March 14, 2002
Initiative expands UWired services
UWired is set, officially, to extend its reach.
With the new UWired Health Sciences initiative, beginning April 1 faculty and staff in South Campus can avail themselves more easily of the services formerly available only at the Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT) in Odegaard Undergraduate Library.
UWired Health Sciences, forged through a partnership among many different campus organizations and units, will support teaching, learning, technology and research throughout not only the Health Sciences but also the entire campus. The initiative will utilize existing campus-wide technology tools while making available high-end customized solutions.
Health Sciences faculty have from the start been heavy users of Catalyst, a suite of Web-based tools to aid teaching and learning. Tom Lewis, director of the Educational Technology Development Group, estimates that about a third of Catalyst users are from Health Sciences and that several campus-wide Catalyst Web Tools are an outgrowth of projects designed to serve South Campus needs.
The new initiative, created through a friendly merger of staff and resources from the Health Sciences Center for Educational Resources, the Locke Computer Center, and Health Sciences Academic Services and Facilities with help from the Health Sciences Library, will provide a combination of assistance with do-it-yourself online projects, workshops about Catalyst and other teaching technologies, and fee-for-service work.
Kathryn Waddell, director of budget and administration for the Health Sciences Administration sees this as a unique opportunity to pull together historically competing services under one umbrella.
“We are creating an environment that will offer a suite of services which faculty, staff and students can utilize,” she said.
For the first time, people from across campus who have some money and need Web development help for teaching or research projects will be able to buy the services they need. Higher-end services such as instructional design, graphics and illustration, photography and computer imaging, and Web application development will also be available. Another outcome of the new initiative will be enhanced access to streaming media tools — ways of getting audio and video to students — and improved connections with television facilities.
“Using our combined staff should help projects more closely integrate with the campus computing infrastructure than what many outside contractors will be able to do,” says Lewis. “We’ll be providing one-stop shopping in Web services for teaching and research needs. And people won’t feel compelled to reinvent the wheel each time they start a project.”
UWired Health Sciences also will be the first place to go to find out about applications of Internet 2 (see related story on Health Sciences pages) for teaching and research opportunities.
UWired Health Sciences will make better use of scarce resources, Lewis says, while connecting South Campus users of educational technology with their counterparts elsewhere.
As of April 1, the e-mail for UWired Health Sciences is uwiredhs@u.washington.edu. The phone number is 206-543-9275, and the office is located in T-271 Health Sciences.
