School of Information

07-08 Faculty Annual Report

(May 1, 2007 to April 30, 2008)

My up-to-date Vita is available at:

http://www.dr-chuck.com/dr-chuck/resume/research.htm

http://www.dr-chuck.com/dr-chuck/resume/travel.htm

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I.               Teaching

A.    Classroom teaching

We have listed the Q1 (course) and Q2 (instructor) scores, along with class size, for the courses you taught this past year. If you believe there are any errors, please describe them below.

Course #	Course Name	Term	Enrollment	# evals submitted	Q1	Q2
539	Design of Complex Web Sites	Fall 2008	38	31	*.**	*.**
543	Programming I	Fall 2008	17	13	*.**	*.**

Course #	Course Name	Term	Enrollment	# evals submitted	Q1	Q2
182	Building Applications for Information Environments	Winter 2008	19	15	*.**	*.**
539	Design of Complex Web Sites	Winter 2008	38	19	*.**	*.**

If you have a score below 3.5, please describe your plans for improving your teaching.

B.    Student supervision

 

1)    Doctoral students

None.

2)    Other student supervision: list all students whose work you have supervised on an individual basis, and briefly describe your interaction with them.

None.

C.    Instructional development: List any new initiatives or major course revisions that you have engaged in.

I am part of the faculty committee developing the new undergraduate Informatics major. This included regular committee meetings for the planning of the overall major.

In addition I developed a new course (SI182 - Building Applications for Information Environments). This course was approved by the SI Curriculum Committee in the Fall 2007 and I taught the first instance of the course to 17 students during Winter 2008. Paul Conway helped me greatly in the preparation of the course and working with the curriculum committee.

I also worked with Atul Prakash of EECS to help him develop the EECS 182 course which is the EECS equivalent of SI 182.

D.   Other : Describe any other significant teaching activities not covered above

II.             Research

A.   Publications appearing in 2007-08 list all publications that appeared during this year. Underline all co-authors who are students.

1)    Articles in refereed journals

Charles Severance, Joseph Hardin, Glenn Golden, Robert Crouchley, Adrian Fish, Tom Finholt, Beth Kirschner, Jim Eng, Rob Allan, Using the Sakai Collaborative Toolkit in e-Research Applications, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, Volume 19, Issue 12, (p 1643-1652) (7 Jun 2007)

Charles Severance, Joseph Hardin, Anthony Whyte, The Coming Functionality Mashup in Personal Learning Environments, Interactive Learning Environments (Journal), Volume 16, Number 1, April 2008.

2)    Articles in refereed conference proceedings that are comparable to journals in terms of prestige - None

3)    Chapters in edited books - None

4)    Books or monographs - None

5)    Articles in workshops, symposia, and less rigorously referred conference proceedings

Pushing the Boundaries of Innovation Through Community Source, Proceedings of Educause Australasia, May 2, 2007.

6)    Other publications

B.    Publications in press: List papers that were accepted for publication in 2007-08 but have not yet appeared. Again, underline student co-authors and give page numbers.

C.    Invited talks. List all invited talks you gave this year

Invited Featured Speaker: Pushing the Boundaries of Innovation through Community Source, Educause Australasia - Melbourne, AU - May 2, 2007.

Invited Keynote: Overview of Sakai - University of Windsor Technology Days - May 22, 2007.

Invited Talk: The Coming Functionality Mashup, National eScience Center, Edinburgh, Scotland - May 25, 2007.

Invited Talk: Pushing the Boundaries of Open Source - the Sakai Project, Merit Member Conference, Ann Arbor, MI - June 19, 2007.

Invited Talk: Sakai as a Virtual Research Environment - Digital Libraries a la Carte 2007 - Tilburg University, Heerlen, NL, August 30, 2007

Invited Talk: The Upcoming Functionality Mashup - Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona Spain, October 4, 2007

Invited talk: Breaking Down Barriers between Learning Management Systems, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK December 14, 2007

Invited Talk: Open Source Learning Management Systems: Much More Than Free Source Code, LaSalle University, Barcelona, Spain, April 8, 2008

D.   Editorial Activities

1)    Editorial boards. List all editorial boards on which you serve. Indicate if you are an editor, associate editor, etc.

None.

2)    Ad hoc reviewing. Describe any ad hoc journal reviewing you did.

None

3)    Conference reviewing. List all conference program committees you served on. Indicate if you were a program chair, area chair, etc.

I was part of the planning for an upcoming IMS meeting at UM called The Coming Changes in Learning: Creating New Architectures Now! This one-day meeting will be held Thursday, June 12, 2008. I am the lead for one of the panel discussions and selected / invited the panel members.

4)    Grants reviewing. List all granting agencies for which you performed any panel or ad hoc reviewing. In the interests of confidentiality, do not name the panel.

None

E.    Research Support.

We have completed the table below to indicate your current grants and the grants you submitted during the past year. If there are any errors, please describe them below.

Report Category *	Role	Title	Direct Sponsor	Prime Sponsor	Total Award	Start Date	End Date
Ongoing	Co-PI	NCSA Partnership	University of Illinois	National Science Foundation	$*,***,***	10/1/2004	6/30/2008
Ended	PI	Collaborative Proposal: Middleware for Grid Portals	National Science Foundation	None	$***,***	7/1/2003	8/31/2007
Not Funded ('submitted' 07 report)	PI	SDCI Data Improvement: Sakai Research Edition - Human Communication as Part of the Scientific Record	National Science Foundation	None	$***,***	9/1/2007	8/31/2010

* Report Categories Key

New = Awarded between May 1, 2007 and April 30, 2008                                       

Ongoing = Awarded prior to May 1, 2007 and still active

Submitted = Submitted between May 1, 2007 and April 30, 2008 and is either pending or not funded

Ended = Awarded prior to May 1, 2007 and ended by April 30, 2008

Not Funded = Submitted between April 30, 2006 and May 1, 2007 and resulted in "not funded"

F.    Other . Describe any other research-related activities not covered above

I applied to Google for a number of Google Summer of Code students and was awarded three students for the Summer 2008 Google Summer of code. The focus of this effort will be on building implementations for the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) effort.

III.           Service

Please list all formal and informal service (committees, offices held, initiatives, etc.) for each of the following areas:

A.   School of Information

I am a member of the committee organizing the new Informatics concentration (informatics.umich.edu) in LSA. This committee has been quite active during the year culminating in the successful approval of the new concentration in April 2008. I developed and taught the first course in the new concentration - SI182 - Design of Personal Information Environments. This work will continue for the next year.

B.    University of Michigan

I represented the University of Michigan to the IMS Global Learning Consortium (www.imsglobal.org). IMS is a consortium that develops a series of standards for data interchange between Learning Management Systems such as Sakai. My support included representing Michigan at three IMS meetings. My primary focus was on a standard called IMS Learning Tools Interoperability - which is closely aligned with my research area of Functionality Mash Up.

I have been involved in advising the University of Michigan School of Medicine on their next generation of learning management system. In this effort I am working with Ted Hanss, Casey White, Chris Chapman, Joseph Fantone and others.

C.    Professional organizations

None.

D.   Community service relevant to SI mission

I participated in the Sakai project (www.sakaiproject.org) as an open source developer. This included attending three Sakai meetings and doing significant development in the MailArchive and Portal areas of Sakai. As the former Chief Architect of the Sakai Project and the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation I feel that it is important for me to maintain a healthy involvement in the Sakai project to provide technical continuity going forward and to support as needed for the new Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation (Michael Korkuska).

I served on the Science Advisory Board for the National eScience Center (http://www.nesc.ac.uk/) in Edinburgh, Scotland. I was appointed to this board in April 2008 - this board advises the eScience center on financial, strategic, and programming directions. I will be required to attend two board meetings annually with at least one board meeting to be held in Edinburgh.

E.    Consulting : How many days of consulting did you do this year?

Four days

F.    Service not included in any of above categories

I served on the Advisory board of the Etudes project hosted at Foothill College in California. This entailed attending four meetings during the 2007-2008 year.

IV.           Honors and Awards

Please list all honors and awards received in the past year.

            None

V.             Other Information

A.   Describe your most significant contributions this year. (One paragraph.)

I would say that my most significant contributions this year is as a teacher. I have put a lot of energy into becoming a valuable member of the SI teaching faculty, in particular to find ways to teach technology-oriented courses to the SI student population. I think that it is very important for our students to have reasonable mastery of technology regardless of their incoming background. I learned a great deal about how to teach beginning technology courses both at the graduate and undergraduate level.

B.    Please describe the greatest impact your work as a scholar and teacher has had in the past year. This should be broadly interpreted. (One paragraph.)

I think that my most significant impact as a scholar this year are in the area of motivating a new approach to teaching and learning based on Functionality Mashup rather than the idea that we simply take a single monolithic learning management system. A number of my efforts are designed to move this concept forward including: (1) my invited presentations, (2) my involvement in the IMS standards efforts, (3) my journal articles, (4) my involvement with the Michigan Medical School, (4) my Google Summer of Code, and (5) my involvement in Sakai. I work across these efforts to raise expectations and develop technology demonstrators to increasingly get people involved with taking a more student-centered approach to teaching and learning. This is a long effort where progress moves very slowly but one I feel very strongly about and am taking a long view of my efforts.

C.    Please summarize any interdisciplinary aspects of the activities you were engaged in during the past year.

My interdisciplinary activities include: (1) working to build the new Informatics concentration in LSA, (2) working with the UM Medical School looking at where teaching and learning technology is going, (3) working with the IMS organization developing standards and specifications, and (4) working with the Sakai/CTools team to help evolve the Sakai software and how we use it here at Michigan.

D.   Outline your major goals in teaching for the coming year. (One paragraph.)

My teaching goals for the next year are to do a really good job on the SI502 Technology Foundations course. This will be quite a challenge for me as the expectations for the course are very high. It will be my first experience working with Graduate Students to help in the course - this will be a challenge that I am very much looking forward to. I already have started thinking through how I will approach the course. I have talked to Rahul Sami and Paul Resnick to get started on the course early. Also I am very excited to be preparing for SI300 - the undergraduate Social Computing course in the Informatics program. I also plan to further improve the SI539 course.

E.    Outline your major goals in research for the coming year. (One paragraph.)

I expect to continue to pursue my functionality mash up theme during the next year. I am sure that there will be a number of different activities that will be part of this effort. I also expect that this work will take some unexpected turns, as it gets closer to production and realities in the marketplace begin to have an increasing impact of functionality mash up. I would also like to work on becoming involved in a collaborative science effort similar to NEESGrid - I hope to be a collaborator on grants developed by others in this area and provide technical expertise to those projects.

F.    For associate and full professors only: Describe your experiences this year in mentoring faculty. (Be specific; name names and specific activities.)

G.   For all faculty: Describe your experiences this year in being mentored.    (Be specific; provide names.)

I have had a number of wonderful mentors this year:

Paul Conway has spent a great deal of time with me mentoring me as I participated in the Informatics efforts and prepared the SI182 course as well as helping me with my preparation for my SI300 course next year.

Judy Olson has been very helpful in guiding me to my initial success as a teacher in the School of Information. From the very beginning when I was first hired, Judy has made many clear suggestions as to how to succeed teaching in SI - I have followed her advice and have been very pleased with the results.

Joseph Hardin has been very help and supportive as I made the transition from being a full-time Sakai employee for nearly five years to being a full-time faculty member in SI. Joseph has helped me and guided me so that I could make the transition while continuing to be involved in the Sakai project - albeit at a reduced level.

Tom Finholt has been very helpful as my general mentor about virtually everything about my position in the School of Information. He also has been very helpful in keeping me aware of possible research activities where my skills might be useful.

Stephanie Teasley has also been very helpful as a general mentor on how to succeed in the School of Information. She also helps me find opportunities to work with the other fields within the School of Information.

John Merlin-Williams of the Duderstadt Center has been very helpful in supporting my Sakai activity and helping me be effective within the UM Campus IT community.

H.   Describe your entrepreneurial activities or innovations, if any. Examples might include patents, licensing agreements, innovative services or products.

I.      Please provide any additional information you wish to convey to the Dean and Associate Deans.

This has been a wonderful year for me. I made a successful transition to teaching my top priority and I was prepared to work on nothing else but teaching if that was necessary. However with wonderful help, guidance, and support from my supervisors, mentors, colleagues, and staff - I was able to quickly adjust to teaching and enjoyed every minute of my teaching this year. Since the teaching quickly became quite comfortable - I was able to maintain my involvement in other non-teaching activities at a reasonable level - allowing me to maintain consistency in these efforts.

I am using the breaks between teaching to find ways to truly innovate in teaching and learning technology - both on-campus and around the world. I am also always looking for ways to blend my involvement in technology with my teaching and bring those experiences into the classroom in whatever courses I teach.

I truly find the title of Clinical Assistant Professor very empowering - because it gives me the excuse to push myself to be involved in the latest emerging technologies and bring those innovations into the classroom and my other interactions with students as quickly as possible.