Our
technology news this week involves the new TurnItIn
trial at Palomar college, the release of Firefox 2,
Windows Desktop Search 3, Darwin online, a call for presentations from CENIC and
the CETC, a call for big spenders from Jimmy Wales, the
founder of Wikipedia,
and a couple of product 5th birthday parties. We also
have news of training opportunities at Palomar and
beyond. David's Blackboard Feature of the Week
is title "Word Up," having to do with the Blackboard
glossary tool. Haydn has a Teaching with Technology segment titled
"I want to do it, but will they cheat?"
about testing online. My Tech Talk
Topic deals with how to subscribe to an RSS feed in
IE7. Our gizmo this week solves the world's
number one technology problem.
Palomar Tech and Download News
Last week we said we intended to implement the
TurnItIn anti-plagiarism system beginning this
week (10/23) and we did. It is now available
to deploy via Blackboard. We have created a
screen video on just how it works at:
Firefox 2.0 was officially released October 24
(last Tuesday) to little fanfare. This is
about a month ahead of the expected release date and
was prompted, it is speculated, by the early release
of Internet Explorer 7 in the previous week.
In fact the only real news related to the release
was that the Microsoft IE7 developers team sent the
Firefox 2 developers team a congratulatory cake on
the release. No word was received on stomach
cramps or vomiting from the Mozilla crowd.
Windows
Desktop Search 3.0 RTW for Windows XP is also
now available for download. The actual title
is Desktop Search 3.0 RTW, which means, I think,
"Release to Web," but is not explained on the
download site. The download requires genuine
Windows validation (KB917013).
Cambridge University announced this week the
re-release of the
complete works of Charles Darwin online--a
collection of over 50,000 pages and 40,000 images.
This is not a new site, but a much enlarged site.
We, at Palomar, have a set of
world-class anthropology tutorials authored by
Dr. Dennis O'Neil, and Dr. O'Neil points out that he
has long linked to this site. Now, however, a
great deal of ancillary materials have been added.
The
site features a complete collection of Darwin's
works, in html and also scanned, for side-by-side
comparison; a full search tool; never before
published transcriptions of some of Darwin's
holographic notebooks, including the Galapagos field
notebooks (made from a transcription of a microfilm
copy made in the 1960s because the original was
stolen at some time during the 1980s--the Darwin
trust is hoping the news will prompt its return) ;
the "most comprehensive bibliography of works
written by Darwin ever published;" a catalog of
Darwin's hand-written manuscripts; translations of
Darwin's works in Danish, German and Russian;
ancillary Darwin works, such as contemporary
memoirs, reviews, images, and so on; and, especially
near and dear to us, "Audio Darwin, Darwin's works
available as free mp3 downloads."
Unfortunately, the mp3 files were created with
text-to-speech software, not by means of a human
reading the text, so the quality is probably what
most people would consider unusable.
Click here for a sample. With all of those
students trooping in and out of the University each
year, couldn't they have launched a program to
record 10 pages each from the works of Darwin, and
thereby rendered usable mp3 versions?
CENIC
(Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in
California) is making a call for presentations for
their 11th annual conference to be held March 12-14
in San Diego (at the Marriott in La Jolla, to be
exact). "The
CENIC 2007 Program Committee is seeking
presentations, demonstrations, and panel discussions
focused on network-enabled applications and research
related to the 2007 conference theme, Making Waves...Past
topics have included optical networking, teragrid
computing, network security, implementing IPv6,
end-to-end connectivity, quality of service, last
mile solutions, wireless technology, collaborative
music and dance, and collaborative medicine."
Click here for more information.
A call for presentations is also being made for
the Online Teaching Conference, to be held June
11-12 at Ohlone College, Fremont California, and is
being sponsored by several of the
CETC projects.
Click here for more information or to apply.
Thanks
to Chris Norcross for this one: Jimmy Wales,
founder of
Wikipedia, posted last week
a request for proposals from the wiki community
on what to purchase with $100,000,000. He has
in mind copyrights or licenses. What licenses
could/should be purchased and then made freely
available to all? "Dream big. Imagine
there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights to be made available under a free
license. What would you like to see purchased
and released under a free license?" You can
find a not-so-serious discussion
here. (Picture at right by
Gus Freedman, licensed by Wikimedia foundation).
Google announced the availability of custom
search engines. Go to
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ and design your
own, then place the custom search box on your web
page.
The iPod
turns 5 this week. The little device that
transformed the world of portable gadgets has been
around half a decade now, and goes on selling like
none other. Watch the video via YouTube of
Steve Jobs' announcement of the release of the
original iPod (9:12):
At the time, there was no market leader in
digital music, but the iPod changed all that.
Now 70% of new US cars come with iPod docs, and they
sell these little things at the rate of around 35-40
million units per year. A thousand songs is
what the original held (10GB), which seems laughable
now. The original interface was via firewire,
long ago abandoned, along with the early click
wheels which have also been greatly modified.
The original price was $499. The iPod saved
Apple computer, which was on the verge of
disappearing at the time or its introduction, and
has become a cultural icon that has transformed the
workout and the drive to work. It is so
desirable, in fact, that the new
red iPod is being used as a charitable come-on
in the
global fight agains AIDS.
Guess
who else is turning 5 this week? Windows XP.
OS years are more akin to dog years, and this OS has
lived longer than it should. Not that it
hasn't been, on the whole, great. Windows
Vista is going to be released to manufacturing in
the next two weeks and the question is, "What took
so long?" We can't wait for Vista, but its
worth noting that XP took over the OS market very
rapidly, and will linger for some time.
According to
ars technica XP is running on 75% of the world's
computers, Windows 2000 on 10%, Windows 98 on 8%,
and Mac OS on 3%. It will probably remain the
dominant OS for some time, especially in light of
the success of Windows XP Tablet PC and Media Center
editions. Microsoft is even working on an SP3
for XP which will be released (at least
it is planned to be released) in 2008. We
still get calls from people running Windows 95, so
it may not go away all that fast. Anyway, we
are moving on as soon as we can, but its been great.
Happy birthday XP, but not too many more.
Training Opportunities
Academic Technology Training
We
will be presenting the following workshops next
week:
On Wednesday, November 1, from 2-4pm in
LL-111 Haydn Davis was to present "Creating
Surveys in Blackboard,"
but it has been canceled.
Register for all Academic Technology workshops
through the
Professional Development web site.
Click here to access our entire training
schedule,
here to access the new "competencies"
approach to our workshops, and other training
information.
@ONE will be hosting a lunch'n'learn seminar on
"Two approaches to strengthen computer literacy
skills," Nov. 6 from 12-1pm.
Click here for information and to register.
@ONE has also announced a new session
for "Introduction to Online Teaching and
Learning," a Multi-Week Online Course with
Joshua Stern to Start Monday October 30 and
running through Friday, December 1. Sign up
right away to reserve your space at:
On Monday, Oct. 30, at 10AM (PT) IMS will be
holding a webinar on "The effective use of
assessments in higher education."
Click here for details and registration.
The IMS is the organization that created
interoperability standards for elearning systems.
Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray
Word Up
Dave discusses the Blackboard glossary tool this
week. He describes the three ways to get words
into the glossary and points out its limitations.
"I want to do it, but will they cheat?
Some Guidelines for Instructors who Test Online"
This segment is about
testing online using Blackboard. Haydn covers
suggested guidelines for online instructors who might want to test online, but
have concerns about student cheating.
See
an index of previous "Teaching with
Technology" segments.
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray
RSS Feeds in IE7
Finally, RSS feeds can be subscribed to and read
natively in Internet Explorer. Firefox has
long had this feature, but Internet Explorer has
finally caught up. This piece will assume you
know nothing about RSS, news feeds, or receiving
podcasts, for that matter, and will first explain
what they are, then explain how to view, subscribe
and manage them in IE7. Finally, not to leave
the more advanced user out, we will describe how to
export your feed subscriptions from your current
news reader and import those feeds
into IE using an OPML (Outline Processor Markup
Language) file. Beginners can forget this
part.
What does RSS stand for? It depends on who
you talk to, but for our purposes we will go with
the widely accepted convention "Really Simple
Syndication." Surely you've seen all those
little orange buttons (called chicklets) all over the Internet that say
XML, or RSS, or ATOM, or POD or just a little orange
thing with curved lines on it, like this:
First of all, why are there so many of them?
As always, it has to do with a proliferation of
standards. There are two basic types of RSS
feeds, RSS and Atom. For the purposes of our
discussion, they are the same. Podcasts are
also just an RSS feed with an audio enclosure, but
more on that later.
Linked to these buttons is the subscription URL
for an RSS feed. The subscription URL points
to an XML file, somewhere on some web server, that
contains a description of the feed, it's
author, name, description, copyright, an entry for
each item in the feed, date and time stamped, and
any enclosures each item may have (like audio files,
which makes the feed a "podcast."
Don't worry about all the technicalities.
The simple version of this story is that an RSS feed
(often called a "news" feed) is a two part affair:
one part is the XML file mentioned above that
contains headlines and pointers to the web address
of the news stories, and the other part is a program
that will check these XML files for you, once you
have "subscribed" to them, and let you know when new
items have been added. For standard RSS feeds
these programs are called "news aggregators;" for
podcasts, they are called "podcatchers." They
do the same thing, except podcatchers have
specialized functions for manipulating the audio
attachments to the feed.
Now, back to IE7. In the past (with version
IE6) when you clicked on one of these chicklets you
would see a screen of incomprehensible
gibberish--the actual XML tags contained in the XML
file for the news feed. For IE6 the only
reason the chicklets existed was so that you could
right-click them, copy their subscription address,
and paste it into your news aggregator--a process
called "subscription." With IE7, when you
click on a chicklet, you get nicely formatted text
(the contents of the news item), with a link to the
article itself and an offer to add a subscription to
the news feed to your browser, like this:
Click the "Subscribe to this feed" link, and you
will see the following dialog:
If you have already created a folder structure,
the drop-down in the "Create in:" field will contain
a list of your folders, but because you are a
beginner at this, you will not yet have created a
folder structure. (You can create a folder for
your feed at this time, by clicking the "New folder"
button). Click the Subscribe button to
subscribe.
Now, open your list of feeds by clicking the
little star next to the tabs at the top of your
browser:
Now click the "Feeds" button in the fold-out
panel to see a list of your feeds (notice that
Favorites, Feeds, and History all share this area in
IE7)
A list of all the feeds you subscribe to will
appear. They will only be organized in folders
if you have organized them that way, which is
usually something you do not get around to doing
until you have subscribed to a number of feeds.
You will see the feed you subscribed to at the
bottom of the list (unless you put it in a folder as
noted above). Notice that when you hover your
cursor over the feed title a little refresh icon
appears on the right. Click the refresh icon
to force an update of the latest feed items.
By the way, to create a folder, right-click a
feed title and choose "Create New Folder" from the
popup menu.
Feeds and folders can be arranged by dragging
them around.
The default period set for refreshing feeds in
IE7 is every day. This is often too long a
period. You can cotrol the overall default
period on all feeds by selecting Tools > Internet
Options > Content > Settings button:
The feed setting dialog, as you can see, also
contains other configurations. Unread feeds
are displayed in bold, read feeds in regular type.
If you get tired of hearing the whoop IE makes when
detecting a feed, you turn it off with this dialog.
You can also configure the refresh rate on
individual feeds by clicking the feed properties
link when viewing the feed within IE:
Note also that you can select "Automatically
download attached files." Any sort of document
can be attached to a feed item, so be careful with
this.
IE7 will automatically download audio enclosures
to podcasts if you subscribe to them, and all you
need to do to play them is click on the audio link
right in IE:
To get rid of an RSS feed or podcast from IE7,
simply click its title and choose delete.
What if you're an old pro and have a set of feeds
already developed in a news aggregator program?
It is simple to import them into IE7 if the news
aggregator you are using supports exporting your
feeds as an OPML file. Most do.
First, login to your news aggregator and export
your feeds list as an opml file. Then, open
IE7 and choose File > Import and Export... > Import
Feeds > Navigate to the exported opml file and
choose to import it. The file hierarchy you
had created will be retained. The opml file is
a simple XML file, so if you need to edit it to
eliminate some feeds, it is easy to do.
One more nice little feature in IE7. If you
organize your feeds into folders, then hover your
mouse over the folder in the feed list, you will see
an arrow appear next to the folder. Click the
arrow and it will open all the feeds on tabs in the
browser. Nice.
See
an index of previous "Tech
Talk Topics" segments.
Gizmo of the week
Worlds Number One Technology Problem Solved
Forget
about the big social issues. What's the number
one problem facing everyone in the technological
world? Lack of standards? No. Pace
of technological change? No. Over glut
of Paris Hilton videos? Hardly. The
biggest problem is, and you all know this, "I can't
find the @#$% remote!!!" No more. Now,
from Brookstone you can purchase the NEW Super-Sized
TV Remote (Brookstone
sku #538744). "With giant buttons, this
extra-large remote is easy to use and impossible to
lose. Simple to program, this 6-in-1 remote controls
your TV, VCR, DVD player, satellite, cable and
auxiliary A/V device. It even features
glow-in-the-dark buttons, so you can easily find the
remote in the dark. Features 296 codes for most
popular brands of A/V devices. Uses two AA
batteries" (batteries not included). This
behemoth measures 5" x 11" x 1". No word (even
in the product manual, which I read cover to cover)
about its weight, which is not without interest, it
would seem to me. Maybe gramps can build
granny a solid oak podium to hold the thing next to
her recliner.
Now, anyone who has attempted to program one of
these "universal remote" devices knows that they
will indeed control some, but not all, functions on
some, but usually not all of your devices. I'm
here to tell you you will never need just one
remote. I have six I need to keep track of.
The advantage of this one is its super size.
The solution, as I see it, is to place velcro loops
on the back of this one, and little strips of velcro
hooks on your other remotes, and attach all the
other remotes to the mother ship, sort of like ticks
on a dog. Then, unless you live in one of
those Winchester mystery houses with huge, oversized
furniture, never again will the remotes slip out of
site. Just the opposite. You'll be
craning your neck to see around them just to see the
TV.
This one goes for $35, and another $5 for a
4-battery pack--if you are that lame.
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 "Timecode"
by
MRDC. Here is a quote from the artist known as
MRDC: "...anyone
can throw paint on the wall and call it art, but a true
artist instinctively chooses the best colors, shapes and
textures... I don't follow formulas and yet my music
works because I know how to blend just the right
sounds."
Podcast
for October 27, 2006 - Episode 38
The
site features a complete collection of Darwin's
works, in html and also scanned, for side-by-side
comparison; a full search tool; never before
published transcriptions of some of Darwin's
holographic notebooks, including the Galapagos field
notebooks (made from a transcription of a microfilm
copy made in the 1960s because the original was
stolen at some time during the 1980s--the Darwin
trust is hoping the news will prompt its return) ;
the "most comprehensive bibliography of works
written by Darwin ever published;" a catalog of
Darwin's hand-written manuscripts; translations of
Darwin's works in Danish, German and Russian;
ancillary Darwin works, such as contemporary
memoirs, reviews, images, and so on; and, especially
near and dear to us, "Audio Darwin, Darwin's works
available as free mp3 downloads."
Unfortunately, the mp3 files were created with
text-to-speech software, not by means of a human
reading the text, so the quality is probably what
most people would consider unusable.
CENIC
(Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in
California) is making a call for presentations for
their 11th annual conference to be held March 12-14
in San Diego (at the Marriott in La Jolla, to be
exact). "
Thanks
to Chris Norcross for this one: Jimmy Wales,
founder of
Guess
who else is turning 5 this week? Windows XP.
OS years are more akin to dog years, and this OS has
lived longer than it should. Not that it
hasn't been, on the whole, great. Windows
Vista is going to be released to manufacturing in
the next two weeks and the question is, "What took
so long?" We can't wait for Vista, but its
worth noting that XP took over the OS market very
rapidly, and will linger for some time.
According to
Forget
about the big social issues. What's the number
one problem facing everyone in the technological
world? Lack of standards? No. Pace
of technological change? No. Over glut
of Paris Hilton videos? Hardly. The
biggest problem is, and you all know this, "I can't
find the @#$% remote!!!" No more. Now,
from Brookstone you can purchase the NEW Super-Sized
TV Remote (
The
music for today's show was provided by
