podcast
Spam is on the menu as Ken and Courtney talk about the new tougher setting available in Lafayette's Proofpoint anti-spam service and then look at the growing phenomenon of "spam blogs". There's also more details about Apple and Dell's notebook computer battery recalls, a discussion of Google's new Image Labeler game, news about the Windows Media Player 11 Beta's ability to stream audio and video to Xbox 360s, and information about the early fall ITS workshop schedule.
There's actual coffee with this edition's Coffee Break as Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley talk about their caffeine fix from the newly-relocated Cosmic Cup. In ITS news, they have an announcement about the WW2 Community Web Server Rebuild Project, and in Tech News they discuss Apple's laptop battery recall and Penn State's new podcast project. Finally, in Help News, they talk about why students may still want an All-LAN cable when wireless is available and announce the Consulting Center's Fall Semester hours.
In this edition of the ITS Coffee Break, Ken Newquist and Courtney Bently take a look at the recently re-opened beta site for Google's web-based word processor Writely, talk about updates to Safari Tech Books Online, offer tips for working with Blackboard, and ask for volunteers to help test the ITS web site.
Blackboard -- both the creation of courses for the fall, and a new patent lawsuit that the company field against a competitor -- dominates the ITS Coffee Break's August 14 edition. The show also has ITS news about the next scheduled network outage and September's big LVIAC Copyright Workshop featuring Kenneth D. Crews. In tech news Ken and Courtney discuss the implications of the Blackboard lawsuit, the social video web site YouTube, the recall of 4.1 million laptop batteries by Dell, and the release of the Firefox 2.0 Beta.
Ken and Courtney give a rundown of changes to Novell Native File Access on the Mac and the upcoming ITS scheduled outage, and then talk about the new "Deleting Online Predators Act" approved by the House of Representatives. They also give a report on the recent "LVAIC Technology in the Classroom" presentation held at Cedar Crest College, and offer their thoughts on some of technologies demoed, including using green screens for instructional video, Unreal Tournament for teaching, and wireless "clickers" for classroom participation.
The ITS Coffee Break crew takes a look at the new Parallels virtualization software that allows you to easily run Windows, Linux and other operating system under Mac OS X. Courtney and Ken then launch into a discussion of video blogs, explaining what they are, offering a few technology/web culture/geek centric examples, and speculate on possible roles for vlogs in academia.
The podcast begins with a recap of last week's email server problems, and then announces the creation of the new ITS Network Redsign blog on Soapbox. Tech news focuses on the trend of corporations attempting to make their own social networking web sites to cash in on the success of MySpace ... with less than stellar results. Finally, Help Topics looks at upcoming workshops, including one that focuses on "MySpace and Facebook" and another that looks at what learning objects are available for use by faculty.
The July 17 Coffee Break begins with reminders about the upcoming network outage and changing your network password, and then delves into conversations about how wikis can be used in collaborative projects and trends in podcast listenership. News of upcoming workshops rounds out the podcast.
The July network outage tops Lafayette news in the July 10 edition of the ITS Coffee Break, while Tech News looks at "Understanding Virtual Worlds" and "Social Software and Learning. Finally, the Help segment offers tips for working with lengthy Microsoft Word documents, notes new versions of Adobe, Macromedia and Apple software, and discusses the use of commenting on ITS help pages.
This week the ITS Coffee Break looks at the upcoming LVAIC Technology in the Classroom Symposium and discusses Trinity University's course web site entitled "Games for the Web: Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer On-line Games".