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NCREN Community Day — 2016 Highlights

NCREN Community Award Nominee Bob Klein Presents
NCREN Community Award Nominee Bob Klein Presents

DELTA was well represented at NCREN Community Day, as a number of DELTA team members attended and provided conference presentations this year. The event took place November 3-4, 2016, at the Hillsborough Street DoubleTree Suites hotel, near NC State University.

NC State and DELTA work closely with MCNC & NCREN. NC State’s primary internet services come to the campus via NCREN fiber, and DELTA’s Moodle and Mediasite services are hosted in the MCNC Data Center.

Community Day is an annual event that began in the 1990’s and draws NCREN partners from across the educational spectrum. Highlights this year involved DELTA’s Media Production Services Video Communications unit.

Members of the VCS Instructional Media Production unit presented Fundamentals of Video Production for the Cell Phone Users of the World, a seminar on how to use cell phone video and simple video editing tools to create instructional video. John Gordon led the seminar with the assistance of Jeff Robinson, Arthur Earnest, Todd Buker and Michael Castro. The presentation included a demo reel of VCS production work, which was frankly stunningly beautiful. This team does top-notch professional work!  They did an excellent job with the seminar too, which was very well received by participants.

VCS Infrastructure Coordinator Bob Klein gave an excellent presentation on his work, as he was a finalist for the NCREN Community Choice Award. Bob was one of only three finalists, out of nominees from all across the state. The award went to the Vice President/CIO of Surry Community College. Of course, we wanted to see Bob get it, but being in the running against a CIO shows the high regard in which Bob’s outstanding service to NC State is held, by both NC State clients and his peers in the NCREN community.

Attendees from DELTA Media Production Services included Tony Pearson, Bob Wilkerson, Joe Gray, Peter Watson and Tim Hinds.

Topics covered in breakout sessions included broadband expansion in North Carolina; Federated ID Management; digital records preservation; health and safety information issues; security concerns with “the Internet of things”; and various use cases.

Perhaps the most enjoyable use case was a brief talk by a Roanoke Rapids high school sophomore who attended classes online while undergoing chemo treatment for leukemia. The now healthy young man spoke of how beneficial it was for him to stay engaged educationally and socially via IP, when his white blood count was too low (from the chemo) to be exposed to a lot of people. It was an inspiring talk, and a good reminder that the kind of work we do here in DELTA makes a positive difference in the lives of others.