Reserchers at MIT’s “Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab” are using Microsoft’s Kinect depth sensor as a part of a camera system designed to create real time building maps as users walk around.
The Instructional Technologists come to your academic building every week to connect, partner, and collaborate.
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Ahmad Khazaee
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Dan Wheeler
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Social Sciences
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Natural Sciences & Math
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& Univ. Studies
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Mark Hine
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Zlatko Grozl
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Natural Sciences & Math
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Art & Humanities
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In a blog post, Derek Bruff describes some potential uses of Twitter in the classroom that include:
Technology change is inevitable and Colgate’s Moodle is no exception. Moodle version 2 will be in place for the fall 2012 semester after two years of version 1.
Why must we change? Security updates, software support, and new or improved functionality are the primary drivers. Why don’t we want to change? Lost or reduced functionality, new interfaces, time to migrate and re-learn. Simple resistance to change is probably also somewhere in the mix of your, and my, reluctance to switch.
And yes, we in ITS are along for the ride with this change, learning and re-learning and flustering and cursing with you. Much has changed behind the Moodle scenes and we are struggling to understand the new software and create a functional version.
We are maintaining the link http://moodle2.colgate.edu as our starting point for information on the transition to the new version. Check there for the latest server links, Moodle news, and how-to files.
So what about this new Moodle version are we likely to praise? Curse?
Below are some of the changes we are expecting.
Moodle v2 developers have spent a lot of time trying to make Moodle look and work better, offering:
Moodle v2 has more connections with the non-Moodle world, including access to documents in:
Moodle v2 will have all your old Moodle courses with almost all their content (wikis are problematic) available for use and re-use in the future. We can also restore old Blackboard archives to Moodle v2.
We will lose some things.
The timing of change doesn’t always fit our academic schedule. This means that some even nicer… features, not quite ready yet, will probably need to wait for spring 2013.
Google Forms is a tool that you can utilize to simplify the collection and organization of information. On campus we have used Forms as surveys, checklists, rosters, and a way to collect RSVPs. After you’ve created a form in Google Docs you share it and as people fill it out all the responses are collected in a spreadsheet by the same name. This saves having to sift through emails and manually creating a spreadsheet. I’ve linked a video of one of it’s uses here at Colgate, and if you want more information on Forms or need help getting started send an email to itshelp@colgate.edu.
Now that the summer has started, and all the papers are graded, everyone is certainly highly excited about the upcoming Webinar Wednedsdays! At least I hope that this is the case, but nonetheless, Academic Technologies team will continue the Webinar Wednesdays all Summer on different topics. For instance, today’s topic will be Gmail Management, facilitated by Ahmad Khazaee. I will be facilitating a Webinar session next Wednesday, where we’ll discuss different aspects of Google Blogger. Please keep in mind that our summer Webinar Wednesdays takes place at 11 AM, rather than at our usual time.
As a followup to my last webinar, i thought it would be interesting to share the following three Google Calendar videos, which outline some of the topics that we covered recently. I hope to see you there.
Editor features a generous toolset including clone stamp, spot healing, shape distortion, magic wand and lasso selection tools, a text tool and much more. Upload files from your computer, edit visually then download back to your computer.
An effective PowerPoint presentation, for example, can benefit from well cropped and edited images, leaving distracting backgrounds and extraneous material out to focus on the images’s subject. Images can also be created with Editor for inclusion in presentations and documents.
Some of the more Photoshop-esque features include the layers pane, navigation pane and the history pane. Save options include jpeg, png, tiff and the pxd format, pixlr’s layer-saving format.
Visit http://pixlr.com/editor/ to test drive this free, feature rich editing tool.
One of the main functions of an LMS (learning management system, AKA Moodle) is the creation of a course silo, or stack. That is, the LMS creates a place where students, faculty, and associated others connect with course materials and participate in classroom activities, a place where only enrolled or invited people can work. The silo exists while the course is in session and usually is deactivated shortly after the semester is ended.
There are some excellent — even some essential — reasons for creating this course stack. One obvious requirement is copyright law, which restricts the open posting of some course content, be it text or media. One particular advantage is maintaining the privacy of discussions of potentially controversial or embarrassing topics. Perhaps less obvious in the privacy arena is maintaining the long-term privacy of even non-controversial topics — former students may find that old, non-controversial but still-public blog posts are not in keeping with their current views or those of their employers.
The silo fits less well in the overall concept of an ongoing personal educational process, where course content, student submissions, and other materials may be (should be?) relevant to one’s growth during a four-year evolution. A seminal paper in the silo for Course I is likely to retain relevance in Course II, and may even have important meaning in unrelated Course B. Yet it is stuck in the Course I silo.
So this course silo which is so convenient in many ways is in other ways antithetical to what we want our students to become; life long learners. What are the alternatives? Open courses in Moodle? Moodle courses need not be restricted to a semester’s length. Other open systems? An environment which is open at least to the Colgate academic community (without some copyright-restricted materials, of course) might be used to facilitate this more open learning. But even these tools can’t make students want to participate, and then actually participate, in this more broad, developing learning process.
More reading on the topic…
…dan wheeler
