Eureka! Discovering Rich Sources of Open Educational Content:  A Primer for Instructional Support Staff

Rick Reo
George Mason University

Web 2.0 software tools and services are generating a profusion of new sources of reusable, rich media content; however, copyright concerns pose obstacles to faculty adoption of this content as well as the tools in their practice.  The presenter will discuss ways to alleviate faculty adoption issues by first delineating major sources of Creative Commons (CC)-licensed, rich media content hosted by selected Web 2.0 services, and academic initiatives such as Connexions, MIT OpenCourseware, and the H2O project, and second, by demonstrating easy ways to search for CC-licensed multimedia materials.

Partnering for PCI Compliance

Cathy Hubbs and Joe Arevalo
George Mason University

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) poses a unique challenge to institutions of higher education, which often host many diverse credit/debit card merchants on our campuses. Learn about the merchant levels and the 12 security requirements, the partnerships we formed to work toward compliance, and the technical approach we took to secure Point of Sales systems and other systems we discovered on our public network.

A Comprehensive Approach to Handling Confidential/Sensitive Data

Darlene Quackenbush. James Madison University and Shirley Payne, University of Virginia

With continued reports of high-profile data breaches in universities, many are led to reassess current policies, practices and communication strategies around protecting confidential or sensitive data.  The presenters will share projects and lessons learned from their universities, highlight resources available nationally and discuss the compliance concerns and other challenges that demand on-going engagement of persons throughout the university in data protection and security efforts.

Oodles of Moodle (A Free Open-Source Course Management System)

Thomas Marcais
Sweet Briar College

Moodle is a free, open-source Course Management System. This session will demonstrate some of the powerful features available in Moodle. Find out why many colleges are leaving high-priced commercial systems (like Blackboard) for this highly capable, easy-to-use, free solution.

The Fate of Residential Networks - Is it Time to Outsource RESNet?

Joe Haynes
University of Mary Washington

Residential networks are full of interesting challenges for colleges and universities. This panel will provide insights into what they're doing and considering doing with Residential networks.

Software Distribution at Virginia Tech, Methods and Technology

Joe Kelley, AIS Enterprise Systems Support and Patty Branscome, Virginia Tech

The on-campus Virginia Tech Software Distribution office handles commercial vendor software distribution and licensing for staff and students at the university. This presentation will discuss the various vendor licensing programs used by the Software Distribution Office and lessons learned in student and staff licensing. An overview of a rule-based network software distribution technology used to implement distribution to individuals, student classes, departments, and colleges will also be presented.

Innovative Uses for Collaborative Support Tools

Rob Sprague and Raven Jennings, Virginia Tech, and Rick Reo, George Mason University

Virginia Tech is constantly seeking new and innovative ways to support our constituents.  During the past year we have discovered and implemented two new tools that have improved the efficiency of our support personnel: Confluence Wiki and Jabber IM and Chat.

Microsoft Vista and Office Tips and Tricks

David Norris, Microsoft's Education Solutions Group

Demonstration of some of the compelling features of the newly released versions of Miscrosoft's two flagship products. By design, a portion of the time will be left for general questions so that we can follow where current audience testing, use, and questions lead - and we will target much of the demo on features and functionality that are especially useful in our support (and faculty research) roles.

Virtualizing Face Time for the New Student: A Portal Implementation Story

Cathy Finn-Derecki and Dana German,
University of Mary Washington

The UMW Department of Information Technologies team will be in the midst of deploying the Luminis Portal, Banner, social software, and multimedia technologies in new and creative ways in service to this goal for Summer 2007, and are brave enough to give us an in-progress report card at this session.

Collaboration: Co-location, Advantage, or Just a Buzzword?

Tim Tolson, Donna Tolson, Carla Lee, Andrew Sallans, Nancy Kechner & Joseph Gilbert
University of Virginia

Collaboration is a popular term these days, but what does it really mean? Especially with libraries and IT organizations in higher education, is there really a "collaborative advantage"? We'll discuss our two support labs at UVa staffed by library and ITC for collaborative service provision in support of digital scholarship and research computing.

Windows Vista Activation

Kevin Dean
Microsoft Corporation

This session will provide guidance on the activation scenarios for Microsoft's Windows Vista. Kevin Dean, Higher Ed Technology Specialist, will discuss strategies for best matching activation strategies for different university audiences followed by Q&A.

Playing with Blocks: Digging Inside the Web Standards Toy Chest

John Loy
University of Virginia

The past few years have witnessed a hectic flurry of website design and development based on Web Standards. From useful ways to employ the semantics of html, to long-overdue refined aesthetics using CSS for page layout and typography, to Javascript-based cinematic effects rivaling Flash, new tools and techniques seem to be emerging almost daily. This presentation will briefly introduce a prime selection of these while building a set of typical website templates and user interface elements from the block up -- HTML block-level element that is.

Reducing the Risk of Data Theft with BitLocker and EFS

Zeb Bowden
Virginia Tech

A growing number of colleges and universities have recently fallen victim to data theft and/or unintentional data exposure. Many of these events were highly publicized and resulted in an abundance of negative exposure for these institutions. Microsoft Vista includes two technologies, BitLocker and Encrypting File System (EFS) that are intended to mitigate these risks. This talk will provide a brief overview of these technologies, ideas for effective implementation, and some potential problems (support, data recovery, etc.) that we may encounter in an educational environment.

Architecting an MS WSUS Solution for the .edu Environment

Marc DeBonis
Virginia Tech

Develop, build and deploy a WSUS (Windows Software Update Service) infrastructure that services faculty and staff Windows systems and core MS applications. This infrastructure allows for the timely testing, deployment, and installation of necessary patches and updates to your customer base. Such automated installation reduces the number of vulnerable and exploited systems thus lowering the total cost of ownership for the lifecycle of these systems. See how Virginia Tech has developed an open source solution that allows for tiered delegation, reporting and provisioning based upon the MS WSUS framework. See http://wsuswiki.w2k.vt.edu for more information.

The Secure Laptop

Erica Hilgeman
Dell Computers

Encryption, authentication, biometrics, "lo-jack"! What are all of the options and values of securing my laptop? What is possible? Why is it important?  How will adding security features to my PC affect my ability to use it the way I like? All of these answers and more from the Dell / Higher Education Laptop Brand Manager.

Presenter Unable to Attend

Student Employees + Video = AWESOME!

Pam Lowery, Ben Tolson & Philip Holbrook
University of Mary Washington

This presentation will be demonstrating the possibilities of using instructional video in higher education. Over the past four years we have pioneered (at least here at Mary Washington) the vast realm of student aide capabilities in regards to how video production can be utilized to convey other information to students. We will review the process of making movies and will use previous UMW videos as case studies.

Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)

Richard Hach, Virginia Tech and Wendy Wigen, EDUCAUSE

It has been three years since proposed changes to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) first came to the attention of the higher education community. Convinced that these changes, if approved, could severely impact our campuses and networks, EDUCAUSE opened a dialogue with the FCC and the DoJ to try and minimize the costs these new rules would impose on our community. Several rule makings and a court decision later, we have arrived at a point where we hope most campuses will be exempt from CALEA compliance. This presentation will help explain what all the fuss was about: What is the purpose of CALEA? Why did we never hear about it before? What would compliance have meant if left unchallenged? Why did we go to court? What did the court decide? What are the criteria for having to be compliant? What does it all mean in the end?

A Question of Innovation: Open-Source Alternatives to Learning Management Systems

Jerry Slezak and Martha Burtis
University of Mary Washington

This presentation explores the implications of using open-source tools to provide a teaching and learning alternative to the traditional enterprise Learning Management System. First, we will examine how the choices we've made as institutions about working with proprietary, locked LMS's are affecting the larger conversation about the role of innovation in higher education. In addition, we'll present a specific example of a course taught using loosely-bound, free and open-source tools to create a community of learning and inquiry.

Needles, Haystacks, and Omnivores: Finding and Consuming Information Through Social Tagging and the Semantic Web

Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn and Jim Groom
University of Mary Washington

This presentation will be a dialogue between two approaches to finding and organizing information on the web, especially material in blogs or other forums that students use in their classwork.  The semantic web offers a formal mechanism for categorizing resources so that they can be easily searched and repurposed across applications.  Social tagging offers an informal mechanism for doing the same things.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and have too often been thought of in mutually exclusive terms.  This presentation will explore those strengths and weaknesses and pursue ways in which they can indeed be used to complement each other.  In particular, we will explain some of the ways that we are experimenting with the approaches in the teaching and learning environment at the University of Mary Washington.

VA High School E-Transcripts: Where do we start and How Far to the Finish Line?

Karen Lee and Joe Manning, James Madison University and Bethann Canada, Virginia Department of Education

JMU initiated a pilot project for electronic high school transcript exchange in fall 2005 and found a world full of players, each in a different stage of readiness. JMU admissions and IT staff  provide their answers to what is the goal, who are the players, what is the best standard format, what are the major hurdles, and what are the keys to success.  Bethann Canada of the Commonwealth's Department of Education then shares her view of the issues, the accomplishments to date, and what colleges and universities in Virginia can be doing.

What I Did Last Summer with PHP and MySQL (and AJAX)

Samuel Johnson, Trisha Gordon, and Richard Gregory
University of Virginia

This session will demonstrate a number of interesting applications made with PHP, MySQL and AJAX at the University of Virginia.

Help Desk Tips and Tricks: How to Better Support All Types of Customers

Natalie Talbott, Virginia Western Community College; Crystal Pruett, J. Sargent Reynolds Community College; and Rae Smith Watson, Northern Virginia Community College

This panel discussion by representatives from college Help Desks will discuss Help Desk Tips and Tricks--best practices, and software demos like LivePerson!

A Real World Approach to Virtualization

Robert Nash
SyCom Technologies

All of us have heard why we should use virtualization technologies -- to provide a proven platform for server consolidation, improve application availability, enhance disaster recovery, increase responsiveness to application provisioning and allow legacy systems to co-exist with new environments. Many have already jumped into the use of this technology, some are still evaluating it and the rest are still on the sidelines. What will we cover in this seminar?

1. We will explore what is possible.
2. We will explore what makes practical sense, all within the constraints of modern budgets.
3. We will show you how others have approached evaluation, implementation and testing and why some initiatives have been successful while others have struggled.

We will present a structured methodology for deciding where to begin, what to expect and where to place your operational priorities.

CIO Panel

Join fellow attendees as our panel of Chief Information Officers offers updates and observations from their vantage points as CIOs/information technology executives from several different settings in Virginia higher education. You can expect an energetic and informative discussion of current initiatives and common ground, as well as a bit about what might lie ahead.

Promoting Security Awareness

Ron Angert, Virginia Tech; and Clay Calvert, University of Mary Washington

While the tools and techniques used to secure our networks and data consume the vast majority of our time and attention, the monster of failures of our users to understand the consequences of their use of the technology is always present. Social engineering, privacy of account credentials and wasting resources by using institution computers for non-business activities are common issues for all of us. Making all staff aware of these issues is a constant need. This panel will facilitate a discussion of ideas that attendees are implementing at their institutions and a collection of training and communications materials will be assembled for sharing.  Please bring printer materials to share, posters to display and urls of on-line materials your institution has developed sharing.  Please bring printer materials to share, posters to display and urls of on-line materials your institution has developed.

Feasible Desktop Disaster Recovery on a Budget

Jeremy Kong
University of Virginia

For current versions of OSX and Windows XP, we all need disaster recovery methods.  UVa Arts and Sciences has switched to DriveImage XML for the Windows platform, and SuperDuper! for the Macintosh.  This presentation will discuss the pro’s and con’s of DI XML (a free product) which does complete system backups using a bootable CD with BartPE to completely image a system for archival, or also rapid deployment to another system, and SuperDuper which is licensed software for a fairly inexpensive fee. SuperDuper also does complete system backups and has some other features that make disaster recovery for Macs a breeze.

Internet Cockroaches 101

Karen McDowell
University of Virginia

You all know about viruses and worms and the broad category of spyware, but do you know about these cockroaches? They are the most insidious Internet stalkers of all, and you best learn to identify and eliminate them. Cockroaches cause untoward, serious problems, the least of which will slow down your entire operation, as well as afflict student users and tie up your help desks. Learn the basics of pest control! There is, unfortunately, no possibility of eliminating them completely any more than we humans can eliminate cockroaches in this world, but at least you can keep your own computers and networks relatively clean.

Foo Club

Steve Stedman
University of Virginia

This session will be an engaging saga of how a group of enthusiastic Web geeks - isolated in pockets of excellence across the vast academic organizational chart - find each other, find their voice, and find success. The organization they are from - beTech - quickly becomes the nexus of Web development and collaboration on grounds and is poised to take the next big step. Find out what lies ahead for beTech and how to recreate such passion on your campus.

New Presentation Technologies in the Classroom

Gerry Campana
Epson

There are many new technologies in the data projector technology that will be covered… new ‘closed captioning’ capabilities, Wireless technology, Audio, Vido over wireless, tablet PC and wireless projectors, multi screen, multi projector presentaitons with a single PC, and much more.