Jeff Gillman, the Director of the Botanical Gardens, hosts a podcast that investigates the surprising history, biology, and culture behind the plants we eat.
From apples and artichokes to digitalis and peyote, Jeff and co-host Cindy Proctor, an instructor at Central Piedmont Community College, discuss the plants that we interact with on a daily basis and how they can sustain us, intoxicate us, cure us of disease, and even kill us.
To listen, see: The Plants We Eat
The Brooklyn Oral History Project grew out of an “Oral History and Memory” class at University of North Carolina, Charlotte taught by Dr. Karen Flint. The goals of the course were to learn the practice of oral history, but also to preserve the memories of every-day life in the Brooklyn neighborhood between the 1950s and 70s.
This site contains nearly 200 hours of audio recordings of interviews with people who lived, recreated, or attended church or school in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Charlotte, a largely African-American neighborhood that was a self-sustainable town within a town.
The Academic Hub is a name my team has given to a collection of WordPress plugins and themes designed for academic institutions. Included are two hub plugins (Connections Hub, Organization Hub) and a theme called the News Hub.
The Connections Hub plugin enables a “connection” post type that has fields for a person’s profile information including the groups they are members of and their links with others.
The Organization Hub plugin provides admin pages for managing users within an organization, including tools for the bulk creation of sites and management of updates.
The News Hub theme can be used to create news sites, as well as sites that display connection posts and their various taxonomies.
For more information, see: Academic Hub
To help faculty and students find software for teaching, learning and research, we’re developing an online inventory of such software on a site we’ve called Techne.
One of the challenges of software inventories is figuring out how to organize the various types of software available. Currently we are using two taxonomies. The first is a hierarchical taxonomy which is used to organize software into a limited number of categories. These are displayed on the site in the left sidebar. The second taxonomy is used to organize software in ways not captured by the hierarchical categories….Read more…
The Thinking Matters site was launched in October 2012. Since then it has aggregated nearly 3,000 blog posts from 24 different sites and includes twitter streams from nearly a dozen faculty.
The design of the site has undergone considerable revision. Originally, the site consisted of a single column of posts with 2 right sidebars that displayed links to recent posts, a few twitter streams and a tag cloud. The site now uses a magazine layout with two columns of posts and a column of twitter streams.Read more…
My team has been developing a collection of WordPress plugins for creating what we are calling “connection hub” sites. These are sites that aggregate content from hundreds of faculty profile sites and then organize these connected sites by discipline and research interests. See: Faculty Connections
Faculty in the Physics and Optical Science department have created hundreds of instructional screencasts that are used in introductory physics courses and in courses on physics for science and engineering.
Initially these videos were shared with students in QuickTime format as downloads from static html websites. These videos have since been moved to Vimeo and YouTube and linked to from WordPress sites:
YouTube is definitively a better service for distributing such videos, particularly its auto-captioning service which will automatically create captions based on Google speech-to-text technology. The automatically generated captions make lots of mistakes, but Google provides an interface for correcting these errors.
We worked with the UNC Charlotte Office of Disability Services to have all the videos professional transcribed and then used YouTube’s captioning service to create captions from our transcription text. This service also allows you to export a captions file. We used this service to import captions to video on Vimeo.
The OAT is working on creating a site for publishing information about labs, see:
http://pages.charlotte.edu/labs/
We programmatically created posts for each lab with basic information using the CSV Importer plugin. We used categories and tags to organize the lab information. Crystal Barton updated the Translucence theme to use custom categories and tag labels from the custom tag and category base name specified in the site settings (see: Custom Categories and Tags Labels). This enabled us to rename “categories” to “specifications” and “tags” to “software.”
We’ve launched the Thinking Matters faculty blog aggregator site.
We’ve been designing some WordPress themes for use at UNC Charlotte. This blog is now using the “Minimal Light” variation which may be a good choice for faculty profile sites.
We are also developing a WordPress theme that is modelled on the templates used for university pages that we hope to use for at least one of the our sites, see:
Office of Academic Technologies
