Growing the New Technopolis

Several things have come down the pipes lately that seem post-worthy, so I thought I’d try to list them in one fell swoop.

- The Carolina portal at iTunesU, for which Doug was mainly responsible for getting going, launched recently. Here’s an article in The Daily Tar Heel about the launch. The content itself can be accessed by pointing your browser to http://itunes.unc.edu.

This is also exciting for me because my department, Communication Studies, will have its own channel for student and faculty content. Good stuff!

- Bob came over to UNC on the day of the launch and he and I met with staff members at UNC’s service learning organization APPLES about getting them involved with Bob’s Digital Media Sandbox Consortium. Bob was very eloquent about the need for digital fluency in service-learning, and the APPLES crew was excited about the possibilities (that was my take on it, anyway). We made plans to get them involved in the podcasting tournament. Then, this week, I had a good meeting with their Associate Director to talk about how they could more sustainably integrate podcasting into their service-learning efforts.

- Finally, a little own-horn-tooting: I have had a paper accepted to the Community Informatics & Development Informatics Conference in Prato, Italy. I am collaborating with the Academic Director of the City of Knowledge at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil. If anyone cares to read the first draft (written for a community development class last semester) and offer feedback – well, I just don’t know what I’d do for you. It’s on my website here. It concerns the use of digital storytelling for community and economic development. And, uh, if you have a couple grand’s worth of staff development grants to fly me over there, that’d be nice too!

I’ve been feeling over-worked lately (isn’t it summertime?!), but this is all great news and evidence that some of our hard work is paying off!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 7:14 pm and is filed under In the News, Service-learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.