Giant photos from film camera

Pictures from last month's JMC Giants game
Nicole and I went to the Giant's game with faculty and staff from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications last month. As well as my cameraphone Treo, I carried one of my film cameras, as I often do, and the pictures came out pretty well. I like shooting with film. You can carry a once high end film camera that takes great shots, has no battery weight and would cost only $200 to replace if someone poured beer on it. The downside is it took awhile to get the pictures developed, but that is life with film. I hope you like these photos!

[Click here to see photos on Flickr]

Kemp in Merc

Jeremy Kemp Gets SJMN Recognition
It is great to see when one of San Jose State's really talented faculty gets due recognition. Today, when I was looking at the on-line edition of the San Jose Mercury News I saw just such a thing. SJSU faculty member Jeremy Kemp was highlighted in a story by Kara Andrade. Andrade said, " On any given day, Kemp logs into Second Life from his laptop and finds his students struggling with the building of virtual objects, such as flying carpets, and helps them learn online skills. He often chats with his students using the Second Life voice tool, which helps him tune into his students' frustrations."

Kemp does not just use Second Life. Kemp, along with Daniel Livingstone of the School of Computing University of Paisley, Scotland is one of the two developers of Sloodle. According to Joe Miller, VP Platform, of Linden Lab, which created Second Life, "One of the things that I’m most excited about is a mashup between Second Life and the learning management system, Moodle. Its called Sloodle."

The writer for the Mercury News did a great job covering Kemp's class, but she just touched the surface.

This is going to be huge for higher education. We are extremely lucky to have one of this technology's leading innovators right here at San Jose State University! Kemp deserves a lot of recognition for his great work.

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EnACT/ATI Summer Institute is here but I am not there

EnACT/ATI Summer Institute at SJSU
Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education, the mission of EnACT (Ensuring Access through Collaboration and Technology) is to support students with disabilities within the California State University in attaining their postsecondary educational goals. The EnACT/ATI Summer Institute is being held at San Jose State University. It started Monday, July 9 to Thursday, July 12. This morning I had breakfast with Abbe Altman of the CSU Center for Distributed Learning and a number of other folks from CSU campuses throughout the state. I really wish I could be at EnACT/ATI Summer Institute since it is so close, but I cannot as we are in the middle of an important search for a staff member to fill a vacancy at our help desk. I expect we will be hit with requests for services from faculty, staff and students for support in making their instructional materials accessible. The information being taught in the sessions at the conference would be very helpful in accomplishing that. The moral of the story, we need to find a way to record these sessions and make this information available for people who cannot attend the sessions. My suggestion, a podcast, perhaps something based a The Podcast Academy model.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

SJSU and Second Life

Dr. Ken Haycock, Professor and Director of the School of Library and Information Science at the San Jose State University sent in this great post to BCTLA News about Second Life at SJSU. This site is a news page for members of the British Columbia Teacher-Librarians' Association. Their are some great and innovative things going on at San Jose State University and Haycock's post is a fine example of that.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, SLIS, Second Life, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Happy Birthday To Us

Grey skies bright future
Despite inclement weather the university concluded Founders Week with a big birthday cake and a free lunch for all employees and students.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Virginia on my mind

My Opinion: We need to do what we can to reduce stress and tension
I don't think we do enough to reduce stress at SJSU and tension is often unnecessarily high on our campus. A campus does not have to be as tense as ours is. With a little effort we could make it much more pleasant and less stressful for students to get an education at SJSU. It seems to me that reducing student frustration, stress and anxiety is not a high enough priority on our campus.

For example:

• I believe the hassles students have to go through to get enrolled at SJSU are incredible and inexcusable.
• When students at SJSU have problems it is not clear to students where to go to get their problems resolved. Getting solutions at our campus can be like navigating a maze of disconnected groups that do not talk to each other. For example, today students at SJSU had to pay fees. Many of them created tickets in our "Help Desk" ticketing system asking to get their fee paying issues resolved. Since the university does not have one ticketing system for the entire campus the only resolution we could give our students was to point them in the direction of another help desk who we thought could help them.
• In our computer lab in Clark Hall there is a print station. You have to pay for prints when you use the computers with a card that you have to add value to. But, there is no place in the lab to add money to the card. Try telling that to a student who is in a rush to print a paper before a class.

At the time I am writing this I do not know what set this guy off in Virginia
But, in my heart, I think there is a lot we could be doing to reduce stress at SJSU. It may cost a little bit to fix these stress points. But, it is worth the cost. Life is so short, and so precious.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, Campus Life, Virginia Shootings, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Net-generation Instructor

Carl Berger keynote session
The Net-generation Instructor is the topic of the presentation that Berger is giving at CATS2007. Berger is an engaging speaker and is talking about issues affecting faculty adoption of Web 2.0 technology. He opened with an exercise in cognitive dissonance, he had everybody count back from 100 by sixes as he whistled. He presented some very interesting statistics on new media literacy among students and faculty and attitudes toward new technology adoption and the Net-Gen Instructor. This session is available on Elluminate.

Characteristics of a Net-Gen Instructor:

• Younger, but not exclusively
• Perception that their expertise is strong in all areas
• Preference in how to learn, they prefer to learn by experimentation and consulting with friends.

How do we guide them?

• Get out of their way
• Meet their special needs
• Recognize their efforts (in RTP)

His Presentation is Here [Power Point]

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, CATS, CATS2007, Fullerton, CSU Fullerton, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Strike News!

CFA HEADLINES
March 21, 2007 • SPECIAL EDITION

FACULTY UNITED!

• 94 percent vote to support a strike
• Voter turnout is 81 percent
• Bargaining crisis inspires 1,300 new members to join the union.

Any lingering questions about the solidarity and resolve of the California State University faculty were answered resoundingly Wednesday by the results of the first strike vote in the history of the California Faculty Association.

A stunning 94 percent of the voters agreed that the CSU’s professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors and coaches should initiate rolling walkouts if the CSU administration continues to reject bringing their salaries in line with their peers across the country.

More than 8,000 voters—an extraordinary 81 percent of the CFA membership—turned out to send an unmistakable message to Chancellor Charles B. Reed.

Here’s how CFA President John Travis summarized that message: “Faculty don’t want to strike, we want to teach. But in my 30 years at the CSU I’ve never seen us more united. Faculty members are taking a stand and it starts with insisting that the chancellor make us an equitable salary offer. We won’t settle for less.”

The pro-strike-authorization numbers rang across all 23 CFA chapters. On only one campus was the vote in favor of striking as low as 79 percent.

An equally telling number is the 1,300 faculty who have been moved to join CFA during the recent months of the bargaining crisis and impasse. Taken together, the landslide strike authorization and the union’s growing ranks leave no doubt that faculty have the capacity to shut down the university if an agreement cannot be reached, and reached quickly, said CFA Vice President Lillian Taiz.

“There will be hundreds of faculty and supporters from other unions on the picket lines,” predicted Taiz, a leader of CFA’s field operations, “and we think they will be joined by students and staff who are as fed up as we are.”

Chancellor Reed blasted at Capitol hearing
There was great symmetry in Wednesday morning’s historic events. Even as Travis, Taiz and other CFA leaders were announcing the League of Women Voters-certified strike-vote totals at Dominguez Hills, Charlie Reed was getting grilled at the State Capitol in Sacramento.

At a special hearing of the Senate Education Committee’s subcommittee on the budget, legislators pressed Reed about his scandalous “Executive Transition Program” handouts to CSU executives, and the chancellor struggled with evasive and incoherent responses.

But when the hearing ended, Reed got no relief: he was immediately encircled by scores of reporters insisting on his reactions to the strike announcement just issued in Southern California. The San Francisco Chronicle called it a “one-two punch.”

A sampling of the media coverage of today’s historic developments can be viewed at http://calfac.org/inthenews.html

CFA’s news release about the strike vote is at http://www.calfac.org/allpdf/newsreleas/2007_pressrel/PR_032107_Strike_Vote_Count.pdf

Clearly, Reed’s policies and style have united CSU faculty as never before.

CFA Board votes to implement rolling strikes on all 23 CSU campuses as 10-day “quiet period” ends
On Wednesday evening the CFA Board of Directors met and, by unanimous vote, made it official, turning the strike authorization into a strike plan with teeth.

The Board empowered the CFA officers and Field Team (who organized the strike vote) to make a final decision on which days and which campuses will begin the two-day walkouts in the initial round of job actions. Out of necessity, planning has been under way for months.

The first walkouts are expected in April but may occur sooner. Once the fact-finder’s recommendations are made public this Sunday, at the conclusion of the 10-day “quiet period” mandated by state law, the faculty are legally entitled to undertake job actions—to go on strike.

The expectation is that Chancellor Reed will ignore the recommendations of the fact-finding report and quite possibly attempt to unilaterally impose working conditions on the faculty.

If he does either, a strike will begin shortly thereafter.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, Strikes, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Campus Rot

Are we going downhill?
I have been here well over 20 years. I started as a student in 1979. It seems to me things have never been as bad as they are now. Student fees continue to go up, the faculty is on the verge of a strike (that is not going to be good for anybody), parts of the campus are dangerously understaffed, morale is low and we can't even keep the windows clean in parts of our campus. (Photo, March 2007 in DMH building SJSU)

I have seen really good staff leave the university due to stress and low pay. I do not see much hope on the horizon. Something seems seriously wrong at this university to me and nobody seems to be seriously working to fix it.

Technorati Tags: San Jose State University, SJSU, CSU, California State University, San Jose, ssloansjca

Signs of a strike at SJSU

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