A brief history of PDF

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I have found in my travels that PDF is not very well understood on campus. I’ll try to clear up some of this confusion.

PDF is a file format that is essentially a virtual printout. It looks the same on each computer on which it is opened. Pagination, margins, fonts, and layout are all very consistent from place to place when you save a document as PDF. This means that a form or brochure that has been professionally done is best distributed as PDF.

Another reason to save files as PDF is that anyone can download a free PDF reader application. That means that you don’t have to worry about whether someone outside campus has Microsoft Word 2003 software.

Adobe sells software to create and modify PDF documents. This software allows you to make fillable forms that can be distributed and submitted electronically. Adobe provides a very nice comment markup system that can even work when people have the lowly free Reader application.

In most departments there is no need to pay for the Adobe software. We can use a free solution called PDF Creator that acts as a virtual printer. Any document or application that has a “print” option can then be turned into a PDF. This is a better option than scanning to PDF on a copy machine. This is because a copy machine takes a photographic image of your text. The resulting PDF is really just a picture, so you can’t cut or copy the text from it. This problem is resolved by using PDF Creator.

What to do about Spam?

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Some sources estimate that 90% of all e-mail in North America and Europe is actually spam, also known as unsolicited junk e-mail. That means that only 10% of the e-mail messages sent are legitimate! How are we supposed to cope with the overwhelming volume of potentially dangerous trash?

We’ve put a system in place at Illinois Wesleyan called Red Condor. It isn’t perfect, but it keeps some of the junk out of your inbox. Sometimes junk slips through, and sometimes good stuff gets caught. Things can get confusing when that happens. To help clear things up, Lisa and I have come up with a few bits of advice for working with spam and Red Condor at IWU:

  • DON’T spend a lot of time managing your Red Condor quarantine list. Nothing special happens when this junk mailbox is empty. Just scan your spam digest for good e-mails that have gotten caught, then forget about the rest. If you waste your day sorting junk, the spammers have already won.
  • DO use a free throwaway e-mail account when you sign up for sites and services on the web. Google and Yahoo offer e-mail accounts with lots of storage that can soak up unwanted commercial e-mail while your main account remains focused on real correspondence.
  • DON’T automatically trust e-mail even if it appears to come from a familiar address. We have seen reports of junk e-mail that seems to be from one’s own account! Most of these cases are “spoofed” e-mail, in which its origins have been fraudulently masked or replaced with something you are likely to trust. Don’t send sensitive personal information via e-mail.
  • DO manage your Red Condor spam filter by using “friends” and “enemies” lists. The “friends” list will permanently allow mail from a sender a free pass through the spam blocker. The “enemies” list will automatically reject mail from a sender. Keeping these lists up to date is like training Red Condor to work more efficiently. This will allow you to be more efficient, spending less time picking good e-mail out of the Red Condor junk mailbox.
  • DON’T add your own e-mail or “iwu.edu” to the Red Condor “friends” list. This allows any spoofed e-mail fraudulently claiming an IWU address a free pass through the spam filter right into your inbox!
  • DO use the junk filters in your own e-mail program as a second line of defense. Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora, and Apple Mail all have their own systems to detect spam e-mail. Turning this feature on can catch junk mail that Red Condor has missed.

As always, you can contact the IT Help Desk at (309) 556-3900 or by sending e-mail to helpdesk@iwu.edu. We are happy to help you overcome this frustrating problem!

Software Training Workshops for IWU Faculty and Staff

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Rick and Patrick are planning a series of Training Workshops for the week of December 15. We will be using Microsoft Office 2007 but the tips and techniques we use will work in Office 2003 as well! Here is the breakdown day-by-day:

  • Monday – Tips for MS Word: Check out Word 2007 while Rick and Patrick share a few techniques to save time while word processing. We will share our favorite tips and leave time to answer questions.
  • Tuesday – Tips for MS Powerpoint: Take a look at Powerpoint 2007 and learn some tricks to improve the quality and efficiency of slide shows.
  • Wednesday – MyIWU Course Tools: Get an overview of the collaboration tools available in MyIWU’s course and group pages. You don’t have to be a faculty member to use MyIWU to share files, share a calendar, e-mail a group, or distribute announcements – all you need is Patrick to show you how to get started.
  • Thursday – Basics of Photo Editing: Learn some essential techniques for working with digital photos. Cropping, rotating, redeye, and color adjustment are skills you can use to improve photos for your department website or at home.

These sessions will be offered at 9am and repeated at 2pm each day in the Stevenson Hall Training Room.  Please contact Rick at rlindqui@iwu.edu if you plan on attending!

Moving to the new iMovie

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I led a class through the basics of iMovie 08 last week. I had reservations about using the new version since it is a complete departure from the original iMovie paradigm. All video clips were formerly contained within “projects”, meaning that people were expected to shoot footage and use it once. Now, video clips become part of a video library, just as you would put photos in an album, to facilitate searching, storing, and reusing video in multiple different projects. This is a by-product of the advance in video quality and storage capacity – individuals and families will soon have large libraries of all the video they have shot over the years, the same as they now have large collections of digital photos.

To prepare for the class I read the relevant chapters in a very good Apple Training Series book. I took a quick look at some of Apple’s brief but excellent online tutorials. I also spent a little time using a new iMac with built-in iSight camera to capture some video and move it around. In the end, I decided that iMovie 08 is actually easier and more powerful than the trusty old versions. However I’m not sure I’d try it on any Mac older than a year or two.

It is much easier to scan through video clips to find the relevant parts – Apple calls this “skimming”. There is more control over video and audio detail. For example, you can set white balance or rotate a frame. Audio “ducking” is now turned on by default. This means that your background song automatically drops to a lower volume if there is another audio track put in at the same time. No more manually adjusting to make room for narration!

Finally, there is a YouTube upload feature built right in. All you do is enter your YouTube ID and password and you can put your finished movie on the web right from iMovie.

The next step is to use iMovie 08 to produce a real movie project. Patrick and I could use some help in thinking of a theme. I suggested the “Secret Places of IWU”, which would serve as a tour of rarely seen locales on our campus. Any other ideas?

Microsoft Office Live online workspace

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I was working in Google Docs yesterday and thinking that I could be more efficient by creating documents in Word. However, Word doesn’t allow me to share my documents with coworkers. Perhaps Microsoft’s online Office Live workspace would bridge that gap.

I signed up and was pleasantly surprised that the site allowed me to use Firefox. After two confirmation e-mails I uploaded a Word doc and tried to edit it. Office Live prompted me to download and install a program to my hard drive. However even with this program it is not possible to edit documents directly using the web interface. The system “checks out” the file and opens it using your own copy of Office. This is true in either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Sharing the document was easy enough. I’m not sure how many hoops my invited viewers will have to jump through to access the document, as they are not regular Office Live users. There is a checkbox that will allow viewers to see the document without logging in, so I hope that will streamline the sharing process.

So far the lack of direct online editing and the cumbersome signup process are major hindrances to this service. I’ll try it a bit more to see if there are any features that outstrip Google Docs in the online collaboration arena.

Visit with Google

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Patrick and I were in Chicago late last week for a presentation from Google. The Google rep was good but did not have a lot of deep insight into any of the specific areas of interest to higher ed. We did find out that Google donates advertisements to nonprofit groups, including colleges and universities.

You might think that after a pitch from Google I might be even more enthusiastic about the adoption of Google services at IWU. I’m actually even more skeptical now than I was before. Google isn’t able to engage in a long-term agreement, so there is no guarantee that free e-mail hosting and apps will continue to be free after 3 or 4 years. It wouldn’t be much fun to engage in a big migration to Google only to have to do it again in a few years.

This has started a healthy discussion about the positive and negative effects of this service. Why do we even provide e-mail hosting at all? Why not just create forwarding aliases to students’ existing e-mail?

The Google rep also explained that the eternal “beta” nature of their software is basically a software design philosophy. The current version is always the public version and updates, changes, and improvements are continually being worked on. This is a sound, positive, user-centered philosophy. I actually like this aspect of Google apps quite a bit. However I am a “power user” who is interested in adapting and learning. Many users are not so adventurous. I don’t think many of our users want to hunt around for features that may or may not have changed since yesterday. It actually sounds like our front-line staff would have a crazy moving target to support.

On the upside, Google is offering 7GB of mail storage per person as opposed to our 250MB. They have tons of data centers which means uptime and performance will probably be better than we can provide. On the downside, we are small fish in the big Google pond, with no financial stake in the deal. What leverage could we possibly have if the system goes away or doesn’t perform as promised?  A small university complaining about a free service to a huge company? I’m not sure the move to Google is right for us. I hope the discussion will continue among the campus community before any decisions are made.

Wireless changes coming soon

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A lot of people have been confused by our wireless networks of late. This is because there are really two different wireless networks at IWU. This means that there are two sets of physical hardware, each with their own setup process for the user.

There is a new one, which we are calling “IWU Wireless”, that has been installed in a few buildings: Welcome Center, Harriett, Adams, and the East St Apartments. The old wireless network is still called “IWU Secure” and is in all the remaining places, including Ames, Buck, Hansen, and the Memorial Center.

We are tentatively planning to swap out all the old equipment very quickly – perhaps within the next week. We are working on a timeline and documentation for users to switch their computer configurations over to work with the new network.

Once we have new documentation, you will be able to find a link to it on the IT Home Page.

Moodle pilot update

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There are four faculty members in our Moodle pilot group this term. They’ve been charged with the task of using some or all of the Moodle features and helping our campus decide if Moodle is worth pursuing further.

One of the attributes of this pilot program is that no integration work has been done to sync enrollments in Moodle with class rosters in Banner. I’ve had to manually import users and assign them roles in each Moodle course. This isn’t too bad when done in bulk using a CSV file, but when students are still adding and dropping classes it is a bit cumbersome. I can see that this roster sync will be at the top of my list if we stay on board with Moodle next term.

A couple of our faculty have already had their students working in Moodle, submitting assignments and accessing course resources through the Moodle course instead of our traditional MyIWU course tools. The others are working with their courses a little further before bringing the students in. I haven’t seen anyone make use of the gradebook yet, nor have there been any quizzes (this is the first week of classes, so a quiz could be seen by students to be an act of war).

I’m thrilled with the look and content of our active courses. They look as good as any I’ve seen from other institutions. I’m looking forward to hearing about student response – either way they go, I’d like to present a summary of our experiences sometime next year.

My first Google Presentation

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I promised more about Google Apps, but I’ve been sidetracked with other things. My solution: use Google Apps for the other things! Today I used Google Presentations as the slideshow component of a training session.

I created this slide show from scratch rather than importing a Powerpoint file.  I found that a few important features were lacking during the creation process. There is no “alignment” tool to keep various objects neat and tidy on each slide. There also does not appear to be a way to create or modify a template. You are stuck with Google templates for better or worse. I had a little trouble with fonts, but with a bit of toying with it I was able to square it around. This may have been a result of pasting text from various sources. Different applications deal with formatting in different ways so it might be nice if Google added a “paste plain text” function.

On the other hand, it is amazingly easy to share this presentation online. I’ve imported another slide show and made it viewable to anyone with an iwu.edu Google account.

It was easy to find, easy to load, and worked great in full-screen mode. I was a bit disappointed that there was no video upload tool – the “insert video” tool in Google Presentations only allows you to embed YouTube. If you want a video from another source, you have to use an old-fashioned hyperlink.

I like that this presentation is now available to me anywhere at any time, given a browser and Internet connection. I don’t need my files with me, nor do I need Microsoft Office.  I’ll be using it again for the next few presentations I give. I think it will suffice quite nicely.