ITS Coffee Break – 6/15/07 – Network Upgrades, MIT Virtual Residences, Leopard, Training Feedback

Posted on by

The ITS Coffee Break begins with news of the first-year student technology guide, an update of ongoing work on the network redesign project, and latest about our progress importing Fall 2007 course data into Moodle. Moving on to Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley look at MIT's virtual residence halls within Second Life, discuss the new Leopard edition of the Mac OS X operating system, and check out the new Windows version of Apple's Safari web browser.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

Show Notes

ITS News

Tech News

  • MIT's Virtual Dormitories for Freshmen
  • Leopard Features
    • http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/06/11/leopardnew/
    • Stacks: Browseable lists of files; seems to work like my right-clickable Dock folders do now.
    • Quick Look for viewing popular file types; I expect this to be very useful at work, when I need to view fills but don't need to launch Photoshop to do it.
    • New Finder will allow searches across multiple Mac; this would be useful now when my primary computer is a PowerMac desktop and I'm working on my work MacBook Pro laptop, but might not be as handy when my primary home computer becomes a mac book.That said "Back to my Mac" search allows you to look at computers even when you're on the road, across the net, which is very cool.
    • Spaces — multiple virtual desktops — is nothing new for Linux users (and even Mac users who've tried one of the many third party or Unix options. This is integrated into the new OS though, and I see this as being very handy — I expect to have "Web", "Writing" and "Audio/Video" spaces as soon as I have Leopard.
  • Apple brings Safari to Windows
    • http://www.apple.com/safari/
    • Apple's "one more thing" at the Worldwide Developers Conference was a beta release of Safari 3 for Windows.
    • No one is sure if this is a new front in the browser wars, an attempt by Apple to familiarize Windows users with Safari ahead of its iPhone release, or just a Windows blip that will fade away in a few years.
    • One things for sure, it's a beta. Security problems have already been reported, and its been reported to crash in a variety of Google apps (like Google Reader and Google Docs).
  • Safari On Windows A Security Risk

Help News

  • Workshops
    • Still only Moodle workshops; we're working on a full schedule of workshops (including more advanced Moodle workshops and non-Moodle workshops like Dreamweaver, Audacity and iMovie) for July and August.
    • View the schedule or register for a workshop.
  • Feedback on Learning

    • We want to know how you like to learn new programs and techniques: workshops? online tutorials? cheat sheets?
    • Send feedback to itsblog@lafayette.edu.

Contacting the Podcast

ITS Coffee Break – 6/5/2007 – Moodle Update, Summer Reading Lists, Google Street View

Posted on by

Hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley settle into their summer routines with the latest edition of the Coffee Break. In ITS news, they provide an update on the conversion from Blackboard to Moodle. In Tech News, they provide a rundown of their summer reading and projects lists, talk about Google's new 'Street View' addition to its Maps tool, and take a look at the new beta version of CNN's web site. Finally, they announce the first batch Moodle Quickstart workshops for the summer.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

Show Notes

ITS News

  • Moodle Update:
    • We're in the process of getting all of the course data for Fall 2007 out of Banner and into Moodle. We were able to import all of these courses, plus all of the active faculty for the fall, into our test version of Moodle. What we're working on now is connecting the faculty with their courses automatically.
    • It's a complex process, but we're hoping to have the courses setup, and assigned to their respective faculty, sometime in the next week.

Tech News

  • Ken's Summer Reading List
    • The Last Colony by John Scalzi: The concluding book of a trilogy in which Earth's retirees can join the military at age 75, get brand new (if green-tinted) bodies and go off an fight in alien wars.
    • Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge: Vinge returns to the concept of Singularity, that the rapidly approaching instersection of humanity, computers and bioengineering will radiically transform the human race into something so different we can't even imagine it.
    • American Gods by Neil Gaiman: Norse gods do battle against the new gods of the wired world.
  • * Court’s summer list
    • Moodle, e-learning course development
    • Red River  by Lalita Tademy
    • Clyde Edgerton, Floatplane Notebooks: six different first-person narrators, Edgerton recounts the family exploits between 1956 and 1971 and provides significant glimpses of family history as far back as the Civil War.
    • blog several times a week
  • Google's Street View
  • The Google 'ick' factor
  • CNN's New Beta

Help News

  • Upcoming Workshops: Moodle
    • Moodle Quickstart, 9-10:30 a.m., Tues., Jun 19
    • Moodle Quickstart, 2:00-3:30 p.m., Thu., Jun 21
    • Moodle Quickstart, 10-11:30 a.m., Tue., Jun 26
    • Moodle Quickstart, 2-3:30 p.m., Thur., Jun 28
    • Moodle Quickstart, 1-=11:30 p.m., Tues, July 10
    • Moodle Quickstart, 2-3:30 p.m., Wed., July 11

Contacting the Podcast

ITS Coffee Break – 5/16/07 – Moodle, Podcasting & Teaching, Windows Vista

Posted on by

A discussion of Lafayette's upcoming conversion from Blackboard to Moodle leads off this week's edition of the ITS Coffee Break. In Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley review “Confessions of a Podcast Junkie”, an EDUCAUSE article by Carie Windham that the discusses the advantages of combining podcasting with teaching and talk about Case Western Reserve University's virtual campus in Second Life. In Help News, they announce ITS's new “Windows Vista” resource page and offer a preview of upcoming summer workshops.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

ITS News

Tech News

  • Confessions of a Podcast Junkie

    • by Carie Windham
    • http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0732.asp
    • Quoted from the article:
      • "For teaching and learning, the students saw concrete benefits to podcasting projects, especially when compared with standard modes of testing, such as writing a paper or doing a class demonstration:
        • They were able to get "intimate" with course material, either by relistening to course lectures and supplements or by teaching the rest of the class.
        • They could showcase their projects to the rest of the community, expanding the reach of the classroom to their friends or members of the community.
        • They had the opportunity to review course material during pertinent moments in the semester, such as before exams or during course projects.
        • They learned new technical skills, whether they were downloading files or creating new ones."
  • Case Western Reserve U. Builds Virtual Campus to Woo Prospective Students

  • A new DS addiction? SimCity DS

Help News

  • ITS Recommendation Regarding Windows Vista

    • http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/news/vista
    • ITS has been testing Microsoft's Vista operating system since its release and has discovered several incompatibility issues with Vista and key network, academic, and administrative applications used on campus. For this reason, ITS continues to recommend Windows XP Professional as the operating system for all campus computers.
  • Upcoming Workshops

    • No workshops are scheduled during the rest of May, but look for Moodle workshops to be offered beginning in June. Workshops on web design will be offered later in the summer.

Contacting the Podcast