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Palomar College Academic Technology Resource Center

September 28, 2007

Contents
  • Technology News
  • Training Opportunities Next Week
  • The Blackboard Feature of the Week:
    "We need information: Stats!"
  • Tech Talk Topic:
    "How to access Academic Technology Workshop Training Materials"
  • For more, see podcast notes page for Episode 73.


Training Workshops
 

Click here for the schedule of Academic Technology training workshops this semester.

For help:
voice: (760) 744-1150 ext. 2862
atrc@palomar.edu

Technology & Download News Briefs

  • If you have signed a contract to work 850 hours at $77.10 per hour, you may want to send back the Lincoln Navigator.  An Excel 2007 calculation but was discovered this week.  Open Excel and enter the formula =77.1*850 in any cell.  The result will be displayed as 100000, rather than the correct answer 65535.  It turns out there are 12 known floating point numbers near 65,535 and 65,536 which are calculated incorrectly in this fashion.  "Of the 9.214*10^18 different floating point numbers that Excel 2007 can store, there are 6 floating point numbers (using binary representation) between 65534.99999999995 and 65535, and 6 between 65535.99999999995 and 65536 that cause this problem" (bink).  Microsoft is working on a patch and will release it as soon as possible to the normal update cycle.  Older versions of Excel do not display the bug.
     
  • Also new from Microsoft, in an effort to boost its share of Internet searches (and thereby sell more advertising) Live Search has a new index and search interface, a la Google.  "Microsoft said the index of web pages on the new Live Search was four times larger and more relevant results would be returned" (msnbc).  Microsoft is still a distant third as a search provider, behind Yahoo and Google.  For detailed information, see the Live Search blog.


 

  • Also from Microsoft (if that were not enough), there is a free, downloadable eBook titled Build a Web Site That Sells.  Click here to download.  The book is in PDF format.
     
  • The news just keeps coming from Microsoft:  It was reported this week that they are in talks with Facebook to purchase a 5% interest in that company, an investment valued at $300-500 million.  Google has a similar interest, so it looks like another bidding war.  Also from Microsoft, the new Zune2 will be released October 16th, with something new called the squircle--a cross between a square and a circle where the click-wheel control used to be.  Don't sell your Apple stock (engadget). 
     
  • A new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project reveals that "83% of online Americans say they have used the internet to seek information about their hobbies and 29% do so on a typical day."  Click here for the report in PDF format.
     
  • Google Book Search now has a new clipping tool, which clips excerpts from books into Google Notebook, along with the source URL, of enormous use to researchers building a library of clipped selections from mountains of public domain books.  "You can now highlight a section of text in any public domain book in Book Search, create a clip from it, and share it with the world. You can post your favorite clips to your blog along with a personal annotation, collect them in a Google Notebook, or share them with friends anywhere you decide to embed the link. Your clip looks exactly as it appears in the book, or if you prefer plain text, we have that too" (Inside Goolge Book Search).  How does it work?   Just click the clip tool at the top of the book view pane and highlight the text you want.  You can clip it to Google Notebook or a blog, as image or text, with a single click.
     
  • Google also released this week their long awaited presentation manager (their idea of web-based competition for PowerPoint.  Ars technica reviewed:  "Having spent nearly a decade working with PowerPoint...I found myself intrigued by Google Presentations. I wondered if it could truly replicate the functionality of PowerPoint, how much flexibility it offered users, and how polished the end products would look. At the risk of causing you to stop reading here, the answers are 'not really,' 'not much,' and 'not very.'"  Go to the Google Docs homepage to try it out for yourself.  To get Google's side of the story, click here for the press release.
     
  • Intel has announced a target date, sort-of, for delivery of USB 3.0 devices, which will require fibre cabling since they are aiming at offering 10-times the speed of USB 2.0 devices.  "the final version specifications to be finished by the first half of 2008, with USB 3.0 peripherals realistically appearing in 2009 or 2010" (ars technica).
     
  • Another week, another version of iTunes.  The new version is numbered 7.4.3, and is available now for download.
     
  • What's the word on the street?  It's "squid."  At least it is this week.  Sesame street has a new weekly video podcast featuring a single word.  Watch people dance like squids, see pictures of squids, see NBC news anchor man Brian Williams say "squid, squid, squid, squid, squid, squid."  This and much more.  Click here for more information and to subscribe to the vodcast (or simply watch it without subscribing).
     
  • Belkin is now shipping a wireless USB Network hub that works with existing wireless network access to USB devices.  "The system works by simulating a direct USB connection, tricking the computer into thinking the devices on the network are directly attached to it" (PC World).  It retails for around $160.
     
  • Speaking of great hardware, Western Digital this week unveiled their new lineup of "My Book" external hard drives, or "storage appliances" as they are now called--the term "hard drive" sounding too much like something that can break.  The new My Books (designed to look and stack like books) are physically smaller, sleeker, and capacity has been increase.  The top-end drive can now store 2TB or data, the low-end drive, 320GB.
     
  • Featured Safari Tech Book Online: The Digital Photography Book: The Step-By-Step Secrets for How to Make Your Photos Look Like the Pros'! by Scott Kelby.  "Scott Kelby, the man who changed the "digital darkroom" forever with his groundbreaking, #1 bestselling, award-winning book The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers, now tackles the most important side of digital photography--how to take pro-quality shots using the same tricks today's top digital pros use (and it's easier than you'd think)."  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 -15:24]

Training Opportunities

The Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray

We Need Information, Stat!

It sure would be nice to structure content in Blackboard so that the material which is used most frequently is most available. It would also be nice to know when students are using the course, or what tools in the course students are spending the most time using. After all, we have expectations about what students are doing, but wouldn’t it be grand to have evidence to prove or disprove our expectations?

Never fear, Course Statistics is here!

Linked at the middle right of the Control Panel, the Course Statistics area has only a few options. You select the kind of report you want, what date range you want a report on, and which users you want counted in the report. Hit Submit, and wait until your report is generated.

Of these settings, often faculty members will just leave the Users set to All Users, but if for some reason you want details on what a specific student is doing in the course, you can get reports showing only his information. Also a common setting choice, if no start and end dates are selected, the entire history of statistics for the course are used; remember that your course exists for around 90 days before the start of the semester, so leaving the time before the start of the semester in the report may not actually be what you wanted.

Of the reports to choose between, Overall Summary of Usage can give a good feel for when students are using the course (but the actual data displayed in the report can be overwhelming). Also the Accesses by Content Area can give a good feel for which of your content areas students access, but the usefulness of this report depend heavily on the design of your course. After all, if you have all your material gathered into a single content area, knowing that content area is used 100% of the time would be pretty useless. Obviously the “by Groups” and “by Forum” reports are only useful if you are actually using Groups or Discussion Board Forums.

When viewing these reports, try to avoid getting bogged down in the individual user data. All the data is shown, but the more useful portion of these reports is likely to be the graphs. It’s far simpler to look at the bar graphs and tell trends of which days of the week your course is used, or which hours of the day students are likely to be using the course, than it is to try and decipher fine detail from the massive data grids included in the reports. (Go ahead, run a report, you’ll see what I mean.) The pie charts which accompany these reports will, like all pie charts, only be useful if you look at the usage totals summarized at the end of each data grid, just try not to get stuck in the actual data.

Another reason not to get too locked into the individual data is due to the nature of Internet statistics; there is a difference (which is not at all intuitive) between a Hit on a web page, or a View of that page… and frankly trying to describe Internet statistical nature is both too boring and too long-winded for even me to try and explain. Bottom line though, you can use these Course Statistics to look for trends in student use, but don’t try to get too many details out of the reports.

Happy statistic gathering, everybody!


 		 Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 8:04
 
See the index of Dave's previous "Blackboard Feature of the Week" segments.

Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray

How to Access Academic Technology Workshop Training Materials

We have been engaged in presenting workshops on a variety of technology topics, and I would like to use this space to describe, for those workshop attendees who wish to work on the materials, and for those who were unable to attend, how to get to our training workshop training resources.

We have grouped our training support materials in a Blackboard course in which all faculty members have been pre-enrolled.  We have also enabled guest access on this area, so if you are a staff member or simply anyone in the world curious about our materials, you can access them in Blackboard as a guest.  I would like to review here how to access this training course.

First, for faculty members, all you need to do is login to Blackboard.  In the My Courses, under "Courses you are enrolled in" you will see one called "Academic Technology Training."  Click that and you will be into the course.  To find a specific workshop, click on the Workshops link, and then choose the workshop from the various areas of "competency."

If you are a staff member, or member of the public wishing to access these materials as a guest, the access route is a good deal more convoluted.  Begin by starting the Blackboard login procedure:  Go to http://www.palomar.edu/pconline and click the big red login button:

On the next page click the little grey login button on the left of the page:

On the next page, click the "Preview" button on the left of the page:

Now you are in to Blackboard.  Click the red "Courses" tab:

Now click the "Academic Technology" link in the "Course Catalog" area of the resulting page (I told you it was a bit convoluted):

Finally, click the AT_Training link on the next page.

You're in.  Simple as 1-2-3 (4, 5 square root of -i).

The training area is constantly changing and developing, so check back if you don't find what you are looking for.  Eventually, there will be a content area for each workshop we do (there already are for most workshops--though some have yet to be developed).

Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 7:08]
 
See an index of previous "Tech Talk Topics" segments.

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