This will be a great opportunity to share the efforts we have made to develop a strong liberal arts curriculum at Stockton and to engage our students in serious study of core texts from many disciplines and traditions.

If you are a Stockton faculty member interested in 1) volunteering to help with a few co-sponsor’s chores, 2) presenting a paper at the conference, 3) participating in a panel on the liberal arts and core texts at Stockton or 4) just finding out more about this, please let me know soon.
jamie.cromartie@stockton.edu

Our original server was not a powerhouse and our original blogging software, manila, was infrequently updated. Together they were no match for the growing demands of the web, and in 2006 server and software suffered badly from relentless spam attacks. The time spent manually removing spam from the “comments” section of hundreds of blogs was lengthy (and I thank primarily Ken Tompkins and Bob Heinrich for completing that thankless task). After that, we invested in a new server and new blogging software (WPMU).

The new blogging software, however, did not allow us to invoke the OverLib javascripts that make our projects’ annotations work. Thus a dilemma arose. We could not keep the old server running and open to the web (it was closed to all but the on-campus Stockton College community). In the summer of 2009 I took the time to migrate the projects from the old server to a new one. I used Firefox to save each project page, and it did a great job of saving pages with associated folders containing necessary javascripts, images, etc. Still, I had to edit the code for each page and rework links that pointed to the old server. It was a tedious process, but I hope worthwhile. You can see the projects here.

This is a fairly simple example of the need for file migration. If we care to save early examples of electronic technology, or even classroom projects that aren’t particularly old, migration of files to newer formats is absolutely crucial. In some cases the updating of file formats can be automated (in Photoshop, for instance, macros can be fashioned that repetitively reformat all files stored in a particular folder). But at other times the process can be time consuming and an easy thing to overlook. Think of those eight tracks floating around your house — perhaps cassette tapes and albums are better examples. All of these formats, none of which is particularly old, are becoming increasingly difficult to play. The same dating is happening electronic files on and off the web right now.

It may be good for the economy that many of us use iTunes to repurchase music that we already own (sometimes in several formats, I have many Dylan tunes on album, cd, and now iTunes), but such redundancy is expensive when we consider educational resources on the web. File migration is a matter that educators, not just the folk in tech support, needs to consider.

Tom Kinsella