Author Archives: Curtis Kelch

current activities, not the least of which has been Moodle

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Much of my last few weeks has been spent in a renewed push to help people work on their campus websites. I also had to prepare a presentation for the upcoming Sungard Summit conference. 

I’ve also been spending time every week working on a revamped test Moodle system. This time the campus authentication system is in effect!

Yesterday Patrick and I tried out the integrated wiki tool and the chat tool. We also tried something called a “choice,” which is really just a poll. Another tool is called “survey” which you might think does the same thing as a “choice.” Not so – surveys are actually standard types and are not customizable at all. They are mostly variations of ATTLS (Attitudes Toward Thinking and Learning Survey) or COLLES (Constructivist On-Line Learning Environment Survey) survey instruments.

I’d also like to encourage everyone to subscribe to the other Office of IT blogs. Our staff has been doing a nice job of keeping some communication flowing, but we still need people to read them!

Fred’s blog – IT planning and operations (also a source for notes and updates on system problems and outages)

Network and Server Group blog – some great explanations of what goes on in the mysterious server room

Patrick’s blog – great tips and basic explanations of useful desktop-level skills

IT Testing – Apple iPhone

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Apple iPhoneInformation Technology is looking at the ever increasing number of smartphone devices, and how to best support the devices on campus. The trick is to find a device or two that we can standardize on that work with the campus wireless system, shared calendar system, and e-mail. IT is currently testing the iPhone from Apple. Here is Trey’s impression of the iPhone after two days of use.

  • First impression – I have been using a handheld device of some kind (Apple Newton, Handspring Visor, Sony Clie, Treo, and currently a Palm T/X) for many years. The iPhone interface is excellent, and very intuitive. I find myself trying to use the iPhone touch commands on my Palm after only two days of testing.
  • Text input – I have not mastered the keyboard on the iPhone. Poking at the keyboard with my finger gets tiring on a long e-mails or notes. I find using my thumbs to be a bit clunky, but I am getting better with practice. The autocorrect function saves me quite a bit.
  • E-Mail – works very well with IWU’s e-mail system. Very easy to navigate, automatically checks mail every 15 minutes, and can be adjusted for manual, 30 minutes or 1 hour.
  • Calendar – for Mac users the iPhone can sync to Meeting Maker, which is used in many areas on campus. The iPhone does not sync to Meeting Maker for people using a Windows computer. More testing to take place.
  • Network connectivity – The iPhone uses the AT&T Edge Network for Internet access, and also supports Wi-Fi networks (like the ones found in Starbucks, etc.). AT&T iPhone plans all come with unlimited Internet access. The Wi-Fi connection is much faster than the Edge network. The Wi-Fi works great at my home, but the iPhone does not currently have settings to allow it to work on the IWU Secure network or corporate networks.
  • Battery Life – Seems pretty good. I am recharging the phone for the first time today – day three.
  • Audio Quality – The phone calls sound good. The speaker phone is okay.

I entered the iPhone evaluation with no expectations. I must say that after using the iPhone for a couple days that the “cool factor” is extremely high.There are many more features to investigate so more will follow.

update from IT Help Desk

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Lisa at IT sent the following notes today regarding securing your desktop computer and cautious computing:

Tuesday the 12th was Black Tuesday with numerous updates for Windows – there was also several Mac Updates as well (for Leopard anyway). Might wanna remind people to make sure updates run for their computers.

Also, this info about “Valentine’s Day” virus spamming may be of interest: http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2008/02/12/valentine-nuwar/

And, since it’s taxtime, here’s info on Fake IRS Tax Refund scam: http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/index.php/2008/02/04/fraudsters-offer-irs-tax-refund/

And….. How prevalent IS malware (group terminology for virus, spyware and adware)? This article give some very REAL figures and projections: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001378.html

Clickers in the Classroom

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We’ve begun a small-scale test of “clicker” technology this week at Illinois Wesleyan. The Provost’s office funded the purchase of 35 remotes and one base station. We chose a simple, modestly priced brand called iClicker that was actually designed by a group of physicists at University of Illinois. The devices are about 6 inches long, 2 inches wide, and 1/2 inch thick:

iClicker remote

These devices are designed to collect data instantly from a classroom full of students. Big deal, right? Well, they might actually be a pretty big deal. But before we invest heavily in them we’re going to have a few faculty try them out and measure the results.

Continue reading →

moodle tests on hold

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One of our systems administrators informed me last week that Moodle has been removed from our Mac server. She is going to find another home for it but is not sure when it will be back up. That means my plan for testing Moodle will be delayed a bit.

In the meantime we’ll spend a bit more time on iClickers!

Eudora might not be dead after all…

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I suspect that most users don’t think too much about software choices. They use what is available or what is familiar. In many cases any gain in productivity made by switching to a different application for a given task is offset by the labor and training required by the switch itself.

E-mail is one case where this trade-off needs to be more closely examined. Eudora is widely used at IWU but is no longer supported by Qualcomm. Thunderbird is a popular free and open source e-mail application. It does a great job supporting things like authenticated outgoing mail (needed for sending mail from off-campus) and IMAP (needed for storing and manipulating incoming mail on the server) while Eudora has not done so well working with these technologies.  This would not be a big problem if it were easy to switch from Eudora to Thunderbird. Unfortunately the import procedure is anything but smooth if there is a lot of mail involved. And one thing is for sure – people keep a lot of mail.

Recently a development has occurred that brings me hope – Eudora has stopped developing their old code and begun to build Eudora 8.0 based on the core of Thunderbird. So the underpinnings will work well with the protocols we need here at IWU, but there will be user interface features borrowed from the “classic” Eudora design. In the recently released beta (test) version of Eudora 8 the following features were announced:

  • menu structures will be similar to classic Eudora
  • shortcut keys will largely be the same as classic Eudora
  • mailbox list can be separated from the actual mailbox
  • improved importing from classic Eudora to new Eudora, including filters and address book

My hope is that the new Eudora 8 will provide a smooth transition from the old unsupported classic versions into a much more productive, supported Thunderbird-based e-mail application without trading away any ease of use AND without a painful upgrade process.

 Please note that Eudora 8 is in beta test and SHOULD NOT be installed on University computers.

If you’d like to read more, here is an article from Wired Magazine about the release:

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/mozilla-resurre.html

Online quizzes!

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Last week I took a look at Moodle and tried creating a quiz using the “regular” method – using menus and buttons to navigate graphically through the process of making categories for questions, then populating these categories to form a test bank, then actually putting questions together. It turns out that this is a slow process. I thought that there would be a better way, especially since most teachers already have questions defined from past terms.

There is indeed a faster way. Moodle can import 12 different types of quiz files, including Blackboard and WebCT. The quickest way to go, however, is probably the GIFT format. This is a simple text-based format that uses a variety of delimiters for different purposes. For example, if I want to create a multiple choice quiz I could start by making a plain text file like this, indicating correct answers with “=”:

How many glasses of water per day should a person drink?{~15 ~0 =8}

What is the best type of donut? {~sprinkles ~jelly-filled =eclair}

The GIFT format allows a wide variety of questions: multiple choice, true/false, “missing word”, short answer, even essay. If your answers are numeric you may provide a margin of error. In my first example, for instance, I could say that any answer within 10% of the correct answer would still be graded as correct. 

Here is another example question, this time in matching format:

Match the following IWU departments with their corresponding buildings. {

    =Theatre -> McPherson

    =IT  -> IT House

    =Admissions  -> Holmes

    =Mathematics  -> CNS

}

There are also provisions for feedback to be given for certain question types, describing why an answer was correct or incorrect.  

It wouldn’t take a lot of work to reformat an existing quiz in Word to fit these patterns. It is also possible that existing test banks that come along with textbooks may already be formatted in one of the Moodle-compatible formats. Once the questions are inside a Moodle course page you can add a quiz wherever you’d like in your course outline (Week 8, topic #4, etc). Next week I’ll add a quiz and get my IT House colleagues to try it out!

evaluating Moodle

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I’ve spent a little bit of time evaluating a test installation of Moodle, the open-source course management tool. This tool is becoming quite popular at institutions similar to Illinois Wesleyan, but we still don’t know much about what it offers.

The basic idea is that a teacher will get to create a web space for each course, accessible only to students enrolled in the course. The web space can be structured in a number of formats. The most popular seem to be either “weekly” or “task-based”, which divide your course up either chronologically or topically. Here is a screenshot of a Moodle course homepage, from the teacher’s perspective:

a course page in Moodle

There is an overlap between the tools available in Moodle and those within the MyIWU course tools, such as news and calendars. On the other hand, there are some features that are quite nice. For each week or topic in my course I can create “activities” or “resources”. Here is a screenshot displaying available “activities”:

a course page in Moodle

 As you can see, the array of options is dizzying. I haven’t tried them all, but I did try adding a quiz. I had to first create a test bank of questions, then set up quiz options (how many points, can a student retest, etc). I plan on learning ways to import test banks from other formats soon. I also plan on asking some of my IT colleagues to try taking a quiz to test the usability from the student perspective.

Here is a screenshot of available “resources”:

a course page in Moodle

I created text pages and web pages using Moodle and was pleasantly surprised with the final product and the usability of the tool. It was fast and easy to create a simple document for students that included images. This would be an excellent way to deliver an online handout related to a reading assignment at a particular point in a semester.

Next time around I plan on trying a wiki and importing quizzes into Moodle!

Holiday Gift Ideas

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Here are some fun and useful gift ideas to consider for the Holiday season!

Wireless Presenter

Need a simple remote to control your PowerPoint presentation. A wireless presenter is just the device. The Targus Wireless Presenter allows you to move from slide to slide, page up and down, darken and resume the screen and includes a laser pointer. Available from Tiger Direct for $26.99.

Gorillapod

This light and versatile tripod is a great digital camera companion. The Gorillapod has over two dozen flexible leg joints that bend and rotate to secure your camera to almost any surface, rocks, tree branch, pole, on a table, etc. The Gorillapod is available from Joby for $24.95 with free shipping.

Backup HardDrive

Need peace of mind knowing that your music, photos, and documents are backed up? An external backup drive may be just the device you need. The Maxtor One Touch line works very well for both Windows and Macintosh computers. Drive sizes start at 80Gb and go up to 1TB.The 120GB model sells for $89 at Amazon.com.

Slingbox

The Slingbox is a device that lets you watch and control your DVR, Digital Cable receiver, Satellite receiver, or DVD player on your personal computer or PDA any time, any where. There are three models, the Slingbox AV, The Slingbox SOLO and the Slingbox PRO. The differences between the boxes are the AV and SOLO devices have a single input from a single source, the SOLO is HD capable. The PRO allows four inputs and is HD capable. The Slingbox is available from many sources. WalMart sells the AV for $109.48, the SOLO for $148.88, and the PRO for 198.88.

Cube World Digital Stick People

Two inch cubes house electronic stick people that live together for your entertainment. When multiple cubes are stacked together the digital people interact with each other. Their antics are quite amusing. You can also interact with the cube people. Shake a cube and see what happens. Cube World people can be found at Thinkgeek.com. A set of two costs $25.

WiFi Detector

Do you travel around with a laptop and wonder if a wireless signal is in range and don’t want to lug your laptop out of the case to see if a wireless signal is available? A WiFi detector might be just what you need. A simple detector that shows if a signal is present and clips to your key ring can be found at Tiger Direct for $10. A more sophisticated detector that shows the SSID (wireless network name), encryption status, channel, and signal strength can be found at Thinkgeek.com for $49.99. For those who are both stylish and geeky, Thinkgeek has a WiFi Detector Shirt that shows actual wireless signal strength on the front with glowing bars for $29.99. Your glowing shirt will look spectacular while sitting in the Memorial Center, Hansen Center, and many Academic areas on campus!

Take TV

Do you have video on your computer that you would like to watch on your TV? Take TV allows you to move videos from your computer to a simple USB device. Plug the device into a TV, sit back with the Take TV remote and watch your video. The 4GB models sells for $99.99 at Amazon.com, the 8GB models sells for 142.49.

R2-D2 Interactive Astromech Droid

A very cool Star Wars toy that listens and responds to your commands. R2 goes on patrol, will take someone a drink, along with many other activities. Check out the video at Thinkgeek.com. R2D2 costs $129.99 at Thinkgeek.com

Happy Holidays!!!!!!