technology

Gateways

• Netvibes: A double-sided portal that allows for public and private views, as well as friending associates.
• iGoogle: A personal page with no external web presence. Content can be organized into tabs, Google App integration is a plus.
• Mahalo: A human edited search engine, with the goal of having 10,000 handcrafted result pages for the most popular topics. Firefox toolbar allows users to create user and topic pages.
• Shyftr: RSS reader that allows users to share and comment on each other's feed items.

Random Cool App

• PicLens: Image browser plugin for Firefox

Getting Started

• Everyone starts at Help Island, which has a handful of tutorials explaining how to interact with the world. Once you've learned the basics, you can move to the mainland, or elsewhere.
• Moving around is straightforward, using the directional keys. Getting from region to region can be done in one of two ways:
  • Do a global search, based on keyword.
  • Use the Map tool to enter a region, and then coordinates.

I'll be at DrupalCon Boston from March 3 through March 6, which I'm attending for the day job. While I'm keeping an eye out for stuff related to higher education, most of the sessions deal with developing Drupal for any environment, be it a campus blogging platform or a science fiction webzine. Here's what I've got lined up so far.

Now that the semester is underway and Moodle is ticking along at version 1.8.4, we've started turning our attention to Moodle 1.9, which is presently at Beta 4 and will hopefully be ready for release by May. The Moodle core team (at http://www.moodle.org) is making a concerted effort to knock out bugs and fix functionality issues that showed up during the sometimes-bumpy 1.7/1.8 versions, and one of the big things (at least for us) that they're fixing is how to upload resources. This tracker report, while technical, explains what they're doing.

In a nutshell, they're the new "Edit Resources" page (which is used to upload files, link to web pages, etc.) will now have the ability to "post without previewing". This is something our faculty have wanted for a while; as is, Moodle forces you to preview *everything*, which is a real pain when you're uploading a Power Point presentation, since it forces you to "preview" that presentation by downloading it again.

Chris Ruebeck, Assistant Professor of Economics & Business, will be teaching a 100-student Economics 101 course this spring. To help keep his students even more engaged, Chris will be distributing to each student a hand-held audience response device that each student will use throughout the semester. These devices, often referred to as "clickers," will allow Chris to quickly poll his class on course content, take attendance, and potentially collect quiz responses almost instantly.