I just came from a meeting with representatives from three of the UT campuses interested in using or supporting video conferencing environments for teaching and research. Most of the people were from the support sectors like Info Commons and their parallels on the various campuses. Only 2 faculty came and the other faculty member wanted to use it broadly for tri-campus lectures in the physical sciences and math–a worthy goal, but I was surprised not to have more groups using it for distacne ed and other research projects. There was a representative from KMDI there and we talked about the relative affordances of Breeze Live versus E-Presence software. I talked about using Breeze in research and teaching and the advantages of the archiving functions.
There will be subsequent meetings to leverage some cross campus support for enhancing the technology capactiy for these kinds of initiatives. Won’t help us a lot directly–but will make a more solid infrastructure to tap into.
I also discovered that James in IKIT is developing a whole website on a content management system somewhat like the moveable type platfrom that these blogs and the GRAIL project website (soon to be released) are runnning on.