NEWS FEEDSeptember 17, 2007. The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) kicked off the academic year with the 2007 Fall Premiere, presenting an overview of the newest technology and services offered to Columbia University faculty.
Faculty and instructors from more than 35 academic departments and divisions of the University attended the event, which presented innovative ways that Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, podcasts, and RSS (really simple syndication) feeds enhance classroom teaching and course Web sites. Speakers also highlighted iTunes U, a podcast repository, which may soon be available university-wide.
"User-created content and social networking have soared in popularity around the world; this popularity is now spilling over into the academic community. This event allowed us to present purposeful and powerful teaching and learning tools for faculty and students while harnessing a wave of new technology that many students are already familiar with," said Maurice Matiz, vice executive director of CCNMTL.
Columbia Wikispaces, a derivative of Tangient's Wikispaces.com, launched this fall. Columbia Wikispaces offers a private wiki -- a collaborative website that faculty and students edit with the ease of a familiar word processor-style interface -- to all University courses. Wiki participants can easily share content, photographs, and other media within a private Web space intended to supplement the course curriculum.
The event also introduced new CCNMTL services for faculty and instructors, including several new workshops and EnhancED, a new Web site for faculty with resources and articles that explore the use of new technology with familiar teaching activities. This EnhancED Web site is available at https://enhanced.ccnmtl.columbia.edu.
