Today we have news of downloads, news of coming
technology, and even an advocacy issue: net
neutrality. We have also upcoming @ONE and
Microsoft training opportunities. David will
speak on controlling Blackboard personal
information. Haydn will speak on evaluating
the quality of online courses. My
tech-talk-topic will be on the new features in IE7
Beta 3. And finally, forgotten last week, the gizmo
of the week week--since the week of the 4th of July
is coming up and last week we had midsummer day--the coolest
barbecue grill ever.
Palomar Tech and Download News
-
IE7 Beta 3 is now publicly available for
download. Remember, this is BETA software,
and not for installation on mission-critical (or
even mission-useful) computers. See the
tech-talk-topic below for more.
-
The National Educational Computing Conference
will be held in San Diego July 5-7.
Click here for full information.
Online registration is closed, but onsite
registration will open July 4 at the San Diego
Convention Center.
-
Microsoft has announced its collaboration with
the
University of California and
University of Toronto libraries as part of
the Microsoft Live Book Search program, opening
soon.
Click here for full information. Live
Book Search is not yet available, but should be
soon. These great libraries have agreed to
provide out of copyright materials for the
system. Live Book Search is part of the
Open Content Alliance,
"...the collaborative efforts of a group
of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and
governmental
organizations from around the world that
will help build a permanent archive of
multilingual digitized text and multimedia
content." The OCA is part of the
Internet Archive. This system is not
live yet, but only just not live. Expect a
quantum leap soon is the availability and
usability of public domain materials in a non-wiki
environment.
-
Microsoft has announced that
Office 2007 will be late. Until this
week we had been expecting a release date in
October, 2006. Now MS says it will be
"broadly available" in January--most likely
released in concert with the broad availability
of Windows Vista. "Feedback on quality and
performance" from Beta testers was sited as the
reason. Microsoft shares jumped 21 cents
on the news!
-
The "Net
neutrality" effort was rejected by the US
Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation
Committee this Wednesday, much to our distress.
It was an effort to prevent "...telephone and
cable companies from providing better service
and prices to preferred customers."
Click here for the story. This is very
disturbing news, and the future of net
neutrality is in doubt. Supporters of net
neutrality argue that "...service providers
could give preferential treatment to business
partners or use pricing and access limits to
discriminate between Web sites and other
Internet users." Standf by for the end of
bit torrent, uTube and allofmp3--except in their
approved and licensed versions. For
Google's take,
click here. We should all be
concerned.
Training Opportunities
-
July 10 - Aug. 4 "Teaching Online" free online class from @ONE,
this is an introduction to online teaching with
emphasis on pedagogic issues.
- Of special interest should be the
facilitated online course they are offering "Introduction
to Teaching with Blackboard 6.0" from July
24-August 11.
-
July 24-Aug 18 "Internet Research Strategies"
will also be offered by @ONE.
- Microsoft is offering free eLearning on the
Office 2007 family of products through their
eLearning Portal. You can choose from
any or all of 10 different eLearning courses and
will be granted free 90-day access. Course
on the new Access, Excel, InfoPath, OneNote,
Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Visio, Groove, and an
overall course on the Office 2007 interface are
offered.
Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray
This week Dave covers the personal information
settings in Blackboard.
On your My Palomar tab, look to the far left of
the screen:
Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time =
7:07]
Teaching with Technology - Dr. Haydn Davis
Haydn's topic today is "Evaluating the quality of
online courses." He takes off from where he
left off last week discussion "How to create an
exemplary online course," and discusses some
criticism he received and some of the lessons to be
taken from the criticism. He goes on to
discuss two valuable resources:
Notes from Haydn's presentation [pdf - 12K]
Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time =
9:11]
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray
My topic today is the new IE 7 Beta 3 install,
and IE 7 in general. I downloaded and
installed IE7b3 this morning--or rather tried to,
hit a snag--of my own making, I'm afraid--and then
finally succeeded. That is all by the way, but
the MS help along the way was questionable.
In any event, there's lots to like in the new IE7
version. The following graphic summarizes:
To explain, here are the highlights:
Tabbed browsing--finally, you don't have to use
Firefox (with its lack of support for W3C standards)
or the clunky MSN toolbar to get fast tabbed groups
and tabbed browsing. It works great and has
been enhanced with easy tabbed groups in the
favorites and a Quick Tabs button (
)
that shows a thumbnail of all current tabbed
sites--for those who really, really like tabbed
browsing. Another nice touch is the ability to
right-click on any link on a web page and 'Open in
new tab.' New in Beta 3 is the ability to drag
the tab order around, a very welcome feature.
An optimized design on the menu bar and within
the tools is great. Less desktop space is
sacrificed to the interface. The favorites
center is a good example, with icon headers and the
combination of native RSS, Favorites and History
view all on one easily tucked away panel:
The "classic menus" are finally gone, but easily
restored by right-clicking the toolbar.
It is now simple to set up a tab group and add it
to your favorites, and even simpler to access.
Printing is much improved. Shrink-to-fit
printing, and advanced print preview have been added
that eliminates the long-standing problem of cropped
pages when printing. Full-page and full-width
views are now available in print preview, ala
Acrobat. A crop tool would be welcome for when
I actually WANT cropped printing! Not all CSS
is honored even yet in the final printout.
The search box can be configured for any of a
large number of search providers, including Google,
Yahoo, AOL and all the major Microsoft competitors.
Results are reported natively from that search
provider.
The 'send to email' feature has been added back
to the "page" dropdown. It had been eliminated
in Beta 2, along with 'edit in FrontPage,' view
source and other features that made IE so popular.
New on the page menu, and much overdue, is the Zoom
feature, which allows zooming of the current page to
presets, up to 400% or custom to any size.
Horizontal scrolling of the zoomed page has been
fixed in Beta 3.
Native RSS (all right, pace Firefox users) is
now also very prominent in IE7. The feed
button lights up on a page that contains RSS feeds
(provided the page author has supplied the correct
meta tag on the page) and subscription is within the
browser and accomplished with 1-click ease.
Simply clicking on the RSS button renders the
formerly unreadable XML elegantly, for quick
scanning. It works well with all versions of
RSS and with Atom.
This is a brief summary of the new features.
There is a great deal to talk about regarding the
new security features too, but that's a topic for
another show. To get an exhaustive but
accessible summary, download the
IE7 technology overview.
Resources
Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time =
11:18]
Gizmo of the week - Here's the one that got
away last week:
The
345 horsepower, 5.7-litre HEMI V-8 engine powered
Barbecue. It's the Chrysler Group's
one-of-a-kind barbecue, that can cook 240 HEMI-dogs
in 3 minutes, and is covered by over 330 square feet
of stainless steel. I originally saw this in
an article about the
10 Coolest BBQ Grills at
neatorama.com.
A runner up was
Barbee Q. Piglet,
a
pig-shaped grill designed for slow cooking pork, but
selecting the Chrysler-powered grill was an easy
pick as best-of-show. If you are the outdoorsy
type--and who isn't who loves to grill--you will
lust after the
Nexo Outdoor grill ("Hand made in Denmark," no
less, which probably means unaffordable). It
deserves an honorable mention.
(Source:
neatorama.com)
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 "Stereo
Mash Up" by
Burning Babylon. "Burning Babylon is a one man
dub reggae project from Boston, Massachusetts.
Created by Slade Anderson, the heavyweight rhythms
of Burning Babylon's sound are firmly anchored in
the 1970's Jamaican roots tradition, but with an ear
for the neo-dub stylings of the present day."
Dub/Boston? Now you know.
We
used tracks 1: "7 Nine Skank;" 10: "Trouble Dub;" 2:
"Addis Red Dub;" 9: "1500 Tons;" 10: "Rude Boots;"
8: "Heavy Dread;" 4: "Midnight to Six;" 13: "Senhaja;"
6: "Soundshank Rockers."
Visit
magnatune and reward them for their generosity,
and if you like this album, buy it. Magnatune is not evil!
"Finance is the
art of passing money from hand to hand until it
finally disappears." ~
Robert Sarnoff
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for June 30, 2006 - Episode 23
