Our Technology Fellows

After nearly four successful years, NITLE is concluding its Technology Fellows program. We thank all of our Technology Fellows for their generous service to the liberal arts community and for sharing their expertise with so many. Their contributions have broadened and deepened the community's understanding and knowledge.

In the coming weeks and months, NITLE will launch a new Fellows program aimed at further developing the community's understanding of how to use technology in service of the larger educational and institutional goals of liberal education. The new program will build on groundwork laid by this first-generation Technology Fellows program.

Cohort Eight, Group Two | Cloud Computing Technologies

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Rosalyn Metz

System Administrator for Curricular Support, Wheaton College

Since coming to Wheaton College in July of 2008, Ms. Metz has been a key player in several projects that involve developing web-based applications aimed at facilitating teaching, learning, and research. She currently serves as the systems administrator for Wheaton's Moodle pilot, has created a MediaWiki farm for faculty research and pedagogy, and improved Wheaton's installation of WordPressMU. She is currently working on ways to improve access to library information. In her previous position at Ex Libris, Ms. Metz served as the implementation librarian for SFX (a link resolver) and Verde (an e-resources management system). In this role she developed training curriculum and worked with libraries to help them understand their new systems. Her interest in cloud computing comes from her desire to develop new systems. She believes that cloud computing has the potential to allow academic institutions to work together to develop innovative technologies without having to concern themselves with the problems that physical hardware supply.

Mike Richwalsky

Assistant Director of Public Affairs, Allegheny College

Mike has ten years of web development experience and since 2002 has managed website development and applications at Allegheny College. He has presented at many higher education conferences, including HighEdWeb (where he won a red stapler!), EduWeb, CNI, and the Carnegie Mellon Digital Library Colloquium. He keeps a blog focused on higher education web development topics at highedwebtech.com. In addition to several years in the private sector, he was previously webmaster and educational computing consultant at Duquesne University. Mike received his BA in journalism from Duquesne University. His fellowship will focus on cloud computing.

Cohort Eight, Group One | Digital Media Delivery

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Joe Wack

Multimedia Support Manager, Rhodes College

A 2001 graduate of Rhodes College, Joe currently collaborates with Rhodes Librarians, Archivists, and Information Technology Specialists from his position within the college's Information Services division. He oversees the Applied Teaching and Learning Center, orchestrates media services at college events, engineers all multimedia classroom audio visual systems, and creates the user interfaces for campus touchscreens and control software. He bravely keeps close contact with Rhodes faculty about learning space design and the use of digital media in their classes. Joe's lifelong passion for technology led him to create the Rhodes Online Media Center, assist with the foundation of Crossroads to Freedom, and co-host Teaching with Technology workshops. Upon completing one additional course, Joe will be a Crestron Certified Programmer and thus free to explore other pursuits, such as lion taming, starship pilotry, and soup. Joe Wack's (yes, that's his real name) fellowship will focus on digital media delivery and its integration with web sites and course management systems.

Cohort Seven | Digitization Strategies, Technologies, and Practices; DSpace Interface Development Technologies and Manakin

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James Gehrt

Digitization Center Coordinator, Mount Holyoke College

In fall 2006, James was hired as the first Digitization Center Coordinator in the Library, Information and Technology Services (LITS) at Mount Holyoke College. The Digitization Center was established as a centralized imaging center to provide consistent quality digital imaging services to the Mount Holyoke community. Prior to Mount Holyoke, James was the Lab Manager for seven years, at the Chicago Albumen Works in Housatonic, Massachusetts. The Albumen works is a renowned negative duplication, photographic conservation, and digital imaging lab, whose clients include national and international archives, museums, and private collections. James is also a fine art and commercial photographer, who has been involved in the photographic and digital imaging industry for sixteen years. His work has been exhibited in local and national, solo and group exhibitions. He received his BFA in photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1991. James has provided digital imaging training sessions at Mount Holyoke College, as well as presenting and attending NITLE workshops on digitization. James' fellowship will focus on Digitization Strategies, Technologies, and Practices.

Eric Luhrs

Digital Initiatives Librarian, Lafayette College

Eric is responsible for the creation and delivery of local digital collections, as well as the administration of Lafayette's DSpace and CONTENTdm servers. Eric has followed DSpace development for a number of years, and he believes that the platform has significant advantages over commercial alternatives, including strong technical underpinnings, community-driven development, and a firm commitment to open source principles. Eric plans to use Manakin with Lafayette's DSpace to customize primary and collection-level interfaces, and he hopes to improve the existing item-level interface by adding better visualization tools. Eric holds an M.A. from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and an M.L.I.S. from Rutgers University. His fellowship will focus on DSpace Interface Development Technologies and Manakin.

Cohort Six | DSpace, Sakai, Moodle

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Jin Guo

Metadata Librarian, Washington College

Jin is part of the team that initiated and created Washington College's digital repository using DSpace. Jin is responsible for original cataloging of materials in all formats; the maintenance of Innovative Millennium Databases; and for the application of appropriate metadata schemas such as Dublin Core, MARCxml, and MODS in order to develop the digital repository using D-Space. Jin is now exploring ways to include archival content in D-Space. Additionally, Jin has experience offering integrated library system instruction to small groups of paraprofessionals where she teaches groups how to use ILS in general and how to develop new functions for specified purposes. Jin also has experience in providing online search instruction to library end-users on various subjects. Jin is very interested in exploring new ideas in the application of technology for storage and retrieval of content. More information about Jin can be found in her blog, http://metadatalibrarian.blogspot.com/. Jin's fellowship will focus on DSpace and Developing Institutional Repositories.

Mary Glackin

Instructional Technology Consultant, Mount Holyoke College

At Mount Holyoke, Mary is part of a hybrid team that serves the research, library, educational technology, and information literacy needs of the campus. Mary holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Wesleyan University. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Biology and Chemistry and has research experience and publications in biochemistry and computational biophysics. Her work at Mount Holyoke currently focuses integration of technology into the science curricula and on learning management: co-directing the exploration of options, coordinating the conversion from WebCT to Sakai, directing workshops, and developing support strategies. Mary is an active participant in the Sakai community, especially with NITLE, where she is a keen advocate of teaching and learning best practices. Recent projects include planning and chairing, with Michael Hanrahan of Bates College, the 2006 - 2008 NITLE-funded Bioinformatics Retreat for biology, computer science, and math faculty to foster the integration of bioinformatics in undergraduate curricula; chairing the 2005 study group exploring learning management system options for Mount Holyoke; and co-directing the 2005 NITLE-funded workshop to teach Maya animation software to faculty and staff from NITLE participating colleges. Mary's fellowship will focus on Sakai and Open Source Portfolio.

Bob Puffer

Academic Technology Coordinator, Luther College

Bob Puffer has over twenty years' experience in the application of information technology in higher education, event management, manufacturing, telecommunications, and the retail industry. He has made presentations at Educause, Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, ARTS, Society for Applied Learning, the National Retail Federations' RISCON, and Retail Systems Conference. At Luther College his work focuses on distance and online learning initiatives synthesizing leading-edge, open-source technologies with the traditions and heritage of the college. Instrumental in moving his campus from Blackboard to Moodle, and heading Moodle initiatives for K-12 programs and his PBS station, he is known in Iowa as “the Moodle Evangelist." Bob's fellowship will focus on the Moodle Learning Management System.

Cohort Five | Technologies for Teaching Languages

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Christine Boyland

Director, Language Learning Center, Bryn Mawr College

Before coming to Bryn Mawr College in 2006, Christine was an instructional designer at St. Anselm College and a Russian instructor at the College of William and Mary. At Bryn Mawr, she combines these experiences in teaching and instructional design to instruct and support faculty in the development, adaptation, and implementation of technology-enhanced instructional materials. In addition to teaching faculty workshops, she has trained students in a 10-week summer Multimedia Development Institute, which led to the development of a virtual Language Learning Center in Second Life. Chris’s current interests are Web 2.0 tools and digital audio and video for language teaching, the effective integration of instructional technologies in learning management systems, and open source tools.

Todd Bryant

Language Program Administrator, Dickinson College

Todd Bryant is the academic technology liaison for the foreign language departments at Dickinson College. He also teaches or guest lectures occasionally in the German department. His work focuses on emphasizing the social aspect of language learning through technology. His projects have included setting up Dickinson’s community blog and wiki; developing the language exchange application, The Mixxer; and teaching German using World of Warcraft. Todd has also been an active leader in the language technology community. In 2007 he co-led a project that received an award from NITLE’s Instructional Innovation Fund: Games and Simulations for Situated Learning in the Liberal Arts Classroom, and in 2008 he helped plan NITLE’s Enhancing Study Abroad conference at Dickinson College.

Trina Marmarelli

Foreign Language Instructional Technologist, Reed College

Dr. Marmarelli began offering technology instruction in 1999, as a graduate student in French at Stanford University, where she was responsible for training and advising graduate teaching affiliates and lecturers. She also has eight years’ experience teaching French language and literature and introductory courses in the humanities at the college level. Since arriving at Reed in the fall of 2007, her focus has been on using technology to create opportunities for students to practice speaking their target languages and hear authentically spoken language through technologies such as Skype, Audacity, YouTube, and Dailymotion. She also has experience with blogs, instant messaging, social networking, wikis, and digital images. Her current focus is on using learning management systems like Moodle as an access point for course-specific content and as an archive for student-produced materials.

Hiroyo Saito

Director of the Language Learning Center, Haverford College

Hiroyo Saito has been the director of the language learning center at Haverford College for five years, and she previously worked at the language centers of MIT and Boston University. Ms. Saito holds graduate degrees in Teaching English as a Second Language and Educational Media and Technology. At Haverford she leads campus language faculty in finding ways to provide language instruction using technology, with a focus on such technologies as social software (blogs, wikis, and chat), Blackboard, and digital audio and video production. Her current interests are Web 2.0 tools, especially digital narrative tools, and digital audio and video production for language teaching, and the effective integration of instructional technologies in learning management systems.

Cohort Four | Software for Statistical Analysis

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Manolis Kaparakis

Director, Quantitative Analysis Center, Wesleyan University

Manolis did his undergraduate work in Athens, Greece, and his graduate work in Economics at the University of Connecticut. He has been using statistical analysis software in both teaching and research. For a number of years he taught at Providence College where he coordinated the quantitative economics major and taught the econometrics and forecasting courses using SAS. At Wesleyan he has taught courses using SPSS and has extensively worked with Stata and other statistical analysis software, e.g. Eviews, JMP, Limdep, etc. In his current position he regularly organizes and leads workshops for courses using statistical analysis software, trains peer tutors who offer tutoring for students working on data analysis projects, and provides in-class instruction on statistical methods and workshops for faculty or professional staff. In 2007, along with colleagues from four other institutions, he received an award from the NITLE Instructional Innovation Fund to study “Data Sharing Systems: Supporting Quantitative Analysis across the Curriculum."

Cohort Three | Multimedia Tools for Digital Teaching

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Matthew Slaats

Academic Computing Consultant for Visual Resources, Vassar College

In his collaborative role with the Arts and the Visual Resource Library at Vassar, Mr. Slaats supports the integration of media for use in pedagogy. His work focuses on accessing images, sound and video through the Internet or presentation software for use in the classroom, as well as materials production through QuickTime VR media and the use of ubiquitous computing in performance. In addition, he has expertise in Final Cut Pro, imovie, Dreamweaver, Keynote, Powerpoint, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Audacity, Soundforge, Pro Tools, Blogging, Social Networks and Quicktime. Mr. Slaats holds an MFA and MA in Fine Art with a focus in integrated media from the University of Wisconsin, where his studies focused around the use of media in performance, art installation and augmented reality gaming. His current project is a cross disciplinary effort between the Dance, Music and Computer Science department at Vassar working with the interactive technology Max/MSP and Jitter.

Tamra Hjermstad

Instructional Technologist for Visual Arts, Mount Holyoke College

Ms. Hjermstad has created and conducted workshops for multimedia development including the following applications: Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, iMovie, iDVD, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack, Motion, and Maya. In addition to traditional "user" workshops, she creates course specific sessions bridging multiple applications and teaching workflow development and project management. For example, for a digital animation class, she discussed with the instructor the learning goals, determined the software and skills in each software needed for the project workflow, and created a series of in-class sessions to achieve the goals. Currently, Ms. Hjermstad is interested in developing short cuts for traditional multimedia applications through Web 2.0 and Google-type apps that do some of the heavy lifting in terms of general media production workflows, thus freeing up the user for more conceptual and creative production time.

Felix Kronenberg

Assistant Professor of German and Manager of the Foreign Language Resource Center (FLRC), Pomona College

Dr. Kronenberg both offers language courses in German and advises faculty on the use of technology in foreign language learning and teaching. He especially focuses on various multimedia tools, including Web 2.0 applications, multimedia production tools (e.g. audio, video, digital narratives, comics, manga), hardware and software, video conferencing, and other web tools. Dr. Kronenberg helped plan the recently opened Foreign Language Resource Center at Pomona College and also runs the “Language Technology Boot Camp” to train language residents in technology for teaching and learning. An expanded version of this project received an award from the NITLE Instructional Innovation Fund in 2007 to share training across campuses through short video clips, a multimedia manual, downloadable sample lessons, templates, and ready-to-use teaching materials.

Cohort Two | The Integration of GIS and Web-Mapping Technologies into the Curriculum

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Jon Caris

GIS Specialist, Environmental Science and Policy Program, Smith College

Mr. Caris has offered both general instructional technology and GIS-specific training for more than 10 years at a variety of graduate and undergraduate intuitions, including Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and Antioch New England Graduate School. In addition, he has contributed key support to several research projects requiring both GIS and image processing applications. Currently, he focuses on teaching faculty how to use GIS in their research and teaching. Mr. Caris' primary interest is in identifying the right mix of technology and applications for liberal arts colleges to develop and maintain web mapping applications suitable for both teaching and collaborative research, with an emphasis on open-source alternatives. He is particularly interested in developing his expertise vis-a-vis web-mapping applications, using programs to host maps on the web, and teaching GIS with online technologies.

Sharron Macklin

Instructional Technology Specialist, Office for Information Technology, Williams College

Over the past 12 years, Ms. Macklin has designed and offered instruction in a variety of technology areas. In graduate school, she created curricula and provided workshops in web-page creation, basic GPS skills, and simple GIS for a high school outreach workshop program. She also worked with other graduate students to provide training and materials for a comprehensive series of multi-day ArcView workshops available to the Maine community. Her work at Williams focuses on helping faculty incorporate technology in their teaching, and her responsibilities have included offering workshops in InDesign, Photoshop, scanning, poster design, Blackboard CMS and GIS. She often works with faculty to develop instructional modules for their classes, with pedagogy as the focus and technology as the vehicle. Additionally, she has served as an adjunct faculty member teaching undergraduate GIS courses at Southern Vermont College and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Betsy Reese

GIS Coordinator/Map Curator, Bryn Mawr College

Ms. Reese has offered a variety of classes, workshops, and tutorial sessions on various aspects of Geographic Information Science, including the use of the ESRI software, virtual globes and web mapping, diversity and social justice issues relating to GIS and cartography, and GPS use and integration. She has also worked with librarians to look for improved ways to support GIS and research in the library and is currently working with the Coordinator of Staff Education and the Teaching and Learning Initiative at Bryn Mawr on the integration of various teaching and learning frameworks as related to the teaching of GIS. Ms. Reese is particularly interested in helping learners at all levels become technologically skilled, critical thinkers.

Cohort One, Group Two | Social Software and Computer-Mediated Communication

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Laura Blankenship

Senior Instructional Technologist, Bryn Mawr College

Focus: software and computer-mediated communication and their integration into the classroom. Ms. Blankenship has four years' experience with offering workshops in a variety of technology tools, including web development applications, course management tools, instant messaging, and video editing, to name just a few, with a specific emphasis on pedagogicaly applications and technology-related issues such as copyright, open source and its implications for higher education, and plagiarism. She has also taught two freshman-level courses that have integrated blogging into the learning experience, using the first of those classes as the basis for her dissertation on the use of blogs in the teaching of writing. She also has experience with podcasting, wikis, and other social software tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and Google Docs.

Sean Pollack

Instructional Technologist, Pomona College

Focus: software and computer-mediated communication and their integration into the classroom. Dr. Pollack brings to the program seven years of experience designing, implementing, and conducting technology instruction and conferences for GLCA, ACS, Cal State Fullerton, and Pomona College; he also bring ten years of teaching experience in writing and literature. He has experience with weblog software in classroom settings, administration of Word Press, and as a user, teacher, and administrator with course management systems. His interest in using electronic text, discussion, and new media for teaching and learning in the humanities is long-standing. In graduate school at the University of Michigan, his composition courses were among the first in the English department to use a networked classroom, HTML course pages and readings, threaded discussion, and student-authored web pages to explore new models of writing, reading, and discourse. Currently, he is interested in finding new models and modes of class-based learning that make use of newer tools of electronic publishing--weblogs, content management systems, wikis--that support student active learning and constructivist pedagogies.

Donnie Sendelbach

Academic Technology Specialist, Lake Forest College

Focus: software and computer-mediated communication and their integration into the classroom. Dr. Sendelbach has seven years of experience in technology instruction at three NITLE participating colleges and 15 years' teaching experience in language and composition. She has served as the Director of Humanities Computing at Lawrence University and the Mellon Technology Fellow in Writing at Bard College. She has offered workshops, class sessions, and individual tutoring on a variety of software programs as well as tools within Moodle, WebCT, and Daedalus Online. Much of her training and work has focused on tools that develop students' written communication skills within and outside the classroom. She also has explored the pedagogical uses of chat and discussion boards as ways to supplement face-to-face class discussion while also demonstrating the importance of writing for an audience.

Cohort One, Group One | DSpace and the Development of Institutional Repositories

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Scott Hamlin

Faculty Technology Liaison for the Humanities, Wheaton College

Focus: DSpace and the development of institutional repositories. Mr. Hamlin regularly offers technology instruction to undergraduate students for courses in the Humanities, focusing primarily on web-based projects, social software, digital images, and the creation of digital editions of archival materials using TEI-compliant XML. He also has experience training faculty and staff members at and outside of Wheaton. He has organized workshops on a number of digital technologies and has been increasingly interested in finding good solutions for digital asset management at Wheaton. Last year, he led a group that chose and established the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) at Wheaton for managing digital images. He has lead the conversion of slides to digital images by directing the workflow for digital image creation, description, and storage within MDID. He has a strong interest in creative and effective uses of metadata, including work with TEI-compliant XML, and has been actively investigating digital repositories in recent years (Fedora, DSpace).