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Simon Gray |
Bareback is right. Ask Dave. He had
to personally deliver his own son this week.
Yep. Didn't make it to the hospital in time,
so he had to assist his wife Jenni with delivery in
the front seat of their car. If you wish,
read the story at his web site. Warning:
graphic content.
I did my part by watching his first son Daniel,
age nearly 3, and I'm not sure which of us had the
more challenging task. Simon and mother
are fine and doing well at home. The catch?
The hospital won't issue a birth certificate,
because he wasn't born IN the hospital, and with no
birth certificate, no SS number, and with no SS
number, no insurance... It's a good thing Dave
is taking the month off. He'll probably spend
most of it trying to take care of the bureaucratic
tangle.
At Palomar, all is going well as the Spring
semester speeds toward its conclusion. We
replaced a defective memory module in the Blackboard
App1 server, a trivial affair with no user impact.
The entire campus network collapsed briefly Thursday
afternoon, for reasons that are still, apparently
unknown. Oddly enough (or perhaps,
coincidentally) MSN also collapsed about that time.
Food for thought.
Our show today features tech news from around
campus, a teaching online feature from Haydn, a
tech-talk about RSS, blogging, and podcasts, and the
gizmo of the week: the TrackStick.
Campus Tech News
- From a Blackboard announcement to system
administrators: "On April 11, Microsoft is
releasing a critical update in response to
patent litigation between Microsoft and Eolas
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate). The update
also includes critical security fixes for
Internet Explorer. Most users will receive this
update automatically via Windows Update. After
the update, users will be required to activate
applets, ActiveX controls and other embedded
objects and plug-ins before they can interact
with them. Activation requires hitting the space
bar, pressing the enter key, or using the mouse
to click on the item. Users running the Firefox
or Safari web browsers will not be affected by
this update."
The Blackboard notification goes on to say "In
general, our testing has uncovered increased
instability with the IE browser after this
update has been applied. We are escalating this
issue with Microsoft."
We in Academic Technology will begin testing
this patch as soon as we can obtain it next
Tuesday. If you have questions, or errors
to report, contact
onlineclasses@palomar.edu, or call (760)
744-1150 ext. 2862.
- There is a new "Teaching with Blackboard"
online, facilitated training course beginning
April 24, being provided by the @ONE system.
Click here for details and registration
link.
-
The
fifth annual arboretum beautification day will
occur Saturday, April 29, hosted by the Cabinet
and Furniture Technology program. For
details on the arboretum see its
web site, and the outstanding site created
by prof. Wayne Armstrong detailing
the plants of the arboretum. For more
information,
click here.
- CCCCConfer announced an April 26 webinar
which is mandatory for all those wishing to
apply for a MEET grant. This is an
immediate grant-funded opportunity for CCC
faculty and staff designed to support the
development of instructional materials to be
delivered via CCC Confer. Up to 10 grants
of $2,000 will be awarded as well as an
opportunity to collaborate with colleagues from
throughout the system at a MEET Grant retreat.
The deadline to apply for this grant is May 1,
2006.
Click here to register for a mandatory
informational MEET Grant Webinar hosted by
Blaine Morrow, CCC Confer Project Director,
Wednesday, April 26, 2006 at 10AM.
Click here to visit the CCCConfer web site
to learn more about the grant.
- KKSM will be broadcasting live all Comet
baseball games. KKSM streams live on the
Internet 24/7 at
http://www.palomar.edu/kksm. Click the
"listen live" link. For more information,
click here.
-
The Concert Hour
for APRIL 13 FRED BENEDETTI,
one of Southern California's
premier guitarists tackles Mozart's Symphony
No. 40, accompanied by.......an IPOD!
Contact the
performing arts department for more
information.
Upcoming Training Workshops
- We have no academic technology training next
week.
-
@ONE and
FCCC have free online eLearning.
Microsoft and
Adobe both have excellent free training
materials online.
- Go to our
training schedule to get the details
of future training.
Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray
The Blackboard feature of the week is on hiatus
this week. Dave, as I said above, has been
busy with the birth of his son (my second grandson)
Simon. We hope to coax Dave into recording an
episode from home for next week's show.
Teaching with Technology - Dr. Haydn Davis
Haydn's topic this week is Blackboard makeover.
It's a terrific idea. This is a plea for
participants.
Links
Listen to this segment
[mp3 - Play time
= 8:31]
Tech-Talk-Topic
RSS: news feeds, blogs and podcasts
This week I delivered one of our technology
hour topics (it turned into an hour-and-a-half,
I'm afraid) on RSS, really simple syndication.
It is a technology that has taken the Internet
by storm, and is in use in a very big way by all
the major news and information outlets, BBC,
CNN, MSNBC, CNET, Microsoft, in fact, it is hard
to find a major web site that does not use RSS
to release news and announcements. It is
the solution to SPAM. Stop spamming with
annoying newsletters and informational emails,
and simply expose a feed to which interested
parties can subscirbe. Those using it have
found it drives increased website traffic, and
gains the sponsor the favorable opinion of the
user, since they have left the contact option
where it belongs, with the user.
Now, to get this very useful (and simple)
technology adopted at Palomar College.
Academic Technology is the only department using
it at present, though all should. For our
podcast trial this semester, we have also set up
RSS feeds for the professor's class blogs:
Chris Barkley, Jose Esteban, and Haydn Davis.
What is the connection between blogging and
RSS feeds? RSS announcements inform blog
readers of updates to the blog. A simple
subscription to the blog's feed will let you
know there is new material to read, if you want.
What is the connection between RSS and
podcasting? A "podcast" is just an mp3
"enclosure" (just a file attachment, so to
speak) to a standard RSS feed. It is
how podcasts work. Subscribing to the RSS
feed also subscribes the user to the podcast.
Because the technology is so new, though, the
same readers (usually called news aggregators)
often cannot accomodate the mp3 file enclose, so
you need a separate piece of software, called a
"podcatcher" to subscribe to podcasts. The
links below may help with all this.
I have posted the
handout from this RSS workshop [pdf] online
for further information.
Links
News Aggregators (readers)
Web based:
Installable software:
RSS feed hosted services
RSS feed composer software
Feed validation service
Blogging services
Podcatching software
Podcast directories
Click here for help with podcast and podcast
notes subscriptions
Listen to this segment
[mp3 - Play time
= 12:06]
Gizmo of the week
The
TrackStick. Now let's see, where was
a yesterday? No problem, just upload the data
from trackstick to find out. "The TrackStick
records its own time, date, location, speed,
direction and altitude in its 1MB of flash memory.
The data can be loaded to your computer via USB and
plotted on Google Earth, Google Maps, Mapquest and
Virtual Earth so you can "playback" your journey."
(Source:
Wired News Gadgets)
The TrackStick web site suggests other uses:
- Find where your kids have been
- Verify employee driving routes
- Review family members driving habits
- Watch large shipment routes
- Know where anything or anyone has been
The TrackStick is barely bigger than a pack of
gum, but costs $249.
Source:
http://www.trackstick.com/
Music
The
music for today's show was provided by
Magnatune.com, and is used through their
Creative Commons license for podcasts. Today's
album was
The Four Seasons by
American Baroque.
Brief bio: "Founded
in San Francisco in 1986, American Baroque brings
together some of America's most accomplished and
exciting baroque instrumentalists, with the purpose
of defining a new, modern genre for historical
instruments."
Visit
magnatune and reward them for their generosity.
Magnatune is not evil!
"When I was
born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year
and a half.” --Gracie Allen
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for April 7, 2006 - Episode 13
