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ATRC Podcast
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 Podcast
for May 18, 2007 - Episode 60
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Play time 46 minutes - Program Notes
"Ask yourself
whether you are happy and you cease to be so."
~John Stuart Mill
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|
John Stuart Mill |
Tech and Download news: Graduation day is here, the
Fall 2007 Blackboard course shells will be available for
development starting May 20, the Spring 2006 courses
will be pruned May 19, @ONE has an online teaching
conference in the bay area or online, Microsoft and
SanDisk are developing a new flash memory standard,
Amazon announced a forthcoming DRM-free mp3 download
service, WinHEC happened this week, friends don't let
friends MySpace, web censorship is growing, according to
the OpenNet Initiative, there's a new way to encode data
on living bacteria, and we have a new online book to
feature on Apple QuickTime Pro. David's Blackboard
Feature of the Week is titled "Announcements,
Announcements, Announcements," wherein he discusses...
You guessed it. Haydn is off this week. My Tech Talk
Topic this week is "The 'New' Google," about the new
look and functionality of the Google web site. Our gizmo
this week will make your arm rock and roll.
Technology News Briefs
-
Palomar College commencement exercises will occur
today, Friday, May 18 at 5pm on the football field.
Congratulations to all our graduates and transfer
students.
-
Blackboard reminders: Tomorrow, May 19, the
new Blackboard course shells for Fall 2007 courses
will be created. They will be available for
faculty development starting May 20. Also
tomorrow, Spring 2006 courses will be pruned from
the system. If you have not yet archived your
Spring 2006 materials and want to, your last
opportunity will be today, Friday May 18. Once
course materials are pruned from the system they are
irrecoverable.
-
Beginning this summer session (starting the week of
June 18) Palomar College will offer "Practical PC,"
both online and in traditional face-to-face
settings, aimed at teaching how to properly
configure and secure a personal computer." For
more information contact
Terrie Cannon at (760) 744-1150 ext. 2610.
Click here for the course description at the
CSIS web site.
-
The 2007 Online Teaching Conference, sponsored by
the
CVC,
@ONE,
CCC Confer, and
3C Media Solutions
(formerly known as CCCSAT) will be presented at
Ohlone College on Monday and Tuesday, June 11-12.
 You can go in person ($100) registration required),
attend free via live web casts and CCC Meet & Confer
sessions, or view the archive after the event, which
is also free.
Click here for details and registration.
-
 Microsoft
and SanDisk have announced a joint project to
develop a new USB flash drive and memory cards
(beyond the current U3 standard) "will let users
carry their full personal computing environment
(including their familiar interface) with them in
addition to a few applications." When the
drive is unplugged it supposedly removes all traces
of the user from the host computer. The new
drives are expected to reach market by the second
half of 2008 (BusinessWire).
-
Amazon, the world's largest distributor of music
CDs, announced Wednesday that they will be opening
an online mp3 download music store before the end of
2007 to distribute music DRM free! They have
signed a deal to distribute the entire EMI catalog
(except for the Beatles) without copy protection.
Download and do what you want. EMIs catalog
includes Coldplay, Norah Jones, Joss Stone and Pink
Floyd.
 EMI
has been testing DRM free music on iTunes, but
unfortunately Apple elected to charge more for DRM
free music ($1.29 per track rather than .99 per
track with DRM--why?) so comparisons based on the
Apple experiment will be useless. Warner Music
Group and Vivendi Universal are also experimenting
in small ways with DRM free music. In
episode 50 we covered Steve Jobs' call for DRM
free music, but many argue that it was a political,
disingenuous ploy to defelct heat from the EU,
seeking to declare iTunes illegal in Europe.
Steve has not dropped DRM from independent
distributors' tracks being sold on iTunes, even
though the artists do not want DRM. The Amazon
download store will undoubtedly be in operation
before the holiday season this year. (See
the MSNBC article).
-
 WinHEC
went on this week, the Windows Hardware Engineering
Conference. For you hardware and driver-writer
types, there are many
downloadable papers from those presented at the
conference. One of the highlights was Bill
Gate's announcement of the
Windows Server 2008 feature set and
Windows Home Server hardware platform and
services.
Click here for a video of Gates on hardware
innovation.
Click here for access to webcasts, virtual labs,
podcasts and chat sessions.
Click here for the WinHEC home page.
-
Friends don't let friends join MySpace, or, 'Susan,
you're going to regret putting that tattoo there in
fifteen years.' The founder of
Center for Digital Democracy Jeff Chester
recently wrote, "I think a new digital Puritanism is
arising.
 A
case like the drunken pirate [a case where a
Pennsylvania woman was denied a teaching degree
based on a rather innocuous MySpace photo of her
dressed like a pirate and holding a drink]
highlights the need to develop a whole new standard
of ethics, since even a relatively innocent remark
or situation online can backfire and ruin someone's
entire career." In other words, things you
post on MySpace will, not might, will, eventually
come back to haunt you. Many of us are
conducting our electronic speech in the same way we
conduct our private speech, and it is stored that
way forever. Never mind if it was a joke or
send up. The moral of the story is, there are
always unintended consequences to permanent, public
speech, so be careful. (MSNBC)
-
According to a new study from the
OpenNet Initiative (a collaborative partnership
between Harvard, Toronto, Oxford and Cambridge
Universities) "Internet censorship and surveillance
are growing global phenomena." Of forty-one
states sureveyed, state mandated net filtering was
found in twenty-five states. "Countries which
carry out the broadest range of filtering included
Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia,
the United Arab Emirates and Yemen..." (BBC).
Below we have reproduced the ONI's world map of
political Internet filtering. See the
web site for details. (Grey areas indicate
states that were not surveyed, that is, no data.
They do not necessarily indicate the absence of
filtering.)
-
File this one under, 'My Code has a bug.'
Professor Masaru Tomita of Keio University heads a
team that successfully encoded data (Einstein's
famous "E=mc2" and the date "1905") into
the DNA of a bacterium. "The four characters
that represent the genetic coding in DNA work much
like digital data" (MSNBC).
The advantage of storing data this way is it will
last as long as the species lasts, more than a
million years, perhaps. The practical ability
to read the data at high speeds is, however,
limited, but not impossible.
"Many people never even thought about storing
data for thousands of years," Tomita said. "This may
sound like a dream. But we're thinking hundreds of
millions of years." Admit it, you have often
suspected that life on earth is the discarded
experiment of a race of overlords who failed in the
attempt to create intelligent life.
-
 Featured
Safari Tech Book Online:
Apple Pro Training Series QuickTime Pro
Quick-Reference Guide by Brian Gary, Steve
Martin, Jem Schofield. "This handy
180-page book offers a great overview of QuickTime
Pro, including a fundamental explanation of video
encoding and an invaluable look-up guide of video
codecs and the QuickTime Pro interface." Palomar maintains a
subscription to Tech Books Online, and the books can
be accessed from any computer on the campus network,
or from off the network with a password
obtainable from the library.
Listen to the news [mp3 -
13:13]
Training Opportunities
- Academic Technology Training
- We have completed our training schedule for
Spring 07. We will announce the new schedule
in this space in a couple of weeks.
- Palomar Office 2007 Training
- The Information Services department will be
offering training next week, on May 14, 16 and 17,
In Word, Excel and Outlook 2007. Contact the
help desk (phone ext. 2140) to schedule a time.
-
@ONE training resources:
- Free training from
Microsoft
- Free Microsoft eLearning courses: for a limited time access
to these excellent e-Learning products on Office
2007 is available.
Click here to access a gateway to sign-up for
training in the new Office interface, Access 2007,
Excel 2007, Infopath 2007, OneNote 2007, Outlook
2007, PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007, Visio 2007, and
Groove 2007. You may also download a free
e-book from this site titled
First Look 2007 Microsoft Office System in
PDF format.
- Free training from
Wimba.com through their desktop lecture series
- "Conversing Online from Canada to Mexico: A
Practical Study in Teaching Languages Online" will
be presented May 22 at 10am PDT.
Click here to register.
- "Practical Uses of Pronto: Instant Messaging
with Blackboard" will be presented May 30 at 11am
PDF.
Click here to register.
Blackboard Feature of the Week - David Gray
Announcements, Announcements, Announcements!
With another fresh batch of courses about to
begin, this seems a good time to discuss a commonly
viewed component in Blackboard, the Announcements
tool. This is the only segment of a course site that
we create by default. The Announcements are what
most students first see when they enter a course
site.
By default, the Announcements area shows postings
from the last seven days, plus any “permanent”
announcements. Generally these are course
announcements, but on occasion there are system
announcements about things like upgrades or planned
system outages that may appear on this list. The way
announcements post, system announcements are on top,
with course announcements lower; permanent course
announcements always go above regular ones, and they
are all sorted chronologically by the time of
posting, with newest on top. That sounds confusing,
but suffice to say, the posts show up in the order
you post them, unless you make one permanent.
 Obviously,
“permanent” is one of the choices for an
announcement, but there are other options as well.
To add an announcement to your course, go into the
Control Panel and click the Announcements link near
the middle left of the screen, then click the
prominent Add Announcement button in the upper left.
If you are using the Visual Text Box Editor in
Blackboard, you may notice that for the
Announcements tool the Editor is a bit limited.
There are several things (such as attaching files)
that are disallowed in the Announcements form.
However, all the familiar “markup” tools are there
(such as bold and italics) as well as the
spellchecker tool. An announcement must have a
Subject, and should have a text message; there is
also a choice to include a Course Link to some other
location in the course. The deployment options
include the aforementioned “permanent” choice (a
simple Yes/No radio button) and the traditional
Display After and Display Until date/time choices.
In my opinion, the Display After/Until choices
are not that useful for announcements. If you
don’t set them, the announcement will immediately
display, and by default students won’t see it after
seven days. But, if a student wants to look back
over old announcements, they can always use the
“View Last 30 Days” or “View All” choices in the
Announcements area. If, however, you set up a
Display Until restriction, the announcement would
not show up, even if a student selects “View All”.
Generally I suggest leaving announcements as not
permanent, with no Display restrictions.
Now that we are at version 7.2 of Blackboard,
there is an additional choice on the Add
Announcement form, a check box to “Email this
announcement to all course users.” Predictably this
sends the text of the announcement to everyone in
the course.
Once you’ve set the controls the way you want
them, just hit Submit and your announcement is
posted.
Note: To get to David's vodcast site,
click here.
Teaching with Technology - Dr.
Haydn Davis
Haydn is off this week.
 |
See
the index of
Haydn's previous "Teaching with
Technology" segments. |
Tech-Talk-Topic - Terry Gray
The "New" Google: "Universal Search"
On Wednesday this week Google announced "its
critical first steps toward a universal search model
that will offer users a more integrated and
comprehensive way to search for and view information
online. The company also introduced an updated
homepage design and several new navigation features
that make it faster and easier for users to find the
information they are looking for" (Google
press release).
 In
an apt analogy to agricultural hoards--those oh so
important repositories of the yet with us
agricultural revolution, Google compared the new
strategy to the demolition of informational silos:
"The ultimate goal of universal search is to break
down the silos of information that exist on the web
and provide the very best answer every time a user
enters a query. While we still have a long way to
go, today's announcements are a big step in that
direction."
Basically, a Google search will now return blended
results from the array of Google "silos:'
videos, images, news, maps, books, websites, and so
on. As time goes on, the company plans to
integrate the different resources more obviously in
the results page, with simple mechanisms to filter
based on information type. What makes Google
so successful is their ranking algorithms. You
almost always find what you want near the top of the
results page. This is so amazing, because a)
the average number of search terms entered in a
Google search is 1.3; and b) almost no one proceeds
to page two of the search results page. The
moral: most people are very lazy searchers and want
(or will accept) what Google finds as relevant on
results page one.
Though
the " new" Google interface is still spare even by
minimalist standards, you will observe new links in
the upper left of the page.
These
same links will now appear at the top of the results
page.
Clicking any of them will perform a focused
Google image, video, news, etc. search.
What gets revealed when you click the more link?
The Blog Search is very valuable. Blogger
is the proprietary, free blogging service of Google,
so it gets its own category, for reasons that seem
more commercial than practical. Clicking the
Blogger link will lead you to the blogger login
page. It will not perform a search on blogger
blogs.
Orkut, for those who don't know, is a social
networking service run by Google; a MySpace wannabe,
like so many others.
After performing a "more" search, you will see
yet another more button. Clicking it this time
will produce a smaller set of search tools, with an
"even more" link.
Clicking the "even more" link will take you to
the exhaustive page of Google search tools.
It is a prodigious list indeed, and goes on much
further than illustrated here.
Another innovation on the home page is a link to
something called iGoogle. (They used the i for
no apparent reason other than to prevent Apple from
prefixing it to every known word and consequently
trademark every known instance). iGoogle is
your Google "portal." (And we thought portals
were dead). It is Googlishly spare, sort of
like Yahoo cleaned up and made presentable for grown
up company, but can be customized to be as cluttered
and confusing as you wish.
The elements you see illustrated above come
standard with your iGoogle interface (and note in
the upper right it is simple to switch back to
Classic Coke--I mean, view). If you have
Windows Vista you already have these things on your
sidebar and am not sure why you would want them on
your Google interface, but each to her own.
If you click the Sign in link in the supper right
you can sign in with your GMail account information
and load your personal customized Google "portal"
page which can be elaborated with colorful themes,
and thousands of freely available widgets.
Is all this customization too much for you, or
not enough? Google is ever advancing.
The new navigation links that appear at the top of
the search page will eventually be transformed into
tabs with specific search results illustrated in
tabbed fashion.
If you would like to see some new directions
Google is taking search technology, you can use the
new Google
Experimental Search from Google labs.
Experimental Search will permit you to see search
results in timeline or map view, with contextual
links to help refine the search.
Faster, better, more accurate, more easily
extended, what's not to like about the new Google.
Gizmo of the Week
The BlueQ Vibrating Bluetooth Wristband
 You're
in the job interview. They're starting to like
you. Suddenly, from your pocket comes the
scream from Jet's Shine album. The rest of the
interview concludes rapidly and you never get to
hear the scream again from that company calling.
Ringtones are the problem. Sure, you can
set the phone to vibrate, but you forget to do this,
like always. Even if you remember, vibrate on
most phones just isn't noticeable enough to have the
desired effect. Enter BlueQ's honker vibrating
bluetooth wristband.
When you receive a call, your arm starts flailing
wildly. Well, its not that powerful, but it
buzzes, shakes and otherwise undeniably plucks at
your central nervous system so that you just can't
miss a call when you have your earbuds in, are in a
really noisy bar, or, of course, that critical job
interview. (Of course, you will have to
explain why you have lost control of your arm, but
that's better than hearing Jet.
The "functionally designed" BQ Wireless goes for
just $39.95 and will begin shipping in late July.
(Source:
wired - picture credit: Tokyo Times)
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 "Four
Strings" by
Jag. "Pared down to the down-home marrow of
their bluesy bones, the twenty-six acoustic tracks of
Four Strings are like an ultra-pleasant visit to
guitarist JAG's front porch, where he plays for you on
his hand made cigar box guitars, as well as acoustic
ones. Intimate, unvarnished, authentic."
"Why is it that our
memory is good enough to retain the least triviality
that happens to us, and yet not good enough to
recollect how often we have told it to the same
person?"
~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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