On August 1, UIT’s Spark suite of communication and collaboration tools was recognized as the winner of the 2007 Campus Technology Innovator award in the category of Social/Community Networking.
Tufts was one of 338 institutions submitting nominations for the 13 categories in the competition. You can read a case study about Spark in the August issue of Campus Technology.. Students, faculty, staff and others in the Tufts community can use this award-winning tool to create blogs, wikis, or asynchronous discussions with Spark, as well as syndicate podcasts from the site.
The article describes the goal of Spark as encouraging “authentic and novel academic connections across the campus community.” With the guidance of project lead David Grogan, Manager of UIT’s Curricular Technology Group, the team of developers chose the Movable Type blog system from Six Apart, the Confluence wiki system from Atlassian, the JForum discussion tool, and designed a podcast publication utility.
After creating a Web interface for the first four tools in the suite, the team launched the first version of Spark in September 2006.This summer the team is implementing a “variety of enhancements” that will increase usability and “make content more visible, to encourage discovery and connection-making.”
We invite you to check Spark out for yourself at https://spark.uit.tufts.edu
