Courtney Bentley

It’s been a fun week; on Tuesday I broke Zimbra. We figured this out on Wednsday morning after the President, Provost and several other colleagues got to work and realized that instead of seeing their own calendar in iCal they were looking at MY CALENDAR. And actually, it was only a snapshot of my calendar from Tuesday afternoon.

So if you use iCal, don’t accidentally copy/paste an event into the Calendar label name.

Here is the Excel Workshop file we will use for today’s session. Download a copy and we’ll proceed from there.

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Demo for using the Excel formula for concatenate. This allows you to combined data from different cells and add other static content.

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A couple of weekends ago I was a tag-along for one of the geology field trips. We drove to Sandy Hook, New Jersey to look at erosion of the coastline. I look loads of pictures and added them to Flickr. Then I mapped them so we could look at them in context.

Unfortunately, they haven’t made it possible to embed this yet so I can only send you there to look at my Map of Sandy Hook.

What do you think?

A colleague passed this along yesterday, and before I forget to share the wealth I thought I’d post this. A Firefox extension called Table Tools allows you to take an HTML table and sort it in the browser or copy the contents in a tab-delimited format.

Now I wait for a student who is hand copying data from a table and I pull that one out for them…

For the third time in two years I’ve participated in a Moodle Hack/Doc Fest. This idea came out of the first NITLE Moodle users meeting in Denver. A group of programmers and instructional technologists get together for three days and work together to make changes, test things and write documentation. We also find a little time for some fun and usually good food.

During the Fall semester many faculty took advantage of opportunities to work with instructional technologists to integrate technology into coursework.

In each of the partnerships highlighted here, the faculty members approached Courtney Bentley, Jason Alley or Pat Facciponti with an assignment idea or a course goal in mind that they thought could be accomplished best with technology. Through consultation and collaboration with Bentley, Alley, and Facciponti, faculty designed projects so that the technology helped students accomplish the goals of the assignment and fit the pedagogy of the course.

To become familiar with the technology they would use to complete projects, students attended a minimum of one class session with an instructional technologist in Skillman Library, and continued to stop in for additional assistance as they worked to complete the assignments.

“Students often don’t know about emerging technologies, despite the fact that lots of faculty think students are tech-savvy,” said adjunct English Instructor, Carrie Havranek. “Even if students do know about a technology, they don’t know 100 percent how to maximize its usage or understand its context, so it helps to introduce it in an academic context.”

An audible poetry anthology available in iTunesU
Using an open source audio editing program and USB microphones available through the library’s circulation desk, students in Chris Phillips’ 19th Century Poetry course worked throughout the semester to develop a portfolio of recorded readings of poems from the class texts.

“Students didn’t just take the time to prepare the readings, but they practiced them until they sounded good without the context of body language,” Phillips said. “They also did research into different performance styles and soundtracks (either period-specific or more recent) to enhance the connection they made between 19th-century poetry and our current culture.”

Students used forums in Moodle to post drafts of the recordings and conduct peer review of their work. As each recording was complete, students submitted the files to their course space in iTunesU. The final portfolio was accompanied by a paper where students explained their interpretive choices.

“The students pick this stuff up fast, and you don’t have to be the expert at all, Phillips said. “I would recommend you personally prepare and convey to the students is what an assignment might SOUND like (make your own as a test, and play it for them), and give them a sense of what kinds of things they could do with it.  I played around with different settings and mixes, made a few rough sample files to play for them, and my willingness to play my own voice in a work-in-progress helped them be less self-conscious about getting in front of the mic.”

We ordered the Voodoo Dozen and this is what we got: A dozen random donuts with bubble gum, capn’ crunch (with crunch berries), sprinkles, oreos and a myriad of other things. A few of the flavors are almost to much to handle.

It’s friday. the friday before classes start on monday. so that’s a total fun-day.