DyKnow has recently released a PowerPoint plugin, available as an update, v.5.2.74. The PowerPoint plug-in that adds functionality and increases integration with Microsoft PowerPoint.
Key features include:
Get ready for the upcoming CTC workshop series entitled Creating Your Professional Social Network Presence November 16th - 19th. This series is in response to the numerous questions and suggestions we have been receiving about creating social professional networks. The series is divided into 4 sessions:
Facebook Profiles vs. Fan Pages: Separate your public network from your personal network Learn the differences between a private Facebook profile and a public Fan Page. We will discuss the various communication methods for both options and talk about which is the best choice for sharing information with groups and individuals. This workshop will focus on how to create a Fan Page from your personal profile and how to add productivity applications to communicate with your Facebook Fans. Monday, November 16th 10:00 am - 11:30 am CTC Classroom REGISTER NOWWednesday, November 18th 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm ITV Classroom REGISTER NOW
Twitter: What do so many people have to say?
This workshop will focus on the ins and outs of using Twitter. During this session we will cover how to use the popular social networking tool and why one would even want to use it. Learn how to follow topics that are of interest to you and how to develop a following of your own.
Monday, November 16th 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm CTC Classroom REGISTER NOW
Wednesday, November 18th 10:00 am - 11:30 pm CTC Classroom REGISTER NOW
Moveable Type: How your blog sets your online presence apart from the rest
Moveable Type is a blogging tool available to faculty and staff at SHU. During this session we will discuss how to request a moveable Type account, how to add and edit entries, and how to add media such as images, video and audio.
Tuesday, November 17th 10:00 am - 11:30 am CTC Classroom REGISTER NOW
Thursday, November 19th 10:00 am - 11:30 am ITV Classroom REGISTER NOW
Mash It Up! Make Facebook, Twitter and Moveable Type work together for you
With so many social networks how do you make time to use them all? Well, you don't have to! Attend this session to find out how to tie Facebook, Twitter and Moveable Type together and make it easier to manage them all at once. During this session we will share applications that mash your online presence together.
Tuesday, November 17th 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm CTC Classroom REGISTER NOW
Thursday, November 19th 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm ITV Classroom REGISTER NOW
We look forward to seeing you there. Questions? Contact Melissa McDowell at Ext. 6173 or melissa.mcdowell@shu.edu
On October 15th and 16th, the Teaching, Learning and Technology Center offered its first Online Teaching Boot Camp. This event focused on providing information and resources to faculty who are either interested in, currently developing, or teaching online courses. The sessions offered during Online Teaching Boot Camp were developed based on feedback from faculty during previous online course development projects.
For attending the entire day and a half workshop, Professor Reed Easton and Professor Susan O'Sullivan-Gavin from the Stillman School of Business were awarded a Certificate of Recognition for being our Online Teaching Innovators. When asked what he thought of Online Teaching Boot Camp, Professor Easton said
"I found the Online Teaching Boot Camp to be extremely informative and important to both my understanding of Blackboard Version 9 as well as the mechanics that make up a quality online course. I created the first online courses to be offered at the School of Business and have been involved in online education since 2002. I would strongly suggest that all faculty interested in continual improvement take advantage of this opportunity."
The TLT Center crogratulates Professor Reed Easton and Professor Susan O'Sullivan for their accomplishments and dedication to developing and teaching quality online courses and thanks all of the attendees for their participation and making the first Online Teaching Boot Camp a success!
Faculty: Dongdong Chen, Ph.D
Department: Asian Studies
Project: Engaging the Learning of Chinese Language and Culture in Second Life
This semester Dr. Chen has embarked on incorporating the virtual world Second Life into two sections of Introductory Chinese I (CHIN 1102). Dr. Chen is using the Second Life School on Chinese Island, created by the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University.
The following abstract describes Prof. Chen's virtual world project:
Along with face-to-face instruction, students will engage with their peers in the virtual world Second Life to learn about and practice the Chinese language and culture. 30 Students in this course have created virtual representations of themselves in the form of avatars and will navigate their way through the Second Life Chinese School, built by the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University. Using the resources provided by the Second Life Chinese School, 8 learning tasks were designed to accompany the teaching throughout the semester. Students are required to complete these 8 tasks individually and collectively. By exploring the learning activities, some of which are built into the school, students will acquire basic concepts and elements of Chinese cultures. They will also engage in conversation using the voice chat feature of Second Life through a number of assignments outlined in the course syllabus. The voice chat will be recorded and submitted to the professor for a grade. In this presentation we will discuss the Chinese virtual learning spaces within Second Life, the logistics of creating student accounts, the learning tasks, and students learning experience of Chinese within this virtual space.
Prof. Chen will be presenting this project at the end of this month at Yale University for the Northest Association for Language Learning Technology (NEALLT) and the New England Regional Association for Language Learning conference.
Phone support is now available for the SHU Mobility Pilot Program!
If you are participating in the Seton Hall University Mobility Pilot Program and have a question about your device, support is now available by calling 973.275.2222 and then selecting option 4.
On October 6, 2009 representatives from NMC's virtual world building team gave a tour of a project that they created for the University of Washington's Psychology department. The goal of this project was to recreate a real-life experiment space using a virtual environment. The real-life experiment seeks to evaluate people's responses to office and classroom environments that are decorated in a stereotypical computer "geek" way (e.g. Star Trek posters) versus more neutrally decorated rooms. The research team is specifically looking at how long people spend and interact with objects in a room and if there are any gender differences.
The tour began with an explanation of how the subjects of the experiment were trained in how to navigate through the Second Life environment. A maze was created that tested a user's ability to navigate through the space, once a user was able to successfully complete the maze three times they were thought to have mastered the necessary skills needed to continue with the study. The hosts of the tour then explained how objects were quickly rezzed so that rooms can be quickly changed into tech-geek or genre neutral. They made an important point of noting that Second Life is not a photo-realistic environment and that the goal of this project was to make the environment as realistic as possible in the placement of items that were identical to the real-life conditions but not to reach the same level of graphic realism.
When subjects enter the experiment rooms in Second Life using their avatars a sensor is used to detect what direction they were facing, this information is then emailed to a specific account for data collection.
Is Second Life even suitable for this kind of research? The research team found that results from the Second Life experiment were very similar to real-life results. What does this mean for researchers? Using a virtual world such as Second Life allows researchers to conserve resources in both finding and building out real-life spaces which costs money and time.
For more information visits the description of this build available on the NMC web site at: http://sl.nmc.org/2009/10/06/october-vwex/
An article on this study can be accessed at: http://scicom.ucsc.edu/SciNotes/0901/pages/geeks/geeks.html
Over the past couple years we have been supporting faculty in their use of digital story assignments to promote deep learning and reflection for students. Many of these efforts have been in undergraduate courses in the College of Arts and Sciences. On October 15th, Jane Leng, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences University of Surrey, will be hosting a seminar on the use of digital stories for nursing students.
The seminar presents the results of a Fellowship project which was stimulated by a concern that some student nurses underestimate the learning that takes place in practice and have limited awareness of their own tacit knowledge. Drawing on the work of Michael Eraut into how professionals learn through work, I investigated the power of stories to capture and articulate deep professional learning and the added value there may be in using emerging technologies to assist story telling. A group of final year undergraduate student nurses focussed on an experience from practice which had been important in their professional development and created a digital story to explain what they had learnt. The students' own evaluation of both the process and outcome of this work has been highly positive. Clinical educators and university teachers also recognised the stories as both inspiring and instructional. It is now intended that the stories be used as learning objects for both pre registration students and those learning to be mentors of students in practice. The lessons learnt from this project can inform the use of digital stories in other professional training contexts.
If you are interested in attending the seminar from a distance visit this link: http://learningtobeprofessional.pbworks.com/Jane-Leng
DyKnow has recently released an update to their v5.2 release (v.5.2.74), which includes a PowerPoint 2007 Add-in. Click Here to download the latest release of the DyKnow software.
An overview of the DyKnow PowerPoint 2007 add-in is available by clicking here.
The PowerPoint 2007 Add-in includes the following enhancements:
Click here for a self-paced, interactive training modules that teach how to use DyKnow's PowerPoint Integration feature.
On October the 8th, the TLT Center presented RSS & Google Alerts as a Virtual Research Assistant. Included below are links to the presentation and to a document regarding RSS generated by Educause
RSS Google Alerts Presentation
Educause Learning Initiative: 7 things you should know about... RSS (April 2007)
RSS (really simple syndication) allows individuals to 'subscribe' to a web page (typically news outlets, journals, and blog sites), and have any new content delivered to you! This session will focus on setting up an RSS Reader (used to collect 'RSS feeds'), locating sources of information, and subscribing to RSS feeds. We will also discuss how RSS feeds can be utilized for instructional purposes. This session will also cover Google Alert - what it is, how to create an alert, and how to manage alerts.
Facebook just announced that they have added Latin to the list of over 70 supported languages. For educators this could be a creative way of bridging the gap between teaching students a language that may seem distant from their everyday lives. Outside of the classroom, this is also interesting for someone interested in Latin and would like to be immersed in an environment that can facilitate the practice of this language.
Elizabeth Linder, Facebook representive, states:
To students of Latin, the availability of the language on Facebook may be just what's needed to narrow the distance between themselves and the venerable language. After all, the experience of studying Latin can frequently seem somewhat far and away. Even the readings prescribed by Latin teachers have an air of detachment about them: Cicero and Demosthenes, Caesar and Virgil. While students of "living languages" practice on subtitled films and in conversation groups, on vacations and with exchange students, Latin scholars soak in rare living breaths of their studied language, satisfying themselves with the occasional legal phrase, nursery plant, benediction or school motto. Recognizing verb stems and identifying vocabulary roots just somehow aren't quite the same as ordering off a menu or asking for directions.
Considering the amount of time people spend in facebook this could provide a rich practice environment for language learning.
As we move into the month of October, most of the SHU community has now had MS Outlook for about 6 months or so. Some of you may have begun receiving the message that you are approaching the space quota for your file and that you need to take action. Please take that warning seriously, because if you ignore it and exceed your limit, you will not be able to send or receive any e-mail until the condition is cleared up.
Each Seton Hall user is allotted 500mb of space in their e-mail file. This space can get eaten up quickly if you generally receive a lot of mail and just leave it in the file. There are three things you can do right now to reduce the overall size of your e-mail file and keep you from approaching your limit.
First, delete any message you do not need to hold onto. Look through your Inbox, all of your folders and especially look at the Sent folder. I'm sure there are plenty of documents in there that you don't need anymore.
Second, when you delete an item, it goes to the Deleted Items folder and stays there until you empty it. Please, get in the habit of clearing out the Deleted Items folder once a week by clicking on Tools - Empty Deleted Items folder and click Yes to confirm.
Third, when a message arrives with a file or files attached, that message's size is probably quite large and eating up your e-mail file space. A good thing to do is open the message by double-clicking it, then double-click the attachment and save it to a drive of your choice. Then right-click the attachment and Remove it from the message. You may still save the message if you'd like, but its size has been substantially reduced by removing the attachment.
You should then think about setting up archiving as a way of keeping the file under control. To get to the settings in Outlook, select Tools - Options - click the Other tab - Auto Archive. The dialog box that appears enables you to set up archiving to your own requirements.
The first field asks how often to run the archive. If you are nearing the file space allotment, I would suggest running the archive every day. In the middle of the box you would designate how old an item has to be to be archived. You can select a certain number of months, weeks or days. You have to determine what setting you are comfortable with. The archived items are stored in a personal folder under your Documents folder and it will display in your Outlook navigation pane, so you can quickly access it if need be.
I hope these tips will help and I hope everyone realizes that we all have to work at keeping our e-mail files under control. If you need help or have questions concerning your e-mail/archiving, etc., please contact me at x2161 or at otskeybi@shu.edu.
