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ATRC Podcast
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 Podcast
for December 1, 2006 - Episode 42
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Play time 55 minutes - Program Notes
"The grass may be
greener on the other side of the fence, but , brother
and sister, you still have to mow it."
~Little Richard
Little Richard is 70! Yikes. The
"Emancipator of Rock and Roll" and 5-decade pop icon is
a septuagenarian. Say it ain't
so, Richard. Even though he continues to rip it up, he says
he is retiring.
We have, again, lots of tech and download news.
From Microsoft, a new day for business has dawned; also
from Microsoft a free XML notepad, an updated
Windows Live toolbar, an updated 3D Virtual Earth, and a
patch for 2007's new daylight savings time; from Adobe
there is a new Flash player; from Pew a new study of the
podcasting phenomenon; from Dell we have an "urgent"
update for various laptop wireless cards; from US-CERT
news of an Apple OS X vulnerability and a patch; from
Merriam-Webster a chance to vote on the word of the
year; from the U of Maryland a new world's fair
collection; from the Palomar library a great new title
in the Safari database; and finally, from our Behavioral
Science department news of a research poster session. David's Blackboard Feature
of the Week is titled "The Performance Dashboard -
Revisited," where he
describes the new features in performance dashboard and
discusses some of their uses.
Haydn's Teaching
with Technology segment is titled "What is
Effective Online Teaching: Student Survey Says..." My Tech Talk Topic
describes how to use the Horizon Wimba voice board
within Blackboard. Finally we have our first
official cold weather gizmo this week, the evil snowbots.
Palomar Tech and Download News
-
Yesterday, November 30, was a new day for business.
At least that is how Microsoft was billing it.
It was the day Windows Vista and Office 2007 were
released for sale to business customers. The
products will be available to consumers January 30,
2007, though new computers are now being delivered
with
upgrade coupons even now. As with all new
OS introductions, adoption will be gradual.
The Gartner Dataquest projects 57% of computers
shipped in 2007 will come with Vista (see chart
below), and that adoption rates throughout 2007 will
be a mix.
Click here for an MSNBC article, with sidebar
showing a video of Steve Ballmer expounding,
here for the NY Times article,
here for the official Microsoft press release,
and
here for generally useful Microsoft resources..
Also released yesterday were backend products
Exchange 2007 and SharePoint server 2007.
-
 Version 9 of Adobe's
Flash Player for Internet Explorer has been
released.
Click here to download/install. Be careful
to uncheck the Yahoo! Toolbar selection before
downloading if you do not want it. Version 9
of the player is Windows Vista ready, meaning it has
been designed to run in Vista's new "protected mode"
once you have installed Vista. For more on
Flash and Vista,
click here.
-
The
Horizon Wimba voice tools building block has
been updated on our Blackboard server from version
5.0 to 5.1. With the ugrade come two new
tools: the Wimba podcaster and the voice presenter. The
podcaster makes it easy to create a podcast with a
related RSS feed. The presenter allows for
audio annotations to any URL. We are testing
these products now, and will make them available for
the Spring 2007 semester. Academic Technology
will provide TBA training to departments,
individuals or small groups who wish to use these or
the other voice tools. Contact Academic
Coordinator
Haydn Davis (ext. 3626) to arrange for training.
-
There is an "urgent" driver upgrade for Dell
wireless WLAN cards. The upgrade affects those
who reside in the US. It supports "...the Dell
Wireless 1350, 1370, 1450,1390, 1490, and 1500
series Mini Card, MiniPCI and PC Card devices (not
USB)."
Click here to find out more and download.
-
If you have reason to browse or edit XML files, the
Microsoft XML Notepad 2007 is now available for
free download.
-
 Windows
Live Toolbar 3.0 was updated this week.
According to Microsoft "These upgrades let Windows
Live Toolbar 3.0 integrate with other Microsoft
products and provide more features and
functionality" (KB926307).
If you are not a user of the toolbar,
click here for more information and an
opportunity to download. We use the toolbar
and can recommend it highly.
-
"Starting in the spring of 2007, daylight saving
time (DST) start and end dates for the United States
will transition to comply with the Energy Policy Act
of 2005. DST dates in the United States will start
three weeks earlier (2:00 A.M. on the second Sunday
in March) and will end one week later (2:00 A.M. on
the first Sunday in November)" (MS
KB928388). If you have not already
downloaded and installed the Windows XP patch to
make your computer update daylight savings time
correctly for 2007,
click here.
-
 Also from Microsoft, the Virtual Earth 3D (beta) is
available. "Virtual Earth 3D brings you
another step closer to knowing "what it is like out
there". You can search, browse, and organize local
information viewed in three dimensions, just the way
it exists in the real world. This enables you to
more effectively find the data that is relevant to
you, making Live Maps more useful than ever."
Click here to download.
-
"Some 12% of internet users say they have downloaded
a podcast so they can listen to it or view it at a
later time. However, few internet users are
downloading podcasts with great frequency; just 1%
report downloading a podcast on a typical day."
The 12% figure is up from 7% when the identical
survey was run last Spring, and therefore shows
significant growth. This is from the latest report from the
Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Click here for a pdf version of the report (4
pages). The survey also revealed that online
men are twice as likely to download a podcast than
online women, and that Internet veterans (with 6
years of use or more) are twice as likely to listen
to podcasts as Internet late-comers.
-
A Mac OS X vulnerability report:
"The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-Cert)
issued the alert after security researchers produced
code that could exploit the DMG bug.
 The flaw
involves the way OS X handles disk images and could
be used to crash or take over a vulnerable
machine...So far the DMG bug has only been shown to
work under laboratory conditions and has not been
seen in the wild" (BBC).
Apple released a patch for the vulnerability on
Novemberr 29.
Click here for the story from US-Cert,
here for a tighter lipped, more euphemistic
version from Apple, along with links to download the
patch, I mean, update.
-
Merriam-Webster has announced that they will be
determining the 2006 word of the year in a new
manner, by conducting an online vote.
Click here to vote. Submissions will be
accepted through December 4.
-
 What
do the Eifel tower and television have in common?
They were both introduced at World's Fairs.
The University of Maryland announced last week
the availability of a new collection in their
libraries titled "A
Treasury of World's Fair Art and Architecture."
For five years the U. or M. has been digitizing
photos, graphics and essays related to mainly 19th
century world's fairs.
-
Google
announced this week that they are abandoning
their for-pay research service called
Google Answers. You can browse the
questions asked over the last four years of the
project, but Google is no longer accepting new
questions. Mean while, competitor Yahoo's
free answer service continues to thrive, and has
been joined by other free sites such as Microsoft's
QnA,
Answerbag.com, (both of the latter leaning to
the airhead side of things) and the far more
authoritative and serious site (in my opinion)
Answers.com.
-
Palomar recently obtained a subscription to
Safari Tech Books Online (login required from
non-Palomar network computers) from
Proquest. Safari is billed as "an
e-reference library for programmers and IT
professionals" but it is far more general than that.
O'Reily, the inventor of Safari, describes the
service as "... a virtual library that lets you
easily search thousands of top tech books, cut and
paste code samples, download chapters, and find
quick answers when you need the most accurate,
current information." Of interest to our
listeners is the recently added book
iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual.
Check out this great resource and become familiar
with the Safari database to help answer your
technology questions and build tech skills.
Use the following RSS button to subscribe to a feed
of the latest titles as they are added to Safari:
-
 Next
Monday and Tuesday, December 4th and 5th, students
from Psychology 230 will be holding poster sessions
from 10am to 12pm. Come by room BE6 to check
out what our advanced psychology students have been
investigating. It will be a big encouragement
to the students. For more information contact
Fred Rose at ext. 2344.
Click here for a PDF [54K] describing the
student projects. The event is described as a
morning of food and discovery.
Listen to the news [mp3 -
12:53]
Training Opportunities
- Academic Technology Training
We are
presenting one workshop only next week, the final
one for the Fall semester. Terry Gray will be
presenting "All
About Blogging" on Friday, December 8 at 10am in
room LL-111. The workshop will last for one
hour.
The
Academic Technology schedule of training workshops
for Spring 2007 has been published.
Click here to access the schedule,
here to read a description of the various
workshops within their competencies and also the new
Blackboard Certificate program and TBA training.
New in the Spring will be a re-designed
Blackboard Certificate Program, an expanded
Copyright Essentials online workshop, and new
workshops on IE7, digital projectors, new Blackboard
voice tools, drawing in PowerPoint, charts and
diagrams in PowerPoint, and one we are calling "So
Long FrontPage," where Chris Norcross will be
demonstrating the replacement product for FrontPage
from Microsoft called Web Expression. Along
with the new workshops will be the most popular of
the standard offerings in Blackboard, PowerPoint,
Acrobat, FrontPage, Photoshop, Windows and others.
Register for all Academic Technology workshops
through the
Professional Development web site.
- As a re-reminder, the @ONE in-person Winter
Institute will be held at MiraCosta college January
9-11.
Click here for information and registration.
Online Teaching, Podcasting, Flash
and Voice Over IP, are among the workshop tracks for
which you may register.
- @ONE also has self-paced courses and streaming training videos on
demand.
Click here for descriptions and use.
- Microsoft webcasts:
- Free Microsoft eLearning courses: for a limited time access
to these excellent e-Learning products on Office
2007 is available.
Click here to access a gateway to sign-up for
training in the new Office interface, Access 2007,
Excel 2007, Infopath 2007, OneNote 2007, Outlook
2007, PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007, Visio 2007, and
Groove 2007. You may also download a free
e-book from this site titled
First Look 2007 Microsoft Office System in
PDF format.
- Free online training is available for Horizon
Wimba
Live Classroom and the Horizon Wimba
Voice Tools, both of which we have access to in
our Blackboard system.
Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray
The Performance Dashboard - Revisited
First, a couple of Blackboard reminders:
According to the Blackboard course lifecycle (as
discussed in episode 17) the Fall 2005 courses
will be removed from Blackboard on Tuesday, December
19th. If you need to backup your old materials, you
should Archive your old Blackboard course, as in the
instructions found online at
http://www.palomar.edu/pconline/facultyservices/instr_archive_course.asp
.
Also, for those who think the 'courses you teach'
list is too ponderous, instructors can remove
entries from their “My Courses” list in Blackboard (as
discussed in episode 7), which can dramatically
clean up the appearance when you first log in.
Instructions on removing these courses may be found
online at
http://www.palomar.edu/pconline/facultyservices/BB_Removing_Courses_from_the_My_Courses_Module.pdf
Now, to the dashboard:
The Performance Dashboard (which was
discussed in episode 4) is linked from the
middle right of the Control Panel, and displays a
list of users in the course. Outside of the vital
statistics (Name, Username, Role), there are some
particularly useful columns in the dashboard:
Last Course Access – this shows the last date and
time that a user accessed materials in the course.
- Days Since Last Course Access – so you don’t
have to count the days since the user was last
in.
- Review Status – this is a count of how many
items each user has “reviewed”. Clicking the
number gives a list of all items in the course
with Review Status enabled, and shows the status
of each item for that user. (Review Status was
discussed in episode 14.)
- Adaptive Release – click the icon in this
column to see a map of course content, with the
Visibility and Review status for each item,
which allows an instructor to tell what each
individual student can see in the course.
- Discussion Board – this is a count of how
many forums a user has posted in. Clicking the
number gives a list of the forums, with a count
of the users’ posts within that forum. Clicking
those counts give a summary of the posts in the
forum, with information such as average post
length, as well as a display of all the posts by
that user in that forum. If discussion board
grading by forum is active, there is a choice to
submit a grade here as well.
- View Grades – this brings up the user grade
list, similar to the Gradebook View by User
listing.
The list of users in the dashboard can be sorted
based on any of the columns, with the exception of
Adaptive Release and View Grades (which are only
icons in the dashboard anyway).
Note: To get to David's vodcast site,
click here.
Teaching with Technology - Dr. Haydn Davis
What is Effective Online Teaching:
Student Survey Says...
As the end of the semester approaches,
evaluations are on many minds. Instructors are
having their classes evaluated and of course student
performance will be evaluated and given a course
grade. Evaluation of online courses has been mostly
unsatisfactory however. We do have a system in place
to allow online students to evaluate their online
courses but the evaluation survey return rate has
been so poor that no meaningful conclusions can be
drawn.
What do online students think of their learning
experience with online classes? A recent report
published in the American Journal of Distance
Education journal attempted to answer that question.
The report discusses students’ views of online
teaching and identified the major variables
associated with effective online teaching.
- adapts to student needs
- uses meaningful examples
- motivates students to do their best
- facilitates the course effectively
- delivers a valuable course
- communicates effectively
- shows concern for students’ learning
In some of the open-ended comments, students
stated that they really appreciated – and found most
effective – instructors who were “visibly and
actively involved” in promoting their learning and
who created a structured but flexible learning
environment.
|
|
Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time =
7:13]
|
|
Ref |
American
Journal of Distance Education, Vol. 20,
No. 2, 2006
|
 |
See
the index of
Haydn's previous "Teaching with
Technology" segments. |
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray
Using the Horizon Wimba Voice Board within
Blackboard
Would you like to:
- Provide vocal feedback to your students on
their work on an assignment?
- Have your students do a reading, ie recite a
poem, do a verbal interpretation of a text,
simply introduce themselves?
- Create a verbal assessment?
- Hold an asynchronous, online, threaded,
verbal discussion?
Are you a foreign language or ESL instructor who
wants:
- Your students to practice pronunciation
verbally in a manner that you can review, yet
will be private for each student?
- Have your students conduct a verbal
discussion in the language you are teaching?
- Ask your students to read passages in the
language you are teaching for practice or
homework?
In general, would you like to create:
- A get acquainted area where students can
verbally express a little about themselves and
their interests?
- An online forum where you can introduce
yourself and ask students to respond to
ice-breaker open ended questions?
- An ask-the-experts web area where students
can pose questions, verbally, to a researcher or
other expert and receive their answers,
verbally, at a later time?
You can do any or all of these with a Horizon
Wimba voice board within your Palomar College
Blackboard course. All you need is your
computer with a properly connected microphone and
speakers--or a headset that combines both. To
respond to your audible comments to a voice board
your students will need the same, or can use any of
the computers in the Academic Technology labs, where
microphones are available on some computers, and by
request on any computer.
Creating a Voice Board
Creating a voice board within a Blackboard
content area is very simple. Login to your
Blackboard course, go to (or create) the content
area that you wish to use, change to edit view
(click the Edit View button in the upper right of
the content area screen), click the "Select:"
drop-down menu in the upper right of the screen, and
choose "Voice Board" and click Go.
The first time you select this, you may be
prompted to install a Java plug-in from Sun
Microsystems. As of July, 2006, the current plug-in
was version 1.5, called the "J2SE runtime
environment 5." This will install quickly on the
fly. Then, you may be warned by your computer about
trusting "the signed applet distributed by 'Horizon
Wimba'." Select "Always" to always trust Horizon
Wimba applets.
You may already have gone through these steps, in
which case you may not see both of these messages.
In any event, after the applet is installed you will
see the "Add Voice Board" Blackboard area. Begin by
naming the board and providing any textual
instructions you wish.
Configuring Your Voice Board
Next, select the settings which will control the
behavior of the voice board:
Audio Quality. We recommend
using "Superior Quality" audio, though there are
3 lesser choices. Even though the applet
describes this as "Broadband usage," 29.6 kbits/sec
is within the throughput capacity of a 56k
dial-up modem.
Message Length. Use this setting
to control your expectations for student
posting. Be sure to allow ample time
depending on the nature of the board and your
assignments.
Short Message Titles. If this is
not selected (our recommendation) the message
titles as they appear in Blackboard will be
verbose, including subject line, name of poster,
length of record and posting date. If
short, subject and poster ID are the only thing
displayed.
Chronological Order. By default
messages are displayed in the order in which
they were posted, with newest at top. If
you make this selection, oldest messages will
appear at top.
Students may start a new thread.
The default is for this item to be selected.
If deselected, students may only reply (which
could be useful in pronunciation or reading
exercizes) but not to start new topics.
Private threads. If discussion
threads are private only one-to-one
communication between instructor and student can
occur. If this selection is made only
instructors can compose new threads, students
can only see their own replies and replies from
the instructor while instructors can see all
replies.
After configuring your board, click "Submit" to
create it. From here on out things get much
simpler.
Posting to Your Voice Board
To create your first post, click the "New" icon.
The "Compose" window will appear containing a
field to enter a subject (textually), a text message
area where you can enter any textual material you
wish (but not graphics or hot links), and a
recording tool (click the round button to record,
the pause button to pause/continue recording, and
the square stop button to end recording).
Click the triangular play button to listen to your
recording. If not satisfied, re-record.
When satisfied, click the "Send" arrow to post the
message to the voice board.
To reply, click the "Reply" button and go through
the same steps.
Your reply will appear indented, Discussion Board
style, in the message Window. Each thread will
be separate and indented in the usual way to
indicate postings and replies to postings.
Note the "Advanced Features" indicated by the
voice board control icons. You can forward any
message from the board (if this is allowed by the
instructor) via email (actually, what is sent is not
a voice file attachment but a link to the file on a
Horizon Wimba server). You can import audio
files in wav, mp3 or spx format (we recommend
working with mp3 files only). You can export
any/all files from the board. You can publish
any/all files to a web page (what you get if you
choose to "Publish" is javascript code which you can
paste into any web page which will render the HW
player associated with the particular audio file).
You can also directly save any audio posting to a
board by clicking the triangular icon in the bottom
of the playback tool and choosing to save in one of
three formats:
We recommend using mp3 format for size and
quality considerations. These mp3 files can
then be placed on any portable mp3 player, like the
iPod, for later review.
We recommend the use of voice boards to increase
course interactivity and student engagement, to
deliver customized instruction asynchronously, to
build student rhetorical skills, and for specialized
uses in foreign language and ESL instruction.
Gizmo of the week
Genius in Winter
"Let us love winter,
for it is the spring of genius." ~Pietro Aretino
It was a dark and stormy night. It was.
The wind was howling, the street lights flickering,
half obscured by the skeletal branches rattling in
the storm...
That's right. It is winter, or nearly so,
at least as winterish as it ever gets in Southern
California. This week to celebrate the onset
of sub-70 degree temperatures we bring you our first
winter gizmo to warm your hearts, defend your
hearths, and maybe, make it onto your gift lists.
 The
Evil Snowbots. From the product
website: "...we were visited by two robots
from the future! They spoke to us and now it is time
to share their message. There's good news and bad
news. The good news is there are tons of really cool
robots in the future. The bad news is they are
divided into two factions, are waging war against
each other, and have "downgraded" humans to pretty
much servants and food. We quickly smashed the
robots with hammers, and swore to devise a way to
save humanity. Before we destroyed the robots,
however, we were able to learn two things. 1. Each
army of robots uses a different color scanning light
(red or blue); 2. We have no idea which side is in
humanity's best interest to win"(ThinkGeek.com).
The SnowBot features:
- USB Powered (for great justice!)
- Scanning LED Robotic Eye
- Rate of sweeping is controllable via knob
- Selectable LED Robotic Eye Colors (Blue or
Red)
- Authentic Snowbot Sound (on/off switch)
- Rotating, articulating metal arms
- Coiled (12") USB cable extends to 30"
The selling price? $12.99!!!
It was the authentic SnowBot sound in this list
of features that prompted me to order a dozen. I want to be just as craftily prepared
for future assaults as the US is with its
anti-missile defense system, and what a bargain,
comparatively speaking. But wait, what if the
future evil snowbot armies got their start by a
freak spontaneous conjoining of a dozen robots on
chained USB hubs on my very desk during an
electrical storm? What if this innocent
purchase is the doom of humanity? Should I set
half the eyes to blue and half to red? Will I
come in some morning to find they have destroyed
each other? Or all turned on me in a
massive ambush? Will a terminator (a good
terminator, not a bad terminator) be coming back
from the future to destroy my Snowbots' pincers? Where is Pietro Aretino when
you need him?
(Source: fosfor)
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 "Nocturne"
by
West Exit. From the magnatune web site: "Sexy,
ambient dance grooves move under layers of synthesizers
& keyboards. Beautifully haunting & catchy vocal
melodies float provocatively over the music telling
stories of love lost, gained, & coveted. Merging the
acoustic & the electric, mixing soulful chords with
funky beats; The West Exit is a sultry blend of pop,
R&B, & electronic music."
We used tracks 11: "All right now;" 5:
"Take a ride;" 7. "Calico;" 10: "Nine Lives;" 3: "Every
time;" 8: "Become anyone;" 6: "1995;" 2: "Artificial;"
12: "Ce soir a jamais."
Visit
magnatune and reward them for their generosity,
and if you like this album, buy it. Magnatune is not evil!
"Hard work never
killed anybody, but why take a chance?" " ~
Edgar Bergen
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