Podcast: Download (15.9MB)

On the first ITS Coffee Break of the new year, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley recap Lafayette’s Moodle Hack/Doc Fest, talk about changes to Moodle for Spring 2008, and take a look at the new web-based survey tool Opinio. In Tech News they talk about the MPAA admitting that college students aren’t responsible for nearly as much lost revenues as they previously claimed, and experiment with GoodReads, a social networking site for folks who love books. Finally in Help News they explain how to change your name or e-mail address in Moodle, geek out about a Color Palette Generator that choses colors based on pictures users submit to it, and revisit the technology video podcast commandN. Continue reading →

The ITS Coffee Break helps faculty and staff at Lafayette keep their New Year’s resolutions to clean up their web sites and learn about multimedia editing with news of the upcoming Web Design Day and Audio & Video Project Planning workshops. In Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley give a roundup of education technology blogs, while in Help News they discuss the rest of ITS’s January term workshop offerings.

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

• Web Design Day
  • 9:00 a.m.-4:00 p.m., Wednesday, January 10, 2007
  • Spend the day working with Dreamweaver to revise or build your personal or departmental web site. The morning session will give you basic command of the program as well as incorporate some best practices for web accessibility. The afternoon session will continue with more advanced techniques for using style sheets and making your site more accessible to search engines as well a your users. This session will be hands-on and you will have time to work on your own sites.
  • Register online.
• Audio & Video Project Planning
  • 1:00-4:00 p.m., Thursday, January 11, 2007
  • Looking to provide your students with video or audio content during class? Want to assign your students audio or video projects for class? This session will cover the things you should know when assigning a media project as well as how to help you or your class get started. We will look at podcast, video podcast, recording clips from satellite programming and other ways of providing supplemental content for your course.
  • Register online.
• iTunes U Pilot
  • Still time to join up for the spring semester! For detials, check out the 12/18 podcast. If you’re interested e-mail us at itsblog@lafayette.edu.

Tech News

• Education Blogs
  • Arts & Letters Daily
    • A regular round-up of book reviews, articles, essays and commetentary from around the world of higher education, published by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
    • http://aldaily.com
  • The Wired Campus
    • Education technology news briefs assembled by the staff at the Chronicle. Recent stories included Princeton’s deal with Ruckus, a legal downloading music service, a buddy-finding, laptop-based, wifi-using system at MIT called ‘iFind’, and recent hacker attacks on higher ed.
    • http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus
  • EDUCAUSE Connect Blog Feed
    • A stream of news and happenings from around the technological edusphere. Recent topics included replacing Blackboard with blogs/wikis, thoughts on getting Google to create a “to do” list for their calendar, and news about a study looking at media in the lives of 8-18 year olds.
    • http://connect.educause.edu/blog
  • Liberal Education Today
    • NITLE’s daily blog focusing on technology’s impact and usage at liberal arts colleges. Great for keeping up with what other folks are doing, as well as keeping an eye on trends that could effect us.
    • http://b2e.nitle.org
  • MacResearch
    • More a news site than a blog, MacResearch discusses the intersection of science and Macs. Useful for keeping up with scientific software releases, updates and bugs on the Mac.
    • http://www.macresearch.org
  • Running with Scissors
    • A blog that describes itself as “trying not to get poked with the pointy end of instructional technology”. Updated infrequently, but I love the tag line.
    • http://jerryslezak.net/scissors

Help News

• Upcoming Workshops:
  • Outlook (Jan 4), Excel I (Jan 5), Excel II (Jan 9)
  • Complete list: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/pages/calendar
• Help Document Audit
  • ITS is reviewing its help documentation in January. If you have suggestions for revised or additional help documents, please let us know.

Contacting the Podcast

• Questions, comments and suggestions can be sent to itsblog@lafayette.edu.