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Palomar College Academic Technology Resource Center

February 6, 2009

Contents
  • Technology News Briefs
  • Training Opportunities
  • The Blackboard Feature of the Week:
    "Blogs vs. Discussion Boards"
  • Teaching with Technology:
    "If I Did It...Here's What I Did"
  • Tech Talk Topic:
    "Google Earth 5"
  • For more, see podcast notes page for Episode 99


Camera Checkout

You can check out a Flip video camera from Academic Technology for quick class video projects.

For help or questions:
online: help ticketing system
email: onlineclasses@palomar.edu
or (760) 744-1150 ext. 2862

Technology News Briefs

  • In a turn-about for Wikipedia, founder Jimmy Wales has called for implementation of flagged revisions in the English Wikipedia.  Flagged revisions means that editors must review and approve revisions before they are committed to print (electronic though it be).  Many have objected, including many of the editors whose job it would become to review all those revisions.  They argue it is too labor intensive to work and runs contra to the roots of the way Wikipedia has been built.  Wales counters that it is too easy to quickly publish misinformation.  How do you want it, quick or right?  Stay tuned to see how this plays out  (BBC).
     
  • This is the bicentennial of the birth of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, born on the same day (February 12) in 1809.  For a notable evaluation of the work and importance of Darwin, listen to the four-part In Our Time broadcast archived at the BBC, and subscribe to this remarkable podcast series while you are at it.  For Lincoln, visit the US government's Lincoln bicentennial web site.
     
  • The super bowl occurred since our last podcast, and as always the most interesting part was the ads (though it was a pretty good game, all agree).  Hulu (who themselves produced one of the better ads) has made the ads available in the widget below, for remembrance sake. 
  • Google Earth version 5 was released this week.  It has a great many new features, at last including features of the long awaited "Google Ocean" project.  Click here for a BBC demo of the new "3D bathymetry" features in Google Earth, or watch the embedded video below.  Click here for the official press release, and here to download and install the new Google Earth 5.  Also new in this version are a historical slider to view older earth imagery, Mars 3D--a tour with high resolution imagery and 3D terrain of the Martian surface--GPS import from Garmin, Magellan, and NMEA compatible devices in the free version of the program, and broader language support.
     
  • File under Google's bad:  For a period of approximately 40 minutes on the morning of January 31, every site on the Internet, according to Google, was potentially harmful, a message that may be existentially true but prosaically dubious.  The message, received as a result of a Google search between the hours of 6:30am and 7:25am PST that day was literally "This site may harm your computer."  For those (few) who have never seen this message as a result of a Google search, it is generated automatically by Google servers based on a StopBadware.org control list of known malware sites.  The list on this particular morning contained the URL "/" which when expanded automatically by Google's algorithm embraced all possible URLs, and thus the warning.  Technicians realized the problem almost immediately, but, as Sean Connery said in The Hunt for Red October, "You don't exactly stop a ship this big on a dime."  It took the better part of an hour to reverse all engines.
     
  • There is a new version of Firefox now available, version 3.0.6. The upgrade mainly fixes bugs and patches vulnerabilities.  There are no new features.
     
  • Global warming notwithstanding, extremely heavy snows across the UK brought travel and network infrastructures to a standstill.  Transportation for London (TfL) collapsed briefly under a barrage of inquiries, as did lesser networks across the kingdom.  Click here for the snowy video from the BBC.
     
  • Respondus recently announced the addition of John Wiley & Sons to their test bank network.  "Some of the Respondus-formatted question banks that will be available in Spring 2009 from Wiley include:

    "Contemporary Business 13e" by Boone/Kurtz
    "Physics, 8e" by Cutnell
    "Psychology in Action, 9e" by Huffman
    "Intermediate Accounting, 13e" by Kieso
    "Financial Accounting, 5e" by Kimmel
    "Introduction to the Human Body, 8e" by Tortora
    "Accounting Principles, 9e" by Weygandt"

Palomar College faculty have access to Respondus software through our secure download site (Palomar login required).

  • As predicted, Congress approved a delay of the already oft delayed digital TV switchover.  It had been scheduled for February 17, and has been delayed to June 12.  Now, get ready for the next dealy... (NY Times).
     
  • Here is an interesting point from the ubiquitous 5-minute video "Did You Know" [YouTube].  It answers the question, how long did it take these technologies to reach a market audience of 50 million?
    • Radio - 38 years
    • TV - 13 years
    • Internet - 4 years
    • iPod - 3 years
    • FaceBook - 2 years
       
  • Congratulations to Kalyna Lesyna of our Behavioral Sciences department for developing a great new web site for the Sociology Program.  It looks great and is comprehensive and, it goes without saying, useful.  Now the real work begins: maintaining it.
     
  • And speaking of Sociology, there is a bill before congress now (HR 414, sponsored by New York republican Peter King) that would require cell phone cameras to emit a "tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone."  The bill is titled "The Camera Phone Predator Act", the idea being that "children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone."  Au contraire, say many teenagers, whose practice it is to deliberately send nude or semi-nude photos of themselves to girl or boyfriends.  Of course, the two ideas are not incompatible.  Click here for a survey of teens and young adults (13-26) published by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy title "Sex and Tech".  The results might surprise Rep. King (ars technica).
     
  • Featured Safari Tech Book Online: Googlepedia: The Ultimate Google Resource, by Michael Miller, and published by Que. "The all-encompassing book about everything Google. Not only will you learn advanced search techniques, but you also will learn how to master Google's web and software tools. It's all inside!"   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 Academic Technology training schedule has been published for the spring 2009 semester.  Click here for the schedule, and here for the training description page.  New this spring will be four "technology Fridays" where a topic will be pursued by a limited number of participants (15) in depth for six hours (including an hour for lunch, which will be provided free).  Those interested in technology Fridays are encouraged to sign-up early, since seating and lunch reservations are limited.

      Upcoming in-person workshops include:

    • In addition, we have developed a set of self-paced, online workshops on various technology essentials topics in the Academic Technology Training Blackboard course.  All faculty and staff members are pre-enrolled in this course.  You will find it in the My Courses area when you login to Blackboard under the "Courses in which you are enrolled" section.
       
    • We have also developed (or linked to) sets of screen videos that teach how to use the features of the various technology tools available to faculty members through Blackboard:
       

The Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray

Blogs vs. Discussion Boards

We recently acquired the Learning Objects blogging tool called Journal LX, which allows blogs and journals as elements in Blackboard courses. Since then, a question has occasionally surfaced: What is the difference between using a blog and using a discussion board? As both are textual communication tools, it is easy to be confused as to the differences, and it may be tricky to select which would be best for a given purpose. With that in mind, we recorded a discussion about these two tools.

Other discussions comparing blogs and discussion boards tend to focus on non-academia or non-course-based blog and discussion systems, but two documents of possible interest are:

Keep in mind that a blog and a discussion board are similar, but the same assignment conducted with each tool may end up with widely varying results.


 		 Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 12:00]
 
See the index of Dave's previous "Blackboard Feature of the Week" segments.

Teaching with Technology - Dr. Haydn Davis

If I Did It . . . Here’s What I Did

Background: Assessments of online retention have consistently found that students in online classes drop out at higher rates than on-campus students. Dropout rates have ranged from 15% (good) to 25% (fairly common) up to 80%. Palomar’s data is consistent with this pattern. For Fall of 2008 131/239 Internet classes had a dropout rate of 20% or higher. And 101 Internet classes had a 25% or higher dropout rate.

If I designed and delivered an online class in which no students dropped out, what would I do? Here are seven steps I believe would increase the likelihood of student retention.

  1. One week before the class begins, call each student, welcome him/her to the class, answer any questions, and give instructions for accessing the Blackboard course.
     
  2. One week before the semester begins, make the Blackboard class available.
     
  3. Before the class officially begins, conduct an on-campus orientation in a computer lab in which students would meet each other and go over how the online class would be conducted. Students would be able to practice using Blackboard features such as the Discussion Board, the Wimba voice boards, the blogging tool, Safe Assignment, and other tools that sometimes confuse students.
     
  4. After the orientation send a voice email to all students emphasizing how important it is to get off to a good start by logging into Blackboard several times each week.
     
  5. Once the class begins have a weekly To-Do list for students that explicitly tells them what they should be doing each week to be successful.
     
  6. Maintain an active presence on the Discussion Board, responding to students’ posts by complimenting their good posts and challenging them to think critically. Consider enabling “Allow Members To Rate Posts” and ask students to rate what they consider to be good posts.
  7. Have weekly quizzes and other means of providing frequent and regular feedback to students .

Tech Resource Of The Week: Engaging and Effective Online Discussions [PDF - U of Oregon]

Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 9:55]
 
See the index of Haydn's previous "Teaching with Technology" segments.

Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray

Google Earth 5

The Google big guns were out on Monday, February 2nd at the California Academic of Sciences: Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, Marissa Mayer, Google VP, John Hanke, Director of Google Geo, even former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore for the announcement of the release of Google Earth 5, a major new edition of the spectacular GIS software given away to the world by Google.  Now Google Earth includes Google Ocean, oceanic survey data along with a host of place marker provided by the likes of National Geographic, BBC, Cousteau Ocean World, Census of Marine Life, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and many others.  New also is Google Mars, where the red planet gets the same treatment the earth gets in Google Earth; a Google Earth history slider, where historical satellite imagery can be viewed; and a great new Tour feature that allows for the easy creation of audio narrated tours (KMZ files) of the earth, mars, or elsewhere in the universe with Google Sky, which is also fully integrated into the program.

Rather than try to describe it all, we will let Google videos do the demonstration. 

Let's look more closely at the new Google Ocean Layers:

Layers, for those who do not yet use Google Earth, are overlays that add detail and placemarks which, when clicked, open windows on further information about the earth or, in this case, earth's oceans.  For example, when the "Explore the Ocean" layer is selected, you will find it's icons located around the earth's oceans.  when you click on one you get an informational pop-up, which may contain textual information, graphics, audio, video, or, indeed, links to yet other web resources.  Here is an example:


The image above is static, of course, but the National Geographic YouTube video is live within Google Earth and can, like almost all YouTube videos, be embedded (or linked) elsewhere, like this.

There are many similar layers from other providers like the BBC, the NOAA, the World Wildlife Fund, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Scripps Institute of Oceanography,  Monterey Bay Aquarium, Bermuda Institute of Ocean Studies, OCEANA, Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation, Shark Allies,  Hawaiian Undersea Research Laboratory, Costa Lab at UC Santa Cruz, TOPP (Tagging of Pacific Predators), Nature Conservancy in California, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, Penguin World, the Marine Conservation Society, GEBCO, and many other institutions and individuals.

Many of the layers contain, themselves, other layers which can be downloaded and viewed on the underlying satellite imagery.  The National Geographic World Ocean Chlorophyll Levels layer is an example.  When it is turned on, a map overlay showing chlorophyll concentrations due to phytoplankton using a color coding system is visible.

Downloadable layers can, at each users discretion, be made part of their permanent Google Earth Places or not simply by dragging it from the Temporary to the My Places folder in the Google Earth Places panel.

 There are layers that show the best locations for Ocean sports (no, not fishing: surfing, diving and kite surfing only); layers that show the location of ocean expeditions, marine protected areas, shipwrecks, data on endangered species (using spectacular photos from ARKive), the location and routes of tagged animals, progress of the census of marine life project, downloadable layers containing historical maps of the see floors (from Marie Tharp historical maps), and notable underwater features.  The "State of the Ocean" layer has its own set of sub-layers:

These layers, when selected, can show other layers that can be superimposed to display:

  • Daily dynamic sea surface temperatures, collated from data collected by the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, NOAA, NASA, and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites;
     
  •  Arctic sea ice conditions from the National Snow and Ice data center (a supplier to land based snow and ice cover displayed in continental parts of Google Earth;
     
  • An overlay map that shows the impacts to marine ecosystems by human activities from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis;
     
  • Detailed data related to fishing grounds on sea food that can/should be eaten based on the whether the particular species is being "sustainable and sensitively harvested" or not, from both the Marine Conservation Society and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The riches of the new Google Earth are amazing.  There are millions worth of satellite imagery, free for the taking, and the teaching and learning opportunities are endless.  Google Earth was amazing in the first place.  Now it is indispensable.

Google Earth Resources

Listen to this segment only [mp3 - play time = 9:20]
 
See an index of previous "Tech Talk Topics" segments.

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