My students and I have been working on shifting from our old HTML site to our new blog-driven website for NeoVox. The latter is still under-contstruction, so I’d appreciate any advice you might have. I’ve written about NeoVox here before and in Kairos, when it was going by its previous name, Uniplanet. The originating concept for the magazine was to develop a site for developing mutual understanding among college students at several colleges around the world by having them collaborate on the publication of the magazine.

I have to say that it has proven largely impossible. We had several sites that we were supporting, sending them several thousand dollars a year. The idea was that they could use the money to help integrate the magazine’s production into their curriculum.  They didn’t. Once the money dried up, they disappeared. In addition, over time our institutional priorities have changed, making us see the magazine in different ways. It’s getting harder to collaborate.

Worst of all, though Cortland spills a lot of ink over the idea of "internationalizing" its curriculum, no support has come our way, even though we were doing what they wanted to do and had been doing it successfully for several years. The bottom line is that while its great to work with students in Africa, Eastern Europe, or South America, those students aren’t paying tuition to SUNY, and they aren’t likely to, either. In fact, as my example points out, we have to pay them.

What NeoVox requires are students registered in courses at Cortland related to producing the magazine; courses scheduled in the magazine’s dedicated lab. Of course the project director and I have spent the better part of the last year trying to build international partnerships and write grants for expanding the program, only to have those rugs essentially pulled out from beneath us.

So…plans continue.

The new plan is two-fold. First, concentrate on bringing more courses into the project. We have already scheduled twice as many courses in our lab next semester as last semester. Rather than focusing on building readership, we are going to focus on making magazine production into a broader learning experience for Cortland students.  There’s a lot to be learned in writing about current events for a general audience, researching online, and collaborating with designers.

Second, I’m thinking about trying to expand the program space horizontally. That is, if the project falls under the category of an experiment in electronic pedagogy, then perhaps the lab could be used more broadly for that purpose. There are faculty sprinkled intermitantly across the campus, teaching with new media. It would be useful to have a centralized site where their teaching could take place, where innovative technologies could be located, and so forth. It would hopefully lead to cross-fertilization between faculty. It would also be easier to publicize and potentially fund than stand-alone programs.

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