ITS Coffee Break

The big news that network passwords will no longer expire leads off the ITS Coffee Break this week. Hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss what this means for faculty, staff and students at Lafayette and what you can do to make your password more secure. In other ITS news, the online survey application WebSurveyor has changed its name to Vovici. The service has a new look, but the surveys hosted through it remain the same. In Tech News, they discuss the launch of EduSpaces, a higher education social networking site and the announcement that EMI and Apple have penned a deal to sell DRM-less music in the iTunes Music Store. Finally in Help News, Courtney offers a quick walkthrough of how to setup rules within Webmail to better manage your e-mail.

News about the extension of the Leopard Shorts deadline and an announcement about Podcamp Philly at Drexel University lead off the March 23 edition of the ITS Coffee Break. In Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss the ed-cast directory of education podcasts, uncover wireless networks with the Mac OS X wifi detector iStumbler and review the latest iteration of Yahoo Widgets. Finally in Help News Courtney announces two upcoming brown bag lunches focusing on GIS and Moodle.

Congress voted to move Daylight Saving Time up by two weeks and in this week's Coffee Break host Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss the implications that has for your computers. In Tech News they discuss Google's opening of Gmail to the general public, assess the tech-savvy of various presidential candidates at TechPresident.com and speculate on Middlebury College's decision to ban Wikipedia as an academic source. In Help News, Courtney reviews how to connect a Nintendo Wii to the campus network and gives a rundown of upcoming workshops.

Prizes for the upcoming Leopard Shorts Digital Media Competition lead off the ITS Coffee Break this week, followed by an explaination of why you may be having trouble sending message to Yahoo accounts from your Lafayette e-mail address. In Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss an Academic Commons article about podcasting in education by Laura Blankenship, Bryn Mawr College instructional technologist. Rounding out the podcast is a rundown of the late February multimedia workshops being offered by ITS.

News of the launch of Lafayette's Moodle pilot program and the Leopard Shorts Digital Media Competition lead off the ITS Coffee Break this week. Tech news finds Blackboard pledging not to sue open source course management systems and those who use them for infringing on its patents, while Apple Inc. and the Beatles' Apple Corp. resolve their long running trademark dispute. Finally, Help News reviews the new Moodle, iTunes U and Word documentation that's been posted to the ITS web site, previews upcoming workshops, and offers a quick tip on working with the iTunes Music Store's FairPlay authorization system.

Hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley lead off the podcast with news about network drive changes for those using Macs. In Tech News they update listeners on the fate of the Deleting Online Predators Act, discuss UCLA's adoption of Moodle as their campus course management system, speculate about Apple's new DashCode tool for creating Dashboard widgets, and ponder a web site that delivered one new Apple bug a month for each day in January.

The ITS Coffee Break helps faculty and staff at Lafayette keep their New Year's resolutions to clean up their web sites and learn about multimedia editing with news of the upcoming Web Design Day and Audio & Video Project Planning workshops. In Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley give a roundup of education technology blogs, while in Help News they discuss the rest of ITS's January term workshop offerings.

News about iTunes U tops the ITS Coffee Break this week as Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss Lafayette's Spring 2007 pilot program for Apple's new education-centric service. In Tech News they focus on LibWork, a search engine dedicated to searching over 1000 librarian-related RSS feeds, while in Help News they look at ways that faculty can use the social bookmarking web site Del.icio.us and RSS to share web sites and online articles with students in their classes.

Learning management systems take center stage as Courtney Bentley, Ken Newquist and special guest Carrie Havranek (Visiting Part-time Instructor in English) talk about augmenting classes with online material in Blackboard, Moodle and Soapbox. They also discuss recent developments in the popular online world Second Life and review the new web site search documentation recently added to the ITS web site.

Sophomore Justin Sayde, RA of the Dry Surfers Organization, guest hosts the 10/30 edition of the ITS Coffee Break with Ken Newquist. The podcast begins with a discussion of possible blogging alternatives to Soapbox and an update on the network redesign. Tech News features a conversation about the just released Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 web browsers, news about a massively multiplayer game set in the Shakespearean timeframe, and thoughts on the upcoming release of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii game systems.