NJEDge Conference 7.0: Aligning the Ubiquitous Campus

November 17 – 19, 2010

Register for attending this year’s NJEDge annual conference: http://njedge.net/conference/2010/

On Wednesday, Nov 17th, at 1:30pm we open with Google "From the Clouds: Google Digital Books and Education Apps in Large Classes" with Chris Palm, Manager of Strategic Partnerships for Google Books, Google Scholar, Google News Archive Search, and Google Magazines. This is a good opportunity to find out how Google’s digital books and research sources affect an institutional library. This session is for 1hr and 15mins for the purpose of allowing more Q&A.

Following the Google talk will be breakout session on Abilene Christina University’s initiative on "iPadin Every Student Hand...." Kevin Roberts who heads the program that seems destined for campuses adoption will talk ACU’s successful pilot program. In discussion will be issues that will affect you, the library, students and school policies.

Our keynote speaker on Thursday is Dr. Peter Smith, a renowned academic whose recent book "Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning" brings up issues regarding digital libraries.

At the first breakout session on Thursday, 10:30, Cathy Kelley (FDU) and Mary Jane Clerkin (Berkley) will present on "E-readers & e-books: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." Both schools have pilot programs, using Kindle, Sony Reader and iPad Touch this year. This session shows some of the advantages and shortcomings of e-texts and e-readers.

At 11:45, Ken Ronkowitz from Passaic County Community College weighs in on open text books. "It’s anOpen Book: Adopting Open Textbooks" is treatise on why this option is good for learning, good for teaching, and good for the pocket book.

The afternoon has a talk by Perry Samson, "Surprise! Laptops INCREASE Student Engagement in Large Classes." Be sure to stay for Sujay Daniel’s reveal of NJVid.Net.

President Crabill of Raritan Valley Community College will talk about the community college’s Big Idea Initiative.

Taras Pavlovsky, Dean of the Library at The College of New Jersey, and John Brennan, Digital Projects Coordinator for Rutgers University Libraries collaborate on Friday for their poster session on “Partnering Today to Manage Tomorrow’s Libraries.” Here’s your chance to talk directly to them about The VALE OLE Initiative, which brings together leading academic libraries within New Jersey in partnership to employ the Kuali OLE open source library management software.

The conference ends with fireworks! David Pogue of The New York Times will be speaking about "Web2.0, Social Media, and Other Buzzwards."