Accomplishments

Best Practices Showcase and Annual Conference

Since 2003, NJEDge.Net has held monthly meetings of its working groups.  Biannually it offers two topic-centered best practices showcase, and an annual conference in late fall.  The two and a half day conference is open to all New Jersey institutions and generally attracts over 350 participants which includes CIOs, faculty, administrators, and system architects.

 The theme for the Fifth Annual Conference in 2008 is Building Community through the Application of Technology, which will address the broad interests and concerns of the New Jersey higher education community, K-12, hospitals and other non profit partners and provide opportunities to explore innovations in educational and administrative technologies with. Pre-conference workshops, plenary-session demonstrations, concurrent track sessions, and ePosters will cover a wide range of educational technology issues, specifically: eLearning and Libraries; Emerging Technologies; Policy Issues and Strategic Planning; and Network and Systems Computing.

Passaic County Community College on Online Writing Resources

Presented at the NJEDge.Net Faculty Showcase, March 2008. 

 

 

 

K-20

The NJEDge.Net higher education consortium maintains an excellent relationship with K-12 communities.  The success of this effort has encouraged NJEDge.Net to further foster and participate in the following three K-20 programs:

Around the world in 24 hours -- The purpose of the project is to bring students from different cultures and backgrounds together to promote global awareness and understanding.  The students engage in collaboration through a combination of activities that utilize videoconferencing and an interactive website for the exchange of information and ideas.

The culminating activity involves Passaic Valley High School hosting a series of approximately one-hour individual videoconferences with participating international schools during one 24-hour period. Students are engaged in discussion on selected topics and problem-solving.  The project has two basic elements: the actual videoconferences themselves and an interactive website to promote the exchange of information and ideas.

The advances in communication technology offer this generation valuable and fruitful multicultural dialogues.  Videoconferencing allows people separated by distance to verbally and visually communicate in real time. Interactive websites allow for the continuation of dialogue long after the videoconferences are over.  The students at Passaic Valley High School have hands-on learning which prepares them to be intelligently engaged in diagnostic analysis and lively discussion with their peers from around the world. This project serves as a basis for the students to understand their relationships and responsibilities to people, institutions and the environment.

Science in Cinema -- High school students watch films e.g. Erin Brockovich or Jurassic Park.  After viewing the films the students conduct videoconferences, via the NJEDge.Net, network with bioethicists, scientists, and doctors from higher education institutions to get a scholarly understanding of issues from the films. 

The Rainforest Connections -- By using the NJEDge.Net network and Verizon as resources, Professors from Montclair State University create an annual interactive videoconference on the Rainforest in Central America. The Rainforest Connection is coordinated by the Center for Professional Resources In Science & Mathematics (PRISM) at Montclair State University. PRISM provides services to school districts in the teaching of science and mathematics. Researchers appear in live sessions from the forest to talk about their experiences, their research projects, and ecological principles. They answer students' questions.

Emergency Notification System

Maintaining community safety requires constant evaluation by compliance officers, risk managers, and IT personnel.  On and off campus safety is a stated responsibility for member institutions.  While technology has made great strides in providing communications protocols, critical situations often challenge notification best practices:  What means are in place to notify everyone in the community?   How to convey urgency without widespread panic?   

NJEDge.Net, in consultation with the CIOs of its college and university members, conducted a comprehensive statewide Request for Proposal soliciting over 40 vendors for an Emergency Notification System.  The procurement was specified in Request for Proposal #657 which was released by NJEDge.Net through Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey on behalf of New Jersey's Institutions of Higher Education on July 19, 2007. 

Following an extensive evaluation process, a multi-vendor award was made to the three vendors that best fulfilled the requirements specified in the RFP.  The award went to NTI ConnectED; 3N Corporation; and Baycomm Research.  The selected vendors range from providing basic notification capabilities to more extensive feature rich notification capabilities.  A basic requirement for each system selected included redundant electronic notification methods to avoid the possibility of single points of failure. 

Copyright Symposium

This was a two year project funded by NJEDge.Net and Seton Hall University.  It ran from 2004-2006. It held seven videoconference meetings, accessible at two Northern, one Central and Southern New Jersey campus. 

For Higher Education institutions the digital era has opened avenues to research and scholarship previously unavailable. It has also brought into focus issues regarding copyright, intellectual property, plagiarism, information literacy, infringement and other topics to which educators must be concerned and accountable.

The New Jersey statewide symposium – Steering a Course through the Copyright Morass– was an open forum for educators to learn, discuss and take action on copyright issues. Its purpose was to provide basic information, discussion, and dialogue among the colleges and universities in New Jersey. The program dealt with student awareness of copyright issues and file-sharing; intellectual property from a faculty prospective and new federal regulations.  It invited renown specialists such as Dr Kenneth Crews, Associate Dean of the Faculties for Copyright Management at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis; Steven J. McDonald, General Counsel at Rhode Island School of Design; James Heller, Professor, William & Mary University and Robert Boynton, Professor, New York University

Video tapings of the conferences are available at http://euphrates.wpunj.edu/copyright/