There’s still time to sign up! Free design workshop series starting next Tuesday at 7pm in NJ. All skill sets welcome http://is.gd/4cB4T

Testing Ping.fm please ignore.

Hello, all,

Congratulations on your successful Grant Proposals for the DLAC Grants! I am making contact here to remind you that you have help available to you in meeting the needs and goals of your proposals. For the rest of you, thank you for your parts in the project.

I’ve been tasked with coordinating technology support for the grants, and I’m beginning to do that here, today. I am becoming more familiar with each of your proposals as time passes, and have met with several of you already in regards to your projects.

We have 4 exciting new supported technology services forthcoming, each of which should be available for your use within a month. These are:

• Wimba (Blackboard conferencing addon)
• iTunesU (media and podcasting for teaching and learning)
• ShareStream (streaming media server with TEACH act compliance built in)
• MoodleRooms (A learning management system for the Web 2.0 set)

As they come online, I will let you know about their availability through this list.

I also intend to use a blog in order to gather ideas, share findings, and promote communication. That blog is available at

http://viewtorial.wordpress.com

I’m excited about our prospects, and I look forward to helping each of you to exceed your goals. Please don’t hesitate to reach out and make contact if you have questions, suggestions, or concerns.

John LeMasney
Manager of technology Training at Rider University

Google Presentation allows you to share and publish your slide
presentation files. This is a great tool for online collaboration,
learning, and presenting. Google Presentation is totally free; all you
need is just a Google Account to login.

In this tutorial, we are going to look at how to share you presentation
with others and how to publish your presentation online so that anyone
can have the opportunity to get access to your presentation.

1.      Let’s first go to www.google.com <http://www.google.com/>; you
can see a tool bar above the big “Google” logo; click on “more” and go
to “Documents”

2.      You will need to use your Google Account to sign in. Again, if
you don’t have a Google Account, simply click on “Get Started”; follow
the instructions and you will get a new Google Account.

3.      To share your presentation file, you will need to own the
presentation file (be the creator).

4.      First, select and enter the presentation file you wish to share;
once you are in the editing mode, click on the “Share” tab, which is
near the “Save” button.

5.      Now you are in the share tab, you can choose to invite others as
collaborators or as viewers. Collaborators can edit your presentation
file while viewers can not.

6.      Now you will need to enter the email address of the people you
want to share with; when you are done, click the “Invite” button.

7.      A window will pop up to let you composite an email reminder to
those you want to share your file with; after you are done, click on
“Send” button.

8.      You will notice that the numbers of Collaborators and Viewers
has changed on the right.

9.      Now let’s see how to publish your presentation file. Click on
the “Publish” tab, which is next to the “Share” tab.

10.  Once you are in the Publish tab, click on “Publish document” button.
11.  Google will give you a URL address for your presentation file; you
can send this link to anyone you wish to share with. If you don’t want
to share your presentation file anymore, just click on “Stop publishing”
button.

This concludes our tutorial on how to share your Google Presentation
with others and how to publish your presentation files.

-Ze Peng

I’m looking for a great way to search through my email. I use email to store all kinds of information, like records, numbers, contact information, conversations, projects, files, and events. So, looking for these kinds of things using tools like the non indexed search tools in the mail client itself can be an exercise in frustration. What’s worse is that when I use an indexing tool like Google Desktop search it often just does not find what I’m looking for, no matter what my search phrase is. So, this open source tool for indexing email into a database seems like a great thing to me. We’ll see.

freshmeat.net: Project details for MailSteward
MailSteward will archive all of your email in a database for easy retrieval, without touching or modifying the email in your email client program. Just click on the Store Email in Database button and MailSteward will go to work storing copies of all your email, both text and HTML versions, and attachments, into a relational database file. You can then retrieve email and attachments from the database by searching on Date, From, To, Subject, Mailbox, or Body text.

Dennis Hood writes:

Dear John,

I am sending this Call for Proposals on behalf of the New York New Jersey Association Support Teaching and Research (NYNJA STAR), formerly the NYNJ Blackboard Users Group.

We recognize, especially with the Bb-WebCT merger and the rise of Sakai and Moodle, that the virtual learning environment (VLE) landscape is shifting, hence the more inclusive nature of our group and accompanying name change. This change meshes nicely with the theme “Interoperability” for our second annual conference to be held at Princeton University June 19, where we are hoping to have presentations about multi-platform learning objects, plugins, building blocks, collaborative tools, etc., and on commercial and open source platforms working “cooperatively” in the same institution. A CFP will follow.

We welcome all our VLE colleagues to join us.

NYNJA STAR
New York New Jersey Association
Supporting Teaching and Research
(Formerly NYNJBUG http://www.nynjbug.org/)

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Second Annual Virtual Learning Environment Conference:
“INTEROPERABILITY�?

June 19, 2006
Princeton University

Abstracts for presentations related to the following suggested topics are requested:

Pedagogy and Technology
•    Student Issues and Perceptions
•    Assessing Pedagogical Successes and Failures
•    Teaching and Learning
•    Teaching and Technology
•    Building Faculty Communities of Interest
•    Lessons Learned
•    Collaboration

New and Emerging Technologies
•    Innovations
•    Open Source Initiatives
•    Beyond the CMS/LMS
•    Interoperability
•    Systems Integration and Open Source
•    Where do we go from here?  A Roadmap for the Future
•    Roundtable discussion of CMS/Open Source Issues

It’s About Support!
•    Community Building
•    Learning from Past Mistakes
•    Survival Techniques
•    Building In Quality Support from the Ground Up
•    Assessing Quality Support
•    The Promise of 24/7 Support
•    Online Support Tools:  How good are they?

Building Blocks and Plugins
•    Versioning Issues
•    Collaborative Tools Assessing Quality Support
•    Improving Performance of Building Blocks
•    Deciding Whether to Update Your Building Blocks or Build New Ones
•    Evaluating and Comparing Building Blocks:  Strategies
•    Interoperability

Sessions will be 60 minutes in length and will be comprised of no more than three presenters, but can include a session moderator.  Presentations must be interactive.

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words in length and should be addressed to the Conference Organizing Committee by March 3, 2006 at
NYNJ-CFP@Princeton.EDU.

The New Jersey Faculty Development Network’s 17th annual conference will be held on April 21, 2006 at Centenary College. The conference theme is “The Student-Customer in the University-Corporation: Keeping the Focus on Teaching and Learning.�?

Strands include:
-Defining the corporate model
-Effects on classroom teaching
-Implementation of the corporate model by faculty in the classroom
-Effects on faculty morale
-Role of student-customers in creating/reacting to the corporate model

You are encouraged to submit a proposal to present at a conference session. Proposals will be accepted until Tuesday, February 28, 2006.

Proposal must include the following information:
1. Presenter(s) name(s)
2. Institutions(s)
3. Address
4. Telephone number(s)
5. Session title
6. The strand(s) being addressed by your session (see above list)
7. Session abstract (not to exceed 100 words)
8. Session objective(s)
9. Description of your session (with explanation of both the content and the interactive
process of the session). The description should not be longer than 2 double-spaced pages.

Please send your proposal to: Stacy Davies
Centenary College
400 Jefferson Street
Hackettstown, NJ 07840
908-852-1400 x. 2384

or via email to: daviess@centenarycollege.edu

Proposal must be received no later than February 28, 2006.

Kathy took some snapshots during my presentation as an example of Archiving. Here they are, being presented as an example of Dissemination.

This is a screencast I created in Windows Media format that descibes how to export the content from a discussion board forum in Blackboard to Microsoft Word. This means that even after a class has ended and the course has been removed form Blackboard that you have the ability to view a discussion board, save it, print it, edit it, comment it, use parts of it for other types of presentations, and do pretty much anything you would do with a regular Word document.

The screencast is here: Discussion Board Export to Word Document