In 2006, the New Media Consortium published Maximizing Campus Impact: Lessons from the Trenches, a white paper informed by a conversation among the NMC Directors at the annual meeting. The paper includes case studies, lessons learned, and tips for becoming -- and remaining -- an effective new media organization in a campus setting.

The topic was revisited at the 2009 Directors’ Meeting held in Austin, Texas. Although the original paper is still timely, the directors recognized that new challenges have arisen from the current economic climate. The discussion at the 2009 meeting focused on creative ways to maintain excellence in the face of adverse conditions such as budget cuts, travel restrictions, and loss of staff.

Calling what it offers as Social Bookmarking 2.0, diigo is a free tool that features a wide range of research and collaboration tools of interest for educators. Join us Wednesday, January 14, 2008 at 9:00AM Pacific Time (check for local time) when we talk to diigo co-founder and Vice President Maggie Tsai who will share the features diigo offers for teachers and students, and give us some clues about what may be coming in terms of new features.

See the archived recording from this session or listen to an audio recording (20 Mb MP3) of the first third that contains Maggie's demo.

As another example of gathering data from our NMCTAB listserv without an avalanche of emails, we recently set up another Google Form to collect information in response to a question from Cheryl Schaffer from Emerson College, who has asked:

I would like to get a general sense of what technology other schools are using for Webinars. I am seeing interest in this from Faculty and Staff and would like to offer some solutions to them.

Within four days almost 30 people had responded- see below for the results or view in Google Docs. These individuals reported institutional use of the following webinar technologies (quite a few places have multiple systems in place):

A few weeks ago we posted Collaborating without Email as an idea how to gather information from NMCTAB withoutn the usual round of long emails needing manual compilation. A member had asked to poll the NMCTAB on use of ePortolio software and whether that as a resource had been used in an accredidation process. We did this by setting up a form in Google docs that populates an online repadsheet.

The results included 25 responses collected in 9 days, without one email filling up the NMCTAB listserv. The results are available at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=prvl0yLfIeb5nQKy_I253HA