The July network outage tops Lafayette news in the July 10 edition of the ITS Coffee Break, while Tech News looks at “Understanding Virtual Worlds” and “Social Software and Learning. Finally, the Help segment offers tips for working with lengthy Microsoft Word documents, notes new versions of Adobe, Macromedia and Apple software, and discusses the use of commenting on ITS help pages.
Getting the Podcast
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- Download the MP3 directly
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Show Notes
ITS News
- Network Outage July 19
- This month's scheduled outage for network infrastructure maintenance will take place Wednesday, July 19, from approximately 3:00 AM to 7:00 AM. A list of services impacted by this outage will be posted closer to the outage date.
Tech News
- 7 Things You Should Know About Virtual Worlds
- A PDF posted by EDUCAUSE designed to explain virtual worlds to educators.
- It provides an example scenario in which a first-year med student interacts with a virtual clinic throughout the semester. Each session sees a new environment for the clinic: family practice, emergency room, etc. The student interacts with doctors, patients, etc. while faculty supervise.
- Examples of real world applications, from the PDF:
- "Dartmouth College has begun creating a virtual world to train community emergency response teams."
- "Harvard University created River City, a virtual world that presents users with an outbreak of disease, allowing them to move through the environment, make inquiries, and examine data to try to discover the source of the illness."
- "Using a game engine, the University of British Columbia developed a virtual world based on real archaeological sites in which students use contemporary materials and techniques to create replicas of structures of the time."
- Provides overview of advantages (freeform exploration, immersive, problem-solving environment) and disadvantages (students don't use the time wisely, goof off, can't handle the open ended nature of the assignment)
- Does not provide suggestions on tools to build such worlds however.
- http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=666&ID=ELI7015&bhcp=1
- Social software and learning
- Discusses social software trends and their implications for education in the United Kingdom. Discusses, for example, how a mashup culture (recombining digital files into different forms) impacts how we look at creativity or how constant connectivity impacts lectures (as students can easily look up terms discussed in class)
- Provides a good overview of what's going on in the social software space, and backs up the implications with research, but not much in the way of practical examples are given.
- http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/opening_education/social_software_01.htm
Help News
- So You Want to Write a Book with MS Word
- It can be tough to use Microsoft Word properly, particularly when writing a long document, such as a book or term paper. This page explains how to use templates, styles, AutoCorrect and macros to make a consistent, less-corruption prone, easier-to-update Word file.
- http://daiya.mvps.org/bookwordnoframes.htm
- Help documentation
- Updating software (Adobe, Macromedia and Final Cut Pro)
- New documents to accompany
- Commenting on help documents
- Comments are turned on so you can let us know if documents have error or if they are helpful or if you know a different way to complete the same task.
- Some space still available in Excel 2 on Thursday
- July and August schedule coming soon