2010 Self-Study
iii. Technology Week 2010 In October 2010, the College and the ICT Co-Lab held a week-long series of events focused on technology (http:// cis.uky.edu/techweek). The events included a lecture by Drew Curtis, the founder of fark.com, a two-day mini conference on openness and transparency, and a two-day course on iPhone application development. The events were wellattended and well-received by the UK community, and we plan to make Technology Week an annual event. Technology Week 2011 will be held during the Homecoming Week at UK and will be co-sponsored by UKIT and other partners. The event will include a career services component and a student entrepreneurship component. In addition, the event will bring alumni to campus and connect working professionals with our students. iv. Hardware Investments At the beginning of 2010, we purchased a robust Web server to deploy college Web initiatives. We now have a flexible platform for hosting the College main site, and the sites for College research centers. We are also better prepared to meet future demands, whether that includes cataloging media, streaming video, or hosting online surveys. Having a local server allows us to respond to new needs with minimal delay. v. Content Management Initiatives Over the last 12 months, the College Website (http://cis.uky.edu) has been completely recast as a content management system (CMS), where each faculty and staff member has access to the site and can publish his/her content independently. The submissions are automatically organized and indexed for the ease of search and accessibility. Similar systems have been deployed for the research initiatives, such as Risk Sciences (http://risk.uky.edu). The new architecture makes sharing content very easy, so that College content can be automatically fed to research sites, and research information and news automatically appear on the College site. vi. Digital Signage The content management system (CMS) that drives the College Website also drives the digital signage that was installed in summer 2010 in both the Grehan and Little Library buildings. The signage system can be remotely managed, and it automatically retrieves new content from the College CMS, such as information about the upcoming events, to present on the signage screens. Since deployment, the system interface has gone through three upgrades to improve readability and ease of use. The system will continue to be developed alongside the Website and other content management initiatives. vii. Open Source CMS Support on Campus The College Website and the center sites run on open-source CMS (namely Drupal and WordPress). Since summer 2010, UKIT has been investigating the possibility of supporting Drupal as a University-wide CMS. Our College and the College of Agriculture have been early adopters of Drupal, and our representatives have played key roles in UKIT committees on future CMS support on campus. In December 2010, the College IT Coordinator provided several short training sessions on Drupal for the UK community. These sessions were sponsored by UKIT and are part of the effort to create a community of Drupal users on campus. The College IT Coordinator started a UK Drupal User Group in October 2010, and, by December, it had grown to 50 members. viii. Program for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PIE) The College of Communications and Information Studies formed the Program for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PIE) with the goal of enhancing the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The program collaborates with partners both on and off campus to deliver a series of initiatives, including business plan competitions, structured mentoring arrangements, and targeted course offerings. These initiatives all share the goal of encouraging entrepreneurial behavior. Ultimately, the
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