Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Wednesday May 10, back in Indianapolis
Tuesday dawned another beautiful day, so I just headed on down the highway. After a few hours of mindless truck passing and roadkill avoiding I felt in need of a break. I had seen a sign on the side of the road advertising a car museum in a town called Auburn, so decided to have a look.
This turned out to be a fantastic display of some beautifully restored cars from the era of Indiana's prime as an auto manufacturing industry. The Auburn car company became the Cord car company, which ultimately also made the Duesenburg - hence the museum was called the A-C-D museum. Many of these cars were one-offs, or one of very few remaining, and all were restored to immaculate condition.
The building as well was a bit of a classic. The company's administration and design building, very much in the classic deco style, and has been painted up with all its highlights. I particularly liked the patterning on the floor. I never realised that there originally so many small, private car manufacturing companies in Indiana. One display showed the location of over 100 different companies in the 1930's in this state alone.
Today has been spent at a full-day meeting at the IUPUI (Indiana University, Purdue University Indianapolis - and we thought AUT University was a redundancy!). This was a project team meeting for the expansion of their ePort tool - the same open source one that Darren Cambridge who I met at George Mason University has been working on. This has been used for the last couple of years by some of the university's innovators
(mainly in the schools of Education and Engineering), but is now planned for extension into their TLC's (Themed Learning Communities). These are cohorts of 1st-year students - 19 of them altogether, each with 25 students and a bunch of instructors and advisors.
The meeting was interesting from the point of view of some of the underlying issues of a large-scale implementation. They are grappling with issues of student completion, assessment, publicity, staff training, executive acceptance, etc. Many of which sound very similar to the challenges we will face at AUT I'm sure.
So now I have dropped off my rental car - nearly 2500 miles later - and feel very relieved that all my transport can now be left in the hands of others. Tomorrow will be a very early start for a 6am flight to San Francisco via Chicago.
Tuesday dawned another beautiful day, so I just headed on down the highway. After a few hours of mindless truck passing and roadkill avoiding I felt in need of a break. I had seen a sign on the side of the road advertising a car museum in a town called Auburn, so decided to have a look.
This turned out to be a fantastic display of some beautifully restored cars from the era of Indiana's prime as an auto manufacturing industry. The Auburn car company became the Cord car company, which ultimately also made the Duesenburg - hence the museum was called the A-C-D museum. Many of these cars were one-offs, or one of very few remaining, and all were restored to immaculate condition.
The building as well was a bit of a classic. The company's administration and design building, very much in the classic deco style, and has been painted up with all its highlights. I particularly liked the patterning on the floor. I never realised that there originally so many small, private car manufacturing companies in Indiana. One display showed the location of over 100 different companies in the 1930's in this state alone.
Today has been spent at a full-day meeting at the IUPUI (Indiana University, Purdue University Indianapolis - and we thought AUT University was a redundancy!). This was a project team meeting for the expansion of their ePort tool - the same open source one that Darren Cambridge who I met at George Mason University has been working on. This has been used for the last couple of years by some of the university's innovators
(mainly in the schools of Education and Engineering), but is now planned for extension into their TLC's (Themed Learning Communities). These are cohorts of 1st-year students - 19 of them altogether, each with 25 students and a bunch of instructors and advisors.The meeting was interesting from the point of view of some of the underlying issues of a large-scale implementation. They are grappling with issues of student completion, assessment, publicity, staff training, executive acceptance, etc. Many of which sound very similar to the challenges we will face at AUT I'm sure.
So now I have dropped off my rental car - nearly 2500 miles later - and feel very relieved that all my transport can now be left in the hands of others. Tomorrow will be a very early start for a 6am flight to San Francisco via Chicago.
// posted by Mark Northover @ 1:53 PM 
