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.

If you are currently on campus remember to move your cars tonight – Sunday, August 26^th.  Cars must be moved to the outer loop of Hilltop Circle, the Walker Avenue Parking Garage or the Satellite Parking Lot.  Cars remaining in the residential areas or the inner loop of Hilltop Circle will be ticketed and towed!  Thank you for your assistance as 2000+ residential students return to campus on Monday, August 27^th!

This could be the auto mechanics dream… the engineering geniuses at Middle Tennessee State University have developed an invention that allows any one to drive a hybrid car.

It is a pretty nerdy video… but the invention is pretty cool.

The battery powered device can be mounted to the rear rotors of almost any car and, according to the developers, can boost in-town gas mileage 50-100 percent. If put into production, the retrofit could be available for $3000.

Put one of these things on your Hummer for ultimate irony.

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.