Here’s Wii-tard.net specialist Johnny Lee doing things amazing things with various Wii parts.

Designs for the Campus Green Initiative web site have been created. At this time, all members of the committee may vote on the design they like best and to offer feedback. Colors and fonts were chosen give an earthy, natural feel. Photography of the campus can be taken and incorporated into the designs, as well as standard stock photography. Content section ideas include: What You Can Do (ways for people to get involved), Projects Across Campus, Your Ideas (allow people to submit their own ideas), Did You Know (a page for environmental facts, campus statistics, and the like), and News and Events.

Constructive feedback is welcome. If you have suggestions on other information you would like to see on layouts or pages, please post them in the comments. To see a large-scale version of the layout, click on the links below. Each design will open in a new window. To vote for your favorite design you must first register for a TechTips account and then click on the button next to the thumbnail design and click ‘Vote’. You may vote only once, and the poll will close on December 21st.

Dark Green

Internal Page Layout

Nature

Internal Page Layout

Retro Happiness

Internal Page Layout

Campus Green Initiative Design Choices

• Dark Green

  

  (0%, 0 Votes)
• Nature

  

  (0%, 0 Votes)
• Retro Happiness

  

  (100%, 6 Votes)

Total Voters: 6

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It’s getting close to the end of semester and many of you are wrapping up your Blackboard course sites, getting ready to copy content over to new courses for the Spring and sending final grades to the Registrar. I’d like to draw your attention to the Closing out a Course section in the Faculty FAQs. There are a couple of steps that I highly recommend you do to ensure the safety of your course. At the end of the semester be sure to export and archive your course. Exporting a course site is just like saving a copy of your course, complete with all its content. Save it on to a CD or a flashdrive. Archiving a course site will save the course complete with student records (follow the instructions for exporting a course, simply selecting Archive from within the Export/Archive Manager). I also recommend downloading a copy of your gradebook. As a sidenote, downloading your gradebook from Blackboard should be done throughout the semester. While we all hope that technology never fails it is unrealistic to depend on it. When you download the gradebook from Blackboard it neatly packages it into an Excel spreadsheet. Save this onto your shared drive, hard drive or a flashdrive. And finally you can now submit final grades directly from Blackboard to the Registrar. Follow the instructions on the Faculty FAQ pages and leave one more tree standing this Christmas.

Here’s the second part of yesterday’s NPR report on online courses. This segment focuses more on the technology demand from students and the changes we are seeing in the student population, with regards to how they want and expect to obtain information. Interestingly the report ends with a comment on M-learning or mobile-learning; learning where lectures and podcasts and course information, etc are dumped/delivered to a user’s mobile phone. Japan and some universities in England have been doing this for a while now.

Illinois School Looks to Tech Tools to Teach         Audio link

If you think teaching an online or web-based course means you’re in for an easy semester, think again! Online classes require almost twice as much preparation time as an on-ground class. Here’s part 1 of 2 of an interesting report from NPR on Online Courses in Higher Education:

Online Courses Catch On in U.S. Colleges         Audio link

Are you an instructor using the gradebook in Blackboard? Did you know that there is a new feature that allows you to submit final grades directly from Blackboard to the Registrar? No more hastily completing that yellow form and then driving into work to make sure you turn it in before the deadline; now you can submit grades from the comfort of you own home! The new feature can be found in the Control Panel of your course sites and is labelled as Submit Final Grades, located under the Course Tools module area. For step by step instructions on how to actually use this feature please go to the Faculty FAQ / The Gradebook / Submitting Final Grades to the Registrar. And remember, final grades are due by 5 pm on Monday 17th December.

Course sites for Spring 2008 are due to be created in Blackboard next week. If you want any course combining (i.e. you teach multiple sections or mutliple courses and want them combined into a single course site) please complete the Combine Course Site request form on the Blackboard website.

From Wikipedia:

“Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. The term became popular following the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.[1][2] Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the internet. According to Tim O’Reilly, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”[3]

Technology expert Tim Berners-Lee has questioned whether one can use the term in a meaningful way, since many of the technology components of “Web 2.0″ have existed since the early days of the Web.”

It’s almost here. Come join Mélaine and I next Wednesday at high noon for our first ever TechClub - Brown Bag Session. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP as seats are limited. We will be meeting in JPII 107.

See you there!

This issue occurs when a user uploads a file to the Assignment Manager or the Discussion Board or Digital Dropbox that includes special characters (i.e., ‘#’, ‘+’,’-'e symbols) as part of the filename. For example, if the filename is Paper#1.doc, the instructor may receive the 404 error and be unable to download the document from the gradebook or the Dropbox. Users should not include special characters in the filenames of documents they are uploading to Blackboard through the Assignment Manager, Digital Drop Box or as attachments to the Discussion Board.
Blackboard recommends the following general guidelines for filenames: Characters a-z (upper or lower case), 0-9, period ‘.’ and underscore ‘_’ are acceptable filenames. All spaces will be converted to underscores in the name of the uploaded file.