Early Development
gnovis began in fall 2000 as a student-organized project with its mission being to use the Internet as a forum for CCT student’s work. The launch ceremony featured noted multimedia panelists, including wired.com’s Washington bureau chief Declan McCullough. The panelists noted that the task of creating a periodical publication with such a broad content area posed major challenges. However, the students and faculty remained committed to the value of maintaining a trans-disciplinary journal and decided to continue the project.
Since its formation in 2000, gnovis has been continually evolving, challenged every year by the need to balance the inspired ideas of a new staff with the original vision of the gnovis project.
Growing Pains
The earliest version of the gnovis website was rather like an e-zine, featuring a number of journalistic panels, a showcase of student work, faculty publications, and syndicated 3rd party news feeds pertaining to CCT.
In early 2002, gnovis relaunched its website, temporarily, to prepare for a new emphasis on scholarly articles.
In the summer of 2002, gnovis received a boost when The Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) provided the project with temporary development resources in exchange for a section dedicated to innovation in teaching and learning, which was featured prominently on the next website, which launched in November, 2002 and persisted through August, 2007.
This version of the site continued the prior emphasis on scholarly articles, and attempted to diversify gnovis footprint by incorporating multimedia projects.
In early 2004, gnovis introduced gnovisual and gnodes, to further broaden gnovis’ appeal. gnovisual was a separate website for the presentation of creative work by CCT students, and gnodes was intended for shorter, informal papers. Neither of these projects gained much momentum, but laid an important conceptual foundation for the future.
gnovis Today
In August 2007, seeking to update the gnovis website to reflect half-a-decade of evolution of the web (including the Web 2.0 revolution), gnovis relaunched its website yet again using Drupal. The current site runs on WordPress and was relaunched in 2011. gnovis hopes this more flexible, extensible platform will empower future gnovis staffs to continue to evolve the site and keep up with the rest of the Internet.
