"If the automobile had
followed the same development cycle as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles
per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone
inside"
~Robert X. Cringely
On the show:
Blackboard will be upgraded just before summer semester
classes begin; Firefox beta 3.5 is out; Adobe has
released Photoshop Express, and reveals plans for CS4;
the iPhone giveaway at a Midwestern University; Wal-Mart
slips to number 2; Hulu makes its debut; half of
Americans get their news from the Internet; the largest
academic music library in North America; news on
copyright section 108; and we feature an online book on
Fonts and Encoding.
Dave has an overview of Blackboard vs. Classroom
activities in his Blackboard feature of the week. Haydn
is off this week. Our Tech Talk Topic explains
Archiving in Outlook 2007.
Technology News Briefs
We will be updating Blackboard to version 8 on June
21-22. The biggest change will be the
replacement of the current gradebook with the Grade
Center. For more on the upgrade,
click here; for more on the Grade Center,
here.
Firefox
3 beta 5 has been released as of April 2.
"Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes
from the previous beta, improving stability and web
compatibility, providing platform and user interface
enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox
ever."
Click here to find out more and download.
Adobe has released Photoshop Express, a free,
web-based, light version of their popular Photoshop
Elements desktop program.
Click here to try it. In another
development, Adobe also announced that the next
commercial version of Photoshop, CS4, will have a
64-bit version, but for the Windows platform only.
Mac users will have to await CS5. Read all
about it
here.
How do you provide a common web portal and support
system to 2.5 million students, more than 50,000
faculty and staff, and 109 campuses?
CCC Confer is unique in its delivery of free
e-conferencing services to the world's largest
higher education system, California Community
Colleges. Seamlessly integrated into the CCC Confer
portal, Elluminate Live! supports meeting, training,
tutoring, online student and library services, and
distance learning. Join Blaine Morrow, Confer
director and Catherine McKenzie, TTIP director, for
a free web presentation on the hows and whys of
CCCConfer and other CCC technology initiatives.
Click here for details.
Abilene
Christian University announced last month that
they will be the first University in the world to
equip incoming freshmen with either an iPod touch or
an iPhone. Students will be able to receive
homework alerts, answer in-class quizzes, and use
various web applications the University has
developed.
This one is time sensitive, but important:
Join Dr. Kenneth Miller, Professor of Biology at
Brown University, and expert witness in the
Pennsylvania "intelligent design" case, in a free
webcast from the University of Texas titled "God,
Darwin, and Design: Lessons from the Dover Monkey
Trial."
Click here for details. The webcast will
be held Friday, April 4, at 7PM Central Time (5pm
PT).
Wal-Mart has pulled the plug on its gPC experiment,
and the $199 devices are no longer available in
stores. What is--correction, was--the gPC?
A Linux-based PC sold without monitor or software,
except the OS, of course, off the shelf from
Wal-Mart stores. The price was right, but when
consumers got it home they discovered it couldn't
run anything they wanted to run (engadget).
And speaking of Wal-Mart, they have now been passed
by Apple, who is the new #1 music retailer in the
US.
Do you Hulu? Hulu is the new, ad-supported
video site from NBC/News Corp, with an incredible
array of content (if you can find it on the somewhat
confusing site), all free, if you can stand the ads,
which, to be fair, are surprisingly brief.
Click here to see
it in person, or play the video below for a sample.
According to a new
Zogby International Survey, the Internet is the
top source of news for nearly half of Americans, and
two-thirds are dissatisfied with the quality of
journalism in traditional media. Key findings
include:
48% said their primary source of news and
information is the Internet, up from 40% a year ago;
only those in the over age 65 demographic favor
primary news sources other than the Internet;
29% said television was their main source of
news, 11% said radio, and 10% said newspapers;
only 7% of those in the age 18-29 demographic
said they get most of their news from newspapers;
86% of Americans said web sites are an important
source of news;
64% say they are dissatisfied with the quality
of journalism, while 75% of Americans believe the
Internet has had a positive impact on the overall
quality of journalism.
The largest academic music library in North America
is the Sibley Music Library at the University of
Rochester. The Sibley has for years now been
conducting a public domain scores digitization
project, and have made much of the riches publicly
available. They have placed the PDF images of
over 2600 scores freely available on the Internet.
Click here to access UR Research, then click on
"ESM-Sibley Music Library" and choose "Musical Score
Collection" to access a search box for the
collection.
The Section 108 Study Group is a select committee of
copyright experts charged with updating for the
digital world the Copyright Act's balance between
the rights of creators and copyright owners and the
needs of libraries and archives. The Study Group was
convened as an independent group by the National
Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation
program of the Library of Congress and by the U.S.
Copyright Office. The recommendations, conclusions,
and other outcomes have finally been published.
Click here for the PDF report.
Featured
Safari Tech Book Online:
Fonts and Encodings by Yannis Haralambous.
"This reference is a fascinating and complete guide
to using fonts and typography on the Web and across
a variety of operating systems and application
software. Fonts &
Encodings shows you how to take full
advantage of the incredible number of typographic
options available, with advanced material that
covers everything from designing glyphs to
developing software that creates and processes
fonts."
Palomar maintains a subscription to Tech Books
Online, and the books can be accessed from any
computer on the campus network without as login, or
with your Palomar login and password from anywhere
in the world.
Click here for more information about off-campus
access.
Training Opportunities - the next two weeks
Academic Technology Workshops
We have published our spring 2008 Academic
Technology training schedule.
Click here to read it. For TBA training
call (760) 744-1150 ext. 2341.
On Wednesday, April 9, from 2-3pm in room LL-111
Terry Gray will present "Drawing
in PowerPoint 2007," limited to 8
participants.
Elluminate is our new econferencing system.
There are many excellent training resources
available through the
Elluminate training center. Live,
instructor led training seminars--conducted through
the Elluminate interface--occur regularly and
may be scheduled through their web site.
Rather than dwell on specific tools in
Blackboard, this time I’d like to draw comparisons
between several of the options in Blackboard and
actual in-classroom functions. If you’re struggling
to figure out what Blackboard can do for you,
perhaps this will help.
In class it’s useful to get a feel for which
students are attending regularly. Most of the time
this is done anecdotally by recognizing the
students; in Blackboard you can stop by the
Performance Dashboard and easily see the last time a
student has accessed the course site.
In the classroom, if something out of the
ordinary is about to happen, or if something that’s
been on the schedule for a while is about to be due,
you might write a note on the chalkboard. With the
truly important things, you may even want to “DNE”
it, so other classes do not erase it. Clearly this
is the Announcement tool in Blackboard, even down to
the Make Permanent function to “DNE” your
information.
The most obvious comparison between Blackboard
and classroom functions is with handouts. If you
would have material photocopied and passed out in
class, you could have it posted as an item in
Blackboard. A slightly overlooked option is how
Blackboard items also replicate demonstration
objects that you might bring into the classroom. If
you want your students to see an Asiatic mask, or a
monkey skull, or a topographic map of North America,
these things could also be displayed in Blackboard.
Possibly shooting a digital picture of the item
would work, but there are more freely available
resources of complexity available online than you
might think; perhaps someone has a 3-D model of that
monkey skull, probably some governmental department
has the maps you need available. If you’re not sure
how to get started finding such resources, that’s a
pretty legitimate reason to call on Academic
Technology for help.
If you do objective tests in class, you likely
have your students use a Scantron. If you just can’t
limit yourself to “pick A-E for each question”
testing, you may have to manually grade objective
tests by hand, which is never a fun exercise.
Blackboard’s testing module excels at automatically
and immediately scoring objective test questions,
and may have more question choices than you’d ever
believe. Up to twenty possible answers per multiple
choice question, matching, ordering, multiple
answer, fill in the blank, and even “Where’s Waldo”
style Hotspot questions where the student answers by
clicking a specific spot on an image are all easily
set up in a Blackboard test.
If you ever use blue books, you may want to try
instead having students type up their work and
submit it via a Blackboard assignment. Imagine never
needing to decipher student penmanship again… And if
your concern is over limiting the time in which the
students are working, just have the papers typed up
in a monitored environment, either by bringing the
whole class into a computer lab for that class
session, or by having laptops rolled out to your
classroom for students to use during the class
session. Of course a fully online class would just
want to assume all writing assignments are open book
anyway, but an on-campus class would not need to.
If your students are ever invited to talk about
class material during class sessions, then using the
Blackboard Discussion Board could be a good idea.
Just set up a forum, possibly seed it with some
questions, then tell the students to “talk amongst
yourselves.” Just because students post to the forum
doesn’t make it uncontrolled; there are options to
have moderated discussions, and you could even allow
some trusted students to moderate in your place. If
you just want to facilitate student discussion
without making it a normal part of class, just set
up a forum and let students know they can post there
for any extra things they wish to discuss.
Do you show PowerPoint Presentations in the
classroom? Do you lecture? Likely you do, and
Blackboard has a variety of ways to make this
material available to students. Use the Elluminate
tool to have a live presentation online with your
students, and record that so the student who missed
can at least see what went on. Or, record a solo
session, where you run through your presentation
similar to what you might do in a lecture hall, then
let the students watch that recording and post
questions to a discussion board. Even if you already
have all your material available in a written
format, you could still make little audio snippets
to accompany the written material, verbally drawing
student attention to the most vital material or
correcting the common misperceptions that your
experience in the classroom tells you at least
someone will have.
With the tools in Blackboard it is possible to
replicate many of the features of a classroom
environment over the Internet. However, it is even
more possible to closely tie Blackboard features
into an on-campus class, and offer a richness to the
flow of a semester that could help your students to
succeed. If there’s something you are doing in the
classroom, and you’re interested in seeing if you
can develop an online aid or equivalent, give us in
Academic Technology a call (onlineclasses@palomar.edu
or X2862) and we’ll see if we can work something out
together.
See
the index of Dave's previous
"Blackboard Feature of the Week"
segments.
Teaching with Technology - Dr.
Haydn Davis
Haydn is off today.
See
the index of Haydn's previous
"Teaching with Technology" segments.
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray
Archiving Email
Are you confused when Outlook asks you, every two
weeks, whether you want to AutoArchive old items?
If you don't understand what Outlook is asking you
are probably answering No to this question, on the
theory that doing nothing is safer than doing
something that may lose some of your email messages.
The correct answer to this question, however, is
Yes. To help you feel comfortable about
answering Yes, we have provided the following
information.
In the first place, where does that AutoArchive
message come from, and why does it keep popping up
every two weeks?
Outlook has default AutoArchive settings, which
can be accessed from the Tools > Options menu.
In Outlook click Tools > Options > Other tab >
AutoArchive... button. If you have never
visited this dialog box, you will see the default
settings for your version of Outlook.
First, what this dialog is telling you is that
Outlook will attempt to AutoArchive every 14 days,
that it will prompt you before it acts (that is why
that dialog box pops up every two weeks) and that it
will archive--that is, move offline, to your hard
drive--items older than 6 months to the file
specified in the "Move old itmes to" path. The
file type it will create and/or move the items to is
a ".pst" file, a "personal store" file. These
personal store files can then be backed up or moved
to other versions of Outlook. Remember, these
are the default settings for your folders in
Outlook. The AutoArchive behavior of any
individual folder can be customized, but more on
that below.
In looking at the default settings, I would
suggest that two months is too long a period to
retain old items. Two months is more like it,
but it really depends on the volume of mail you
receive and, related, of course, the number of
projects in which you are involved. I would
also suggest that you create a custom path for your
archive file, rather than the default location
within the My Documents (or Documents, in Vista)
folder structure so that your archive.pst file will
get backed up along with the other contents of your
Palomar hard drive through the IS backup procedure.
Note the check in the check box "Show archive
folder in folder list." As long as this box is
checked, your archive folder will show up in your
Outlook folder list for quick access to archived
email. If you should close your archive folder
in Outlook, you can always reopen it by selecting
File > Open > Outlook Data File... and then
navigating to and selecting your archive.pst (or
whatever you have named it) file. This
procedure will open any .pst file, not just your
archive.pst file, and it is important to realize
that you can export any Outlook folder to a .pst
file in order to back it up or move it to another
version of Outlook.
What if you want different AutoArchive settings
on a particular folder, or you do not want a folder
archived at all? Simply right-click the folder
and choose Properties. Then click the
AutoArchive tab and modify the settings
appropriately, or click "Do not archive items in
this folder" if that is what you want. Note
that a separate archive folder can be created for
any specific folder different from the standard
archive.pst file, or the standard file can be used.
Don't want to wait for the AutoArchive prompt to
archive any or all folders? Click File >
Archive... Select your folder (or upper level
mailbox) and click OK. Archiving will proceed
immediately.
Next time you see that AutoArchive message, don't
be so timid. Go ahead and answer Yes. It
will help relieve the load on the Exchange server
and, if you institute a system of offline backups,
give you greater data security.
See
an index of previous "Tech Talk
Topics" segments.
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 is
Guitarscapes by
Jeff Wahl. "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.
Jeff's live repertoire encompasses the
genres of Folk, Jazz, New Age, Classical
and even Indian Ragas."
"First secure an
independent income, then practice virtue." ~
Greek Proverb
Podcast
for April 4, 2008 - Episode 85
"If the automobile had
followed the same development cycle as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles
per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone
inside"
~Robert X. Cringely
Firefox
3 beta 5 has been released as of April 2.
"Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes
from the previous beta, improving stability and web
compatibility, providing platform and user interface
enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox
ever."
Featured
Safari Tech Book Online:
The
music for today's show was provided by
