beTech :: Evolve Already

• Event: beCamp 2009
• Dates: May 8th 5 PM to 10 PM, May 9th 9 AM to 5 PM, 2009.
• Location: CitySpace (http://www.cvilledesign.org/cityspace/)
• Map: http://tinyurl.com/c6bxzr
• Price: $FREE
• Signup: http://barcamp.org/beCamp2009#Campers

If you’re a geek in or around the Charlottesville metroplex or even if you’re merely tech-curious, this is the event you don’t want to miss. beCamp is Charlottesville’s version of the BarCamp unconference phenomenon—organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. Realizing that the most energizing parts of any tech conference are the ad hoc conversations that take place in the hallways between the sessions, beCamp facilitates these types of interactions for an entire event.

This year we are using the bright airy CitySpace facility, on the downtown mall, underneath the parking garage.  CitySpace is directly upstairs of the space we used last year, and the open layout should mesh well with our OpenSpace conference. We’ll have a large room that can hold all 100 of us, as well as 4 or 5 break out rooms for the individual sessions.

We provide the venues, the wireless, the projectors, the food, da beer—you show up to teach, learn, and participate.

Each attendee should talk about something or volunteer (registration, set-up, teardown, etc.). We will suggest and pick the sessions which will be picked by the attendees Friday evening. For example, if lots of people want to hear about Google’s OpenSocial, then that will be on the agenda. If no one wants to hear about HTML5, then it won’t be on the agenda.

Think of it as an open-source geek gathering where you get to decide what goes into and what comes out of the event. It’s 2 days of creating, collaborating, and conversing with people just as juiced excited about technology as you are.

If you think you can help sponsor some of the needs, please let me know.  We’ve listed some of the needs on this page: http://barcamp.org/sponsor-beCamp-2009

Learn More

Homepage: http://barcamp.org/beCamp2009

Sponsorships: http://barcamp.org/sponsor-beCamp-2009

See other beCamp’s: http://barcamp.org/beCamp2008

Details

Dates: May 8th 5 PM to 10 PM, May 9th 9 AM to 5 PM.

Location: CitySpace (http://www.cvilledesign.org/cityspace/)

Map: http://tinyurl.com/c6bxzr

Price: $FREE

Signup: http://barcamp.org/beCamp2009#Campers

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Originally posted by Eric Pugh | Principal | OpenSource Connections, LLC | 434.466.1467 | http://www.opensourceconnections.com

The first planning meeting for a Spring ‘09 higher ed web design/development conference at U.Va. is set for next Wednesday (full details below). If you missed the earlier email several weeks ago announcing this effort, you can read it online. Jared Spool, of UIE, will be with us on speakerphone to discuss presenter possibilities for proposed conference sessions (thanks to everyone who contributed ideas to the proposal) and help us formulate some next steps. We’ll also start mulling over logistics like securing a funding model, booking space, catering, publicity, setup/tear-down etc.

If you’d like to be a part of the planning but can’t make it to this first meeting, I’ve set up a UVaCollab site and email list at UVaWebConf09 at collab.itc.virginia.edu. All future announcements and online discussion regarding the conference will happen there, so feel free to join if you’d like to keep tabs on the progress. The name of the UVaCollab site is “UVa Web Conf ‘09″, and it’s listed in the public directory.

Hope to see you there!

First planning meeting and discussion with Jared Spool
When: Wednesday, November 12, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
Where: In the Byrd Room, Harrison/Small Special Collections building, U.Va.

Join beTech next Wednesday, December 19, at 3:00PM to map out the future of beTech. This last beTech session of 2007 also marks the end of my run at the helm of this fine organization. In January my family and I will be moving West.

Three years ago Anna Tubbs and I assembled an open group of enthusiastic Web designers and developers and coined the name beTech—Bleeding Edge TECHnology. The name was a little poke at, among other things, many of the University’s inaccessible table-based layouts and dry, brochure-ware sites in an age of CSS, Ajax, and social software. Our goal, then and now, was to subtly coax the UVa Web experience into the 21st Century—to evolve already. We engaged designers, developers, administrators, and anyone that saw the Web as a fascinating realm of possibilities with powers to change the social fabric of this institution and the World. We merely asked that everyone share whatever knowledge, skills, and inspiration they had and to start building the Web they wanted to work in. We’ve come a long way since then.

Today beTech is a strong and vibrant community with almost 200 members on the mailing list and a blog that is followed on every continent that Google tracks. Our inaugural beCamp brought in over 75 campers from across Grounds, across the region, and across the country. The spinoff WeeCamp series is also proving to be quite popular (a WordPress WeeCamp is in the planning stages). beTech Labs, our virtual Web development environment, is really starting to pick up steam with 8 Labs rolling as we speak. It’s truly been an amazing ride and one that I hope will continue to provide opportunities to others for a long, long time. Thank you all!

So let’s get together next Wednesday, dream up the next chapters of the beTech story, and then figure out how to divvy up the organizational duties. Unfortunately, in leaving I won’t have any ceremonial tarball of Mosaic or disc of FrontPage to lay at the base of the beTech Tim Berners-Lee alter but I will pass along any insider knowledge and username/passwords that I can conjure up. I hope to see you all next Wednesday.

The NYTimes recently had a short article about “The Google Way” in their Jobs section of the online magazine. Related by a Google employee (”A Googler”), the article starts: “GOOGLE engineers are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that interests them personally.” Is this something that could work here at UVa?

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re interested in the evolution of the modern student, this video is worth five minutes of your time. Michael Wesch and his cultural anthropology students at Kansas State University just set the educational blogosphere on fire with their production of “A Vision of Students Today”. The video is the culmination of a classroom brainstorming excercise to consider the nature of today’s students. The discussion itself took place in the new thinking space (Google Docs) and started like this:

… the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.

The result is stunning. The video effectively communicates their findings while evoking quite a bit of emotion. It’s “must-see-TV” for anyone addressing the future of learning at the University.

Shameless Blogroll

How I came upon the video is a study itself on how we gather our thoughts these days. It started for me with a piece by Jon Udell on “The once and future university” that, among other things, reflects on how the Internet has essentially supplanted college as the great introducer of new worlds and ideas. For those unfamiliar with Jon’s work, this article is a great introduction to a great thinker and champion of higher learning and libraries.

From there, I followed the links to Andy Rush’s site over at the University of Mary Washington. Andy and his colleagues at UMW Teaching and Learning Technologies are doing amazing things with far fewer resources than UVa. We really need to bring them over here for a show-and-tell and discussion in the not-to-distant-future.

From Andy’s site, I followed a trackback to the Scobleizer. There I found that another regional blogger picked up on the video. That Jim Duncan, a local real estate blogger, found parallels in the video to his work just goes to show how much we’ve evolved into a decentralized information mashup culture.

Are We There Yet?

It’s obviously to our advantage to look beyond our disciplines for ideas and answers. The students are already there and they’re operating at Twitter speed. When most of us were in school, we could only have dreamed of this much informational power at our finger tips. For some of us it’s overwhelming. So then, are we capable of understanding this new paradigm, much less capable of creating the new learning models to leverage it? Watch the video and let us know what you think.

In an almost universally acclaimed decision, the University of Virginia will begin out-sourcing its student email to Google and Microsoft later this semester. Along with email, students will be introduced to a whole new suite of document sharing, calendaring, and instant messaging applications in Gmail and Windows Live. And the icing on the cake? Students can now keep their UVa email account for life, and upon leaving the University, their messages and folders will be preserved (current alumni can also take advantage of this opportunity). Sweet!

The announcement is a welcome—if not jarring—departure from the staid, old ways of doing things at UVa. And, though I am loathed to admit it, I was one of those initially jarred by the offering of, not one, but two new email choices. How could we introduce another student option and additional support complexity when the University already had two somewhat disparate choices (Central Mail System and MS Exchange)? I was particularly concerned about the potential incompatibilities of the document applications (i.e., will Google’s spreadsheet work with Microsoft’s spreadsheet?). Yeah, I was thinking with my lizard brain.

In beTech-land, we already recognize that the world is shifting from a centrally-managed, closed-source working/learning environment to a distributed, open-source, API environment. Information is the application and the tool we use to access it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. A recent Scoble post reinforces the obvious…

These new services let you work with people in a whole new way. No more emailing around Word Docs or Spreadsheets or PowerPoints. Instead you pass around a URL, and work there.

Duh. This is what Work 2.0 looks like. The students, if they haven’t already, will quickly master these new applications as readily as Facebook and MySpace. Rather than coddle students with archaic, committee-conceived, and centrally-managed dinosaurs, the University’s primary task is to provide competitive tools to open worlds of information and insight. All the rest can and will be worked out in due time. For now, UVa students have an unprecedented opportunity to show the rest of us how it’s done.

John Backus, father of the Fortran computer language, passed away earlier this week at age 82. Though he earns a solid place in the beTech Hall of Fame as much for his hacker spirit as well as for pioneering one of the earliest (and most enduring) programming languages, he probably won’t catch a headline in UVa news because, well, John didn’t fare so well here:

After flunking out of the University of Virginia, Mr. Backus was drafted in 1943. But his scores on Army aptitude tests were so high that he was dispatched on government-financed programs to three universities, with his studies ranging from engineering to medicine.

He would later get his masters in math at Columbia University and join IBM as a programmer. Computer programming in the 1950’s still required “hand-to-hand combat with the machine”—banging out assembly code. Backus envisioned a better way and, with his superior’s approval, assembled a young, diverse team to create a FORmula TRANslation System, Fortran.

Still in use today, Fortran changed the landscape of computing and earned Backus a National Medal of Science, a Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, and a Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.