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June 21-25, 2010, MPICT held its 2nd annual Summer Faculty
Development Week at the City College of San Francisco Ocean
Campus. 72 faculty members from ICT related programs at 31
community colleges in four states (California, Oregon, Nevada
and Hawaii) attended. Additionally, 8 community college
institutional IT managers attended MPICT’s first IT Managers
Workshop.
Faculty Development Week is an intensive, 4.5 day event
designed to help ICT faculty stay current on emerging
technologies, learn to teach new material that is current and
relevant, and learn to use new teaching practices and tools.
Information and Storage Management:
The volume of stored digital information is growing
exponentially, and digital information is increasingly
“mission critical” for all types of organizations.
Technologies and practices for storing, managing, securing,
backing up, restoring and assuring digital information are
evolving quickly, and competent people to implement and manage
digital storage are in high demand and well compensated.
Digital storage is currently inadequately addressed by many
community college programs.
Faculty in the Information and Storage Management track
learned how to become part of the
EMC Academic Alliance and
teach its entry level course “Information and Storage
Management,” an overview of the storage field and its many
technologies, like RAID, SAN, Fibre Channel, NAS, and iSCSI.
The course was taught by Jeff Brown, Senior Technical
Instructor at EMC.
Jeff Brown (bottom right) and Storage Faculty Students
VMware vSphere (Virtualization):
Virtualization is ICT technology to replace many computer
resources dedicated to specific functions with fewer computer
resources shared by many different functions. Virtualization
is at the strategic intersection of 3 major ICT trends: ICT
cost management, cloud computing and Green IT.
In these tough economic times, all kinds of organizations are
under pressure to reduce ICT capital and operating costs.
Virtualization is a ripe method to do that, and it is being
implemented rapidly by many organizations for that purpose.
Cloud computing moves away from many high-powered computing
resources at the edge of a client-server architecture to thin
clients at the edge of the network and consolidated and
centrally managed computing resources hosted in data centers
or outsourced. Virtualization is a key strategy for
cost-effectively implementing data center cloud based
services.
Globally, 2% of greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to ICT.
A key way to reduce those emissions is to reduce the number of
computing resources in use, the space required for them and
their cooling and electricity requirements. Virtualization is
a key method for addressing reduction of greenhouse gas
emissions attributed to ICT.
VMware is a market leader in the virtualization space. Faculty
in the VMware vSphere track received training that costs about
$3,000 in the private market, received a voucher for
certification testing, got free course materials, learned to
teach the course and learned how to become part of the VMware
IT Academy program, which endeavors to help public education
deliver needed virtualization knowledge and skills to the ICT
workforce.
Timur Mirzoev from Georgia Southern University taught the
course.
Steve Hailey, President and CEO of the
Cybersecurity
Institute, provided a very dynamic and engaging week of
intensive Digital Forensics education and hands-on
experiences.
Computer forensic services are in ever-increasing demand. As
all kinds of organizations and individuals increasingly rely
on ICT for communications, research and various activities,
evidence of those activities is increasingly found in computer
or digital resources – and the need for qualified experts to
find, document and certify digital evidence is increasingly
growting. People with digital forensics skills are well paid
and occupied.
Steve Hailey (2nd from left on top) and Digital Forensics
Faculty Students
At last year’s Faculty Development Week, there was a track on
Apple iPhone programming. This year, David Wolber, Computer
Science professor at the University of San Francisco taught
faculty Google Android Mobile Programming with
AppInventor.
The Android platform is taking off in the mobile device
marketplace, and there are many new opportunities for
application development in this environment.
David Wolber (3rd from right on bottom) with Android Faculty
Students
Brian Ladd, Professor of Computer Science at SUNY Potsdam in
New York, taught faculty how to use a game-centric approach to
teaching introductory computer science and gave faculty copies
of his newly released book, Introductory Programming with
Simple Games. Hands-on elements made use of the Freely
Available Networked Game Engine (FANG), and discussions
included game-based assignments, designing and managing
open-ended assignments, and evaluating game development
projects.
Brian Ladd (2nd from right on top) and Game Development
Faculty Students
MPICT’s Michael McKeever, who at last year’s Faculty
Development Week taught Cisco Security for the first time to
Cisco Academy faculty anywhere in the world, this year worked
intensively to develop a dozen new faculty members in the
MPICT region to deliver courses using MPICT’s Hybrid Course
Delivery Model.
In this model, faculty deliver in-person instruction to
students in the classroom, while simultaneously and
interactively engaging students online using
Elluminate, which
is available free to California community college faculty with
value added services by
CCC Confer. This powerful and
versatile learning environment allows students to collaborate
in the classroom and remotely, view class archives on the
Internet or via downloads to mobile devices, work on real
equipment in groups, integrate any application into classroom
experiences, and have interactive online office hours, in
which students and faculty can log in to real equipment
together and get “unstuck” on lab exercises.
MPICT is working on a long-term Distributed ICT Education
effort, in which we can improve ICT education in the region by
justifying more specialized and advanced ICT courses and serve
more students better by offering courses from any school to
students throughout the region.
Faculty in this track received Moderator training by an expert
at Elluminate, CCC Confer expert training, training on how to
effectively deliver hybrid ICT courses using MPICT’s Hybrid
Course Delivery Model Toolkit, two days of hands-on practice
and experience and left certified as Elluminate Moderators.
Michael McKeever (3rd from right on top) and New Hybrid Course
Delivery Experts
Tim Ryan, City College of San Francisco Network Manager and
MPICT Co-PI, led a Thursday workshop with 8 community college
IT Managers to work toward institutional IT department best
practices in supporting ICT technical programs. ICT academic
programs have much greater technical needs than other academic
departments. How can colleges best support them?
The meeting offered a rare opportunity to build community
between IT departments at different community colleges, and
lively discussions led to a very productive exchange of ideas,
connections, quality practices and collaboration
opportunities. ICT faculty provided input into the
discussions, and this event should lead to good results in
improving ICT education in the region by improving the way
academic ICT departments and institutional IT departments
interact.
Tim Ryan (bottom right) and the IT Managers’ Roundtable
A main goal of Faculty Development Week is to create community
among ICT educators in the region and promote the productive
exchange of ideas, practices, contacts, subject matter
expertise, curriculum and programs. Juniper Networks hosted a
mixer Wednesday evening, where people socialized. Breakfast
and lunch together were other opportunities for community
building.
Great Connections and Interactions at Meals
Every classroom was in a computer lab, and everyone had lots
of opportunities for hands-on engagement and practice.
 Each morning, at breakfast, the instructors presented to
everyone what was going on in individual tracks, so everyone
had at least a high level understanding of what the others
were learning and doing. Friday morning, there was an open
mike, when people shared information and ideas with the larger
group. For example, Sam Bowne, who taught last summer’s
Ethical Hacking and Network Defense track, provided updates on
IPv6; John Gonder of Las Positas College shared some cool
things he is doing, like using Camtasia for class content
generation; and Aaron Tanaka of Honolulu Community College
described a unique collaboration with UH – West Oahu, in which
students can earn a baccalaureate degree from the University
of Hawaii, while doing 3 years of that education at a
community college.
 Because professional development and travel resources have all
but disappeared in this difficult economic climate, MPICT
provided travel assistance to qualified attending faculty
members.
MPICT is grateful to City College of San Francisco for making
the Pierre Coste dining room and various lab facilities
available for the event – and to Dr. Alice Murillo, CCSF Vice
Chancellor of Academic Affairs for welcoming MPICT’s guests to
San Francisco.
MPICT’s Executive Director, James Jones, was forced to
apologize to everyone for his false promises of no rain, and
MPICT PI Pierre Thiry compensated to attendees by overseeing a
raffle at the close of the event.
Community college educators left Faculty Development Week with
great new knowledge and skills. MPICT is excited to learn how
they take that back to their home colleges and implement it to
offer new courses, enhance existing courses, teach in new
ways, improve student experiences and outcomes and have a
positive impact on ICT education and workforce development in
the region.
Thank you to all who contributed toward this success!
Back to Q2 2010
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