The announcement came out today: we’ll be transitioning to OUCampus as our content management system in mid-March. This will be a dramatic modernization of our web tools!
I’ll be setting dates and times for training sessions soon – probably several dozen classes over 3 weeks in late February and early March!
Barnes and Noble released an eReader software update this week. It enhances the features available on the Nook Color, but unfortunately it doesn’t enable 802.1x! We will never be able to use a Nook on campus if the stock software won’t get on our WiFi.
I booted this device to an SD card with a vanilla Android ROM last week, but I don’t know if that can be an institutional solution.
Hey everyone! I finally got around to putting a custom ROM on this Nook Color tablet. It was quite easy! I used Cyanogenmod 7 and followed the instructions. A couple of downloads, a little configuration, and there we go. Installing apps and setting up accounts is by far the most time-consuming part of the process. This isn’t too surprising. iPads, tablets, phones, etc are highly personal items these days and most of them don’t have user profiles built in.
Maybe the thing to do would be to build a microSD card without all of the account details, make an image of that, then copy it to another card. Then I could have my very own personalized bootable card, but could hand a generic default one to someone else on a moment’s notice.
It turns out it is really easy to embed certain kinds of things in WordPress. Video sites like YouTube and Vimeo work great. Just cut and paste the URL into the Visual editor, make sure it isn’t a link, then publish! Unfortunately Google Docs embedding doesn’t work at this time, but documents can be uploaded and embedded using Scribd:
And here is an example of Vimeo embedding:
It is my intention to totally mess this blog up playing with THEMES!
I’ve been hoping we will add USB charging stations to public areas in our new classroom building. This sort of thing is becoming more common. For example, check out this nifty new bike with USB charger built in!
Another angle in the tablet/e-reader war – running the Nook app on a Kindle Fire:
see more epicfails
We’re offering a noontime workshop on Thursday for IWU Faculty and Staff on feed readers. I’m not sure our students are on the same planet as me on this topic, but I still find feeds to be indispensable. Even after some big interface changes I still prefer to use Google Reader to keep up on all my favorite news sources but have also been looking at some other more visual solutions. Yahoo released one for the iPad last week called Livestand which is the latest challenger to Flipboard, the presumptive leader in this segment of the app market. Come on over to the Davidson Room and we’ll give these apps a look!