The October 3rd edition of the Coffee Break leads off with news of Lafayette's implementation of Shibolleth and the recent Podcamp Philly event held at Drexel University. In Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss the new Firefox Campus Edition, the Chronicle of Higher Education's new Tech Therapy podcast, and one professor's attempt to rate the trustworthyness of Wikipedia's contributors. In Help News they review file compatibility issues with Microsoft Office 2007, announce upcoming Outlook and NetStorage workshops, and offer a tip for quickly saving photos using Safari.
Getting the Podcast
There are several ways to get the podcast:
- Download the MP3 directly
- Subscribe to the Soapbox podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
- Subscribe to the Soapbox feed via iTunes
Show Notes
ITS News
- ITS Implements Shibboleth
- Lafayette is an early adopter of and the first member of CLAC (the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges) to implement Shibboleth, a framework for security- and privacy-focused user authentication across and within institutional boundaries.
- http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/node/403
- Podcamp Philly
- Ken went to Podcamp Philly on Saturday, 9/9 at Drexel University.
- http://podcamp.pbwiki.com/PodCampPhilly
- Posts from the show are up on Soapbox (http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/). Show had about 250 people (at least that was one overheard head count). Had seminars on a variety of topics, including podcast analytics, recording and editing, social networking and much more. Not much on the education side; we'll need to work on that.
- Missed Philly? Well, hopefully there will be another one next year. But they are working on putting together … Podcamp Second Life (http://podcamp.pbwiki.com/PodCampSL).
Tech News
- Firefox Campus Edition
- http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/add-ons/campus/
- Including foxytunes (let you control your media player from within Firefox and load lyrics, cover art, etc. with a click), Zotero (a reference notation tool) and StumbleUpon (a tool for recommending web sites and finding sites similar to ones you've visited.
- Tech Therapy
- http://chronicle.com/multimedia/podcasts/
- From the site: "Scott Carlson, a Chronicle reporter, and Warren Arbogast, a technology consultant who works with colleges, talk about the headaches, anxieties, and general problems you might be having with technology on your college campus. File sharing, security, dealing with vendors, figuring out how to talk to your president, or how to talk to your CIO—it's all game for a therapy session"
- New tool mines Wikipedia trustworthiness
- http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/06/wikipedia.trust.ap/index.html
- Concerned about how Wikipedia's open nature affects the trustworthiness of its entries? So is Luca de Alfaro of the University of California, Santa Cruz. He wrote software to analyze the wiki's extensive revision history to try and determine who the most trustworthy contributors were, based on the assumption that those edited least were likely the most trustworthy. The assumption may not be perfect, but it is an interesting experiment.
Help News
- Office 2007 Compatibility
- Microsoft Office 2007 natively saves files in a format not readable by older versions of Microsoft Office applications.
- http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/help/office2007/compatibility
- Upcoming Workshops
- Netstorage, Outlook: E-mail Organization
- http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/pages/calendar/
- Safari Quick Tip
- Right clicking on any image will allow you to save that image to iPhoto … which then makes it available to all the other iLife applications, like GarageBand (for use in enhanced podcasts).