Career Space E-zine

The UBC E-strategy 2006 Town Hall took place on June 22, 2006 in the UBC Life Sciences Centre. This free fabulous event featured poster presentations and lecturers from a cross-section of departments on campus.

The morning keynote address was delivered by two guests: Walter Stewart , Senior IT Strategist with CANARIE, Canada’s Advanced Internet development organization, and Dr. Brad Wheeler , CIO of Indiana University, the latter of whom came to us via teleconference. The teleconferencing system in the Life Sciences Centre was one that was created for the Expanded Medical Program at UBC whereby medical students at UBC as well as UVIC and UNBC could simultaneously receive their lectures. The backbone of this system was created by Vancouver’s BC.net. While the audience in the lecture theatre could see Dr. Brad Wheeler he could also see participants at the microphone who were asking questions. I had heard about this system being used in the medical program and I was pleased to see it in action. The possiblities of this type of system are overwhelming. I will be interested in seeing the impact of its future innovative uses in education.

Later that day there were a variety of topical lectures to attend. I chose to attend the Office of Learning Technology’s UBC OFFICE of LEARNING TECHNOLOGY - “Remixing and Republishing Dynamic Content Made Easy” with Brian Lamb and Novac Rogic. As a Library Assistant and a webbie enthusiast I was interested in the possibilities of using RSS feeds to create dynamic reading lists for students and faculty. Currently we’re jumping on the RSS bandwagon with RefWorks. One of the librarians, Kristina McDavid of the Woodward Biomedical Library, has previously been using EndNotes as a means of creating bibliographic reading lists for course reserve that is being shared between the Expanded Medical Program Libraries. The introduction of RefWorks will create a more efficient system. Brian Lamb also gave a workshop on July 26, 2006 on a similar topic tailored for the librarians.

During the E-strategy lecture Brian and Novac gave demos for the RSS readers Bloglines and Netvibes. Both are personal news aggregators with RSS and ATOM support. While I haven’t tackled Netvibes yet I have been using Bloglines for the last month and I love it. I can load up all the RSS feeds I’m interested in from Blogs to Flickr accounts and have new updates delivered into the reader. This replaces the “favorites bookmarks” in the browser and can be accessed from anywhere. Other additional features include your own blog, a clipping folder and the ability to email articles to your social and colleague network.

Brian also demo’d a project that OLT is working on called Aggrsive which is a RSS parser/aggregator which allows the user to “batch” RSS feeds into one so that the code inserted into a webpage will show the dynamic content collectively. I’ve visited the website and created an account. However, the “About” page as well as a few others doesn’t seem to be up yet and still seems to be a work in progress.

The last little goodie that Brian showed us is the new Flock browser which is still in the Beta stage. The concept is a free browser that caters to the social software user which has the ability to service a users blog and photosharing accounts with ease without having to jump from website to website. The Flock website has a tour and and a section where you can play with the features and they are definitely looking for feedback. Check it out at flock.com.

The rest of the day there were poster presentations, lectures and a fabulous lunch. I really enjoyed myself and had a lot of fun networking with the faculty and students. It was definitely a day well spent. There is a photogallery and podcasts of this event available on the E-strategy website.