Tonight at midnight Fordham’s Blackboard Learning Management System will be upgraded to version 8.
What does this mean?
First of all, let me reassure you that everything you have previously uploaded to Blackboard will still be there on Monday morning! You may continue using Blackboard this afternoon and this evening, however, any work that you do not save before the 12am deadline will lost.
New features and Enhancements fall into the following catagories:
Grade Center
Self and Peer Assessment Building Block
Safe Assign
Blackboard Content System Enhancements
Scholar Building Block for Basic
Most people can read faster than people talk, so PowerPoint slides that are full of bullets and text distract from what the presenter has to say. Reading the text off the slides is also a sure-fire way to lose the attention of your audience. These are just some of the things to watch out for when putting together a presentation.
What about the things you should do?
That’s a good question! There are many ways to make presentations more engaging. Take a look at some of the ideas on ways to avoid the pitfalls of using PowerPoint and create more stimulating presentations.
Martin Weller from the Open University has posted his very interesting introduction to the theory and methodology behind The Open University’s new Social:Learn program, which will be an attempt to leverage web 2.0 ideas and methodologies–as well as web 2.0 tools–for learning. The talk is really centered around this question: “How can you get that sort of wiki, open source enthusiasm that people have for creating and sharing content into higher education, while still maintaing those values we hold to in higher education?”
ITAC at Rose Hill, including all Media Services and the Faculty Technology Center moved to the new media suite during the last week of May. Our new location is:
Keating, Room B-27
Lincoln Center offices and facilities remain in LL 416 and LL 418.
There are now real time tutoring available form India, which makes studying at 3 AM easier. Apparently the student I have spoken with has said that if the price is right, this type of assitance, particularly for the sciences, would be useful. Of course, it would be useful for grammer as well.
When Napster became an uncontrollable force, CIMS installed a network throttle to give priority to certain types of network traffic. This prevents Napster files from taking over the network and bringing it to a stop.
Kansas University suffers from theft, not unlike any University. We here at Fordham have similar problems with missing video projectors being a special target, which explanins why more and more of them are locked in cages suspended from the ceiling.
There is a great step by step web site on the basics of podcasting including recording your phone conversations. There is one caveat, the how to comes off of a political web site. Just skip the politics.
