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August 17,
2007 |
Contents |
-
Technology
News
-
Training
Opportunities Next Week
- The Blackboard Feature of the
Week:
"Blackboard Course Management Tips"
- Teaching with Technology:
"College Papers: Cheating, Plagiarism, and
Education"
-
Tech Talk Topic:
"What's New in Academic Technology"
- For more, see
podcast notes page
for Episode 68.
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Technology & Download News Briefs
-
 The summer 2006 Blackboard courses will be purged
from the system as of Saturday, August 18. If
you want to save materials from these courses,
archive or export them prior to that date.
Beyond that date they cannot be accessed or restored
to the Blackboard system except from your personal
archive files.
-
Just in case you will be setting up your TurnItIn
assignments this weekend, you should know that
TurnItIn will be unavailable, due to scheduled
system maintenance, on Saturday, from 9am to 6pm
PST. If you have never used the TurnItIn
plagiarism prevention service,
click here for a screen video on how to set up a
Blackboard TurnItIn Assignment.
-
 There
is a new CCC Confer. CCC Confer now uses
Elluminate to deliver their online meetings.
New features include a friendlier user interface,
faster application sharing, easier web tours, simple
file transfer, the ability to capture and print
whiteboard screens, fun emoticons (!), and other
features that make the online meeting experience
simpler but more powerful.
Click here for the new CCC Confer online
training center.
-
Google announced on Wednesday that they have begun
freely distributing Sun's StarOffice suite of word
processing, spreadsheet and other workplace-oriented
programs. The offline, productivity software
normally costs $70 from Sun, but is being given away
as part of Google's Pack download. Google and
Sun "have clarified their tactics for jointly
attacking Microsoft Corp. and its ubiquitous Office
software" (MSNBC).
-
 Google,
Microsoft and Apple all announced changes to their
online storage services last week. Google
announced, essentially, the end of free, unlimited
storage. Paid storage upgrades for behemoth
Picasa or GMail folders (soon to be added, Google
Docs & Spreadsheet folders) can be had at the rate
of $20/year for 6GB (on top of the 2.8 already
provided free of charge by Google), running up to
$500/year for 250GB. To find out more, login
to your GMail account and click the "Upgrade your
storage" link. Windows Live SkyDive is a free
beta solution that provides 500MB of free Internet
file storage for any purpose.
Click here to find out more. You can
create personal, shared, or public folders using the
service. Apple, not to be left behind, also
bumped up the storage associated with .Mac accounts
to 10GB, while keeping subscription to .Mac the
same, at $99 per year. Yahoo already offers
unlimited storage for Yahoo mail users.
Microsoft hotmail has upped their storage limit to
5GB.
-
Nine security patches were released this week on
Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Six were critical,
three important. All but one of them addressed
remote code execution.
Click here for the Microsoft security bulletin.
-
Universal Music group recently made the decision to
begin selling DRM-free downloads of portions of
their enormous catalog. It was revealed Friday
(8/10) that the tracks will contain a digital
"watermark" that will identify them, and potentially
their original purchaser, if they should later be
found on a peer-to-peer music sharing network (Wired).
-
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen acting on
the advise of numerous analysts and computer science
researchers, de-certified California electronic
voting machines in favor of paper ballots.
 "The
systems developed by the likes of Diebold, Sequoia,
and Election Systems & Software were riddled with
software-writing flaws and security holes that made
the likelihood of error or foul play unacceptably
high. The fact that the electronic systems had no
reliable paper back-up – certainly not before one
was mandated by law in many states, including this
one – only made the systems’ vulnerabilities all the
more unnerving. Not only could an election go badly
wrong or be outright stolen; there was no guarantee
anybody could prove it if it happened" (Los
Angeles City Beat).
Click here to hear an interesting audio
interview aired recently on NPRs
Science Friday with Matt Bishop, one of the
principle researchers and leader of a "red team"
responsible for finding security holes in the
recently de-certified systems (mp3 format).
-
 Two
computer science researchers at Northeastern
University have used a supercomputer to prove that
any disordered Rubik's Cube can be solved in no more
than 26 moves. "The supercomputer took 63
hours to crank out the proof which goes one better
than the previous best solution" (BBC).
The human world record holder for solving a
disordered Rubik's Cube is Leyan Lo, in
11.13 seconds (CNet).
-
What Browser are your students using?
According to
W3Schools.com, as of July 2007, some flavor of
IE was being used by 58.5% of users, Firefox/Mozilla
by 35.9% of users, and a smattering of other users
use Opera and Safari.
-
What Operating System are your
students using? Again, according to
W3Schools.com, 87.1% are using some flavor of
Windows, with Windows XP still dominating, 4% use
some flavor of MacOS, and 3.4% use Linux.
-
 Featured
Safari Tech Book Online:
iPhone: the Missing Manual,
by David Pogue. "The Missing Manual is a book
as breathtaking as its subject. Teeming with
high-quality color graphics, each custom designed
page helps you accomplish specific tasks --
everything from Web browsing to watching videos." Palomar maintains a
subscription to Tech Books Online, and the books can
be accessed from any computer on the campus network.
Contact the library for information about off-campus
access.
Listen to the news [mp3 -
13:31]
Training Opportunities
- Academic Technology Training
-
Elluminate Training
- 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.
-
@ONE training resources:
The Blackboard
Feature of the Week - David Gray
Blackboard Course Management
Tips
 Time
for another semester to start, so it seems
appropriate to go over some of the traditional tips
and mix in a couple new ones. First of all, if your
Fall 2007 course doesn’t have materials in it, and
you want to transfer stuff from a previous semester
course, you should probably take a look at the
training video on
Copying Course Content into Another Course. The
process can take from a minute to an hour, depending
on how much stuff you have in your source course,
but it does work rather more easily than re-building
your course from scratch every semester.
Please recall that courses are
created as Unavailable to students, and stay that
way until you manually make each course available to
students. If you’ve forgotten how to do this (and
when you only do it twice or thrice a year that’s
easy to forget) a reminder can be found at the video
Making Your Course Available.
 For
some faculty, given our policy of retaining courses
on the Blackboard system for a full year after the
semester they were originally offered in, the list
of courses in the My Courses module can be getting
inconveniently long. Never fear, once you are done
going into an old course, there is a way to hide it
on your list. The training video on
Managing the My Courses Module will spell out
how to hide your lesser used courses until such time
as you need to get back into them. On a similar
note, given our course retention policy, be aware
that the Summer 2006 courses are going to be
vanishing as of Saturday, August 18th. Should anyone
actually be interested in a description of our
Blackboard course retention policies, there was a
Blackboard Feature of the Week covering this topic
back in episode 37 which includes a nice little
graph representing the course lifelines.
Hopefully these tips will help
with getting ready for Fall, cause… it’s here!
Teaching with Technology -
Dr. Haydn Davis College
Papers: Cheating, Plagiarism, and Education
The Problem: There are many commercial
services that will enable students to purchase papers on
virtually any subject or even to contract to purchase a
paper on a very specific subject. Sometimes students confuse
paraphrasing with plagiarism. Other times students are
unclear about providing proper attribution. What’s an
instructor to do?
One Answer: Palomar College has two
“plagiarism detection” services available to faculty here.
The two services, Turnitin and SafeAssign, are both
available through each instructor’s Blackboard class. Both
provide essentially the same service: they check
student-submitted papers against databases of papers and
produce “originality reports” which provide a “similarity
index.” The similarity index is a measure of how similar the
submitted paper is to other papers.
While Turnitin and SafeAssign both provide
information for the instructor to consider when evaluating
student work, they only provide statistics about similarity
(e.g. plagiarism) and do not attempt to substitute for an
instructor’s judgment.
This semester we are very interested in
identifying a group of faculty who will be willing to
compare and contrast the two systems (publication?
conference presentation material?). In addition to obtaining
PD credit for undertaking this comparison, Academic
Technology will try to provide some material incentive as
well (intentionally left vague). Please email either hdavis@palomar.edu
or tgray@palomar.edu if you might be interested.
Listed below are some online resources.
Turnitin (click on the Training link)
http://turnitin.com/static/index.html
An excellent Turnitin How-to Turnitin
video
http://www.palomar.edu/pconline/facultyservices/UsingTurnItInAssignment.asp
SafeAssign
http://www.safeassign.com/
No Printing in Blackboard script
(follow-up to last week’s tip). This script prevents anyone
from overriding the CSS. Therefore, anyone who attempts to
print a Blackboard test will only be able to print blank
pages. The script to enter – and by the way you can enter
this script into the instructions area and then can
randomize items – is:
<style type=”text/css”>@media Print {BODY{display:none
!important;}}</style>
Note: once this script is entered into the
instruction area you must not modify instructions (if you do
you’ll have to reenter this code). Call Blackboard support
(x2862) if these directions seem unclear.
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry
Gray What's New in Academic Technology
Each year on plenary days we get the opportunity
to present a brief What's New session with both
part-time and full-time faculty members. Here
is a summary of some of the new things this
semester.
 Chad
Abshier. We are please and
proud to announce that we have hired a
new instructional lab technician/help
desk specialist effective August 15,
2007. Chad replaces Daniel Jani,
who has moved to the IS department.
He is a graduate of Point Loma Nazarene
College, where he majored in math and
help administer their computer labs.
He will be managing the ATRC labs during
evening hours. Chad's email is
cabshier@palomar.edu, and he can be
contacted by phone at ext. 2657.
He will receive a different phone
extension at a later date.
 SafeAssign
and TurnItIn plagiarism prevention
services. In addition to the
popular TurnItIn anti-plagiarism we have
added Blackboard's new SafeAssign tool.
We will continue to provide TurnItIn
through the end of the fall 2007
semester. Beyond that we must
decide whether we will continue it or
not, and we are asking for faculty
feedback to help us make a
recommendation. TurnItIn is very
expensive, and SafeAssign is "free," so
to speak, since its cost is included in
our annual Blackboard license fee.
If, however, SafeAssign does not provide
the same level of service as TurnItIn we
want to know.
To find out more about SafeAssign,
click here. We will be
providing training materials on
SafeAssign very soon. To receive
training now, contact Dr. Haydn Davis at
ext. 2341.
 Palomar's
one-year license for theTurnItIn anti-plagiarism service
will run through December 17, 2007 and
perhaps beyond.
It is administered via the familiar
Blackboard interface. Simply set
up a TurnItIn assignment in Blackboard
to take advantage of the enormous
TurnItIn database of textual materials
which can be quickly scanned or
originality. TurnItIn can be used
as a very effective teaching tool in the
discussion of plagiarism, originality
and source citation in academic papers.
Click here for a screen video
showing how to set up a TurnItIn
Assignment in Blackboard (requires flash
player).
Click here for the brief (6-page)
TurnItIn manual (PDF format).
 Elluminate
in Blackboard. We have added the
Elluminate Live! building block to our Blackboard
system. Elluminate is an online elearning
collaboration, file transfer, application sharing
system for live synchronous or archived asynchronous web
meetings. It contains the usual online
collaboration tools, supports voice-over-IP audio,
one-to-many video, presentation, document and even
video sharing capabilities, file transfer, desktop
sharing and application sharing functionality also
in an easy-to-use package.
Click here to find out more about Elluminate in
general,
here to find out more about the Blackboard
building block.
 The
Oscelot Podcaster. We no longer have
access to the Horizon Wimba voice tools. One
of those tools was a podcaster, which permitted
creation of a subscribable podcase within a
Blackboard course. We have found a better
replacement product, however, and it is open-source
and free. It is the Oscelot Podcaster.
It can be used to upload any audio file, or create a
series of episodes to which students may subscribe
via iTunes or some other podcatching software.
Audio (or video) must be pre-recorded and uploaded
to Blackboard. Episodes may be placed in any
and various course content areas.
Click here for information on how to use it.
New Microsoft Products.
 Microsoft
has published new versions of their operating
system, Windows Vista, their Office productivity
suite, Office 2007, and their web authoring product,
SharePoint Designer 2007. Full-time faculty
should contact the IS department to have these
products installed on your office computers, ext.
2140. All faculty and staff can purchase these
products at greatly reduced prices through the FCCC.
Purchase
Vista, Office 2007 or SharePoint Designer 2007
through the following web site:
http://www.collegebuys.org/. Proof of
Palomar College employment will be required.
Reduced prices on Office 2007
and Adobe products for students can be
found at:
http://www.journeyed.com/fccc/.
The new Microsoft products are installed throughout
the Academic Technology computer labs.
New
Adobe Products.
Faculty members, staff and students can
purchase the new Adobe CS3 products at very
reduced prices through Collegebuys.com.
Click here to begin. The new Adobe
products are installed throughout the
Academic Technology labs.
 Olympus
WS-300M Digital
Voice Recorder Checkout.
Faculty members who need a digital voice recorder one time,
or for the entire semester, may check
out the WS-300M from Academic Technology.
More...
Click here to request checkout of a
WS-300 digital voice recorder.
New Schedule of Academic
Technology Training Workshops. We have many of the ongoing favorite
workshops and several new ones for Spring
2007, including a new Blackboard certificate
program.
Click here for the Spring 2007
training schedule.
PDF versions of the
schedules are available below:
The General
fall 2007 Schedule and Training Information Packet (complete
- 24 pages)
Technology Essentials
Presentation Skills
Document Preparation Skills
Communication Skills
Assessment Skills
Teaching and Learning Strategies
Lynda.com training. Two workstations
in the
faculty technology center, room LL-111 are
equipped with logins to the full catalog of
lynda.com training materials. You can drop by the lab at
any time to build practical skills with a wide-range
of programs and systems, including the new Adobe CS3
products; Apple products, such as Final Cut Pro and
Aperture; the full range of Microsoft products,
including Office 2007 and Windows Vista; web
development products, and many more.
Updated Versions of Respondus and
StudyMate. We have updated our campus-wide
license for the Respondus and StudyMate
software applications. There are
new, updated versions of these products
available: StudyMate 2.0.2 and Respondus 3.5.4.
You will need to visit the Palomar College
Respondus/StudyMate web site (Palomar
authentication required) in order to
re-register your product for the new
academic year, even if you are not using one
of the updated versions.
 CPS RF
Personal Response Systems (clickers)
We continue to circulate radio frequency personal
polling devices. Known as "clickers"
for short, they can be checked out from
Academic Technology for classroom/meeting
use. They are used to ask questions of your
class, solicit responses by a simple
select/enter operation, then show the
results as a histogram to the class. The
idea is to generate interest, focus a
discussion, and verify that key concepts
have been understood in a fun, immediate
way.
You may download and install
the CPS software (updated fall 2007) on your own system.
Click here to login and download (use
your Palomar email address and email
password to login). There is new
software for the fall 2007 semester.
Click here to reserve the personal
response system. You may reserve for
one-time meetings, or for each meeting per
semester. You must attend Academic
Technology training on the use of the
clickers before checking them out. To obtain
training, call ext. 2341, or email
hdavis@palomar.edu.
New Self-Serve
FTP/Web Accounts for Students.
Student web/ftp accounts on the server known
as "Pluto" (the student projects server) are
now created on a self-serve basis.
Students should go to
http://pluto.palomar.edu.
Click the
"Pluto Account Request Form" link.
Login with your student ID number and your
Palomar eServices password, then fill out
the request form. Your account will be
created within 24 hours. You will
receive 125MB of storage.
Click here for more information on your
account, and
here for technical specifications of the
storage area, which is
WebDAV-enabled and can be accessed
directly from FrontPage, SharePoint
Designer, Dreamweaver, and any standard
FTP program.
 Computer
Labs. The mobile labs continue to roll. We have
30 laptop computers in 2 rolling carts, with
wireless network access points. These can be
used as classroom labs...bring the lab to your
class, not your class to the lab...or can be checked
out to individual students. Click here to
reserve the mobile labs.
We have expanded the public access computer lab
by 10 new standard workstations and 2 new DSPS work
stations, for a total of 144 public access
computers, 174 counting the wireless laptop
computers.
The computer
labs on the ground floor of the San Marcos
campus library will maintain the following
hours for Fall 2007:
| Monday - Thursday |
7:30am - 8:50pm |
| Wednesday - Friday |
7:30am - 3:50pm |
| Saturday |
9:am - 12:50pm |
We will be closed Saturday and Sunday. For more information about the computer labs, or to reserve lab for
classes, click here.
We have a new pay-for-print system in the
Academic Technology Computer labs this semester that
is cash-based. We no longer will be using
debit cards or card readers. Students who
submit jobs to the lab printers are asked to pay by
cash to a vending machine and then release their
print jobs on a printer release station.
Prices remain the same, 10 cents per page for black
and white print jobs, 30 cents for color. Our
print system also supports internet printing--that
is, print from anywhere in the world. For
details, contact the ATRC help desk at ext. 2862.
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