Professor
Joe Branin
Professor and
Director of Libraries, The Ohio State University
Areas of Expertise
· Information services
· Library collection management
· Information technology and organizational change
Institutions of higher education are knowledge generators
by definition, but are they really managing their knowledge
assets effectively? As new information technology hardware
and software become less expensive and easier to use, more
and more faculty and students are creating databases, electronic
texts, multimedia presentations, and other forms of digital
material that could or should be indexed, shared, and preserved.
Concepts and practices from the fields of knowledge management
and information and library science can provide a foundation
for building an institutional repository and knowledge management
system that can organize, integrate, and insure the future
of important digital intellectual assets in institutions
of higher education.
The Ohio State University's Knowledge Bank project provides
a good example of this new approach. Librarians and information
technology specialists have been working for the last two
years with administrators, faculty, and students to create
a multifaceted but unified knowledge management system for
their university that includes published and unpublished
electronic documents, rich media or multimedia, learning
objects, electronic records and administrative data, faculty
expertise directories, student e-portfolios, and research
databases. Joseph Branin, Director of Libraries at the Ohio
State University, is leading the Knowledge Bank project,
and he will give both an overview of knowledge management
concepts and specific examples of how to create and operate
an institutional repository and knowledge management system.
For more information about the Knowledge Bank project at
the Ohio State University, go to http://www.lib.ohio-state.edu/KBinfo/.
The presentation proposed for the Symposium will briefly
describe the basic definitions and concepts of knowledge
management and outline the progression of academic librarianship
practice over the last fifty years from "collection
development" to "collection management" to
"knowledge management." The motivations for creating
the Knowledge Bank at the Ohio State University will be
discussed, and the main features and challenges of the Knowledge
Bank will be described.
About Joe Branin
Prof. Branin serves as Director of Libraries for The Ohio
State University, providing leadership for one of the largest
university library systems in the nation. Currently ranked
19th among major research libraries in North America, the
OSU Libraries has a collection of over 5 million print volumes,
an annual budget of more than $25 million, and a staff of
430. In partnership with OhioLINK, the Ohio State University
Libraries offer its students and faculty one of the most
complete arrays of digital information and document delivery
services anywhere.
Before coming to Ohio State University in 2000, Mr. Branin
was Director of Libraries at SUNY Stony Brook for four years.
From 1986 to 1996 he was an Associate Director for Collections
and Services at the University of Minnesota Libraries, and
from 1977 to 1986 a Humanities Department Head and Assistant
Director for Collections at the University of Georgia Libraries.
Prof. Branin has overseen grants from the U.S. Department
of Education, the New Media Center, the Council for Library
Resources, the Bush Foundation, and the State of Ohio dealing
with the introduction of new information technologies to
libraries. He has been a consultant to many libraries, and
he was a UCLA Senior Fellow in 1991 and a Council on Library
Resources Management Intern in 1984 at Columbia University
Libraries. He has published and made presentations widely
on collection management and information technology topics.
Current Research
Prof. Branin’s two most recent articles deal with
economic and ownership issues in scientific communications
and the changing nature of collection management in a digital
library environment. In 1998 he published "Reforming
Scholarly Publishing in the Sciences: A Librarian Perspective"
in Notices of the American Mathematical Society (April 1998,
pages 475-486), http://www.ams.org/notices/199804/branin.pdf.
His article "The Changing Nature of Collection Management
in Research Libraries," written with Suzanne Thorin
from Indiana University and Frances Groen from McGill University,
was published in Library Resources & Technical Services
(January 2000, pages 23-33) http://arl.cni.org/collect/changing.html,
and won the American Library Association’s 2001 Blackwell’s
Scholarship Award for outstanding work the field of acquisition
and collection development.
Current Library Projects
Prof. Branin is currently leading two major initiatives
at the Ohio State University: the $100 million renovation
and expansion of the University’s William Oxley Thompson
Memorial Library and creation of the "Knowledge Bank,"
a knowledge management system and institutional repository
for the storage, organization, preservation, and sharing
of the intellectual digital assets of the University.
Dr. Ric Canale
Head of Courseware Development within the Teaching, Learning
& Research Support Department, The University of Melbourne
This presentation will explore the many different aspects
of function and role that are required of an ideal Learning
Management System (LMS). It touches on the major challenges
facing the design and operation of an LMS that must meet
the needs of a diverse group of stakeholders and serve them
all well despite their sometimes conflicting needs. The
LMS is considered as the key system providing technology
supported learning environments for students and, similarly
for teaching academics, the key system providing the administrative
and pedagogic tools for technology supported teaching. Ideally,
the function and sophistication of such an LMS would grow
and be informed by applied educational research.
The ideal LMS is therefore considered from a number of
perspectives as follows:
- A collection of pedagogical support tools (where to from
here?)
- A delivery platform for online, predominantly on-campus
education or large scale distance education (no difference
you say?)
- A change agent for academic professional development;
and a
- A tool of applied education research for a quality educational
infrastructure.
Each of the different perspectives has corresponding functions,
support needs and operational imperatives. In addition,
international standards for LMS softwares and the content
housed within them continue to evolve. A definitive benchmark
LMS is still some way off, yet many institutions have already
committed substantial resources to a centrally supported
LMS. It is proposed that the typical implementations seen
to date have been based on narrow, perhaps over-simplified
definitions for the role of the LMS that do not serve institutions
of higher learning particularly well. The discussion will
conclude by looking at the policy and operational implications
flowing from the views presented.
About Ric Canale
Dr Enrico (Ric) Canale has worked for over ten years in
the design and application of ICT in teaching and learning.
He is the Head of Courseware Development within the University
of Melbourne, and a Director for Digital Learning Systems.
His experience spans public and private enterprises and
for the last three years has included international consulting
work in association with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. Ric's
major interest is in the design and implementation of scalable
e-learning infrastructure that supports a growing diversity
of teaching practices in a standards-based environment.
As Head of Courseware Development within the Teaching,
Learning & Research Support Department, The University
of Melbourne, Ric leads over 20 staff engaged in all areas
of educational multimedia and online technology including
educational design, video production, digital imaging, graphic
design and software development. Courseware Development
Services is one of the largest and most highly accomplished
development and production units in higher education in
Australia. (See http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/telars/cds/index.html
for more information)
In 2003 Ric has been seconded to the Learning Management
System (LMS) Project with responsibility for implementing
a central, fully integrated LMS for the University and merging
its operations within Courseware Development Services during
2004. His interest in LMS decisions and strategies extends
to the work of Digital Learning Systems, which operates
as a standards-based technology solutions provider in the
education and training markets. The company has worked with
a number of Australian universities and recently completed
a world-leading SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference
Model) implementation as part of Open Learning Australia's
e-learning portal. The successful completion of this innovative
project has established DLS as a leading developer in the
SCORM implementation space (http://koala.dls.au.com/scorm/).
Ric has had the good fortune of working with a wide range
of organizations in a variety of contexts and this broad
experience has given him a well-developed understanding
of the teaching and learning issues surrounding e-learning
strategies as well as the details of LMS implementation.
Dr.
Sally Johnstone
Director, Western Cooperative
for Educational Telecommunications (WCET), Boulder, Colorado, USA
The biggest driver of new trans-national collaborations
among higher education institutions is the collection of
technologies that enable people at distant campuses to
work together. As these technologies are fully integrated
into the administrative and academic structures, new policy
and practical issues arise. Even within a single campus,
people are working together differently. The vendor community
is continuously developing new software tools that can
facilitate these new activities, but choosing among them
can be difficult. Sorting through the costs of technologies
can also be a puzzle. Setting the quality standards of
an electronically delivered academic program may also be
problematic. WCET ‘s projects to assist colleges and universities
in all these areas are open educational resources. Dr.
Johnstone will demonstrate several of them.
There are some new ways that higher education academicians
are beginning to work together that do not rely on the
particular higher education structure in which they exist.
These include the sharing of courseware, and the contributions
to repositories of academic material. There are also some
new projects designed to assist academicians in asserting
some level of control over their web-based materials. These
will be reviewed.
About Sally Johnstone
Dr. Sally M. Johnstone is the founding director of the Western
Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications (WCET) at
the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education
(WICHE). In that role she is a resource for state governing
boards, legislators, governors, as well as college and
university administrators on higher education technology
issues. She has worked with over a dozen U.S. states
as well as governments and organizations in Brazil, Hong
Kong, and New Zealand.
The WCET is a membership organization with staff located
in Boulder, Colorado. Its 245 members are located in 43
U.S. states and seven countries. WCET members are primarily
public colleges and universities but also include private
institutions, government agencies, and corporations. The
WCET staff develop research projects focusing on the integration
of technology into the teaching and learning processes,
consult with higher education institutions, hold professional
development institutes for practitioners (in the U.S. and
Asia Pacific Region), publish timely reports, and generally
support their members in the planning for and implementation
of e-learning.
Johnstone writes a monthly column for Syllabus magazine
on distance learning, and co-authors a column for Change
magazine for which she also serves as a Consulting Editor.
She has served on the Boards of American Association of
Higher Education and the U.S. Open University. She has
authored about 20 articles, four book chapters and five
books/major reports on distance and distributed learning.
She also leads workshops and gives about a dozen invited
addresses each year to higher education organizations.
She earned her Ph. D. in experimental psychology from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
