Difficulty reading this?
Click here.
 |
October 24,
2008 |
Contents |
-
Technology
News
- Training
Opportunities
- The Blackboard Feature of the
Week:
"The Flip Video Camera"
- Teaching with Technology:
"Online Teaching Tips and TurnItIn-SafeAssignment
Survey"
-
Tech Talk Topic:
"Create, Edit and Share Placemarks in
Google Earth"
- For more, see
podcast notes for
Episode
93.
|
|
Technology & Download News Briefs
-
Election day is around the corner. Do you know
where to vote? Click here to visit the
Google Maps Voter Info web site to use their polling
place
gadget.
- With respect to that election, while the
manufacturer of Diebold/Premier electronic voting
machines have admitted their voting machines have
contained errors that dropped votes in actual
elections (washington
post;
techdirt),
and researchers have found those same Diebold
machines to be insecure (see
California red
team testing), now news of a Princeton
study of Sequoia/Advantage voting machines has been
released (the
Princeton report
is redacted (!) for security reasons)
showing that:
"We have found that
the Advantage AVC firmware has errors. We have
also found that it is easy to replace firmware
in the AVC Advantage with fraudulent firmware
that can undetectably steal votes and thus
change the outcomes of elections," the report
says. "Furthermore, some kinds of fraudulent
firmware can automatically virally propagate
themselves from one AVC Advantage voting machine
to another, without the attacker being
physically present. Once fraudulent firmware is
installed in the AVC Advantage, it can steal
votes in election after election without any
additional effort by the attacker."
A researcher inexperienced in picking locks
opened the lock on a Sequoia machine within 7
minutes, undetectably bypassed plastic seals on
hardware, and replaced a single ROM chip allowing a
simple program to undetectably manipulate the voting
results of the machine (which includes a paper trail
feature) and virally spread itself to other Sequoia
machines (ars
technica).
- Gloom and doom forecast for the tech sector?
Not so much. Results of quarterly earnings are
in, and while it is true Yahoo's
profit dropped
64% last quarter, and they are laying off workers,
following the 26,000 laid off by HP last month, the
positive side shows iPhone sales have
boosted AT&T
earnings, Amazon has
not faltered,
Apple posted
very strong
earnings, VMWare is
up 28%,
IBM came in with a
very good
earnings report, Microsoft earnings beat
earnings expectations, AMD reported
improved
earnings, and amazingly Google reported
spectacular
earnings and a 31% growth over last
years' earnings. Things could get bad, if the
rest of the economy declines, but efficiency gains
through technology have fueled the expansion of the
world economy since the early nineties, and there is
no reason to expect it will be permanently affected
by the downturn in credit markets.
-
 Are
you Blackberry users growing antsy about your
friends' sexy new iPhones? Get ready to get in
their faces with the new Blackberry Bold, which will
go on sale
November 4. Ok. So it's not
as sexy as an iPhone, but if your a Blackberry type
[read executives and wannabes] you will have to have
one, even though AT&T is going to charge $100 MORE
for it than that same iPhone.
- GMail users: Attention. You can now be
out-of-office, just like your friends who use
Outlook. Google announced new "canned
responses" for GMail (see the official
GMail blog
for details).
- If you are paranoid about people snooping on your
keystrokes, you have good reason. Two dotoral
students a the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne, Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini,
demonstrated this week that they could pick up and
read keystrokes from a variety of keyboards and
keyboard connectors (11 keyboards were tested) at
distances over 20 meters. The basic idea is to
intercept and decode radiation emitted when keys are
pressed. The pair said that "no doubt that our
attacks can be significantly improved, since we used
relatively unexpensive equipments [sic]."
Their conclusion: keyboards are "not safe to
transmit sensitive information" (BBC).
- This Thursday (Oct. 23) Microsoft issued an
emergency Windows patch for a newly discovered
vulnerability which was important enough to be
issued outside the normal Patch Tuesday framework (CNet).
- While we're being paranoid about technology, have
you heard about "THE YELLOW DOTS OF MYSTERY"?
It's true. You're printer is spying on you.
If you wonder what this is all about,
watch this YouTube video (5:43) by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, then go paperless. This, and thousands of other how-to videos are
available from
Instructables.com, the "world's biggest
show and tell".
- The 38,000 employees of Washington DC will no longer
be using Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Instead,
the District has elected to go with Google cloud
computing solution, Google Docs, Google Mail and
Google Video (bink).
- What do these three quotes have in common?:
"We’ve got to
somehow stabilize our connection to nature so
that in 50 years from now, 500 years, 5,000
years from now there will still be a wild system
and respect for what it takes to sustain us.”
" ‘Are we
alone?’ Humans have been asking [this question]
forever. The probability of success is difficult
to estimate but if we never search the chance of
success is zero.”
“Music has to be
recognized as an…agent of social development in
the highest sense, because it transmits the
highest values - solidarity, harmony, mutual
compassion. And it has the ability to unite an
entire community and to express sublime
feelings.”
They were delivered by the three winners of the
2009 TED prize: Sylvia Earle, oceanographer;
Jill Cornell Tarter, Director of SETI (Sarch for
Extrterrestrial Intelligence); and Jose Antonio
Abreu, economist and musician who founded El Sistema
in 1975 "based on the conviction that all Venezuelan
kids can benefit from participating in classical
music". The TED winners get $100,000 each and,
more importantly, "One Wish to Change The World. No
Restrictions".
Click here
to read all about it, and them.
-
 If
you are doing research, and perhaps more
importantly, if you wish to teach your students how
most effectively to do research, you should be aware
of Zotero, a new bibliographic tool that "lives"
inside Firefox and "senses" bibliographic
information contained in web pages. It is the
quickest possible way to gather bibliographic
information while performing electronic research,
and has powerful organizational tools built in.
Developed by George Mason University and funded by
the Carnegie Foundation, the best part is, Zotero is
free.
Click here
for a product tour (Flash using Adobe Breeze), and
here
for the web site with download link, further
information, and additional screencasts and
tutorials. For even more,
click here
for a PDF document from Educause on "7 things you
should know about Zotero".
-
While we are on the topic of research,
click here
for Christine Pruzin's "State Digital Resources:
Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical &
Cultural Materials Collections", an impressive guide
to many remarkable digitization projects under way
across America.
-
 Featured
Safari Tech Book Online:
Leveraging
SmartArt™ Graphics in the 2007 Microsoft® Office
System: Using Office 2007's New Business Diagramming
Tools,
by Bill Jelen. "Microsoft provides a fantastic
new business diagramming engine in PowerPoint 2007,
Word 2007, and Excel 2007 in the form of SmartArt[TM]
graphics. The new SmartArt[TM] graphics allow you to
create process charts, radial charts, organization
charts, and more." 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
- Academic Technology Workshops
The Blackboard
Feature of the Week - David Gray.
 Happy
Hunting
Sometimes you just want to shoot something… with
a video camera, that is. Now, you can! Academic
Technology has five FlipVideo cameras available to
be checked out to faculty. So, if you want to record
a demo in your classroom, a student presentation,
some activity outside the classroom you want to
share with your students… the FlipVideo camera is
for you.
The camera itself is very easy to use; just flip
the power switch, aim, and hit the red button to
start recording. When you’re done, just hit the red
button again; voila! Even better, the process to
handle the recordings is equally easy. When you get
back to your computer, just flip the switch on the
side of the camera, and plug it into the USB port on
your computer. Your computer will ask if you want to
view the videos, and if it’s the first time you’ve
used the camera it will automatically install the
software you need.
So now you’ve recorded something, and hooked the
camera up to your computer, and its loaded software.
What next? Well, now it’s time to make the video
available to your students online. In the FlipVideo
program, say you want to “Share Video”, pick the
video clip(s) you want to work with, then tell it
you want to do “Public Online Sharing”. The program
will ask where you want to share it, and you respond
with “Upload to Other Websites”. A progress bar will
pop up, and depending on how much video you are
about to share the process might take a while. When
it’s done, just hit the “Close” button, and exit out
of the FlipVideo program.
At this point, you should have a folder on your
desktop called “Flip Videos for Uploading” which
will have your videos organized in subfolders. Go
through the folders to find the video, then follow
the instructions from Academic Technology on how to
upload those files into your space on Palomar’s
Windows Media Server. (If you don’t already have
space on that server, you can request it by emailing
Chris Norcross.)
Make a note of what your video files are named,
since you’ll need that information for the next
step.
Now that the video files are uploaded, you can
link to them from within Blackboard. Go into your
course, and click the Add External Link button in
one of your content areas.
All the External Link requires is some name, and
the address to link to. So, in my example video, I
named it “Video: Halloween Decorations”.
(It is a good idea to identify your video links
in some fashion, either by putting them all into a
special “Videos” portion of your course, or by
labeling each individual link to say it points to a
video. That way your students won’t be surprised
when their media player starts up instead of a web
page.) For the address, I used the media protocol
(mms) pointing to the location of the video on the
Windows Media Server. In this case it was
mms://venus.palomar.edu/ATRC/video/HalloweenDecorations.wmv
(If you’ve never seen a video recorded with a
FlipVideo camera before, you may want to watch that
brief demo video.) Hit the Submit button, and your
External Link should be ready.
Congratulations; in just a few steps you’ve
recorded a video, processed it, posted it online,
and linked it within your Blackboard course. Time to
go shoot something else… happy hunting!
Teaching with Technology -
Dr. Haydn Davis Online Teaching Tips and Anti-Plagiarism Survey
Today Haydn uses the following documents to
discuss last spring's Teaching with Technology
workshop tips and also the recent TurnItIn vs.
SafeAssignment faculty survey.
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry
GrayHow to Create, Save
and Share Placemarks in Google Earth
Google Earth is a geographic browser. Essentially
it is a tool for viewing, creating and sharing
interactive files containing photorealistic,
location-specific, geographic information. Best of
all, Google Earth is free, including all the
satellite imagery and GIS data that comes with it.
There is a Plus version, which costs $20 per year
and provides a few additional features, and a Pro
version that costs $400 per year and adds even more
functionality, including the ability to print
extremely high resolution graphics. Google Earth is
based on the keyhole markup language (KML) which is
a sub-grammar of XML, very much like HTML. It is
extremely easy to use and, Google Earth itself,
being among other things a sort of KML graphical
editor, makes it extremely simple to create KML
files that can be shared with others.
These KML files (or, more commonly KMZ files, the
compressed version of KML and the one Google Earth
prefers) are simply a collection of "placemarks"
which can be "played" (viewed sequentially, like a
movie) in Google Earth. Placemarks are not
only a specific location on earth, defined by
latitude and longitude, but also an initial view of
the place described by altitude, angle of view, and
other factors. This article describes the very
simple process of creating a placemark.
How to Create/Edit a Placemark
To add a placemark, navigate in Google Earth to
the location you wish to mark and click the Add
Placemark icon on the toolbar (or use the Add menu;
or press Ctrl-Shift-P; or right-click the location
name in the Search or Places pane and choose Add >
Placemark).
To edit a placemark, right-click it and choose
Properties.
To pick a placemark icon, click the placemark
button on the description tab.
You can use one of the many predesigned icons in
the Icon dialog box, or import one you have designed
yourself.
The initial view of the place can be set manually
on the View tab (the “range” value must be entered
in meters); but it is much easier to navigate to the
view you want and click the “Snapshot current view”
button.
One of the most valuable things about placemarks
is that they can be clicked to provide the viewer
with a description bubble. This bubble will contain
any text, links or graphics you have placed in the
placemark properties description box.
The first few words of this description will
appear in the Places pane, and can also be accessed
by clicking the active link for the location in the
Places pane.
- Valid web URLs are automatically converted
to HTML and can be clicked on from the info
balloon to produce the related web page in the
web window.
- Many HTML tags are respected, such as font,
style, and table tags. If you are familiar with
HTML, you can be quite creative in how your
descriptions are formatted! All HTML tags should
be properly closed. The easy way to accomplish a
sophisticated format in the description field is
to create it in SharePoint Designer or
Dreamweaver and then paste it into the
Description field.
- You can include images in your description
using the IMG HTML tag to refer to either:
- Images stored on your computer's hard
drive (e.g., <img src="C:\Documents and
Settings\HP\My Documents\Pictures\myDescriptiveImage.jpg">)
- Images on the internet (e.g. <img src="http://www.test.com/images/myDescriptiveImage.jpg">).
- When you email that placemark to another
person, local images are included.
How to Share Placemarks
To save a placemark, or folder full of
placemarks, right-click the placemark (or folder) in
the Places panel and choose Save Place As… By
default, .kmz file format is used, which is the
compressed version of a .kml file (keyhole markup
file). If you do not wish to use the smaller,
compressed version, click the Save as type drop-down
and choose Kml. Either style file will open
automatically in Google Earth.
Note that there are also menu choices for
Share/Post the placemark(s) to the Google Earth
Community (thousands of individuals who use and
improve Google Earth) or to email the .kmz file to
anyone else.
The best part of all is, it is totally free!
Subscribe |
Send us your comments
|
