CATS 2005 Conference News

Marion Smith
CATS 2005 Conference Chair

CATS 2005 will be here before we know it: March 22-25, 2005. Sacramento State University is our host campus. The planning committee has already been working for months to make sure this 8th CATS conference is the best ever!

You are invited to to Submit a Session Proposal. After all, the CATS conference is for the staff and by the staff. Stimulate your imagination by looking at the topics that grew out of the pre-conference survey, and remember, you may present on any topic of interest to fellow academic technology professionals.  Read the full article.

SoCal Regional Meeting Report

On October 22, CSU Long Beach hosted another successful CATS regional meeting. It was well-attended, with 54 participants from 14 campuses and the Chancellor's Office, as well as Pasadena Community College and Long Beach Community College. Called "Focus on the Frontline," the meeting covered topics such as Steaming Media, system-wide updates on Blackboard and WebCT Vista, Sentient, and conversations about the CATS Executive Council's 2004/2005 Initiatives. See the meeting program, which has links to relevant documents and websites.

Serious business aside, the participants had some fun and toured the Japanese Garden on the Long Beach campus. If you're ever on the campus, make sure you stop by - it's spectacular.

See pictures from the meeting.

• Candace Egan (Fresno) presented at the Digital Revolution Conference at the University of South Carolina in October. The conference focused on academic activities and research in mass media convergence. Candace presented on how she uses streaming video to teach video production shooting and editing, and showed examples of using PowerPoint to create hypermedia presentations. She also was part of a workshop on Moblogging that experimented with camera phones. See the workshop's output.
• Jennifer Nowotny has left CSU San Marcos for CSU Chico. Her title there is Instructional Technology Consultant, working in the Distributed Learning Technologies.
• And yet another CAT switches campuses! Patrick Crispen has left CSU Fullerton to be the Faculty Training and Support Coordinator in the Faculty Technology Center at CSU Long Beach.
• Corey Gin (SJSU), Helen Chu (Cal Poly SLO), and Abbe Altman (CDL) attended the NMC Online Conference on Social Computing in November. To share information to the CATS community, they contributed to a blog.
• Wayne Smith (formerly of Northridge, now writing his dissertation!) presented at the Annual Meeting of the California Association for Institutional Research (CAIR) in November. The title of his paper was "An SQL-based, Data Mining Approach to Measuring the Impact of Aberrant Course Scheduling at a Large University."
• Carlos Araya, formerly from SJSU, has joined CSU, Chico's Distributed Learning team, where his focus will be on WebCT administration and implementing streaming technologies in support of online learning.

Kathleen Willbanks
Operations & Marketing Manager
CSU Center for Distributed Learning

Electronic Portfolios continue to be a hot topic within the CSU. We aren't alone. Many higher education institutions nationwide are contemplating what to use and how to implement. Partially inspired by requirements from accreditation agencies, there is also recognition of the life-long learning component and ré sumé potential for students that electronic portfolio systems provide.

You can read the results of an in-depth study by the CDL and teacher education faculty. The CSU Deans of Education sponsored this study in 2003, which started with gathering user requirements and requesting information from select vendors.  Read the full article.