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Oscar Wilde |
We have reached the final day of the final week
of classes for the spring semester, 2006. Next
week is finals week, but intense activity will not
abate in our computer labs until the last day of
finals week. I can remember the beginning of
the semester. They were playing "We've Only
Just Begin" on the carillon located in the college
clock tower, and students were sprawled leisurely
over the rolling campus lawns. Now they are
playing "Whose Sorry Now" on the carillon, and
students are bearing down, white knuckled in the
campus computer labs, wishing, o wishing, they had
started that project sooner. What a difference
16 weeks makes...
Our show today features Palomar tech news and downloads, a Blackboard feature
of the week, "the course and account life cycle," a
teaching with technology segment from Haydn
discussing technology tips, where he gives valuable
tips and resources, my tech
talk topic on training, part 2, and the gizmo of the week,
a shocking feature, this week.
Palomar Tech and Download News
- AT Computer lab hours have been announced
for intersession and summer. For
intersession (May 22 - June 16) they will be M-F
8am-4pm; for summer (June 19 - August 11) they
will be M-T 8am-8pm, W-F 8am-4pm. There
will be no weekend hours until next fall.
The wireless labs will continue to roll
throughout the intersession and summer.
- We will be installing Horizon Wimba Live
Classroom and Horizon Wimba voice tools building
blocks on our test system next week, and if all
goes well, deploying them in the production
system for Summer semester. Blaine Morrow,
director of CCC Confer and CCC SAT has
funded access to these tools for the entire
community college system. With Live
Classroom, synchronous, online classes are now
generally possible, and with the voice tools,
new, richer experiences are available to the
online student. To find out more about
these tools, visit the Horizon Wimba web site at
http://www.horizonwimba.com.
- CCC Confer announced this week a free
webinar by Bob Bramucci, Dean of the Open Campus
at Riverside CC, who will speak on "What you
really need to know about Distance Education."
The webinar will be on May 17 from 2-3pm.
Click here for more information,
here to register, or call CCC Confer at
(760) 744-1150 ext. 1537.
- The monthly MS update was released this week
(second Tuesday of each month). This one
was much smaller than last month's gigantic
release, including:
- A security upgrade to Windows XP (KB913580)
- vulnerability patch;
- An update to MS OneNote (KB917148)
- bug fix;
- An update to the junk mail filter for
Outlook 2003 (KB916521)
- update;
- The usual Windows malicious software removal
tool (KB890830)
- update, tool autoruns once a month looking for
Blaster, Sasser and Mydoom type viruses.
- We expect to be updating the Blackboard
system on Saturday, May 20, provided our test
system results check out, to version 7.1.
If so, the system will not be available that
day. The plan is to integrate the new
database server that day also. David
previewed the new features of 7.1 on last week's
podcast (episode
16).
Upcoming Training Workshops
-
We will not be holding workshops through the
summer, so our next scheduled event will be a
pre-plenary session on Thursday, August 17 for
part-time instructors from 2-5pm, and then again
that evening. These sessions will be a
combined "Introduction to Blackboard" and
"What's new in Academic Technology" session,
which should be of great interest. We do
have a tentative training schedule for Fall
2006, which will be finalized next week.
If anyone wishes to see the tentative schedule
and make comments to
tgray@palomar.edu,
click here.
Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray
David's topic this week is "The Blackboard Life
Cycle of Courses and Accounts," spelling out for
faculty when courses and user accounts are created,
and how long they are kept around at Palomar
College.
Listen to this segment [mp3 - 2.22MB - Play time
= 9:43]
Teaching with Technology - Dr. Haydn Davis
Haydn's topic this week is "Teaching Tips."
He takes us to a couple of web sites that really
have good teaching tips, and remarks on the best of
them. The two sites he visits today are:
Here is a PDF version of his notes which contains
specific links to the topics he discussed:
"Teaching Techniques" and "The First Day"
Listen to this segment [mp3 - 3.97MB - Play time
= 17:22]
Tech-Talk-Topic
Technology Training
We have a tentative schedule for next fall,
which we will finalized next week. Click
the following link to read the PDF version of
our tentative schedule.
PDF version of tentative fall 2006 training
workshops
We would greatly appreciate any feedback on
the direction we are taking and suggestions for
other workshops. Contact
tgray@palomar.edu with comments. Our
focus is academic, so we do not offer workshops
that might be more appropriate for staff skills,
such as Excel, Access or Word.
The tentative schedule anticipates 41
different workshops in the fall, but more
importantly, each workshop will have a
Blackboard component containing:
- A workshop outline;
- PDF versions of all handouts;
- Screencasts illustrating key concepts;
- Illustrations and text explaining other
features;
- A list of external resources;
- An assessment component.
- Audio from the actual workshop, after it is
presented;
- A discussion forum to handle ongoing
questions.
The idea is that we will create a sort of "uber-Blackboard
training course, which will contain all the
documentation and instruction tools for each
workshop, and then auto-enroll all instructors
in that Blackboard course.
Furthermore, they content will be grouped by
general competency areas, according to the
categories I discussed last week:
- Technology Essentials
- Presentation Skills
- Document Preparation Skills
- Communication Skills
- Assessment
- Teaching and Learning Strategies
We have no illusions about how much work this
is, and do not expect to be completely ready by
the beginning of the fall semester, but we feel
that the effort must be made. Especially
fortuitous is the advent of Horizon Wimba Live
Classroom and Voice tools in our Blackboard
system, which will make construction of these
training vehicles much easier. If we do
the kind of job we would like, the materials can
serve as training material in themselves, so
that the in-person workshops--which will never
go away, and shouldn't--can serve as feeders to
the online materials.
Stay tuned over the summer. We will be
featuring some of the samples of our training
development work on the podcasts.
Listen to this segment [mp3 - 1.76MB - Play time
= 7:43]
Gizmo of the week
The
Shocking Lie Detector. Lies hurt.
Here is a combination lie-detector, punishment
machine brought to you by the same people who
manufacture the shocking roullette game.
"Here's how to play. Place your hand into the mould
on the device, making sure you make contact with all
the sensors, and strap yourself in. After resetting,
press the ‘analyser' button, and the detector takes
a reading of your vital statistics. Answer the truth
to three warm-up questions (e.g. your name and
gender) for the detector to regulate your readings.
Then the real questions begin... If you answer the
truth to your interrogator's questions, you'll be
fine. Lie, and you'll be punished with an electric
shock." The device sells for $34 and takes 3
AAA batteries.
"
Link:
The shocking lie detector
(Source:
Me, My coke and I)
Music
The
music for today's show was provided by
Magnatune.com, and is used through their
Creative Commons license for podcasts. Today's
album was
Lines Build Walls by
Ehren Starks. The music is described as
"new age [whatever that means these days] jazzy
piano and cello."
We
used tracks 1: "Lines Build Walls;" 3: "No One Will
Ever Know;" 5: "You Are The You;" 6: "No Silence
Please;" 7: "Run;" 4: "Paper Lights;" 10: "Tunnel
Systems;" and 11: "Leaving the Theatre."
Visit
magnatune and reward them for their generosity,
and if you like this album, buy it. Magnatune is not evil!
"Happiness is
nothing more than good health and a bad memory."
--Albert Schweitzer
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for May 12, 2006 - Episode 17
