November 17, 2004“Voyage to Ithaka” is the second national conference sponsored by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) and was attended by over 270 presidents, deans, provosts, CIOs, librarians, faculty, and other administrators and included sessions that showcased various programs and projects sponsored by NITLE and its three regional centers. Ithaka refers to the newly formed not-for-profit organization that is seeking to provide resources to various smaller organizations (such as NITLE). Attendees from Middlebury College included Barbara Doyle-Wilch, Barbara Ganley and Alex Chapin.
The theme of the conference was technology, collaboration, and the future of liberal arts colleges. Many sessions focussed on open source projects including the Sakai collaboration and learning environment for course management and more; and Chandler, a personal information management system designed to integrate email, calendars, contacts and tasks.
Barbara Ganley, a Lecturer and Tutor-in-Writing at the Center for Teaching and Learning Research along with Bryan Alexander, co-director of the Center for Educational Technology and Bret Olsen, a Technology Instructor and Support Specialist, did a presentation on Multimedia Narrative.
Alex Chapin, an Educational Technologist and director of a number of open source projects participated in two sessions, one on Open Source Learning Management Tools for Liberal Arts Colleges where he did a presentation on Segue, contrasting it to Sakai; and one on Open Source Partnerships where he discussed our implementation of Open Knowledge Initiative standards which will allow the next version of Segue to interoperate with Sakai and other systems that use the OKI open service interface definitions (OSIDs).