Difficulty reading this?  Click here.

Palomar College Academic Technology Resource Center

April 4, 2008

Contents
  • Technology News
  • Upcoming Training Opportunities
  • The Blackboard Feature of the Week:
    "Blackboard: A Class Act"
  • Tech Talk Topic:
    "AutoArchiving in Outlook"
  • For more, see podcast notes page for Episode 85


Blackboard Upgrade

Blackboard will be down June 21-22 in order to upgrade to version 8.

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

Technology & Download 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.
     
  • 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 Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray.

Blackboard: A Class Act

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 (atrc@palomar.edu or X2862) and we’ll see if we can work something out together.


 		 Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 11:58]
 
See the index of Dave's previous "Blackboard Feature of the Week" 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.

Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 6:39]
 
See an index of previous "Tech Talk Topics" segments.

Subscribe  |  Send us your comments