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ATRC Podcast Notes

Podcast for March 30, 2007 - Episode 57

» Direct mp3 download  |  » Streamed version [wma]  |  Subscribe

Play time 62 minutes  - Program Notes

 

"Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves"  ~Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson

Tech and Download news: Political Economy Days are here next week at Palomar; Blackboard will be rebooted next week; Adobe announced release of Creative Suite 3; there is a new Apple Boot Camp beta out;  Yahoo intends to remove all space limitations on email storage; the Citizendium has launched; the US loses its global Information Technology leadership position according to the World Economic Forum; there is a new 100 GB upgrade to the iPod; several new studies show that people are not good at multitasking; a new Parks Associates' study explains why those who do not have home Internet do not; there is a new, unique Internet delivery method in poor, rural countries; Disney.com sets some records; and we have a new, featured Safari tech book online.  David's Blackboard Feature of the Week is titled  "Oops...now what?" where he discusses what to do if your Blackboard course copy, export/import or course cartridge load do not go as planned.  Haydn's Teaching with Technology segment is titled "Online Testing in On-campus Classes" where he makes a suggestion that could transform the way you do student assessments.  My Tech Talk Topic this week is "Adobe Acrobat Techniques" where I detail a few techniques I failed to present in a workshop earlier this week. Our gizmo this week is not one dealing with how to wake you up in the morning, but how to keep you from going to sleep whenever (especially in class).

Technology News Briefs

  • Political Economy Days are coming next week.  On April 4-5 the Palomar College Economics, History and Political Science department will sponsor a group of distinguished lecturers speaking on a wide range of topics.  Click here for the room/time/speaker schedule.  Click here for a schedule of the webcasts.
     
  • The Blackboard system will be rebooted the first Wednesday of each month at 6am.  Plan as much as two hours for this process to be conducted to allow for application of operating system patches to the system.  The first "reboot Wednesday" will occur this coming Wednesday, April 4.
     
  • On Tuesday Adobe announced the release of Creative Suite 3.  Take a deep breath before reading the new prices: "The estimated price for Creative Suite 3 Design Standard is $1,199 and for the Design Premium version, $1,799. The Web-oriented editions cost $999 for Web Standard and $1,599 for Web Premium. "  Creative Suite actually ones in 6, count 'em, six flavors.  Click here for the CNet description, here for the Adobe press release.  The web-oriented version sill begin shipping in April, other editions later this summer.  The company spokesman, in a masterpiece of disingenuity, said  "...[Adobe] is not aware of any substantial problems with running Creative Suite 2 on Windows Vista but that the company is not officially recommending that usage because it has not done a full barrage of tests."  What, after 5 years of highly publicized Microsoft development, Vista came as a surprise to Adobe?  Of course they want you to spend another $1,000 to $2,500 on the same products you already own (whose feature sets the average user probably uses small subsets).  Caution before spending may be indicated.  Click here for a set of PDF files from Adobe describing the various CS3 packages, here for the Creative Suite 3 web site.
     
  • Apple Boot Camp, it was announced this week, now runs Windows Vista.  If you want to run both Windows and OS X (Tiger 10.4.6 and soon to be Leopard...) on the same Intel-based Mac, you might be interested in participating in the public beta for the new Boot Camp.
     
  • Yahoo announced this week that starting in May they will remove all limits on the amount of e-mail storage its users can have.  That's right, unlimited email storage.  Previously Yahoo had limited user email storage to 1GB.  Microsoft gives a free 2GB of storage, and Google 2.8GB.  "Officials said the decision reflects the plunging cost of storage" (NY Times).
     
  • The Citizendium (first reported in our episode 33), a Wikipedia rival with certain "editorial reforms" made its debut this week.  Citizendium stands for "citizen's compendium."  Anyone can post to it, but posters must first register with their real names and overall content is governed by an editorial board.  The Citizendium was founded by Larry Sanger, ousted "co-founder" of Wikipedia.  "Gentle expert oversight" is what Citizendium is supposed to have and Wikipedia is supposed not to have.  So far it has 1,100 articles (compared with over 1,706,000 articles in the English Wikipedia).

     
  • For the first time the United States has lost its number 1 position in the World Economic Forum's Global Information Technology Report.  The US dropped to position 7, and was supplanted by Denmark.  "The Global Information Technology Report (GITR) has become the world’s most respected assessment of the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on the development process and the competitiveness of nations" (WEF press release).  "A deterioration of the political and regulatory environment in the US prompted the fall" (BBC).  Click here for the Networked Readiness Index rankings [PDF].  Here are the top 10 (with their previous ranking in parentheses):
1 Denmark (3)
2 Sweden (8)
3 Singapore (2)
4 Finland (5)
5 Switzerland (9)
6 Netherlands (12)
7 US (1)
8 Iceland (4)
9 UK (10)
10 Norway (13)
  • On the hardware front, a new 100GB hard drive upgrade for the video iPod is now available from PDASmart.  "The PDASmart 100gb upgrade installs in an existing 60gb or 80gb iPod Video without any modifications to the case. A new rear casing is available for the 30gb model to allow for the slightly larger hard drive size" (Podcasting News).  Prices start at $275.  On the other hand, the iPod is a natural candidate for the new solid state hard drives, so waiting may be the better option.
     
  • File under: Computers good at multitasking, People not good at multitasking.  "Several research reports...suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car" (NY Times).  Researchers from Vanderbilt "...used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once." 
     
  • There is a new Parks Associates study out last week on Offline Americans.  "Twenty-nine percent of all U.S. households (31 million homes) do not have Internet access and do not intend to subscribe to an Internet service over the next 12 months, according to Parks Associates’ National Technology Scan."  Here are the reasons why:


Chart based on data presented in the Parks 3/22 press release

  • File under "water can be carried in buckets too":  busses equipped with Wi-fi are bringing the Internet to remote, rural villages.  Click here for a BBC article that describes bus service in parts of India, Rwanda, Cambodia and Paraguay that load up on web content in the city, and then drive to the country, serving up content to rural computers.  The project (known as the United Villages project) even allows user requests for specific content.  So what do Indians request?  The cricket scores, new Aishwarya Rai photos and the latest Bollywood tunes, according to the founder of the United Villages initiative (which is delivered for a fee).  The busses also deliver and collect emails from the villagers.
     

  • Fact: Mickey Mouse is more popular than ever.  If you think your web site serves up a lot of pages, consider Disney.com.  They reported on Tuesday that their re-designed site (released last January after responding to the complaints of many over their older, clunkier site) is serving up over 1 billion pages per month, 100 million videos streamed each week, over 6 million unique broadband visitors each month, and a ten-fold increase in site registrations.  Who says site design is unimportant?  Not Mickey.  Gorsh.  (Click here for the ars technica article).
     
  • Featured Safari Tech Book Online:  Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Inside Out by Mark Dodge and Craig Stinson.  "Learn how to conquer Microsoft Office Excel 2007—from the inside out! This book packs hundreds of time-saving solutions, troubleshooting tips, and workarounds, all in concise, fast-answer format. Includes a companion CD."  Palomar maintains a subscription to Tech Books Online, and the books can be accessed from any computer on the campus network, or from off the network with a password obtainable from the library. 

  Listen to the news [mp3 - 15:54]

Training Opportunities

Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray

Oops… now what?

Last time you learned about the different tools at your disposal when the time comes to set up a new course site. As a warning, I mentioned that you should always go into the destination course and confirm that everything copied/imported properly. Now it’s time to discuss what to do if things go wrong…

If you ran a Course Copy or Import Package to get your materials into the new course, but the material didn’t come through correctly, you can always run the copy or import again. However, if some material was put into your course the first time, you’ll want to clear it out before re-running the copy/import, or else you will end up with duplicated content. To clear out your course, there are two steps to take:

  • First, run the Recycle Course tool, which is linked in the lower left of the Control Panel. You select some or all of the sections of the course, content areas, announcements, etcetera, then type Remove and click Submit in the bottom right of the page. Shortly thereafter your course will be devoid of that content… so make sure you are in the correct course before trying this; recycling a course cannot be undone.
     
  • Second, take a look at the remains of your new course. If you selected everything from the Recycle Course tool, you will probably just have a bunch of empty content areas on your course menu; you may want to use the Manage Course Menu tool in the Control Panel to restore your course back to a default state, by removing all the entries from the Course Menu other than the Announcements tool. At this point, you should be able to re-try your Course Copy of Import Package procedure, and possibly have better results this time.

If you had problems with a publisher’s Course Cartridge Import, however, you will not just be able to re-import a cartridge. Even if the contents of a course cartridge are recycled or manually removed from a course, the Blackboard system remembers that the cartridge was imported and will not allow another Cartridge Import to be processed for that course. In that event, contact technical support and let us know the class number; there are two choices you can make, have us remove the cartridge or have us reset the cartridge. Removal will, as expected, remove all cartridge material and free up the course for you to import another cartridge. A reset will remove the cartridge material and automatically re-try the cartridge import process. However, in either case, that must be done by a Blackboard system administrator rather than at the course level by the instructor, so you will have to contact technical support.

At any rate, these are some things you can try when things go wrong. Remember that, when things go wrong, you can also contact Palomar’s Blackboard technical support by emailing onlineclasses@palomar.edu or calling 760-744-1150 x2862.


 		 Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 9:14]
 
See the index of Dave's previous "Blackboard Feature of the Week" segments.

Note:  To get to David's vodcast site, click here.

Teaching with Technology - Dr. Haydn Davis

Using Online Assessments in On-Campus Classes

All instructors devise strategies to assess their students’ learning. In traditional, face-to-face (f2f) classes the most typical strategy is some form of multiple-choice, short answer, or essay test that is done in class with paper and pencil. This process usually takes one full class period, after which the instructor collects the tests, grades them, and enters the grades, one-by-one, into a Gradebook. Some instructors have begun to schedule online, Blackboard tests with their f2f classes. Why? What are the benefits? What are the drawbacks?

Some Background.  As most faculty know, every class a Palomar student can enroll in has a Blackboard shell created along with the class. The Blackboard class remains unavailable to the students until the instructor chooses to make it available. Increasingly, instructors are using the Blackboard class component to supplement what they do in class. For example, many now post their class syllabus, handouts, and other resources for their students to access via Blackboard. One resource that has not been widely exploited yet by f2f instructors is the very robust testing module in Blackboard.

Blackboard provides two types of assessment: Tests and Surveys. Tests are constructed to assess the student’s knowledge or skill level and Blackboard has many different types of questions an instructor can use. Different point values and feedback for each question are possible and, when a student completes the test it is graded automatically (except for short answer and essay type questions) and the score is automatically entered into the Gradebook. Surveys are used for polling purposes and evaluations and cannot be graded and no names are associated with a submitted survey.

Benefits of Using Online Assessments.  Why might instructors who teach f2f classes only want to employ Blackboard assessments in their classes? Consider these possible benefits.

  • Save Time – less time in class spent on testing means more class time for instruction; in addition, the grading of all objective test items is done automatically and the grades entered into a Gradebook.
  • Increase Student Motivation – Blackboard tests are automatically graded and can provide detailed and immediate feedback. Students are more likely to learn from their errors when they see them right away and receive corrective feedback.
  • Reinforcement of Learning – the instructor controls when and for how long an assessment is available to students. Using assessments as a learning check, a test could be set up directly after a class period to allow students to test themselves while the material is still fresh.
  • Knowledge Pretest – it’s helpful to know how much students know about a topic before beginning the lecture
  • Student Feedback – using the Survey tool can be a handy way to obtain information about student perspectives about a topic or classroom activity
  • Increase Student Engagement – create open book, open notes tests which encourage students to collaborate with each other; students who are reading as they go along, talking with others about the questions and answers are learning, and these tests can be graded as extra credit
  • Practice Exams – even if you continue to test in class, allowing students to take Blackboard practice exams can support their learning and help them focus their study

Drawbacks of Using Online Assessments

  • Cheating – if you allow students to take tests online, how do you know it is really them taking the test? The short answer is you don’t. There are strategies you can take to minimize cheating but you can’t eliminate it.
    • create a number of Blackboard assessments each worth a few points, it is less likely that someone could have another person take all the tests for him
    • have students take the objective portion of the test online and the essay portion in class
    • proctor the online test in class by scheduling the mobile laptops – this won’t save class time but each student could review his/her test individually and see corrective feedback for each question (and the grading and Gradebook entry would be automatic)
  • Accessibility – requiring online assessments means that students must have access to computers with internet access but availability is so widely available today that this shouldn’t be a concern
  • Required Technology Skills – true, some computer skills are required to take Blackboard assessments but some familiarity with technology is required for most things in our lives today

While most f2f instructors probably will continue to rely on in-class testing, that approach could be supplemented with online Blackboard assessments

Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 13:05]
 
See the index of Haydn's previous "Teaching with Technology" segments.

Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray

Adobe Acrobat Techniques

I conducted a workshop on Adobe Acrobat version 7 this week.  We covered all the basics, and a good time was had by all, as they say, but after it was over I realized there were several points I had wanted to make that just didn't fit in the allotted time.  It must have been the big prize giveaway that distracted me.  Anyway, here they are:

Controlling the Opening View in a PDF Document.  Let's say you want your PDF document to open with the Bookmarks navigation panel open.  To achieve this, open the document in Adobe Acrobat and select File > Document Properties...  Click the Initial View tab of the Document Properties dialog box and in the Show drop-down select "Bookmarks Panel and Page."  Also select the "Page layout" view and "Magnification"  and "Page number" you wish to start with (ie, the physical page in the sequence beginning with 1 IN ACROBAT, not necessarily page 1 in the document, if there is prefatory material).  There are also some interesting Window Options and User Interface Options you can select.  Be careful, there is some mutual exclusivity going on here.  If you select "Hide window controls" the Bookmarks panel will not display, even though you want it to.  You must know also that if you hide the menu bar, the tool bars and the window controls that the user must press F9 to get the menu bar back in order to exit the program.  A picture is worth a thousand words here:

Controlling Document Security.  To control document security, once again choose File > Document Properties..." and this time click the Security tab.  The initial state of the document is to have No Security attached.  Click the "Security Method" drop-down and select "Password Security" to access security settings.  Note that "Certificate Security" and "Adobe Policy Server" are not relevant at Palomar.

If you wish to require a password to open the document itself, place a check in the "Require a password..." box.  When you click OK, you will be required to confirm the password.  If you forget the password, you will never be able to open the document again.

Note that you must save the document from within Acrobat for the security settings to take effect.

If you also wish to restrict printing or modification of the document, check the "Restrict editing" checkbox and set the printing and change restriction.  Your choices of printing restrictions include "None," "Low Resolution (150 dpi)," or "High Resolution."

The following illustration shows your choices on the "Changes Allowed" drop-down:

If you have not placed a check in the "Enable copying of text, images and other content" checkbox, none of these capabilities will be enabled:

Finally, provide a password in the Change Permissions Password box.  You will be asked to confirm it after clicking OK.  Note that this must be a DIFFERENT password from the one used for Document Open Password.

Searching a Folder of PDF Documents.  Searching an open PDF file in Acrobat is easy.  Just click the little binoculars icon on the File toolbar, enter your search term and conditional filters (checkboxes) and click Search.  What is not commonly appreciated, however, is that you can search an entire folder of PDF documents, none of which have to be open in Acrobat.  To do so, click the Search icon (the binoculars - or click Edit > Search, or press Shift-Ctrl-F).  Under the "Where would you like to search?" area of the search pane select "All PDF Documents in" then click the drop-down  and choose "Browse for Location..."  A Browse dialog box will appear allowing you to navigate your file system to the folder you want to search (this is another good reason to store all PDFs in subfolders of their own).  Select the folder, enter your search term, apply conditions (if any) and click Search. 

Acrobat will report search results by document:

By clicking any of the contextual search results entries Acrobat will open the document and jump to the location (which will be highlighted in the document) within the PDF file.

Creating a Web Link within a PDF Document.  Use the Advanced Editing toolbar to select the link tool (or choose Tools > Advanced Editing > Link Tool).

Your cursor will assume a crosshair shape.  Hold down the mouse button and draw around the text (or graphic or area of the page) you wish to act as the web link.  When you release the mouse button, the Create Link dialog box will appear.  Select the Link Type and be sure "Open a web page" is selected (Note that you can also make it an internal document link by selecting "Go to a page view," make it a link to another document by selecting "Open a file," or make it a Custom link, which can become very complex, but more on that some other time:

Now, click Next.  An "Edit URL" dialog box will appear.  Enter the URL to which you wish to link:

Since most URLs are quite long, it is far easier to find the site to which you wish to link in your browser in advance of making a link in Acrobat.  Copy the link URL from the browser address bar and then paste it in to the Acrobat Edit URL field rather than trying to type it.

That's it.  Pretty simple all-in-all, but also pretty powerful when adding features to your PDF documents.

Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 8:37]
 
See an index of previous "Tech Talk Topics" segments.

Gizmo of the Week

We have reported in this space on several devices that help solve the widespread problem of awakening in the morning, most notably Clocky, the catch-me-if-you-can alarm clock, and the Flying Alarm Clock.  Here, however, we are tackling the problem from the other end: how to keep from going to sleep in the first place.

Our gizmo this week is MyDo Bururu vibrating sleep warning glasses (first reported in plasticbamboo).  "Designed to assist those cramming for exams or going on a long drive, they work by detecting what angle the bespectacled user’s head is at. If the head drops below a certain level, a little motor kicks-off to vibrate the earpiece ...The glasses can be set to go off at one of four levels of head-droop."

Created by Japan's Vision Optic Company, the shakin' glasses go for only 45,000 yen (about $371).  I'm hoping the bookstore lays in an ample supply of these before finals week this semester, if not, I have a sharp stick with a tripod stand (with optional steering wheel mount) that I would be willing to sell for about $370.50 that would do the same job.

(Source: engadget)

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 "Guinevere" by Jeff Wahl.  "Upon first listen to a recording of Solo Acoustic Guitarist, Jeff Wahl, you might think that it's a recording of several guitarists playing together at once. However, it's all just one guitar with no overdubs. Audiences who see Jeff play live are also often surprised to see one guitarist sitting on stage yet hear what sounds like 2 or 3 guitarists playing together. Often compared to guitarists such as Leo Kottke, Michael Hedges, Joe Pass, and Will Ackerman, Jeff's style ultimately is a blend of many styles that defies categorization."

"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people"  ~ Orson Wells

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