pros make, you’ll also see how to create a finished project. You can create slide shows to make your point, eCards to send an invite to an event, or burn a DVD to share with colleagues right from within this affordable tool. Whether you are using images in a scholarly paper or creating projects for fun, you’ll learn how to look like a guru.
1:30 – 2:30 p.m.: Photoshop CS5 Extended
Photoshop for novice—speak volumes with imagery
Learn the five quick techniques that you can use to get the most from the world’s favorite image-editing software. Whether you are a forensic scientist or an historian, if you can create a compelling image to accompany the story you want to tell, then you can increase the impact of that story. This session will unlock the secrets Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended has to offer.