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ITS Coffee Break – 12/18/2006 – iTunes U, LibWorm, Del.icio.us Tagging

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News about iTunes U tops the ITS Coffee Break this week as Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss Lafayette's Spring 2007 pilot program for Apple's new education-centric service. In Tech News they focus on LibWork, a search engine dedicated to searching over 1000 librarian-related RSS feeds, while in Help News they look at ways that faculty can use the social bookmarking web site Del.icio.us and RSS to share web sites and online articles with students in their classes.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

Show Notes

ITS News

  • iTunes U Pilot Set for Spring 2007
    • We're looking for content for iTunes U, from staff, faculty, students — anyone with audio or video that they're looking for an easy way to share with the campus community.

Tech News

  • LibWorm
    • A search engine dedicated to searching over 1000 librarian-related RSS feeds.
    • Visitors can browse a tag clouds of indexed items.
    • Searches can be saved as RSS feeds.
    • http://www.libworm.com

Help News

  • Using del.icio.us to share web sites and news stories with students.
    • Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking web site — a place where you can store your book marks so that any one can see them. You can also find other people who've bookmarked the same resources, and then see what related topics they may have stowed away.
    • Del.icio.us also creates an RSS feed for any tag you create, so you could easily tag a bunch of stories "MUS104", then have your students subscribe to that feed. Alternatively, you could use Moodle's built-in RSS support to display that feed information in a block.
    • We're also looking into implementing a local version of Feed2JS (http://feed2js.org), which allows you to convert any feed into a simple javascript that can then be displayed within any web page, from MySpace to Facebook to Blackboard.

ITS Coffee Break – 11/20/2006 – Blackboard vs. Moodle, Soapbox in the Classroom, Second Life

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Learning management systems take center stage as Courtney Bentley, Ken Newquist and special guest Carrie Havranek (Visiting Part-time Instructor in English) talk about augmenting classes with online material in Blackboard, Moodle and Soapbox. They also discuss recent developments in the popular online world Second Life and review the new web site search documentation recently added to the ITS web site.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

Show Notes

ITS News

  • Learning Management System Survey & Results
    • Courtney talks about results of the recent Learning Management System she conducted, including what faculty think of the current Blackboard system and what our options are for the future.
  • Blackboard vs. Moodle
  • Soapbox in the Classroom
    • English adjunct professor Carrie Havranek talks about using Soapbox instead of Blackboard for her classes.
    • What's the difference between blogging on Soapbox and posting on Blackboard? (strengths, weakenesses

Tech News

  • Second Life Updates
    • CNN: Growing number of educators explore 'Second Life' online:
    • WSJ: Avatars at the Office
      • The Wall Street Journal talks about companies meeting virtually in Second Life.

Help News

  • New Search Documentation on ITS Web Site
    • Information about how Lafayette's "Google Mini" search engine works, how to optimize your web pages to work better with search engines, how to exclude your pages from a search, and how to add a Google search box to your web site.

ITS Coffee Break – 10/30/06 – Blogging Alternatives, Network Redesign, New Browsers, Shakespeare Online?

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Sophomore Justin Sayde, RA of the Dry Surfers Organization, guest hosts the 10/30 edition of the ITS Coffee Break with Ken Newquist. The podcast begins with a discussion of possible blogging alternatives to Soapbox and an update on the network redesign. Tech News features a conversation about the just released Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 web browsers, news about a massively multiplayer game set in the Shakespearean timeframe, and thoughts on the upcoming release of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii game systems.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

Show Notes

ITS News

  • Guest Host: Sophomore Justin Sayde, RA of the Dry Surfers Organization
  • Blogging Alternatives?
    • While we aren't even close to making a change, we are looking at some alternative blogging software to Soapbox. In particular, WordPress Multiuser was just released on Oct. 23, and it looks like it could do a lot of what's been requested by the Lafayette community, including supporting custom themes for individual blogs and group-based collaborative blogs. Give it a spin and let us know what you think by creating a blog at EduBlogs.org
    • EduBlogs: http://www.EduBlogs.org
    • WordPress Mu: http://mu.wordpress.org
  • Progress on the Lafayette Network Redesign

Tech News