Playing with Technology

What SMART boards should be

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 12:31:07 +0000

This is an amazing video of a multi-touch surface that blows away the current SMART boards I have seen. It is available now and boy would I like to get one to experiment with.

Download This Video from You Tube | View This Video on You Tube

iTunes U goes public

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 31 May 2007 13:55:02 +0000

On Tuesday Apple Computer added an iTunes U area to it’s iTunes store. This should be a very exciting thing for our faculty as it provides them with access to a myriad of educational podcasts and example of what they themselves could be doing with a little help fromInstructional Technology. Wooster has been accepted in iTunes U but hasn’t returned a signed agreement. Why? First there is a requirement in the contract to maintain a certain level of content on your iTunes U account and second to meet this requirement would require that we add significantly to the Instructional Technology staff. It is a chicken and egg type of problem. Anyway, I plan to let faculty know about this new resource and will do everything I can to help them produce similar types of material.

Blogging class

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:37:13 +0000

Talking about creating a blog.

One thing to do is include an image. To do this you go to upload and browse for the image. Once it is uploaded click to use thumbnail and link to image and then drag to post.

Another place for Creative Commons sounds

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 01:44:53 +0000

Freesounds is another place to get sounds that can be used in student projects.

Blog session

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:19:17 +0000

I’m in Professor Holt’s FYS right now. We are talking about how to interact with the blog software. Image uploading is one of the things they need to know how to do.

Digital artifacts

Jon Breitenbucher — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:39:45 +0000

Looking for music, sounds, moving images, or texts that you can use in your projects? You need to check the Internet Archive. The Archive has a large collection of images, sounds, music, and texts that can be used in your projects.

ProfCast

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 01:29:32 +0000

On Tuesday, Feb. 21 we had our first use of ProfCast. It was a great success. Amy Jo Stavnezer agreed to test the application during her Faculty at Large address. I was there a little ahead of time to hook the laptop up and make sure Amy Jo got started OK. There were no issues at all.

ProfCast allows one to capture the slides (it supports Keynote and PowerPoint) and audio of a presentation and keeps them in sync. To use the application requires OS X 10.4 and either presentation application. The only difference for the presenter is to start their presentation and then start ProfCast. When they are ready to present they press the Record button on ProfCast and the presentation starts and progresses like normal. At the end of the presentation ProfCast comes up and asks you to Publish the presentation as a Podcast. We canceled that and saved the session as an enhanced Podcast. This created an m4b file which was uploaded to the server.

If you view the video, you’ll notice the default size is a little small. Visitors can download the file and open it in QuickTime Player and choose to view it at Double size for a clearer picture. It is a little unclear as to what purpose we might use ProfCast in the classroom, but we will probably experiment with it for the remaining Faculty at Large events.

Organizing information

Jon Breitenbucher — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 05:55:49 +0000

Dr. Havholm has asked me to give some pointers to his Digital Aesthetics class on managing RSS feeds to keep up with the blogs and stay sane. There are a few things I plan on talking about:

Mozilla Thunderbird
RSSOwl cross-platform RSS reader
Google Reader requires a Google account
Firefox extension Feedview will be in Firefox 2.0
Safari

e-portfolios

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 02:26:23 +0000

Who are electronic portfolios for? I was thinking through the e-portfolio I’ve designed for the Education department and thiniking about how I could improve it. Now a student is required to go through and change information on each page (about 30 of them) to personalize the e-portfolio. If they need to change the navigation bar they need to edit all the pages. basically anything other than adding content to a page requires major work. There are ways to fix this by using php includes or SSI, but then the students lose the ability to burn their site to a disk and browse it from a computer as if it were on a web server.

Digital Aesthetic class

Jon Breitenbucher — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:15:23 +0000

Today I showed Peter Havholm’s class how to create a blog on our blog server. I also showed them the basics of posting and maintaining their blogs. It seemed to go pretty well. A number of students already have blogs so I wonder if they should ask Peter to let them use their existing blogs rather than create a new one. We’ll see what happens. There has already been one issue with the title of a blog (which has been changed) and I think it is something to bring up at the next policy meeting (really need a name for this).

Network forensics

Jon Breitenbucher — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 16:15:19 +0000

On Thursay (12/8) I made a guest appearance in Dr. Paul Edmiston’s Forensics class. Prof. Edmiston wanted to demonstrate to his class some of the tools used by the FBI and CIA to catch cyber criminals. To that end I demonstrated the Ethereal packet sniffer to the class. I made clear that what I was doing would be against the College’s acceptable use policy and would get them in serious trouble. We captured some traffic in the chemistry building and tried to capture some e-mails from Prof. Edmiston. Due to network configuration we were unable to capture any of Prof. Edmiston’s e-mails. This was just as well as he really didn’t want to have to change his password.

The take home message was that it is relatively easy to capture internet traffic and identify personal information. It seemed to make a number of the students take note and several asked what they could do to protect themselves. All-in-all it was a great experience for everyone.

What is Open-Source Software?

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 02:50:23 +0000

Dr. Hornsten has asked me to talk about open-source software with you today. So let’s get started.

What do we mean by open-source?
Can you name two open-source software programs that you use on a daily basis?
Have you ever thought about what qualifies a program for open-source status?
- Open Source Definition
Does open-source mean free?
- It’s all about the license
  - Can you name some open-source licenses?
    - Some licenses on Wikipedia and OSI.
  - What in the heck is copyleft?
Do you read the EULA? What is an EULA?
Can you patent open-source software?
- Patent Commons.
What is community source?

On a different note. What about mathematical algorithms, can they be patented?

The background. In the early 1970s several researchers were working on a way to send and receive messages electronically in a secure manner. The idea that developed was public key cryptography and was initially developed by Diffie, Hellman, and Merkel, but they couldn’t find an algorithm to make it work. Enter Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman.

The algorithm idea. It is really very simple and everyone should be able to understand the basics of how it works. Find two prime numbers p and q (Can anyone tell me what this means?) and multiply them together and call the answer n. Now find a number less than n and relatively prime (Can someone tell me what this means?) to (p-1)*(q-1) and call this number e. Now break the message into numbers Mi that are less than n and compute Mi^e mod n (What does mod mean?). This is the encrypted message. Through the magic of number theory we know that there is a number d so that (Mi^e)^d mod n will be Mi.

The patent. In 1981, after several key Federal Circuit Court decisions lead to the Freeman/Walter/Abele test for patentability and a US Supreme court decision Diamond v. Diehr, patent #4405829 “Cryptographic communications system and method” was issued for the RSA algorithm. These decisions are still reshaping the face of patent law. It is an interesting exercise to read the decisions and try to understand exactly how one can patent an algorithm. What do you think?

Are faculty scared of technology?

Jon Breitenbucher — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:10:54 +0000

In an article published today in The Guardian and highlighted in the The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog, David Buckingham from the Institute of Education says, “Schools are becoming ‘technically irrelevant’ because pupils know more about computers than their teachers.” Is Prof Buckingham correct? Wooster has a large number of faculty using technology in their classes and has a history of innovation in the use of technology. There are certainly those among the faculty that use technology sparingly, but everyone has a style they are comfortable with and I don’t think pushing faculty to use technology will lead anywhere. Rather, show them what is possible and let them play with the technology so they can make an informed decision.

Prof Buckingham states that research shows that faculty don’t want to make mistakes with technology in front of students. This is an area where Instructional Technologists can make a difference. Providing adaquate training on how to use the technology available in the classroom is one of our responsibilities, and is a relatively painless way to enable faculty to feel more confident about their technological ability.

While Prof Buckingham does not seem to be talking about College and University faculty, I think there are some things that one can learn from his article and the supporting research.

Personal Response Systems (clickers)

Jon Breitenbucher — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 04:56:09 +0000

On Friday 10/21, I held a demonstration of the PRS system from eInstruction that we have until the end of November. PRSs are a way to poll students in class and display the results imediately. Usually the instructor is posing a question and having the students click to enter their answers. We will be getting another loaner system from GTCO CalComp that will be available for use in November. If you would like to experiment with one of the systems, contact Dr. Janet Russell.

Course management

Jon Breitenbucher — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 00:20:25 +0000

The other thing I am working on is Course management. Moodle and Sakai are chugging along. Students don’t seem to like Sakai very much. It has also been a little frustrating for me.