BEAT Program Update September 2006

Having completed two full years of operations it is time for another update on the BEAT program. 

BEAT Program Update September 10, 2006
Mark Hemphill, Program Director, 902-566-0686, mhemphill@upei.ca

Thank you for your interest in the BEAT program.  This memo provides a brief update on our activities as at September 10, 2006.  Consider this update not in isolation but as an addendum to the original BEAT Program description of April 27, 2004 and the first subsequent update of March 23, 2005. 

Download printable version of the Program Update

Introduction

This summer (2006) marked the completion of two years of the BEAT program, a joint inter-disciplinary applied application development strategy of the University of Prince Edward Island and Holland College.

To paraphrase my last full report, our first year activities focused on bootstrapping initiatives which were necessary to prototype new techniques in web-based aggregation, syndication, and multimedia which take advantage of the self-organizing, self-propagating, and self-identifying characteristics of intelligent networks.

Both the collection of software services we've been building, and the virtual communities they have thus enabled, have expanded significantly this past year.   Over the course of the 2004/2005 academic year we were able to initially establish Weblogs@UPEI and Weblogs@HollandCollege and yet their greatest impact beyond the invaluable learning which took place may have been as a proof of concept.  This year, academic year 2005/06, however, we used those bootstrapping initiatives to develop a more robust and scalable collection of services which could truly “power” a number of different initiatives. 

The maturation of our offering, the continued growth of its emergent web properties, and several new developments provide a general outline of our year.   What follows now is a brief report on our recent progress - a select account of our second year of activities.

The Campus Commons Network

A series of upgrades, a redesign, and steady organic growth has elevated our services from a proof-of-concept to a professionally managed and maintained software platform.  The Campus Commons is a unique example of social software.  It is the first inter-institutional campus-wide blogging initiative in the world, a pioneer of next-generation techniques in web-based content management, syndication and community plumbing.    Even at this early stage, and with little in the way of formal marketing effort our platform has shown its great promise as a flexible, multi-purpose communication and collaboration tool.  It has been used to create many interactive personal and group web sites, it has been used to create entirely new and autonomous online communities, to create feature-rich online publications, to develop powerful and multi-faceted media exchange and distribution services, to create open interactive course spaces, to support the planning and recording of conferences and events and much more.

In addition to being autonomous, fully branded services in their own right, a growing collection of distinct member sites now make up a broader "Campus Commons" Network.      

The Campus Commons is a software and services platform

To truly understand the power of the Campus Commons one has to dawn several different hats.   At its core the Campus Commons is a set of powerful services and a steadily growing resource to which everyone in a community may contribute as they wish, and from which anyone or any organization in the community can draw from, again,  as they choose; in their own personalized fashion.   Supporting individuals and social circles of various sizes, for use toward various purposes, topics, and subjects the Campus Commons fosters the building of collaborative web sites and entire communities.   These web sites and virtual communities are built by their creators as branded, customizable web spaces representing a unique destination on the Web and a unique channel extending outwardly across the Internet to reach others anywhere both directly and through software agents (*see the rise of web syndication).

Member sites – your version of the Commons...fully branded and customized

Think of a member site as an organization-specific version of the Campus Commons which complements and extends an existing static web site.   For member sites the Campus Commons is a behind-the-scenes provider of community plumbing, web publishing, web marketing, and web distribution services which enable any given member site to establish a robust and interactive web presence cost-effectively and with relative ease. 

Membership in the broader network permits a member site to draw upon that which they might have in common with other member sites while still maintaining their autonomy.  In this way a member site may use the Campus Commons Network to tap into the growing network of creators and targeted audience it reaches.  Activity from one member site may flow if desired to the corners of another to stimulate community cross-fertilization , a greater dynamism for each,  thus attracting a targeted audience to each when new content is made available.

Users and Collaborators

Every member site already offers their audience a good reason to visit their web site and to take an interest in their organization – they do great work!  And yet it is sometimes difficult to increase that audience and to engage with them on a deeper level.  A web site is a collaboration.  A member site can use the Campus Commons to add an additional range of services to their web site.  These services engage with users, helping them to participate in the building of web pages, to talk about events and issues, and to bring more people back to a context-sensitive web site. 

As this loosely coupled network continues to evolve a network effect builds where growth in any member site tends to benefit the work of every other, and where the whole tends to become greater than the sum of its parts.  Activity from one member site may flow if desired to the corners of another to stimulate community cross-fertilization , a greater dynamism for each,  thus attracting a targeted audience to each when new content is made available. 

The Campus Commons is EASY to use  and cost-effective.

The Campus Commons is easy to customize to your liking.  And it’s easy to use.  If you can send an email you will have no trouble participating in this network. 
What’s more is that it is incredibly cost-effective.  Using smart techniques in web publishing, community forming, and web syndication based on open-source technology we need not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to take advantage of advances in networking, to empower the ideas and voices in our community,  and to reach right around the world to bring attention to our greatest success stories. 

New Features

The tools we offer which provide new capabilities and new leverage to each member site and, optionally, to each user are growing in number and sophistication.    Two new features to make their mark recently, for example, have been the addition of event notices and tagging.  Event notices permit the publication and coordination of events in our community using the same set of content management services used for blogging or distributing audio and video, for instance.  They can be used, interactively, to plan and to solicit feedback on an event or simply as a publicity tool.   Tagging is a simple but deceptively powerful method of organizing all types of content effectively allows users to create, and contribute to, new web spaces in their own completely free-form manner.  Free tagging encourages the spontaneous grouping of content under any given topic, subject, or group description.  A web syndication feed is automatically generated for each user-generated web space to create new content channels, to enhance the searchability of our content, and to permit our community to grow, not merely as its original creators see fit, but in a more organic and democratic fashion. 

Some Highlights of our 2005/2006 Activity

After that brief introduction we can proceed by sharing some select and specific highlights of our year by service area.

Weblogs@UPEI, Weblogs@HollandCollege

The Campus Commons continues to serve and grow as a provider of community plumbing services for our two founding institutions, the University of Prince Edward Island and Holland College.  For example, it has provided infrastructure and support for various types of online activities ranging from basic personal publishing, to the live broadcasting of lectures and speeches, to powering online publications, to the creation of several robust interactive course communities, to offering group web sites, event planning tools, and more.   The Campus Commons platform has proven highly effective in distributing rich media using a number of techniques and formats, in collaborating on various purposes in circles of various size, and in marketing our respective institutions, their people, and their ideas using a variety of intelligent internet-based techniques.

The numbers of individuals actively using, paying attention to, and spontaneously discovering the Campus Commons has grown substantially.  Our circle of known users, for instance, has expanded in depth and in breadth.  The number of registered users has now exceeded 1000 (September 2006).  According to system logs showing repeated log-ins, approximately 350-400 of these users should be considered active (logged in within the past 3 months).  We also know that the broder population of our readership including those without registered accounts has grown substantially. During the recent labour disruption at UPEI, for instance, we witnessed an incredible spike in “registered” activity with some posts attracting 5000 "reads" and 100+ comments even within a few days of their posting.   Much of this activity can be accounted for by readers who while normally content to passively look in (or “lurk” as it’s often called) on the service were moved by the circumstances of the situation to interact with the community in a more meaningful way. 

Moreover system logs show significant growth in page requests originating from our region and some 65 countries.  Our high Google ranking has served us well in attracting the attention of any web surfer who may be interested in our content.

Radio@UPEI

Radio@UPEI continues to grow at an impressive pace and, since my last report, has achieved more than we are able to recount here.   A few highlights will have to suffice.  Radio@UPEI refers at once to a leadership team which has taken an active role in establishing and demonstrating new Internet-based techniques for distributing digital content, a set of services which together offer a powerful yet easy-to-use conduit for users to share rich media, and the growing broader community which has taken to using it.   The service has tapped into an emerging trend toward user-generated content (*see user-generated content section) which is enabled by new Internet-based services powered by social software and further leveraged by recent developments on the World Wide Web such as the rise of web syndication, social bookmarking, and tagging.    Radio@UPEI is unique in our region for its facility to encourage, aggregate, and collate user-generated content contributed by diverse members of a community and its ability to take advantage of smart new techniques in content distribution.

Specifically, after "emerging" in 2004/2005 Radio@UPEI enjoyed a remarkable year of growth in 2005/2006.    Some 171 podcasts were contributed throughout the academic year by a broad range of contributors.  Numerous live events were broadcast in real time.   On request Radio@UPEI also contributed marketing and distribution services to several local and regional events including the PEI Music Awards, the 10th Annual Stan Rogers Folk Festival, and the East Coast Music Awards.

Contributed podcasts featured UPEI President Wade MacLaughlan’s presidential address, the Charlottetown MP Election 2006 debates, many lectures, news reports, audio archives, special events, and, of  course, dozens of features on local artists.

Server logs reveal that our podcasts were downloaded by those in over 60 countries.  Demand for our podcasts peaked in March of 2006 following our successful work at the 2006 East Coast Music Awards with file requests for the month reaching 617,000.   

ECMA 2006

The Campus Commons excels in its ability to support online collaboration in almost any context.   Project management and event management are two examples.    Furthermore with inherent capabilities for uploading, sharing, and syndicating rich media it has particular strengths in the area of showcasing events which cater to the creators in our community.   In order to demonstrate some of these capabilities in their full context we have engaged with various partners in order to lend some support in one or more of these areas.  Our involvement with ECMA 2006 is once such example.

Building on successful trials in covering the PEI Music Awards, Radio@UPEI, and the Campus Commons, was chosen as a preferred partner of the East Coast Music Association in delivering marketing and content management services to the pre-eminent cultural event in Atlantic Canada, the East Coast Music Awards.   Specifically Radio@UPEI developed an ECMA 2006 blogging community, created and distributed dozens of podcasts, operated RadioECMA over FM Radio, the Internet (Aliant.net, radio.upei.ca, Government of PEI website), and television (Canadian Cable Ads Production), and much more.  Radio@UPEI's online ECMA content has created a new resource for the East Coast Music Association, and the artists it represents, content which actively and automatically pursues ECMA marketing goals throughout the year.  As program director of the BEAT program I have accepted an appointment on the East Coast Music Association’s board of directors.   By demonstrating its unique ability to harness the power of the Internet in an arts & cultural  “community” context,  as well as by its quality of workmanship and work ethic that befits a professional organization, Radio@UPEI has been able to forge a promising and sustainable relationship with the East Coast Music Association that should continue to well into the future.   

Panther Radio

A natural next-step for Radio@UPEI, 2005/2006 saw the introduction of Panther Radio a robust Internet sports broadcasting service that carried live play-by-play and colour commentary for all 28 UPEI Panther Hockey games and offered popular and convenient post-game podcasts, blogging, and more.   Through a partnership agreement, Panther Radio was also carried live to some 35,000 subscribers by Canadian Cable Ads Production Ltd on TVAdsIsland wide Eastlink Cable 12 in Charlottetown, 9 in Summerside.

Revenue generated by selling local sponsorship packages was used to acquire new equipment and to provide a travel and time stipend to Panther Radio operators.

Operations and Development Activities

The individual accomplishments of our group in “shoring” up our platform are also simply too numerous to mention.   As of September 2006 we have completed two major software upgrades making several upgrades in physical infrastructure along the way, including proactive measures aimed at addressing our needs in the area of security, scalability and stability.  New software solutions and a gradual redesign have given shape to a more packaged collection of services and a more coherent network of member sites which together form the "Campus Commons".   Smarter backup procedures and system maintenance has given our services greater assurance and reliability.

Learning

It is clear that opportunity in this new networking age, in learning, as in launching a new business or in developing a community, depends not on our ability to seek out and define knowledge but on our skill in unleashing or harnessing its potential. Know-how must be cultivated to accompany wisdom if we aim to excel in the knowledge economy.  The BEAT program continues to foster a rare breed of learning, situated in real-world feedback, that is accelerated, relevant, and highly productive.   It is a style of learning that has proven to be much more fun and much more in tune with both the opportunities and the distractions presented by this still emerging age than many traditional pedagogical strategies.

Applied Research

The BEAT program, its students, and its projects continues to present fantastic opportunities to study and theorize the effects of our new modes of communication.    Our services present rare cases for interdisciplinary study in the area of group interaction, the changing basis of production, distribution, and control, the role of governance and authority in the online world, and e-Learning just to name a few.   Since my last update I have presented papers on three continents on subjects directly relating to the applied creative work of our team. 

"[Community Plumbing in Action] is a very good paper outlining the development of BEAT (the Business, Education, and Applied Technology program, which is an inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional program that takes an applied, integrated approach to IT training) and the Campus Commons at UPEI. There's a lot going on in this paper, so read closely, but the core for me is the conceptual view of a self-organizing academic community and the key lessons: adopt an open strategy, encourage and allow freedom, attract a diversity of members, allow emergent communities to grow, and take an applied and integrated approach. Don't miss this paper." http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=9357

-Stephen Downes, senior researcher, E-Learning Group, Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council, Moncton,New Brunswick, Canada

Democracy in Action

A decidedly newsworthy year at UPEI, which included several headline grabbing incidents, made our offerings central to issues and discussion around campus and provided fertile testing ground for the usefulness and relevance of our services as well as the communities they empower.  Openness, transparency, participation, and due process are hallmarks of any healthy democracy.  As an open, neutral, and clearly community-based service the Campus Commons, unlike any other medium, is available to faculty, students, and administrators alike to share and discuss their thoughts on important issues.    The labour disruption of Spring 2006 presents a particularly strong example.   Dozens took up the opportunity and a spontaneous yet meaningful and productive discussion, not to mention historical record, emerged (See http://weblogs.upei.ca/strike for a taste).   

Coordinators of the BEAT program were invited to the annual IPAC conference (Institute of Public Administration of Canada) to share their experiences with the Campus Commons in this context.   

Relevant Trends

The Rise of Web Syndication

If you’ve noticed those orange buttons that often appear on web sites these days sometimes emblazoned with the letters ‘xml’ or ‘rss’ or ‘atom’ you are noticing a sign of what has by now become a very important shift in the world of online content.    That shift is towards web syndication which refers to a technique, supported by a number of formats, for the more intelligent sharing of digital content.   Most websites now offer syndicated content for others to subscribe to in the form of web “feeds”.    These web feeds in effect give flexibility and mobility to the content to which they refer. People might subscribe to several feeds for instance and instead of spending hours “surfing” to various web sites they’ll use a software tool to make what resembles a "smart" online newspaper - a rendering of personally-tailored content as hand selected from any number of web sites.   Web applications can sort and sift these feeds by any dimension that describes them in a way that allows end users, or those that act on their behalf, to identify content which is important in their view.

The Internet continues to redefine media distribution.   The practice of syndicating content online for example, using standard formats like RSS, is making it easier for creators (writers, musicians, bloggers, archivists, filmmakers, whatever) to discover and reach target audiences once hidden by the complexity and scale of the Internet.    By "describing" the content that you create, or distribute, which happens quite automatically when your create a blog entry, and by offering it for syndication, others who might be looking for just such content can, using software tools, easily and efficiently find it, use it, present it, and promote it.   Thus, in a more indirect way digital content offered in this way is free to be marketed to new target audiences by third-parties.    Any community developer, webmaster, tool maker, or software developer, for example, could subscribe to, collect, aggregate, present, and use your content on their web site in a process that can add value, context, and appeal.   In a nutshell, syndication creates an intelligent mechanism for marketing content, or conversely from a user’s vantage point, for finding content,  whereby those with a given taste or preference are offered new and often more familiar means of discovering and using it.  Once that discovery is made a new and direct channel between creator and consumer can be established and exploited.

The User-generated Content Revolution

By now the names of services like YouTube, Del.icio.us, and Digg have become familiar to most savvy web users.  Moreover, new and flexible ways of describing digital content relying on a widely distributed constituency, such as tagging, and social bookmarking, for instance, have become important features of the Web in general.    These recent trends have joined in the effort led by blogging, wikis, and other forms of social software in creating a people-woven web – an elaborate common space and resource which is developed not by corporations, not strictly by technology specialists, but by creators of all kinds.    This new “enhanced human layer” of the World Wide Web has given rise to significant changes.   For starters, where the creative energy of hundreds or perhaps thousands of creators can be networked and readily tapped, the economics and the volumetrics of building collaborative online worlds changes dramatically.   An “economies of sharing” may be exploited whereby a broad constituency may, for their own selfish purposes, contribute to a purpose that serves others in common to create a rich dynamic resource, with critical mass – a resource which can then be mined and filtered for new and more sophisticated and highly qualified uses.   Adding the smart metadata techniques of tagging and social bookmarking, the once undifferentiated “sea of data” that the Internet may for some have once represented becomes more easily parsed, sifted, rated, categorized and qualified. 

Furthermore, even when large numbers of users or a vast body of user-generated content aren’t of primary concern, by using social software to empower individuals in a community, the integrity and authenticity of our online worlds can be enhanced appreciably.    When one is engaged with a resource and can sense a kind of directness and timeliness through that resource with those who create and manage it, when one can sense they are, evidently, the closest to or most relevant to its subject matter, its intended community, or purpose, the enhanced care, concern, and value inherent in the resource and in the user experience with it are more readily identifiable.

These are just some of the trends which inform our work.  They can help onlookers to situate our technology and our projects and their current trajectory particularly as they apply to community collaboration and web-based distribution.  A thorough review of the implications of these developments: the pending tsunami of user-contributed audio and video, the smart sifting of content, the opportunities for large-scale collaboration, the matchmaking of content creators with target audiences, the threat of disintermediation to traditional media outlets, and so on, are beyond the scope of this report, however the trend itself is worth mentioning.  The Campus Commons is poised to take advantage of the peer-to-peer architecture of the Internet for building and empowering loosely coupled communities of users and for new and intelligent approaches to digital content distribution.

New Projects

In setting its priorities the BEAT program balances a student-centered approach with the requirements of our existing technology footprint and the new opportunities with which we are presented.  The Campus Commons remains the focus and thrust of our activities.  This is a project, and a service, which continues to grow and to reward us, increasingly, for our continued investment.   Indeed a worthwhile project of this magnitude warrants sufficient time to develop.     Therefore our plan continues to be to further enhance the Campus Commons, to look for more partners who might benefit from it,  to look for opportunities which can help us finance its growth on a more permanent basis, and increasingly to consider harvest strategies that permit the project as well as its supporting infrastructure to be shared with and eventually handed over to a permanent long-term service provider. 

That said there are many more specific activities coming into focus.  What follows is a few possibilities - ideas which we are considering at this time as possible new initiatives.

SportsTalk

The Fall of 2006 will see the introduction of a new Campus Commons member site designed specifically for the Island sporting community.   SportsTalk empowers the people, teams and groups in our sporting community.  It can be used to create group spaces for your team or club and to offer all members their own personal web presence with which they can contribute to their team conversation or that of any other within the Campus Commons.

Joinus@UPEI

Joinus@UPEI is the code name for a cost-effective new web-based e-marketing initiative for UPEI that seeks to attract prospective students which may be found outside our traditional recruitment footprint.   Joinus identifies and distributes pointers which highlight activities in our community that may interest prospective students and enhance the reputation and profile of our University.   Joinus uses smart metadata and web syndication techniques to enhance our discoverability online and create intelligent matchmaking opportunities.   The mobility of these pointers which bring attention to the University's success stories permits others, both directly and through software agents, to pull, redistribute and present links to the underlying content in new highly targeted contexts such as the pages of an education in technology web site, an index of post-secondary educational institutions, influential web sites, feed aggregators, and more.

Hosted Services/Private Branding

In addition to serving a distinct and important role in our community and our region the Campus Commons is drawing considerable attention simply for the example it sets and the technology it has developed.  Our work demonstrates a powerful new breed of Internet-based technology deployed in a rather unique way such that it can be applied toward a variety of purposes.    In wanting, somehow, to follow or build upon our example others have asked that we provide software and services which essentially build newly branded permutations of our existing examples that better suit their organization or help to fulfill their vision for a novel business model, community, or marketing service.  These opportunities come in different varieties from requests which are rather ambitious or tangential for our group to those where simply a minor customization on our part could create a very different project and a powerful new service.

The BEAT team will continue to consider these opportunities on a case by case basis with an eye towards offering services which are consistent with our broader set of goals and which are within our reach as an operation.    We view this option as a way to capitalize on the work that we’ve put into the project over the past two years.  We have held openness and customizability to be important tenets of our technology and our process since we began.  To offer fully-branded, hosted versions of any one of our services, or the entire suite, is not

ECMA 2007

As the preeminent cultural event on Canada’s East Coast we feel that the East Coast Music Awards represents an excellent opportunity for BEAT to continue to introduce and showcase services in the area of media distribution as well as collaboration, community plumbing and event management.

Campus Commons Wiki Services

The advent of wiki technology has now made it easy for large groups to collaborate in developing an online knowledge base.  A collaborative knowledge space is a body of knowledge expressed in online form by a group of collaborators.   By making it quick and easy for anyone to manage a web page wikis are helping to create a truly people-woven Web.   

Furthermore wikis can be effective in collecting and collating knowledge formally isolated in the minds, and in the filing cabinets, of different distributed groups.   The process of aggregating and organizing knowledge itself can serve a number of purposes.   Far from a static web site, a wiki is a living breathing conduit to the people who use and build it and their knowledge.   Thus, wikis are a great tool for developing interactive interpretative environments for accessing learning material.  People can use wikis to interact with learning content; creating, listening, and watching, while they learn.   A business may use a wiki to develop an interactive knowledge base that allows users of a product, its customers, to learn and share tips and tricks on how to use and/or fix the product.   In the process they would help their customers get more use and value out of their purchase, and they would save on the cost of customer service as, very likely, less people would be calling in to their customer service center with questions and concerns.   A fragmented and far flung industry association, scientific community, or cluster, such as the Atlantic bioscience community, might find great use and value in a wiki for its ability to foster multi-lateral knowledge sharing.    Likewise stakeholders of all types involved in encouraging immigration to our region might use a wiki to translate and share formal and informal knowledge that goes into successful transitions and new settlements, for instance.  When combined with the complementary set of “social networking” services offered by our community plumbing services, for instance, an immigration wiki could become an invaluable, not to mention cost-effective, vehicle for enhancing the immigration process.

Having used wikis internally now for more than a year, and to the extent that third-parties can partner to act as project leaders and content owners, BEAT is interested in offering enablement services to host and operate knowledge bases of various kinds.   

To serve as examples BEAT will use its own wiki services to establish better online documentation for all of its services.  Furthermore it will begin development of the Atlantic Folk Wiki - a collaborative knowledge base that collects articles on figures, stories, and songs of historical importance to our region.  The Atlantic Folk Wiki will serve as an excellent example of how wikis can be used to establish a rich interactive cultural archive and a flexible interpretative learning environment for educational use.

Challenges

Any new initiative, and especially one that begins by embracing new technology and a fresh approach to learning as ours does, is likely to face some adversity.    The bulk of the adversity faced by our team and our various initiatives has been due to the very newness of them.  This adversity manifests itself in many different ways. 

In the process of attracting and particularly in registering new team members we have found it difficult to appease concerns and complications which students have toward completing their various degree or diploma requirements.  The program isn’t well marketed except as through our various initiatives which, as a byproduct, tend to hail suitable students through their visibility online.   In the conventional sense, however, the program is relatively unknown and poorly appreciated for what it offers students – even those with little or no technical skills.    As a counter-measure to this challenge we would like to see our institutions taking a more active and aggressive role in highlighting the program and in making it easier for students to take regardless of their department or degree requirements.

The very newness of the program also presents a challenge to faculty members who, for a variety of reasons, might fail to see the power and elegance of the services for developing open and interactive course-based communities for example, or as a conduit for presenting and sharing research, or for their ability to develop collaborative knowledge spaces.     Much more than students,  faculty members can be intimidated by what are actually very minor requirements imposed by the technology, and even more so by their transparent and open tendency toward managing content.    As a counter-measure we will be developing simplified documentation and context-sensitive help.   

A scarcity of operating funds has also been a limiting factor for our various initiatives.  We are quite proud that we have been able to accomplish as much as we have given such little in the way of operating resources.  In so doing we have made firm foundations, our sustainability, and the cost-effectiveness of our operations integral to our growth.    However, at times, the scarcity of operating funds has resulted in undue limitations on the impact and leverage that is quite inherent in our offerings.    We are confident that additional dollars spent can result in benefits, and even in cost-savings in other areas, in servicing other programs for example, that can exceed in proportion those of the additional investment.   We have proven that we can do quite a lot with quite little.   Rather than penalize us for this ability investors in our program should consider how our example, and indeed how the leverage we may provide in service to others, may offer a more cost-effective model for supporting educational and community-development initiatives in general.

In closing

These highlights merely introduce the ideas and initiatives that the BEAT program has began to contribute to campus life, to our broader community, and increasingly to our region.   I invite you to search the Web to delve even deeper into our activities and to investigate further the implications of  the new breed of technology we’ve pioneered.   A quick look back to the original program description shows that we remain on course with the original vision and mission of the program. 

If I can speak for other program coordinators I would say that, generally speaking, we are pleased with our progress thus far which has taken us through only two years actual execution.  After developing a firm foundation in year one, we have recently been able to strengthen and to extend our technology such that it can be used to catalyze a number and range of productive and sustainable activities.    

In addition to the core contributions of our program toward learning, innovation, and the enhancement of our institutions, we have contributed services which invest substantially and continually in our community.   These contributions are just now starting to be appreciated.     Our ongoing focus of community plumbing and media exchange and distribution, therefore, continues to be very strategic and increasingly fruitful.    Accordingly, and as our new project ideas suggest the thrust of our third year of operations isn’t necessarily in developing entirely new services as much as it is in capitalizing on those which we’ve already substantially developed.  This will involve developing more robust documentation, more professional maintenance, operations procedures and marketing material which make the service more readily understandable and accessible.   These activities will be complemented by more active recruitment and adoption strategies aimed at developing more member sites and more widespread use of the service.   

Appendix: Awards and FAQs

• The Learning Partnership recognizes and celebrates innovative educators who, through their enthusiasm and inventiveness, excite and inspire their students and colleagues in the nation’s           publicly funded educational institutions.  This year the BEAT program was a finalist for their National Technology Innovation Awards in the category of post-secondary institutions.  The Learning Partnership (TLP) is a national not-for-profit organization, the only one in Canada dedicated to bringing together business, education, government,  labour, policy makers and the community to develop partnerships that strengthen public education in Canada.
• Ryan Palmer, BEAT student received an $8,000 Millenium Scholarship
• Approx number of users registered for the Campuus Commons (Sept 2006): 1000
• Approx number of unique articles authored by Campus Commons users  (Sept 2006): 4000
• Approx number of podcasts (audio or video for example) authored by our members and distributed through the Campus Commons (Sept 2006):  300

Download printable version of the Program Update