January 16, 2009
Dropping out of Online Learning: Reason? Linux
The surprising part of this story was not that the student had to dropout due to a mistake requesting Ubuntu as the OS on her new laptop, but the heat she got from the Ubuntu community for being "too dumb" and "unworthy of a degree" for not navigating her way through living with Ubuntu:
First the breaking story:
The reaction:
Posted by rdivecha at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2009
Geeky Timeout: JJ's Star Trek
There is nothing better than spicing up Star Trek, JJ Abrams style. From the trailer and JJ Abram's previous work (Fringe) the new Star trek will surpass the glory of all the new Star Wars movies put together. Here is the trailer:
Posted by rdivecha at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)
August 14, 2007
InstrDesign SIG: CTools Fall 07 Preview
Resources
-- Actions are better interface -> cool flyout DHTML context menus
-- Citation list tool: library's subscription to online journals & resources. Ability to search the subscriptions and add link to articles directly to a folder in Resources.
Compared to eReserves, this tool does NOT guarantee availability of resources.
Students can create citation lists too with the right site config.
Groups (under Site Info)
Ad-hoc persmission groups for restricting certain resources to certain groups only, at the site level.
Re-ordering Tool for resources
Roles
Librarian - Everthing, except grading and eval materials
Forum Organization and Re-ordering tools
-- Forum statistics
-- Individual author's contribution summary
-- Organizing topics (categories) and have sub-topics for threaded discussions
-- Read/Unread notification for discussions
-- FORUMS ARE NOT GROUP AWARE - important to know.
-- Discussions can be graded by linking to the gradebook:
-- create gradebook entry first
-- then create discussion item linking to the gradebook entry.
Assignments Tools
-- email notification to instructors (on/off/digest mode)
-- This can be used as a reciept (manually forwarded by instructor)
Announcements
-- Time release of announcements (similar to resources).
Syllabus
-- Redirection to URL
-- Redirection to Resources not possible (manually adding a static attachment within Resource is possible).
Wiki
"Watch" tool
History
Comments option - cannot be deleted, just content can be.
Export to Word, PDF, RSS feeds in various formats, public view
Posted by rdivecha at 01:05 PM | Comments (0)
ACSF Meeting: Future of Webcoferencing at UM
"Agora" on Sakai
-- Sean DeMonner (demonner)
Tool within Sakai/CTools. emerging tool. working well at test labs at the 'dude'. Java client. partial mac support. significant development and integration is still pending.
Pilot phase starting post Fall07 rush.
Apart from standard features. One that piques one's interest is "Movie Broadcast".
"Webex" at Business School
we cracked up as the opening remark from the presenter was: "DO NOT BUY". Well its not too bad a system, infact a business world standard in webconf. VoIP was only recently added, so the business school users were using it in conjunction with Skype.
at the business school they had a 10 user licence and a 1Cent overage charge for additional usage. Shockingly this brought their billing amount up from the apparent $16K to a whopping $80K. So, it is great for the business world, but not a good licencing model for the academic world.
ePop (at Law School)
-- for student interviews
-- good entry level system and great licencing options, compared to the big players
-- gives a great screen capture program (like Camtasia)
Adobe Connect - Med School and MAIS
-- MAIS piloted on the med school server and then moved onto a hosted solution with Adobe servers. They dont need kerberos, but the med school setup is integrated with kerberos.
-- production environment expected by summer 2008
End discussion points:
-- WebEx is market leader
-- Adobe connect was surprisingly cheap at 10K/year
-- Live Communicaion server (MS) was evaluated by several ppl, but not really adopted due to early lack of features, reconfig of switches, lack of VoIP
-- Vlad compared Illuminate and can send the comparision matrix
Posted by rdivecha at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)
May 01, 2006
IT Sensibility
Something we knew, but never do:
http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/Software/News?m=732
For Tips on:
* Licensed software
* Software maintenance
* Labor
* Business-based sizing
* Creative financing
Posted by rdivecha at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)
Webcam built into the Monitor!
Image: Apple
Real Eye-to-Eye Contact now possible! (Now = Future)
from Engadget, posted by CultofMac:
We could soon see a new kind of display screen from computer maker Apple – one that simultaneously takes pictures while showing images.
The clever idea is to insert thousands of microscopic image sensors in-between the liquid crystal display cells in the screen. Each sensor captures its own small image, but software stitches these together to create a single, larger picture.
Posted by rdivecha at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)
HP to Support mySQL
I thought this news-bit stood out in the plethora of Software news out these days. A big daddy corp lending application support (not just dev) is always interesting news. Cost is usually the driver. All is here:
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/story/0,10801,110891,00.html?source=x54
Posted by rdivecha at 09:28 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2006
Nancy Allee Honored
Some great news this morning!
Nancy Allee has been approved for membership in the Academy of Health Information Professionals at the Distinguished Member level.
"denotes the highest standards of professional competency and achievement in the field of health care information."
Nancy Allee
Link to the roster: http://www.mlanet.org/academy/roster1.html
Posted by rdivecha at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2006
DIY Podcasting Workshop
Last Tuesday (Jan 31)
The first and proably last of this semester's podcasting workshops went quite well. Attendance was from the Dean's Office, Internet2 and the school in general.
Everyone was able to get through the registration for the three services necessary to start phone-podcasting.
MBL said she might have students phone blog from New Orleans. Others wanted to see how it might pan out in their organizations.
Lets see...
Posted by rdivecha at 11:07 AM | Comments (1)
January 27, 2006
Apple Podcasting Class: At the Dude
This is a good class to take. John Hickey, Apple Systems Engineer was the instructor.
Some take aways for me:
1. Export in QuicktimePro as Mpeg4 BUT name it as .m4a instead of mp4 (the default).
2. I used to think that podcasting directions is a silly thing to do. But!!! Found some useful insight:
Podcast for Directions: Why not silly -
- prevents nausea
- allows people to use their attention properly
- idea of a professor who 'read' his coursepack to
3. The itpc:// protocol was something new. This was the question running through my heart last evening "How the heck do I cut down a user's step of copying and pasting the podcast URL. Whoa!!! Apple has Internet Explorer obeying the itpc protocol to launch iTunes! That was an eye opener. - This should be included in the podcasting workshop.
4. Other good stuff:
Podcast Interviewing: the new iLife has integrated iChat (4 videos at a time), Garageband, iPhoto etc etc. This is fantastic stuff, really.
Garageband: Very efficient and easy production of enhanced podcasts! Mind blowing, sire. Photo syncing, automatic ducking (lowing bg music when speaker speaks, jingles, canned loops).
5. The iMac photo presentation (and the reflection effects) are done using latest AJAX technology.
6. Profcast - what I din't know was the ability of a presenter to switch between presentations while creating an enhanced profcast. Keynote and Profcast integration was quite good.
Posted by rdivecha at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2006
DAMS Update
DAMS Update: Project name changed to BlueStream. Since I have been in a lot of meetings with the DAMS folks, the update for me personally was in the CSS stylesheet of the interface. Lot of the cool features I had seen before. One thing, I thought was new, was publishing video podcasts. But investigation found that it was a proof-of-concept - m4v's did not come from their video compression core 'FlipFactory'. Hopefully, we might be able to work in server based video crunching, which is the most attractive aspect to me personally.
Posted by rdivecha at 06:37 PM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2006
Juan Cole's: A Blogging Success story from UM
Juan Cole is a blogging success stories. Respected, well researched blog that is used by journalists, politicians and academicians all over. Juan Cole is a History professor who presented the CRLT seminar on his professional blogging activities since the early 2000s.
The success of the blog lies in its transparency and authority. Today, anyone can start a blog... and let it die. But Juan's blog-flame has burnt strong for years which makes it a good success. The best part of the presentation was that the presenter was not a tech person trying to sell an idea, but a person, comfortable with the technology, having a pleasant conversation. Felt great.
Building a Blogging/Wiki-ing/Podcasting culture:If this has to be done, high-need groups need to be recognized and then showcased. For the podcasting culture to grow as an academic phenomenon, the experts should, as a group produce one podcast from each department - updated 1-2 times a week. OK, maybe I am asking for too much, but that's whats cool - our own little public health radio, that michiganradio and npr can solicit as an expert source. The richmedia we have is totally instructional in the central sense of it.
Bottom line: Content is King
More...
Two different blog indexes on the web:
Blogdex: Ranks posts by their 'contagiousness', a term about which we were not quite sure about.
Technorati: Which plainly indexes blog and calculated their popularity from the inbound links.
Other interesting websites that came up:
Collective Blogging by Experts
http://www.crookedtimber.org/
Young Academician's Blog Allegedly* Costs him Tenure
http://www.danieldrezner.com/*Alleged by the blogging community, denied by the academician himself
Posted by rdivecha at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)