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 Podcast
for August 14, 2009 - Episode 106
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Play time 45 minutes - Program Notes
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"Greetings."
~translation of Tralfamadorean
message sent via Salo
On the show:
Tech Camp is a hit; a Blackboard purge; Google Caffeine;
screencast.com maintenance; Mac OS X
updates; textbook rentals; Firefox 3.6 alpha; the LHC, take 2;
Word not for sale; Win 7 review; Office 2010
feature set; Hello from Earth; Sony reader to
support ePub standard; a tech book on Google
Sketchup.
David will discuss semester Startup procedures
for Blackboard users. Haydn will
discuss using the Blackboard calendar and
performance dashboard to get started right. I will give an overview of
your tech tool toolkit, focusing on Blackboard
tools, in my tech talk topic segment. |
Technology News Briefs
-
Thanks to
those who attended summer
tech camp. We had a
great time and a lot of
learning went on. We
covered many topics, chief
among them
Blackboard,
Learning Objects blogging
tools,
Jing,
YouTube, the
Wimba Voice Tools,
CPS
Clickers, the
Flip Video
camera,
Google Earth, and
other topics.
-
Summer 2008 courses will be
purged from Blackboard
Wednesday, August 19.
If you need to copy data
from any of those old
courses, or archive/export
them, please do so before
that date.
-
For those of you using
screencast.com to
upload your Jing captures--click
here to learn
about Jing--please be aware
that screencast.com will be
down for maintenance
9:30pm-1:30am PDT Saturday,
August 15.
-
 Google
wants you to help test some
"next-generation
infrastructure." We
are talking about Google
"Caffeine," the new improved
Google Search tool.
You won't notice a
superficial
difference between new and
old Google Search, but under
the hood things have changed,
indexing focuses on the more current,
"momentary web" content than
the older model and the
relevance of hits is
improved. Try
it at
http://www2.sandbox.google.com.
Read about it, and leaLHCn how
to submit feedback,
here.
-
If you haven't clicked
Software Update on your Mac
OS X system lately you might
want to. There are
updates to OS X itself
(10.5.8), Safari (4.0.3) the
AirPort client, Bluetooth
firmware, Macbook firmware
(if this is you), a Java
update, a larger than usual
security update, and if you
have Windows installed, a
Trackpad update. Get
the details (or download)
these and other support
updates at the
Support Download site.
-
Cengage learning announced
plans to begin
renting textbooks
to students beginning this
year through the web site
Cengagebrain.com.
Cengage joins
Chegg,
Bookrenter, and
others in the movement to
rent rather than sell
college textbooks.
Follet is running a small
scale pilot to test the
market, as are
Barnes & Nobel College
Booksellers
(NYTimes).
-
Firefox 3.6 alpha has been
released for download
(alpha means please do not
install on Palomar College
production computers).
Code named Namoroka, its
most exciting features are a
new, high-speed javascript
engine, CSS gradient
background images, and
improved screen scrolling.
Click here for
the roadmap to Namoroka.
-
 The
scientists and engineers at
CERN are going to try again
this November to turn on the
Large Hadron Collider.
It was nearly a year ago (19
Sept. 2008) that, with much
ado, they threw the switch
to a sickening pop and the
acrid smell of fried
circuits--not exactly what
happened, but
there was a catastrophic
electrical failure. The
problem, it seems, was in
thousands
of high-current electrical
connections. The
connections have been
repaired, they think, but
more analysis needs to be
done. In the mean
time, operators are
confident the device can be
run a half-power, 3.5 TeV.
At this energy level important
experiments can be
performed, such as the
search for putative hidden
dimensions, but the "Holy
Grail of physics," the
Higgs
boson, almost
certainly will not be
detected.
Click here for
the CERN press release,
here for LHC
poster boy Brian Cox's
apologia and overoptimistic
pep talk via TED, or
read one of the following for
more sober articles from
The New York Times
or
NewScientist.
-
No
more Microsoft Word? Don't bet
on it, regardless of what
the courts say. A judge this
week issued an injunction
ordering Microsoft to stop
selling Word as a result of
a patent infringement suit
won by Canadian company
i4i.
The patent has to
do with a method used to
parse XML files in the
latest version of Word.
Microsoft has been fined
$277 million in the case,
and has 60 days to comply
with the injunction.
Of course The Empire will
appeal, and the injunction
will not actually take
effect. In 60 days
Microsoft can a) settle; b)
buy i4i; c) create new code
that does not violate the
patent; or d) all of the
above. Microsoft's
response? "We are
disappointed by the court's
ruling," Microsoft spokesman
Kevin Kutz said in a
statement. "We believe the
evidence clearly
demonstrated that we do not
infringe and that the i4i
patent is invalid. We will
appeal the verdict" (SeatllePI).
-
Speaking of cash cows,
Windows 7 has been released
to manufacturing and will be
for sale on October 22.
A public version which will
expire in 60 days is
available (do not install
this on Palomar College
computers), but most of us
can wait. If you are
very curious, however, here
is a
Windows 7 review
from engadget.
-
And finally, speaking of
Office, Office 2010 is due
out in the first half of
2010 (read June 30 at
11:59pm). If you want
a preview,
click here for
the Office 2010 web site.
The videos are interesting
but a bit underwhelming.
The best news is extension
of the ribbon to all
applications, including
Outlook, the worst the
further confusion of the
role of Sharepoint Designer,
now called SharePoint
Workspace, and the exclusion
of Expression web tools.
-
 Greetings
from earth. You may
recall the difficulty Salo,
Tralfamadorean robot, had in
delivering his message in
The Sirens of Titan,
and the consequent effects
on human existence.
Now is your opportunity to
play Tralfamadorean overlord
and compose a message for
your robot to deliver to
planet Gleise 581d. No
joke. You can now
visit the Australian web
site
Hello From Earth,
and compose a message that
will be transmitted to that
possibly inhabited planet.
At least, it is thought that
exoplanet Gliese 581d
is earthlike enough to
support life. Note:
messages must be in English
and inappropriate messages
will be rejected. If
you are inviting the
Glieseans to a party, you
may want to wait on your
Costco run. Gliese
581d is 20.3 light years
away, and with the RSVP
cycle included, the
perishables definitely will
not keep.
-
Sony has
announced that they plan to
support an "open standard"
for eBooks on their Reader
brand ebook reading device.
By year's end they will
support the ePub format, a
standard created by a
consortium of publishers and
used at Project Gutenberg.
The market leading Amazon
reader can load ePub format
books once they have been
converted to the mobi
format. Sony is not
abandoning DRM (digital
rights management) however,
but is dropping their
proprietary DRM in favor of
an Adobe technology that
limits the times a copy can
be made of the ebook (NY
Times).
-
 Featured
Safari Tech Book Online:
Google Sketchup:
The Missing Manual by Chris Grover
(off-campus login requried).
"If you want to learn to create 3-D models using
Google SketchUp, this Missing Manual is the ideal
place to start. Filled with step-by-step tutorials,
this entertaining, reader-friendly guide will have
you creating detailed 3-D objects, including
building plans, furniture, landscaping plans -- even
characters for computer games -- in no time." 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.
Training Opportunities
- Academic Technology Workshops
- The Academic Technology schedule of workshops
has been published for fall 2009.
Click here
to access the schedule. We will be offering
workshops in various topics related to Blackboard,
classroom technology, Google Earth, our new Learning
Object products for journals, blogs, wikis and
podcasts, and traditional workshops in web site
development and PowerPoint. The following will
be offered through August:
-
Blackboard
Essentials will be offered by Chris
Norcross as a part-time pre-plenary activity from
3-5pm on Thursday, August 20 in room LL-109.
- At the same time,
Classroom
Technology will be offered by Lee
Hoffmann, Hadyn Davis and Terry Gray, 3-5pm Thursday
August 20 in room BES-1.
- As a breakout during the part-time plenary Terry
Gray and Haydn Davis will offer
Academic
Technology at Palomar College from
7:15-9pm, Thursday, August 20 in room LL-109.
- On Friday, August 28, Lee Hoffmann, Haydn Davis
and Terry Gray will repeat
Classroom
Technology from 10AM to 12PM in room B-1.
- We have developed (or linked to) sets of
screen videos (screencasts) that teach how to use the features of
the various technology tools available to faculty
members through Blackboard:
How-to screencasts:
Blackboard Feature - David Gray
Fall into Blackboard
Fall is upon us. Remember that your Blackboard
courses will not be accessible by your students
until you manually make them Available. (Click
here for a screencast tutorial.)
Also take note that the Summer 2008 courses, from
over a year ago, will finally be removed from the
Blackboard system on Wednesday, August 19th. Of
course the Summer 2009 courses which have just
completed will be available for instructor access
until this time next year, but the courses from last
Summer must leave us now.
 For
any faculty who haven’t used Blackboard before, I’d
like to urge you to consider trying out extending
your classes with something simple but powerful: Use
the Blackboard Announcement tool. By default every
Blackboard course has an Announcements area, so if
you make your course available to your students as
mentioned above, then begin adding announcements to
your course by going into the Control Panel and
clicking the Announcements link in the upper left
corner, you can open up a whole new method of
communicating with your students. The Announcement
tool can be used for everything from reminders of
upcoming tests in class, through such unexpected
events as a class cancellation should you become
ill, all the way to communicating instructions to
your students in the event of a serious event like
the wildfires of years past. The key to getting use
out of the Announcement tool is get your students
into the habit of checking for them. Consider
augmenting your Fall classes with the simple
addition of Blackboard Announcements.
Teaching with Technology - Dr.
Haydn Davis
Helping Online Students (and Instructors) Get
A Good Start
It probably fair to say the first two weeks of a
new semester plays a large role in influencing a
student to be successful in the class. Getting off
to a good start in a class can motivate a student to
continue to do well throughout the class.
Last time I talked about the importance of
student feedback and I think that while this is
important throughout the course, it may be most
important in the early part of the course. This time
I’m going to underscore that point by mentioning a
couple of tools we’ve harped on before in these
podcasts but with me anyway it’s often helpful to be
reminded of something I already know. With that
adage in mind I want to remind online instructors to
consider using two powerful but underused Blackboard
tools: the Calendar and the Performance Dashboard.
The calendar tool while primitive can be very
useful in helping students stay on task and it has
the virtue of being very simple to use. I recommend
that the instructor place a number of reminders for
students and tell them that they too can add their
own events (of course whatever they add will appear
only in their view of the calendar). I like the fact
that the calendar items appear when the student
first logs onto the Blackboard system.
The process for adding calendar items couldn’t be
easier as I mentioned. The steps are:
Control Panel
Course Tools/Course Calendar
Add Event
Choose Date
The second tool I know we’ve also discussed more
than once but the Performance Dashboard provides a
lot of useful information that, particularly early
in the course can be used to identify students who
might be having difficulty in the class. A short
email or phone call will often get them back on
track. The screen capture below shows how the
instructor can monitor course access as well as
other progress. In the example shown, Adam has not
accessed the course yet and the first week is coming
to a close.
Finally, under the heading of getting started
well, I’ve included two URLs that instructors might
find helpful.
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray
Your Online Toolkit
 If you haven't prepared the electronic portions
of your courses for fall semester yet, it is time to
swing into action. This article will give you
an overview of the major tools we have put in place
to assist you in delivering online
content to students.
Blackboard
Blackboard is "tupperware," as our Blackboard
techs are fond of saying. It is a set of
interrelated containers into which you place your
educational content. It goes beyond "tupperware"
however, because Blackboard includes some native
tools that will help you create and manage
educational content, and we have added others,
called "building blocks," that will let you do some
pretty neat things. Some of the Blackboard native
tools include:
- Learning Units - a great way to present
learning materials in a linear fashion.
- Surveys - a way to poll student opinion
and elicit facts, by name or anonymously.
- The Assignment Manager - if you are using
the "digital drop box" in Blackboard, stop.
Use
the Assignment Manager instead. You will be
glad you did.
- Discussion Boards - It is the rare class,
whether online or in person, that cannot profit from
a written discussion board on challenging and
interesting topics. Discussion Boards can also
be used by students to ask questions about the
conduct of class or the presentation of materials.
- Chat and Virtual Classrooms - though not
heavily used, Blackboard allows for online chat and
a "virtual classroom" via a collaboration server.
There is a more robust version of "virtual
classroom" available through Elluminate Live, a
building block we have added to Blackboard. If
you have a need for a synchronous online
meeting--online office hours, for example, this is
your tool. Online meetings can be optionally
archived.
- Groups - for those who assign student
group work, Blackboard can be used to create online
environments for group projects. Some of the
tools we have added to Blackboard, such as the wiki
and blog tools, can also be configured for group
work.
- Safe Assignment - this is the
anti-plagiarism tool we use. If you give
writing assignments, Safe Assign is a great way to
teach about attribution and citation. It can
be configured to accept student drafts, final
submissions, or instructors can submit individual
documents in order to check them. We encourage
the use of Safe Assignment because the more widely
it is adopted, the more effective it is at
eliminating plagiarism.
- Assessments - Blackboard can create,
manage and grade simple, multiple choice tests, or
can be used to create very sophisticated randomized
tests drawing from question pools so that each
student in the class will receive a totally
different test, which can be timed and automatically
graded (unless you have included "essay" questions
that must be evaluated by hand). The results
of assessments are automatically linked to the
Blackboard grade center so that students can receive
optional feedback instantly. Blackboard
assessments support 26 different question types,
including "hotspot" screen coordinate questions.
Tools to help you communicate with students and
track their progress built-in to Blackboard include:
- Announcements - if for no other
reason you should be using Blackboard to post
announcements. Announcements include an
email all option, and can be synced with
Facebook and the iPhone.
- The Grade Center - this is the one
the students are most interested in. It is
also a great improvement over the old Blackboard
gradebook. If you haven't used it yet,
give it a try.
- The Performance Dashboard - this is a
tool that will help you keep track of student
progress and warn when someone falls behind.
Another tool, The Early Warning System will let
you set specific performance criteria and notify
you when students need your assistance.
"Building Block" tools we have added to
Blackboard:
- The Wimba Voice Tools - a collection
of tools built around a java-based online audio
recorder. The tools include a Voice
Author, which allows recording of an audio
message your students can play back; Voice
Email; a Voice Discussion Board, which also
allows text, where you and your students can
carry on an audible discussion; and a Voice
Presenter, an online "slideshow" application
where you can audibly annotate web content and
solicit your students' responses.
- Learning Objects Campus Pack - a set
of applications that you may use to create
course-based student journals, blogs, wikis and
podcasts. The Learning Objects also
include a Blackboard Search tool and a public
facing Expo tool.
- Elluminate Live - a tool that can be
used to set up an online, synchronous meeting,
or publish an online archive of a meeting.
If you have used CCC Confer you know how it
works.
In addition to Blackboard specific tools, we
license software you can use to create flash-based
learning activities, called StudyMate.
StudyMate can create flash cards, multiple
choice quizzes, crossword puzzles, fill-in-the-blank
and matching exercises, and several other learning
activities. It requires download of client
software from our secure installation point.
Those meeting in-person may also want to
use radio frequency clickers to engage
students and check on learning progress during
class. Clickers add a fun element to any
classroom activity and are easy to use. They
can be checked out from our help desk (room LL-103),
but if you have never used them before we ask that
you schedule a half-hour training session before
using them.
Academic Technology also recommends the use of a
wide range of software and services, accessed via
our Software page, and provides training material on
their use.
Resources
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 "Sky"
by
Ty Burhoe. "It's extraordinary how
seamlessly the intricate sounds of
Indian tabla merge with melodic piano
and soulful rhythms in this elegant
blend of jazz, classical, and world
music."
"I
don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word
one way." ~
Mark Twain
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