Tech Day Talks Social Media

Technology Services conducted the second annual Tech Day last Friday (Sept. 25), gathering faculty, students, staff and vendors in the Lavin-Bernick Center for an interactive exploration of the technologies that influence the academic, professional and personal lives of the Tulane community.

Sample the excitement of Tech Day in this video produced by Sheldon Jones, supervisor of instructional
media services, and Lee Rubin, instructional technology specialist, both with the Innovative Learning Center.

Centered on the theme of social networking and social media, this year's Tech Day featured speakers, demonstrations, panels and hands-on workshops covering diverse aspects of campus technology, from digital archives and administrative computing, to streaming media and 3D virtual worlds.

The keynote address featured Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium on the advantages and opportunities of "the real-time Web." Using online examples, Levine stepped the audience through the myriad of "live" tools and resources available to the digitally savvy.

Applications like Twitter, he said, make the real-time Web potentially more valuable to the user than the static Web represented by Google's indexing. Look for more devices and applications to utilize real-time, user-generated data in the near future, he said.

Tech Day is a celebration of academic technologies at Tulane and the people that make them a reality. If Friday's crowds and comments mean anything, Tulanians welcomed that celebration.

Derek W. Toten is director of instructional media in the Innovative Learning Center at Tulane University.