This afternoon, Dissertation House co-founders Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale and Dr. Renetta Tull joined Oregon State University Physicist Dr. Rubin Landau, and Dr. Phoebe Lenear from the Empowering Leadership Alliance at Rice University to lead a webinar on “The Dissertation Proposal.”   The next webinar will discuss “The Final Defense.” If you want to join, here are the instructions:

*The Final Defense: Thursday, August 30, 10 AM Pacific, 12 PM Central, 1 PM Eastern.  Sign up for this session here by Wednesday, August 29, 2012.  If you previously signed up for the webinar, it is not necessary to register again.  

This webinar is sponsored by the Empowering Leadership Alliance and is open to any graduate student, from any school.  About the Empowering Leadership Alliance:

The Empowering Leadership Alliance (ELA) is a program that was launched in 2007 and is funded by NSF. The program’s director and PI is Professor Richard Tapia at Rice University, and engages underrepresented minority students in computing disciplines at research institutions in a nationwide network composed of dozens of leading universities, professional societies, laboratories, research centers, and corporations.  Read the original press release here.   

UMBC's digital story work is highlighted in a new publication from EDUCAUSE. "Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies" contains case studies highlighting creative solutions to higher education challenges in difficult times. The chapter Stories in Our Classrooms: A Faculty Community of Practice as an Agent of Change by Beverly Bickel, William Shewbridge, and Jack Suess, describes the development of story work at UMBC and its importance in promoting digital literacies on campus.

Editied by Diana Oblinger, the book and individual chapters are avaiable for free download.

We are living in a world where people work from multiple devices -- phone, laptop, and computer - and need access to their files anywhere and anytime. UMBC’s active directory (AD) system serves the campus well but it doesn’t provide the level of flexibility for mobile devices and off-campus access that people need.

The higher education community, through an initiative by Internet2, has worked with a company named Box.com to provide a service that we believe will meet our needs and is secure. DoIT has signed an agreement to bring the Box.com service to UMBC and we will launch this in late-September once we intergrate our single-signon.

Students, faculty, and staff will be allowed to have web-based storage that they can use their myUMBC login to access. Files can be easily shared with others on campus and off-campus. You can even send a user a “URL” that allows someone that doesn’t have the Box.com service to access the file.

One of the nice features of Box.com is that is has great support for collaboration. It integrates well with Google Docs and we feel that faculty research groups will love the flexibility this provides in sharing data with other members of their research team.

Our plans for launching this service are to do a limited launch in the fall inside DoIT and to faculty and staff that want to be early adopters. We will make this service available to everyone, including students, in the spring. During the spring we will identify departments that need more flexibility for shared file storage than AD provides and transition them over to the Box.com offering.

Duringthe fall, DoIT will be working to relocate equipment used for critical campus services now in Public Policy to the research park. One benefit to the campus is that the BWTECH facility is on a different power feed than the campus and if power is lost to the campus, we may be able to keep power to the RP data center.

A second benefit is that this RP data center has considerably more cooling capacity and electrical capacity than any of our existing data centers. This provides an opportunity to expand our research computing facilities over the next few years should a large grant opportunity arise.

Finally, as part of improving the campus infrastructure, Physical Plant and Facilities are improving business continuity for the chilled water on campus and this will improve the PUP data center. Once this is done, DoIT will utilize the PuP facility to expand our support for department and research-based computing systems that are now limited due to cooling in the Engineering data center.