IT’s Academic - Training Archives

Lunch and Learn: Dennis Hood on Blackboard 2011

2011-05-05T13:20:57Z

At the Lunch and Learn on April 27th, 2011, Dennis Hood spoke about what Blackboard users should expect from the latest version of Blackboard at Princeton. He demonstrated the cosmetic and functional changes that will come after the upgrade in June. Blackboard 2011 offers more straightforward navigation, tools for increased productivity with less clicks, and a cleaner look and feel.

A few changes were made in order to make the interface more friendly. In the new Blackboard, your name will again appear at the top of the page when you log in. Blackboard removed this feature in the previous release, but it reappears in this upgrade. The color of links in the page has been tweaked to improve legibility. Some people have reported confusion in the previous release about the menu-hide and menu-collapse features, and as a result, the handles for these features have been made more prominent.

Other changes focused on functional improvements. You can now choose to keep announcements ordered by a priority that you set. There are times in which instructors might want to keep an announcement up all semester, and others which they might only want to keep up for a day, or a week. The changes to the announcements area allow you to more quickly arrange, prioritize, and dismiss announcements for students.

Hood showed that significant changes were made to the content creation tools. The links in the content creation areas, in which instructors can create links, documents, and file downloads for students, now has three links for that purpose instead of the previous five. The most basic function in the content areas allows instructors to choose to create an item or create a file. Creating an Item works similarly to the way it worked in previous releases. Instructors can create a title, body and attachment in an item, and it is immediately available to their students, or delayed if they wish. Creating a File allows you to simply add a file without getting the textbox that creating an Item presents. Any file you upload to an Item or File page uploaded to a local file to Blackboard’s file storage system. When uploading content to courses, instructors can choose to browse your local desktop computer or from your course files that they have already uploaded.

Hood had a tip for Microsoft Office users. There is a particularly useful feature for people who use Microsoft Word to prepare their course content, such as their syllabus. In the past, copying and pasting content from a Word document often meant losing formatting, requiring a subsequent cleaning up of the document, and lost time and effort. There is now a Mashup button with a “Paste from Word” option in the toolbar that can help you to preserve line breaks and other formatting as you paste it in.

Hood told the audience to be aware of a misunderstanding in Blackboard that some people have reported to him. If an instructor wants to remove an item from a content area, it is important to click on the contextual menu next to the item itself. If you click on the remove command in the contextual menu for the content area at the top of a page, (e.g. Course Materials), you will remove the entire content area rather than simply an item within that area. Hood said that Blackboard has greatly improved its ability to deliver files directly to users, rather than as an attachment to an Item.

In the new version of Blackboard, you can add audio files and images as objects in content areas. Students can begin to use these files in one click, as opposed to having to click into a Blackboard item, then into the attachment. Blackboard’s mashups feature supports the use of various external media sites, such as Flickr and YouTube as a source for course content. The new Course Files, found in the Control Panel menu, can be populated with various files such as documents and spreadsheets, then browsed, linked to and shared according to access rules you set up. For instructors who wish to upload a lot of files at once, they need only drag and drop a folder or series of selected files into the course files area. Even if an instructor deletes a link to a file in course files, the file remains in storage until it is specifically deleted from course files. Also when you rename or move a file in course files, all links to it stay intact. For instructors who wish for students to have a place where they can simply drop files that will be shared with other students,, they can recreate the functionality of a WebSpace Dropbox using course files by setting sharing permissions on a course files folder. This eliminates sending students to a different application (WebSpace) for using the shared files folder.

Grade Center now has its very own top-level Control Panel item. Links to Grade Center smart views, where faculty can see, for instance, a subset of all students, can now be placed under the Grade Center link in the Control Panel. Instructors can quickly see items that require action, such as assignments that need grading, with the Needs Grading link. It’s easier to grade blogs, wikis, and journals in Blackboard now. Course Blogs allow items to be posted for student review and comment, and Course Journals & Wikis allow students to individually or collectively write about course content, all of which can be used for assessment. Instructors can now create rubrics to serve as guidelines for grading assignments and essay questions. These rubrics can be associated in the Grade center with the items to which they apply. The Grade Center now allows instructors to grade assignments without knowing who the student who completed the assignment is. This can help to prevent a positive or negative bias that the instructor may have acquired about a student. Another new and interesting feature is that an instructor can color code Grade Center entries in order to highlight certain students, grades or activity.

Finally, there is a new tab labeled Book Bag that shows students which books they selected from their course sites to order from Labyrinth. The Book Bag feature is an inter-application relationship with Labyrinth Books, and allows students to order and purchase books in Blackboard, then simply walk over to pick them up at Labyrinth.

Dennis Hood explained the ways in which Blackboard 2011 at Princeton will improve instructor and student productivity, file management, and media consumption. The interface is a bit cleaner and easier to navigate. The Course Files feature allows for more direct management and control of files in Blackboard. The Grade Center allows users to stay better informed of their recorded progress in courses. Even buying textbooks is easier. For more information, or if you have questions about Blackboard at Princeton, please contact Dennis Hood at hood@princeton.edu.

Blackboard 2011 Quick Start Guide

Audio Podcast of the talk

Ben Johnston on New Scholarly Annotation Tools

2011-04-15T12:48:53Z

Abstract

This session looked at current and future methods of annotating and analyzing text and multimedia materials for scholarly work. From the bookmarking and annotation of webpages, to commenting Word documents for review, and the marking up of XML versions of manuscripts, annotation can take many different forms and be used in many different ways.

Reflecting on experiences of a pilot project undertaken as part of an NEH grant proposal working with a very large 19th Century manuscript, Ben Johnston presented a survey of tools available for annotation including Microsoft Word, Zotero, Pliny, blogs, wikis and also looked work currently being done through a group called Open Annotation Collaboration to standardize and explore the use of annotation in scholarly practice.

What is annotation?

Ben Johnston believes that scholarly annotation should go beyond post-its and marginal notation. In his Productive Scholar talk, Johnston said that physical ink-on-paper note-taking is traditionally the most common way that annotation is done. Post-its, those little multicolored sticky notes, are portable, stable, and work well for one book and one person. New digital tools extend the scope and capability of annotation. Johnston asked “what if I want to use a single note in multiple books” or “move it to other places and other contexts?” In this case, he argues, post-its are limited in their capability.

Newer tools such as mind-mapping applications, wikis, and shared databases, for instance, connect different ideas, often with contextual notes on those connections.. Johnston began to define what annotation is, and the ways in which it can be more or less effective. Twitter posts about Hamlet or Macbeth, for example, may be annotation on those topics, but they might not offer constructive or beneficial content adding to the scholarly discussion. More traditional methods, such as writing a scholarly journal article, is often an extended form of annotation. An article that describes central themes in Macbeth and categorically compares them to themes in a contemporary story is an example of this.

Annotation can also simply be the end-notes, footnotes and comments that you add to a document in Microsoft Word or Open Office. Johnston explained that deep reading, in which one writes notes in and adds comments to a textbook in order to record personal understanding and interpretation, is a very common form of annotation for students, but potentially compacts the experience for the next scholar reading (and annotating) that book. All of these methods are able to be done electronically, but can still fail on some key scholarly activities, such as sharing and allowing for continued discussion.

Scholarly skill sets

People who research and define the important skill sets for scholarly work often find annotation in the short list of those skills. In May of 2000, John Unsworth (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) proposed the idea of Scholarly Primitives, eight basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines. They are discovering, comparing, sampling, representing, annotation, referring, and illustrating. He chose them as a way of assessing the common threads of scholarly activity in the humanities, and how scholarly tools might be best used to focus on these primitives. Tools or workflows that allow scholars to achieve more of these tasks in a streamlined, cohesive way are potentially more useful than those that do not. (http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html)

Other groups have discovered a more condensed toolset and have included annotation (ideologically) within other terms. Project Bamboo is: “a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary effort that brings together humanities scholars, librarians, and information technologists to tackle the question: ’How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?’” (http://www.projectbamboo.org/about/). They have developed some slightly different primitives. Scholars now discover, gather, create, and share. Gathering and creation is primarily where annotation happens in their framework, though discovery supports it and sharing extends it. Notably, create and share are missing from Unsworth’s ideas, possibly because the increased ability to share has become more common in the last ten years due to web 2.0, social media and other technology platforms.

Project Bamboo works to solve problems that have emerged along with these new capabilities. They ask the questions “How do we most effectively facilitate and discuss the scholarly process in the contemporary digital style”” and ”how do we get faculty members, scholars, and IT people to work together to provide platforms to discuss what happens in scholarly practice?” New tools for scholarly annotation begin to answer these questions.

New tools

Some of the digital tools that help scholars to discover, gather, create, and share with annotation are much more than simply virtual post-it notes, but others are just that. Fleck was an example of a service that allowed you to create post-its on web sites and share them with others. It is no longer in business as an annotation service, but now develops games about battling zombies. (http://fleck.com/)

Annotate it (annotateit.org) allows you to use a bookmarklet (a small javascript that you keep in your bookmarks) to save annotations about sites that you are visiting. It saves annotations using a centralized server, which can be locally installed, or hosted by the developer. You can highlight some portion of a page and create an annotation, and you can tag it with metadata. Then, other AnnotateIt users get to see your notes and tags and (hopefully) benefit from them.

You can use Google Earth to overlay historical images on top of a particular area, then add notes and pins to denote metadata about specific locations. You might use it in order to dissect the progression of a famous battle or talk about urban sprawl over time.

Video annotation tools are coming, but are still fairly immature. YouTube.com, for example, allows for annotations, but those annotations are neither listable nor searchable, and you must own the video in order to annotate it. You also can not use the annotations in order to navigate the video. In VideoANT, a project from the University of Minnesota, you can import your video, then pause and annotate it. You can then share those annotations with students or peers.

Professor Herbert Ginsburg at Teachers College in collaboration with the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learnin (CCNMTL) helped to create a system called Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL), which is described as follows: VITAL comprises tools for editing and annotating video and for writing "multimedia essays" with text and video, embedded in an online course syllabus, and housed within a community space where instructors and peers can review work published within the system and build up a personal repository of video and written content. Students who use VITAL learn to observe closely, interpret what they see, and develop arguments using cited video content as evidence. (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/our_services/tools/vital/)

DigressIt, which used to be known as CommentPress, is a plugin for the open source content management system (CMS) called WordPress. It allows you to create a post, and break the text up into paragraphs, then select the paragraph to add comments per paragraph. Typically you could comment on the site itself, or on an individual post, but this tool adds a level of granularity that makes commenting potentially useful for scholars.

Johnston says that Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Open Office, Adobe Acrobat, and Google Docs all allow you to annotate and discover commentary, but that the trouble lies with searching the comments, footnotes, endnotes, references, and so on. For deep reading, and pulling text apart in order to discover deep connections, these are limited tools for the job.

Gathering

New tools have been created to help you to more effectively gather (one of the Bamboo Project’s key scholarly activities) and annotate the gathered data. Zotero, for instance, is a browser plugin and local database that quickly provides references, citations, PDFs, and more from online newspapers, journals and databases that provide that metadata. You can then create relevant collections of those sources. It allows for annotation and commenting, and creates a snapshot of the content so that you can use it even if the online source disappears. A central server allows for sharing collections with colleagues and students.

Endnote is a citation management database with a long list of fields you can populate, and you can leave metadata tags on your notes. However, Johnston notes that Endnote is not as powerful for sharing data as Zotero is.

Johnston describes Mendeley as iTunes for PDF documents. It extracts information such as author, title, and date from PDFs, which you can then sort and filter. It allows you to open, highlight, comment, and search comments in a PDF. Johnston says Qiqqa is just like Mendeley, though he really likes the name and the developer’s interest in improving your productivity. According to the developer, the application “makes you work qiqqa”.

Wikis

One definition of a wiki is that it is an ecosystem of related documents. Wikis can be collections and interconnections of anything, including annotations. OneNote, which comes with the Microsoft Office suite, is a note taking tool, but also a kind of wiki. In OneNote, You can create a note, link it to other notes, and you can end up with a forest of interrelated notes.

Tomboy, an open source, cross-platform desktop wiki, allows you to create notes, highlight text within notes, link notes to other notes. It allows you to search for those items, as well as create a note that follows certain terms that you denote, such as names of characters in stories you are dissecting. Johnston said that Tomboy is a powerful tool to follow specific terms and content throughout a highly complex set of notes. You can even categorize the notes with folders. Simplicity is Tomboy’s best benefit for scholars, says Johnston.

Nvivo is an example of especially useful software for use in the social sciences for transcribing interviews, and coding responses. It comes at a price of $700, which could be a barrier, but makes codes (akin to tags) applicable to any part of the text.

Pliny, a java based desktop wiki developed at Oxford, allows you to import images, PDFs, text, and create notes about their content. It includes a web browser to create notes about web content. You can highlight a section of text on a page, and make an associated note. Then you can bring those notes up in an interconnected mind-map view, and name associations between notes.

New directions in annotation

The University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign has an Open Annotation Collaboration project (http://www.openannotation.org/) that is working on expanding the idea of annotation on the web. The group believes that when you create an annotation, it should be available for others to use to create a semantic web, or an interconnected, openly accessible, searchable, navigable group of organized content. In order to do this, every bit of information, rather than entire pages or sites, should have its own finite location, such as a Universal Resource Locator (URL), on the web. They feel that bits of information should cross boundaries, and be connected, searchable and available. They are focused on the goal of sharing annotation, using open and common web standards, such as RDF and URLs, creating this semantic web.

The Open Annotation Collaboration project has a specific definition of what an annotation should contain, including fields for event, title, author, expression, target, and time. They also feel that annotations can and should be of any media type, and support multiple targets and structured relationships. Annotations should also be searchable and discoverable, according to the group.

Summary

Johnston shared his understanding of what annotation is and is not, and talked about the limitations of traditional methods such as note-taking as compared to new methods that allow for centralization, sharing, and collaborative editing. His problem with the post-it is not in its simplicity or stability, but in its physical limits, keeping a single note from being shared in two articles, for example. A short review of scholarly activities shows the importance of annotation, but also the importance of the discovery, gathering and sharing aspects of scholarly work. Tools like Zotero, Mendelay, and wikis allow you to quickly collect annotation data, craft omnimedia bibliographic entries in your expertise, and share those collections with others in just a few clicks. Very often the same kind of work is being done with more traditional methods. With newer tools, which potentially increase scholarly productivity, more attention can be paid to the beneficial outcomes of good annotation: understanding, teaching, learning, and sharing knowledge.

The presentation from this presentation can be found here.

Bio

Ben Johnston is Senior Educational Technologist at OIT's Educational Technologies Center and manager of the Humanities Resource Center in East Pyne. Ben has been involved with educational technology for over ten years in positions at Columbia University, Bryn Mawr College, and at Princeton University. While at Princeton, Ben has worked with educators and researchers across the Humanities and Social Sciences to facilitate the use of digital assets, technology tools, databases, and digital video in teaching and research.

Lunch and Learn: John LeMasney on 365 Sketches

2011-04-12T13:52:38Z

Abstract

365 Sketches is a project in which I use free and open source software to do a single visual design every day. The project is currently in its second year of production, and was started as a way to force myself to do at least one thing every day to build upon my design skills. You can visit the project and follow my progress at http://365sketches.org.

As time went on, it became a public visual diary, a way for people to come together online and converse about, suggest ideas for, and critique my work. The work is occasionally practical, sometimes clever, often funny, and increasingly personal. I continue to achieve the goals that I had planned for in the beginning of the project. I have seen a gradual improvement and evolution of my design, typography and photomanipulation skills, but I also received many other unforeseen benefits, such as gaining an audience, being contracted for new consulting work, taking part in shows and presentations on the project, and feeling a genuine desire to keep making more pieces.

Origins

This project was inspired by an end-of-year inspirational blog post. In December of 2009, I read this blog post on Smashing Magazine entitled Design Something Every Day! and it echoed a sentiment I had heard in my undergraduate fine arts studies. A beloved ceramics teacher said that the best road to success as an artist was to do something every day -- shake a hand, make a call, throw a bowl, draw a scene, etc. The key was to do something that brought you closer to your goal, and to refine the goal as achievements were made. I had always loved that advice, but had not acted upon it previously.

Reading the post above triggered a memory about the advice, and the project was born. I wanted to master the open source software application called Inkscape, because I thought that it was incredibly powerful, but also because I felt I had only lightly scratched the surface of understanding it. Inkscape is a vector-based illustration program, similar to Adobe’s Illustrator, and it is free. You can download it for Windows, Mac or Linux at http://inkscape.org. I decided that working in Inkscape once a day, then sharing those designs online, was potentially a great way to improve my skills and share my progress. For the online publishing, I decided to use another open source project called WordPress, because Automattic, the company that created it, offers a free hosting service at http://wordpress.com, and because the publishing platform is highly extensible with themes and widgets, sidebar blocks where you can share information and data. I paid for a custom domain name from WordPress, and soon after, my first designs appeared at http://365sketches.org

Community

I personally feel that getting people to find your blog and appreciate your content is easier today than ever before because of social networking. I decided to make a page and advertise new work from 365 Sketches on Facebook at http://facebook.com/365sketches and to tweet about new pieces that appeared on the blog via my personal twitter account, @lemasney (http://www.twitter.com/lemasney). I also share the work on Flickr.com, Yahoo’s photo sharing site, and StumbleUpon.com, a site that allows others to serendipitously visit your site based on their interest preferences. Soon after doing this, I was able to gather statistical feedback, get an increase in comments, and ask people to give me ideas for future sketches. I also wanted people to be able to use my work freely. I decided to license all of the work generated for the project under a Creative Commons, Share-Alike license, so that people could use the pieces for free in return for attribution, but could not later take my work and make it proprietary. Because the work, social networks, blogs, and software are all monetarily and ideologically free, I wanted to ask people if I could do design tasks for them for free as a way of generating new ideas and challenging myself.

I maintain a design consulting company and I wondered what effect the project might have on it. If someone needs a quick logo or some branding work, the project is often a great way for them to get the job done for free and for me to build trust with future clients and add to my portfolio. Sometimes the needs of the request are more complicated than the relatively simple work typically created for the project, and those requests are often converted into contracted jobs. The project has inspired two shows at libraries in the greater Trenton-Princeton area, generated artwork for t-shirts, mugs, and posters, and allowed me to make connections with hundreds of people who had never heard of open source, Inkscape, or my company before. The project became a great way for me to extend my brand and its exposure.

Progression

A few people who follow the project have reviewed all of the pieces in order to look for some overarching progression in the work. Perhaps the best way to do this is to visit the 365 Sketches set on Flickr. I’ve gotten some interesting feedback about the work that I didn’t expect. For instance, one friend said that I have an obsession with hair. Another told me that my work took on a decidedly personal tone after my mother died in October of 2010. A third said that animals were a major ongoing theme. I was personally interested and delighted to discover these themes in my work, but maybe more so that people had taken the time and effort to look back through the catalog of pieces and give feedback.

In the first year, I used Inkscape exclusively, and in the second year I’ve used both the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) and Inkscape. In the future, I will likely move to three-dimensional modeling applications and animation or video. GIMP is for editing photos, and has a similar look, feel, and function to Adobe’s Photoshop. My work in the GIMP tends to be more ethereal, with more soft edges. My Inkscape work is more hard edged and contains more solid blocks of color. If I want to work with photography or realistic blending of forms, I will usually use the GIMP. When I am working with text, making wordmarks, or doing work for an infographic, I will usually use Inkscape. From time to time, the work will pass back and forth between these two applications so that I can gain the benefits of each. I personally believe that I could not have learned as much about the applications using some other method (such as reading or videos), as experiential learning has always been especially powerful for me as a way to gain knowledge.

Process

Making the work starts with an idea. Sometimes the idea is my own, such as something that happened in my life or in the news. Sometimes, I will request ideas from the page’s followers on Facebook. Sometimes I’ll get an email with a request, or someone will have a project or organization that needs some brand elements. I keep a few books nearby in situations where I am blocked. For example, I keep a book called Instant Karma by Barbara Ann Kipfer nearby because it has provided many great starting points for quote illustrations. Then I open up Inkscape or the GIMP and get to work.

The whole point is to get the visual plan that I have in my head onto the screen. As I became more familiar with the tools, keyboard shortcuts, and techniques, this became much easier. I originally started with a 500 pixel by 500 pixel canvas in Inkscape in the beginning of the project, then moved to a golden rectangle format at 809 pixels by 500 pixels. When I switched to the GIMP in 2011, I decided that I would let each piece denote what its size would be. In situations where I do not have a predetermined size in the GIMP, I will usually choose 800 pixels by 600 pixels, because I can be sure that most people can see it on their screen without having to resize or zoom in. After I have my piece done, I’ll save it to my hard drive, then move to Chrome, an internet browser, so that I can share it. I have a bookmark folder that contains several links: The current page at 365sketches.org

The New Post page at 365sketches.org
The Facebook page at http://facebook.com/365sketches
The Flickr upload page at http://flickr.com
The cloud based social aggregator application at http://hootsuite.com

By right clicking on this folder in my bookmark toolbar, I can choose to open all of these at once, and then add the image, a short description, and tags to each of these services in order to advertise the new post to each of those audiences.

Summary

365sketches is a project about design, open source, and community. The project started as a way for me to do just one thing each day to better myself as a designer. It turned into a way for me to share ideas and techniques with hundreds of people every day. By using free and open source software, I was able to maintain the project with no monetary costs, while creating objects of personal and community value. The process for publishing has been refined and modified over time, and provides me with a relatively simple way to share my work with a lot of people in just a few clicks. I hope that you’ll consider participating in the project. The best way is to subscribe to the site at http://365sketches.org or if you’re on Facebook, join the page at http://www.facebook.com/365sketches

\The slideshow for this talk is at http://bit.ly/eWJMfv

The audio from this talk is at http://bit.ly/gqyrkd

Bio

John LeMasney is the Manager for Educational Technology Training and Outreach at Princeton University. He was the Manager of Technology Training and Instructional Technology for 12 years at Rider University. He created LeMasney Consulting and Design, which serves the greater Princeton-Trenton area of New Jersey. His most recent project is 365sketches.org where he makes one design a day using open source software.

John is a husband, father, artist, designer, speaker, technologist, open web standard advocate, and open source evangelist living and working in New Jersey.

PULSe and Lynda.com - On Demand Training at Princeton University

2011-04-06T15:25:26Z

PULSe and Lynda.com at Princeton

Abstract

PULSe – the Princeton University Learning Series is a new IT learning opportunity that supports many of the technologies OIT makes available. Faculty, staff, and students – anyone with a Princeton netID – can participate in the live Friday afternoon webinars or access recorded tutorials on available services such as SharePoint, Roxen, and WebSpace. PULSe maintains a presence on Twitter and Facebook where additional resources are shared. In this Productive Scholar session, you will be introduced to the site, its features, and the iLinc web conferencing system that is used to present the weekly webinars.

Lynda.com is a California-based company that offers online training materials on popular software platforms, web applications, and consumer technology. Some are short introductions to a new technology or software package. Others are in-depth instructions on software applications or suites.

PULSe

Lorene Lavora said that PULSe, an on-demand training program and series, is made possible because of an amazing team of people with a deep knowledge of applications, and that her main goal in the series is to “push the envelope” of how technology training is done at Princeton.

The series of technology webinars, which focus on Microsoft Office products, Sharepoint. and other Princeton University-supported products. are short, to the point, and easy to digest, according to Lavora. The seminars are available to Princeton University community members, meaning that anyone with a NetID can watch prerecorded seminars. You can get to the PULSe site by visiting http://www.princeton.edu/pulse and logging in.

Live PULSe seminars take place on Fridays at 2 pm. You do need to have an iLinc account in order to see live seminars. You can get access to iLinc by visiting http://ilinc.princeton.edu and following the instructions to gain access to the system. All conversation between instructors and participants is currently done by chat in iLinc. Instructors also share video and other materials related to the featured software in each session via iLinc.

According to Lavora, PULSe’s Facebook and Twitter accounts are a great way to start a conversation about training. She says that you can find out what PULSe seminars are coming up, ask a question about the software that the seminars support, and get answers from the people who teach them.

Lynda.com

Janet Temos explained that Lynda.com, a premium technology training site with videos and other resources, currently has over 1000 courses and offers new courses almost every week. On Lynda.com, there are courses covering a wide variety of software including design applications from Adobe, productivity software from Microsoft, cloud applications from Google, social sites such as Flickr & Facebook, and 3D applications such as Blender and 3DS Max. You can see an extensive list of all supported software at: http://www.lynda.com/software/all

Princeton recently purchased a site license, and anyone with a valid Princeton Net ID can take part in the on-demand training. Users are authenticated via CAS, the same system that allows access to Princeton services like Blackboard. If you have a valid NetID, simply log in to Lynda at http://lynda.princeton.edu

Some things to note about Lynda:

In order to use the site, cookies are required. The cookies track your activity and progress so that you can go into the site, do some training, leave the site, and get right back to where you left off. If you add your customized user information (name, etc.) you can get your own name on certificates of completion, but your personal information is not required to use the service or to track your individual progress.

If you are not a Princeton NetID holder, it costs $25 per month to sign up as an individual user. This monthly fee will allow individual users to have unlimited access to training materials and videos.

Internet Explorer 8 users sometimes have an issue with the browser correctly rendering menu drop-downs. If this happens to you, look for the compatibility-mode icon in the address bar, and click it. (Additional information about this issue can be found in the forthcoming Knowledge Base article on lynda.com)

Also note that if you log out from Lynda, you cannot log back in at lynda.com — you must use http://lynda.princeton.edu in order to take advantage of Princeton’s site license. You can also set site preferences, such as whether you want to use Flash, Quicktime, or Windows Media, etc. to view movies.

With Quicktime, for instance, you can increase the speed of the playback in order to learn more quickly, as long as you don’t mind listening to the voice at a higher speed. Other features of Lynda videos include closed captioning, exercise files, and recommended prerequisites.

Lynda.com has a very active social media presence on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. You can also use your iPhone or iPad in order to access Lynda content with the lynda.com App, available in Apple’s App Store. Lynda also offers the Lynda Office ribbon, which adds a Lynda tab to Microsoft Office applications. By installing this ribbon, you get a new sidebar that offers application-contextual training from Lynda.com.

If you would like more information about Lynda at Princeton, or if you have questions, please contact jtemos@princeton.edu.

Here is the link to the presentation for Lynda at Princeton.

AllPrinceton: The Hyperlocal Media Experiment

2011-03-10T21:11:13Z

Introduction

At the Lunch ‘n Learn session on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011, Donna Liu explained and demonstrated AllPrinceton.com, a "hyperlocal multimedia experiment" of which she is the founder and Executive Director. AllPrinceton is not Liu's first multimedia project. After she came to Princeton in 2002 as a Ferris Fellow in journalism, Liu founded the UChannel, in collaboration with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Before Princeton, Liu had a long career as a news producer and manager with CNN, where she launched CNN’s first production center in Asia. She is an Emmy award winner for coverage of the Tienanmen protests in 1989. Liu opened her talk by describing the history and evolution of the AllPrinceton.com project.

Overview and History of AllPrinceton.com

Liu described her transition from analog to digital media during the development of the UChannel at Princeton. Now a digital convert, she not only understands the benefits of new media, but advocates it to others. During the UChannel project, Liu described having conversations with George McCollough, Executive Director of Princeton’s community access TV station, about he future of news and broadcasting, and what the transition to digital might mean for traditional news outlets. Liu noted that she would have loved to experiment with a local news organization during that transitional period, but that there wasn’t enough time to spare among her other responsibilities. When the UChannel was “unplugged," and Donna completed her appointment at Princeton, she suddenly found she had time and decided to begin a local news site that would focus on all topics relating to Princeton.

Liu started AllPrinceton.com with essentially no capital investment and a shared space on a server. She began searching and experimenting with capturing and posting information that seemed to her to be missing or elusive on other local news and civic websites. In order to create the AllPrinceton site, she selected an open source content management system called Drupal especially because there was a supportive community of developers, and also because AllPrinceton's funding organization, The Knight Foundation, was a Drupal advocate as well as being a prime supporter in experimentation with news media. Since Liu considers herself more of a journalist and organizer than a technologist, she chose a pre-configured Drupal theme that was already a favorite among other news organizations using Drupal because it had a lot of news-centric features. As she showed the Lunch 'n Learn audience the new website for AllPrinceton, she explained that the project was in “constant beta” and that the skeletal framework would soon be filled with focused local content, gathered with help from the community. She has welcomed local residents to participate in the AllPrinceton experiment, and has begun to offer regular workshops to get the community involved and informed.

The AllPrinceton.com site

The AllPrinceton.com site is organized into various content streams. There is original content from AllPrinceton writers as well as related, aggregated content from third party sources. The original content is created by students and Princeton community members who are interested in reporting the town’s events and issues. In the center is Town Talk, a group blog where people write their own content about events and issues. Liu described Town Talk as being akin to embedded journalism, where people on the ground report on what they see in the area, and everyone is clearly identified and associated with their various organizations. A calendar, including arts, cultural and civic events, exists where community members might post. A classified section and directory section allow people to exchange information, though it is not yet as popular as other areas on the site. (Liu plans to make these sections more robust over the summer.) The directory, for example, might contain biographical and contact information for Princeton's civic leaders, or other information related to community governance.

Other content on the site is aggregated using curated feeds from established news sources such as The Princeton Packet. The aggregated content exists as a teaser, consisting only of the first few lines of a story, a fragment linked to the entire article on the original site. Princeton Community TV offers a media feed, so that the site also includes links to audio and video content about Princeton.

A search for "Princeton" populates a twitter feed on the site, and as a result, the feed offers not only tweets about Princeton township, Princeton borough and Princeton University, but occasionally picks up a "Princeton" reference that is unrelated to the community. Liu described the accidental inclusion in the feed of lively tweets that referred to an up and coming hiphop prodigy named 'Princeton' (results which Liu was mostly able to filter from the feed). Liu intends to continue applying feed filters so that future twitter content can become more reliably focused on actual Princeton-specific tweets. Liu's goal is to make the twitter feed provide a vibrant and immediate source of information -- as a point of comparison, she described the kind of immediately-aware feeds that we’ve seen occur spontaneously during natural catastrophes such as the recent earthquake in Japan.

Liu identified such timely and specific information as a local news gap, one that AllPrinceton might be able to fill. For instance, although there are alerts and institution-specific alerts of snow and wind emergencies, perhaps there is currently no centralized online presence for such alerts in the community. If simple tools could be made available to let the community self-report emerging situations or outages, AllPrinceton could move from simply being useful to being truly essential service. Liu described a recent meeting during which the proposed school budget was discussed. After an extensive search, Liu concluded that the specifics of the budget weren't described anywhere in the local websites associated with the school board. Information about the budget did not exist on the web until a student reporter from AllPrinceton went to the meeting, got a paper copy of the proposed budget, scanned it and posted it on the site. "Public information does not necessarily mean accessible information," Liu explained, "unless there are media channels to make it available."

Technologies, people and Ideas

Liu cited examples of other technology leaders and popular web based tools that have helped to inspire her work on AllPrinceton. One such tool is Steve Johnson’s Outside.in which takes information feeds from a specific zip code and pulls them together into a cohesive collection of local updates. (Liu also mentioned that Johnson's site was purchased by AOL for $10M the day before her talk.) Johnson continues to improve the algorithm that collects the data to feed the site. But even Johnson has come to admit that algorithms are not enough, and that the information gathered by machine has to be supplemented by human reporting, a kind of "hybrid" concept that is central to Liu's visions for the future of AllPrinceton.com.

Liu also quoted Jeff Jarvis, a guru of digital news and media, as having said “Do what you do best, and link to the rest”--which Liu sees as a sound philosophy, and is the rationale for bringing aggregated content from other established sources to the AllPrinceton site. George McCollough, the director of Princeton’s Community Television and Digital Media Center, remarked Liu, gives people the tools and knowledge to create their own media--and then broadcasts the results. Liu sees McCollough's station as a model for what AllPrinceton.com might provide for Princeton's online community.

An intense focus on local news, a concept Liu refers to as hyperlocality, is, she says, similar to a pendulum swinging back from the overtly global concerns of mass media. Mass news media organizations might be perceived on one hand as media monsters, absorbing and eclipsing local media channels. Locality is gaining in importance, said Liu, especially with regard to news. Media sources are regrouping around communities of interest and geographical locations. Liu decided to focus on the geo-location trend in designing AllPrinceton.com -- in part because she loves the town, but also because Princeton, although small, is a place where many interesting things happen..

Liu spoke of the information-gathering tool Ushahidi as an example of the new trends in crowd-sourced reporting. Ushahidi was originally deployed in Kenya to help monitor elections, The tool allows average users to share information and has been used in emergencies such as Haiti's recent disasters, and the Washington snowstorm. SeeClickFix.com (a possible future addition for AllPrinceton) allows local residents to use smartphones to take pictures of problems, record their geolocation, and report details of what needs to be fixed. The information is then posted to the SeeClickFix. site, and remains there until the problem is resolved. Liu shared her own SeeClickFix view of Princeton after the wind storm we experienced last spring. Liu, armed with her phone, took a walk around her own neighborhood and noted the location of several downed trees. If a similar system was in place for Princeton, information about the specifics of weather, or other sorts of emergencies, could be shared more easily through increased reporting at the neighborhood level. However, without the buy-in of the municipal services such reporting would have little effect. If the community reports an issue and no one with the power to fix it is listening, such a site might actually increase confusion and frustration.

Liu concluded her talk by citing how two Princeton faculty members as being influential to her growing interest in using online media as a public concern. An example of bottom-up reporting can be found in Professor Matthew Salganik's AllOurIdeas.org (itself the subject of a recent Lunch 'n Learn talk). AllOurIdeas is a collaborative tool where a group of people with a shared interest can pick a favorite when presented with two ideas. The ideas presented are posed in response to a shared question or problem. Favored solutions rise to the top of the polls, and participants are encouraged to enter new ideas or solutions to the topic being discussed. Liu noted that Salganik's polling tool is being used in New York City to decide upon the use of new public spaces. She would love to see this tool used to discuss local issues, such as the ongoing talks about the consolidation of Princeton's Borough and Township. The second faculty member who influenced Liu's thinking about new media was Professor Ed Felten. Liu recalled a talk she attended a decade ago, where Felten outline a striking description of what he called "the Celestial Jukebox." This was a visionary future device that could be used to make phone calls, take photos, watch and listen to media, connect to the internet and more. Now that we all can have a "Celestial Jukebox, " in our pocket in the form of a smart phone, what, asked Liu, can we do to make sense of the vast amount of information that now flows from individuals to the internet? She recently asked Felten to consider that question. "Filtering," he replied, "is key." Filtering, curating, and selecting information from the web can result in an incredibly rich source of information about a single topic.

For the AllPrinceton.com project, that topic of shared interest is Princeton itself, and Liu hopes that some creative filtering and channeling through a community collection of "celestial jukeboxes" might result in something that can benefit and enlighten all Princeton residents.

Want to get involved?

If you are interested in working with Donna Liu in developing the AllPrinceton.com site, drop in on one of her regular Friday workshops from 10-12 at the Princeton Public Library. Additional, more advanced workshops are scheduled on an as-need basis at Princeton Community TV.

A podcast of Donna Liu's talk can be heard here.

The new AllPrinceton iPhone app can be found in the iTunes store.

Blackboard at Princeton

2008-09-18T14:01:35Z

Ken King of CUNY was the first to joke that it took three decades for the overhead projector to find its way from the bowling alley to the classroom. His point, true until recently, was that classrooms have been technological backwaters, defined more by chalk and slate than by silicon.

In August 2000, the Provost decreed that every Princeton course should have it own web site. Until then, faculty habitually distributed their syllabi and course information on the first day of the class. Students had to travel to the reserve reading room to obtain most of their course readings.

Today, all courses at Princeton rely upon the BlackBoard CMS (Course Management system). For the students, the change is a welcome relief. Apart from the fact that they can’t now misplace their copy of the syllabus, Blackboard is a central repository for and integral component of every course. Students can read their course materials online, take part in online discussions, download a fresh syllabus, submit their work, and even take a quiz.

]]> A number of enhancements made during the summer of 2008 have improved Blackboard’s functionality:

The Grade Center

To assist faculty administration of grades, a redesigned Grade Center has new capabilities and vast improvements over the previous Gradebook. Some of the new features or improvements include:

• Smart Views - the ability to categorize Students into groupings based on selected criteria. AIs and section instructors are now able to see only their own students;

• Inline editing - faculty can enter grades simply on the Grade Center’s spreadsheet

• Display - faculty can customize the display of the Grade Center.

• Ease of Use - A redesigned tool bar, the Action Bar, provides easier access to multiple functions;

• Reports - Faculty can create and print Reports that they can hand out to students;

• New grade calculations - Faculty can now view average and Minimum/Maximum grades, and they can create weighted grades or a grading Schema.

You can obtain more information about the Grade Center or watch a video overview.

WebSpace

In past years, faculty could use the Blackboard Content Collection, a central repository to store the documents that they could then place on their Blackboard course web sites. By using this content system, faculty could easily link documents to more than one Blackboards course site and more easily carry materials forward from year to year.

This year, Princeton has licensed the full, up-to-date version of Xythos on which the Blackboard Content Collection is based. This document management and collaboration solution, known now as WebSpace, has many powerful features. For example, faculty will be able share files or all kinds easily with University colleagues and others outside the Princeton community. Unlike the former Content Collection, such sharing does not require any kind of special ID or Blackboard access for outside parties.

Faculty are welcome to use WebSpace independently of Blackboard in support of collaborative research or simply as a convenient place to store key files. And of course, they can also use WebSpace as a more comprehensive replacement for the Blackboard Content Collection.

You will fine more information about WebSpace features here.

Discussion Board

Blackboard’s Discussion Boards are an increasingly popular way to extend class discussion. Faculty can post relevant topics and permit students to enter their thoughts at any time. Students gain an opportunity to express their opinions and also to benefit from the thoughts of others.

New features in the discussion board include:

• Users can view course discussions in a Tree View that highlights titles in each discussion thread.

• Instructors can now mark discussion forums as “read” or “unread.”

• Users can now subscribe or unsubscribe to a forum. For a visual introduction to the Discussion Board changes, you can watch a tutorial.

Web Appointment Scheduling System (WASS)

The Web Appointment Scheduling System (WASS) permits members of the University community to schedule office hour and other appointments using the Web. Although developed by the University outside of Blackboard, it is now possible to use the tool from within each course’s table of contents. Faculty, deans, and others can use WASS to create a web-based calendar on which they indicate their availability for appointments. Students and others can locate these calendars on the Web, find an available appointment time, and schedule an appointment. You may learn more about WASS here.

Blackboard Sync

This new tool delivers course information and updates from Blackboard to users inside Facebook. Students who rely upon Facebook for other sources of information can now obtain new assignments, grades, and forum posts there. To add this new feature, log into Princeton’s Blackboard and select “Blackboard Sync” from the Tools module under the My Blackboard tab.

For security reasons, Princeton has opted not to display course rosters on Facebook. More information on this new application is available here.

Training to Go

2004-10-16T02:39:07Z

Office Visit Program expands to include Almagest, PowerPoint.

As many of you already know, through our Office Visit Program you can request that a graduate student consultant in instructional technology come to your office and help you set up your Blackboard courses. During these visits, consultants show you how to start tailoring Blackboard to your specific classes, your department, your teaching or administrative style - and your computer.

]]> Until now, this was the only kind of office visit we offered. Since Blackboard first arrived on campus in 1999 it has expanded and grown and now you can easily integrate a number of different technological tools with your course sites - tools as varied as web sites you’ve built yourself, streaming videos, PowerPoint presentations, or your Almagest projects. In addition, Blackboard now lets instructors store and manage their documents with an easy web interface that you can access right from your desktop.

Because the response to training in this format has been so positive, we are expanding the scope of the Office Visit Program. IT consultants now offer personal assistance not just with Blackboard but with many of the other tools you’ve already been using in your teaching and can integrate with your course sites. If you’d like someone to help you build your first Almagest lecture or try your hand at a simple PowerPoint presentation - fill out the form linked below, and a consultant will get in touch with you within a few days to schedule a visit.

During some of those visits, consultants would often show tips and tricks to make working with your Windows computer and Microsoft software a little easier - things like keyboard shortcuts you may not have known about or finding a file when you can’t remember just what folder you saved it in. Until now, consultants did this simply to help make working with Blackboard course web sites quicker and easier.

Office Visit Coordinator Kati Lovasz
and Consultant Amy Shuster train
in preparation for expanded services.

Through the expanded Office Visit Program you can request an office visit specifically for tips on using Windows and Word. If you’d like someone to help you reorganize your desktop in just the way that suits you or show you how you can navigate your computer’s file system or manage a book-length Word document a little more easily - you can have a consultant come right to your office and show you how to do just that.

This spring we welcome ten new consultants to our fold, graduate students from departments as varied as French and Italian, Physics and Sociology - we are sure that one of them will be able to help you with exactly what you need. Office visits are available to all faculty and staff affiliated with coursework. To request an office visit, go to the Office Visit web site, fill out the form and select the type of visit you’d like:

Windows tips and tricks
Blackboard course management
Creating simple PowerPoint slides
Managing large documents with Word
Creating simple Almagest projects

You can also call 258-7331. We hope to hear from you soon!