digitalMEDIAlab

Over the summer of 2009, we made some big changes to the College’s digital media lab located in Taylor 205. The old lab saw a lot of use and sparked a wonderful variety of media projects, but was looking a little tired and no longer meeting the demands of digital media use at The College of Wooster. So last Spring, The Office of Information Technology formed a project team to talk to academic departments about their needs for digital media in the curriculum and based on those needs, set out to rethink the space and find the right technologies. This project team’s plan was implemented over the summer with some work continuing through this academic year. See the information below to find out what we’ve done.

Technologies now available in the digitalMEDIAlab

• twelve new iMacs running Mac OSX Leopard and Windows XP
• a projector, screen and instructor station for workshops
• two group stations with flexible furniture, mobile whiteboards and mobile LCD screens to accommodate laptops (coming soon)
• a large format printer and color printer
• an audio recording booth
• multi-standard and region free video import and editing station
• three NTSC video import and editing stations
• two scanning stations with optical character recognition and the ability to scan film, slides, and high-quality images

The Environmental Defense Fund provides a paper calculator to help organizations and individuals understand the impact of paper usage.  Click here to see a break down of our contribution and what you can do to help reduce paper usage on campus by 5%:

Wood Use:

27 Tons of paper = 100 tons of wood.  That means it took 366 trees to produce the paper we consumed.

Energy Consumption:

In terms of energy consumption, 27 tons of paper = 807 Million BTUs.  The Paper Calculator includes an energy credit for energy that is created by burning paper – or the methane that decomposing paper creates – at the end of its life. The Net Energy takes the total amount of energy required to make the paper over its life cycle, and subtracts this energy credit. If most of the energy used to make the paper is purchased, then the energy credit might make the Net Energy lower than the Purchased Energy. The average U.S. household uses 91 million BTUs of energy in a year.   807 million BTU’s is the equivalent of about 9 homes per year.

Greenhouse Gases:

Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO₂) from burning fossil fuels and methane from paper decomposing in landfills, contribute to climate change by trapping energy from the sun in the earth’s atmosphere. The unit of measure is CO₂ equivalents. The average car emits 11,013 pounds of CO2 in a year. The production of 27 tons of paper creates 158,817 lbs CO₂ - the equivalent of about 14 cars per year.

Wastewater:

Solid Waste:

Solid Waste includes sludge and other wastes generated during pulp and paper manufacturing, and used paper disposed of in landfills and incinerators. 1 fully-loaded garbage truck weighs an average of 28,000 pounds (based on a rear-loader residential garbage truck).  The production of 27 tons of paper creates 51,535 pounds of solid waste , the equivalent of about 2 garbage trucks.

By using less paper, increasing recycled content, and making other improvements, we can save wood, water and energy, and cut pollution and solid waste.

What has OIT done to help reduce paper usage and our environmental impact?

1.  Duplex printing is available in all public printing locations and most administrative and academic printing locations.

2.  Scan-to-email is now available on all of our public devices. Scan-to-email is a great tool.  The copier will create a pdf file of anything you scan and will send it to any email address you enter.

3.  We are switching this year to recycled paper!  OIT has partnered with Boise Paper to supply campus with Boise’s Aspen 30 product.  Aspen 30 s a multipurpose office paper engineered for use in high-speed copiers, printers, and fax machines.  It is acid-free and uses 30% post-consumer recycled content. We are also receiving the shipment in bulk coming straight from the manufacturer which also helps cut our carbon footprint.

4.  We have eliminated 2 HP laserjets from the printing fleet that the IT staff utilize.  This will help with our energy consumption as well as decrease our day-to-day printing.

What can you do to help? Join OIT in the effort to reduce paper usage by 5% this year.  That’s 270,500 pages or 54 cases of paper.  If you think about it, that’s only 1 ream per office on campus.  270,500 pages is equivalent to 1.4 tons of paper.  That’s 36 trees, 42 Million BTUs or the energy consumption of 1 home, 8,235 lbs. Co2 of greenhouse gas emissions (one car), 31,106 gallons of wastewater and 2,672 pounds of solid waste.

Suggestions on what you can do:

1.  Think before you print.  ”Do I really need to print this, or do I have a copy electronically?”

2.  Use scan-to-email.  Instead of photocopying an article, scan-to-email.  Scan-to-email is available on all of our public copiers and most of our administrative copiers. Scan-to-email can even replace sending a fax.

3.  Print double-sided.

4.  Use Woodle to post articles for courses instead of printing individual copies for class.

5.  Take advantage of technologies that can help you share documents like wikis, blogs, email and network storage.

6.  Watch for our posters and encourage each other to think before you print.

Together we can reduce Wooster’s footprint.

To sign up for these courses, please email Mary Schantz, Director of User Services. Seats are limited and fill quickly!

Steve earned undergraduate degrees in aerospace engineering and urban planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. in management and higher education, also from M.I.T.

QuickTime is required to view the video. To do so, launch the QuickTime application. Choose the “Open URL” option from the “File” menu. Enter the URL “rtsp://helix.wooster.edu/Ehrmann.mov” and click “OK.” Please note that the video can only be viewed from on-campus locations. The slides Steve used during his presentation can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/djplnq.

This extraordinary event can now be viewed online:

Introductions by John Rudisil and Richard Seaman

The Remarks of James Stewart

The Remarks of Donald Kohn

The Remarks of William Longbrake

Questions and Discussion

OIT extends a special thanks to Michael Naylor, Assistant Director of Digital Infrastructure for Media Services and Systems, and the Media Services group for making it possible to share this content online.

It seems appropriate to mark the occasion by posting about a technological development of a kind not usually covered by the OIT blog. Jon Bohmer, a Norwegian-born entrepreneur based in Kenya has developed a solar oven. Dubbed the Kyoto Box, the oven consists of two cardboard boxes and an acrylic cover that admits and then traps the sun’s rays. A bit of black paint and silver foil help to concentrate the heat. Without electricity or any power source other than the sun’s rays, Kyoto Box users can boil water and cook many foods. The ability to boil water is critical to fighting waterborne illnesses. In addition, the Kyoto Box could reduce the use for wood and other fossil fuels for cooking in the developing world. The oven is expected to cost approximately $5. More information is available from CNN.

The Program seeks to select a diverse group from all level of teaching experience, technology use, and project implementation and across all disciplines. Successful applicants will be expected to attend all sessions, must be willing to communicate to their department and campus the projects and tools with which they are working, and must be teaching a course in the Fall of 2009. Upon completion of the week-long portion of the program participants will receive a certificate, designation as a Faculty Instructional Technology Fellow, and half of the $1500 stipend (deposited into a research account awarded to the participating faculty member). The second half of the $1500 stipend will be deposited to participants’ research accounts upon implementing a project in one of their Fall 2009 courses.

Applications for the program will be accepted until midnight on April 26. Applicants will be notified about the status of their application not later than 5 PM on May 6. Further information about the program is available from Matt Gardzina, Director of Instructional Technology.