ATS Blog

Knight, J. K., & Wood, W. B. (2005, Winter). Teaching More by Lecturing Less. Cell Biology Education, 4, 298-310.

...the physical facilities provided by most universities do not favor this kind of teaching. Interaction between teaching staff and students...and other in-class group activities was greatly hampered by the theatre-style design that is unforunately standard for large university classrooms. ...the unfamiliar demands of an active-engagement course may take them out of their comfort zone, resulting in lower student ratings for the instructor.

1. Open Apple Disk Utility
2. Click the Partition Tab
3. Click the Options Button
4. Select GUID Partition Table
5. Under Volume Scheme, select the number of partitions.
6. Choose each volume and select the format.

How has working with persons who are different from you in some way(s) helped you learn more about yourself?

I just downloaded the new version of Adobe Contribute to use it to edit my Blojsom blog.  To connect is pretty easy, just put in the access point for the blog or the xmlrpc connection. Contribute wants to make new templates for each category, so it has a tendency to make a few strange entries in my blog and throw an error message, but it still connects.

This isn't quite so problematic since Blojsom is using Velocity to control the look of the templates.

I was able to insert an image, a link, and to use spell check in relative Contribute-ease.  Adding tags is also just as easy.

 Publishing is problematic if you choose a category - there is an XML-RPC exception. I found a work around.  Contribute makes a connection to each category in an individual blog as a new blog.  So, when posting or publishing, you must select Categories: None in order to be able to post.  If you wish to post to a specific category, you need to select the Category under Blog instead of Categories. This is not intuitive, but certainly possible.  It may be a good idea to look into David Czarnecki's XML-RPC api to create a custom api to avoid this problem.

Last night my colleague and I showed some undergraduate students how to use Apple's GarageBand to create podcasts for their biology class. The project is a part of our iPod Initiative that gives students iPods for a semester to use in specific courses. It was great fun!

In the second session we were walking around looking at the work of the students and checking out their storyboards. A few students were giggling and whispering phrases like, "This is so cool!" It was a ton of fun to see that kind of enthusiasm about learning.

I did feel a bit old when I was giving the session, however. I referred to the controls in GarageBand looking and having the same functionality as a VCR. As students looked back at me with a blank stare I realized that most of them no longer have VCRs. Dvds took over control of the market in the late 1990s. Some of these students would have been 10 when they received their first dvd player! So, they may only be familiar with remote controls and TiVO, not the common VCR iconography with which I grew up.

It is our finding that as the geographical distance between Americans and America's most beautiful avenue increases, identification with the statuary as a symbol of regional identity and "a state of mind," gives way to the appreciation of the avenue, not for its commemoration of the confederate cause, but rather for its aesthetic beauty. Indeed, the significance of Monument Avenue is variable across time and space.

Technorati Tags: Monument Avenue, Richmond

I created a quick entry on the Urban Actions and Issues blog to test the Google map Adam helped us create. It worked out quite nicely and provided the functionality I needed. I was able to add photo examples to the entry, some text and the lat and long provided the mapping data. This weekend I want to finish the stops on the tour of Richmond. This means that I will need to add an entry for each neighborhood in Richmond that we visited.

As I look at the map, I think that I need to create a separate category called Richmond Tour so that all of the entries related to the tour can flow together. The titles of the entries should also not be specific to the topic in the entry, but perhaps to the neighborhood or location which they describe.

Now, that Adam has me interested in all of this, I've been poking around the web for ways to get my waypoints off of the Garmin GPS. [This is all very new to me!] I found a few products that seem interesting:

1. GPS Connect
2. GPS Babel - this is only has a command line interface though

So, we are set up to geo-blog. In order to view entries that have geospatial data associated with them you will need to have a copy of Google Earth. Once you have Google Earth, you can see the ATS blog by:

• Firing up Google Earth.
• Clicking Add > Network Link from the top menu in GE
• Pasting in http://keillor.richmond.edu/blojsom/blog/ats/?flavor=kml2
• The ATS blog will be listed in "My Places"

Adam Burt helped make this Geo-blogging happen with some scripts he created for Ecto. Adam also uses a neat little icon on his blog that shows users that they can subscribe to his blog with Google Earth. Since he enjoys flying, he has many more entries with lat/long coordinates.

How are we going to use this Geo-blogging in education?

I would like to add Geo-blog entries to the CEH blog. The CEH blog is used by the Urban Crisis class. On this past Saturday we toured the city of Richmond to see the various sections and how urban issues are plaguing some of them. We brought with us 2000 census data to view the socioeconomics of each section of the city as well as the mixture of race and median values of homes. Two themes that seemed to resonate over and over again during the tour were race and class. I'll be taking the tour again this weekend with a GPS unit to mark the various locations of the city so that others can take the tour virtually [I brought it along this past weekend but couldn't get any satellite data from inside the bus ]. Each stop on the tour will be a section of the city and another blog entry with geospatial information. This will give us the ability to look at each section of the city and provide another tool to help determine the multiple issues that keep some sections from being able to escape urban blight and poverty.

Another potential use is in the disaster sciences. I have worked with a professor in the past on the Disaster Database Project. This project catalogs over a 1,500 disasters, locations, date, number of people killed, and response to those disasters. It is an effort to understand why and when disasters occur as well as the best ways to lessen the impact a disaster. The instructor in this project just created a Micronation called Perilo. This is a cyber community specifically designed with the purpose to study disaster science. I can see how geo-blogging could be used in this discipline.

Lastly, students in Journalism 311 are blogging about politics. [You can view their blogs: Montana, Tennessee, Ohio, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania] It would be interesting for students to add the meta information for lat and long on news stories affecting the races in the various states. For example, what is most likely to swing the voters: news items happening in the country or what is happening locally in their own state? Tagging entries with geo meta data may help us identify the factors affecting the outcomes elections.

So, this is going to be very interesting. Thanks so much, Adam!

1. Flashpuzzlezone.com
2. theshockzone.com
3. Fooddetectives.com

Walter introduced me to a term developed in the Mid - 90's: Micronation. According to the Wikipedia:

Micronations – sometimes also referred to as cybernations, fantasy countries, model countries, and new country projects – are entities that resemble independent nations or states, but which are unrecognized by them, and for the most part exist only on paper, on the Internet, or in the minds of their creators.

Very interesting idea. Walter is going to create a new nation around the concept of rehearsing disaster exercises. You can certainly imagine that the geography of a nation, the politics and economy all work together to contribute to a nation's state of emergency preparedness, or lack thereof. So, keep an eye out on Perilo.net as Walter builds his new cyber community.

One of my biology faculty sent me this link today.

Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell, an 8 minute animation created in NewTek LightWave 3D and Adobe After Effects for Harvard biology students...Created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Hartford, CT.

This is truly an amazing piece of work!

The O'Reilly Radar has an entry this morning about FOSS4G 2006. That's the Free and Open Software for Geoinformatics 2006 conference, in Lausanne, Switzerland.

It looks like the conference is sharing lots of information, streams of some portions of the conference, from their web site.

It looks like interesting stuff!

A team comprises any group of people or animals linked in a common purpose. A group in itself does not necessarily constitute a team.

1. iPod Tutorial page
2. Betsy's Breezo on Podcasting
3. Podcasting and Vodcasting White Paper from the University of Missouri
4. The Educause paper - 7 Things you should know about...Podcasting
5. There's Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education by Gardner Campbell

1. go to http://www.blockrocker.com
2. in the text box beside "search within selected category" put in William Morris
3. you should see the Permalink of William Morris - The Red House...Now click on zoom in to see the entry on the map.

Very cool, indeed! Good show!

Last night I read,

"Get Organized (Fry, Ronald W. How to Study Program.)" (Ron Fry)

I was looking for a book for my adult students taking a class online. It is a super fast read that is filled with tons of useful and practical information on getting organized, time management, and good study techniques.

In the book, Ron Fry briefly mentions Parkinson's Law which states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." This concept greatly interested me as I thought about my own time management techniques and the fact that I seem to be getting busier. It made me wonder if I didn't need to start implementing some of Fry's time management tips during work hours.

According to the Wikipedia, there is a derivative of the original law that relates to computers.

"Data expands to fill the space available for storage."

As I look at the way our Blackboard server is increasing in terms of storage capacity and the demands for an increase, this law does come to mind. Are we really taking the time to use good compression techniques for files, or are we saving files in uncompressed formats because we have the space? Interesting....

ATS will be holding a number of training classes this fall. A number of links went by on the Adobe list for Higher Ed and I wanted to make sure that I saved one in particular:

Macromedia Higher Education Faculty Development Workshops

As we get ready for our creatUR featUR party, a celebration of animals, wildlife and ipods, I can't help but think about the iPod presentation given by a Music Professor at Radford University at the NMC Summer Conference. Link to his podcast

The students at Radford will now be required to purchase their own iPods if they are studying music. His innovation and creativity was a brilliant example of how technology can be used to enhance instruction and not just as a novelty. I hope that we have the same success in our iPod Initiative.

I put a link to Declan Butler's blog before, but I needed to post again about his Google Earth map on the Avian Flu. I created some instructions on downloading Google Earth and adding the .kml file for one of your biology classes. Thanks again to Declan for the work! This is the second instructor that is making use of it during class.

I always forget this line, so I'm putting this up here to help externalize my memory. sqlplus schema@sid

Easy enough!

So, I'm trying to think of all of the options with this blog for this class. I think that having the students tag photos on flickr and using flickr badges might be the easiest way to go forward. When they create a badge, they can select specific photos, or a random selection of photos from a set or that are tagged. This would allow the students to take photos Richmond, poverty, gentrification etc. and to pick specific photos that demonstrate a specific concept and to add them to an individual entry. Plus, the photos would be stored on flickr so that folks could comment on them.

To create a Flickr badge:

• log-in to your Flickr account
• go to http://flickr.com/badge.gne
• use the wizard to specify your preferences
• copy and paste the code in your Blojsom entry

I'm using OmniOutliner to keep myself organized these days.  There's an add-on piece you can use to implement David Allen's Getting Things Done approach - it's called Kinkless Getting Things Done, or kgtd for short.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it works. I'm not able to integrate kgtd with my Entourage calendar, but I could sync up with iCal.  That would let me track my to dos along with my appointments.  Unfortunately Apple hasn't provided Exchange support in iCal and from yesterday's Leopard preview it doesn't look like I'll see that for a few years, if ever.

To get kgtd to work you need to install another free app called Quicksilver.  At its most simple, it's an app launcher, but to me it seems faster than Spotlight, which I usually use to search for documents not apps.  Quicksilver remembers which apps you open and suggests them to you first when you're typing the first letters of a program's name.

Quicksilver can do a lot more than just launch apps, though.  It's the piece that's copying data over from one part of my kgtd file to another as I check items off my list.  I suspect if anyone in the group with a Mac/programming background got hold of Quicksilver, a thousand flowers would bloom.  It might be too scripty to be interesting to anyone, but even then I'd recommend Quicksilver as a good launcher.

Technorati Tags: Mac

I was just thinking about a class that may be checking out digital cameras and doing some research on the city of Richmond, VA. I was trying to think of all of the different types of data they might want to geolocate and how it would be displayed. I happened to come across this post on Flickr by Mat Howie. Matt used a satellite image from Google Maps and combined it with Flickr's ability to annotate parts of an image. The image tells the story of his childhood in rollover mouse movements. It is quite clever and not too difficult.

I do have a few things to think about:
1. Now that HTML ImageMapper 10 has included Ajax, it might be very fun to use that to display various areas of the city that might be experiencing gentrification.
2. There is also the possibility of geotagging Flickr photos, as posted in the Make blog. Students could take pictures of various parts of the city, upload the photos to Flickr and tag them with the lat and lon.
3. Lastly, we could use the Yahoo! Maps API or the Google Maps API to display the locations of (?put urban problem here) in the city.

This could be very interesting. I have to admit that geolocation does frighten me a bit though.

For more than a week I've been trying to figure out what happened to the audio in Flash. Video plays fine but there's no sound.  I uninstalled, reinstalled, played Adobe's idiotic game where I had to tell my OS to run Safari in Rosetta mode so the Flash Player would install.  Tried version 8, tried the beta of 9.

Nothing.

Today after a liaison meeting I mentioned my problem and Sharon said she'd solved it after doing a Google query on Intel Mac No Audio.  Sure enough I find a note by someone who was as confused as I am now.

Here's the fix:

1. Launch GarageBand.
2. If it's not visible select Window > Keyboard.
3. Play a note.
4. Audio in Flash will now work.  You can close GarageBand.

Weird.

Update: Sharon explained it more in a post late Friday.  You need to reset AudioMIDI to 44.1KHz.  She suggested going to Applications > Utilitiies, Audio MIDI.  You have to mess around to get the setting to be something you can change.

I like my GarageBand fix best.

Technorati Tags: audio, flash, GarageBand, Mac

has been issued a U.S. patent for technology used for internet-based education support systems and methods. The patent covers core technology relating to certain systems and methods involved in offering online education, including course management systems and enterprise e-Learning systems.

1. Open Firefox
2. Navigate here… http://mycroft.mozdev.org/
3. In the Site Name search box, type "Richmond"
4. Click on the "University of Richmond Library" link that appears.
5. Click on "OK" when it asks to verify that you want to add the plug-in.
6. Double check that it was added by clicking on the search box in the top right hand corner of your browser. This will bring up a drop down menu and the plug-in should be at the bottom.

I post my thoughts on the blog mostly for myself. I try not to be an exhibitionist. I merely want a place to post things outside of one computer, accessible from the web and searchable so I can find them later. It has occurred to me most recently that what I write isn't necessarily just for me. After reading Tracy Mitrano's "Thoughts on Facebook", I have given more thought to my "online identity" and wonder if there isn't an advantage to remaining completely anonymous.

Today, Microsoft Office 2004 crashed every time I started Word, PowerPoint or Excel. One or two times I received a cryptic message related to the pdfmaker.dot file and asking me if I wanted to try and recover the file. Another time it said something about the Microsoft Framework not loading. It turns out that it was related to the pdfmaker.dot file. After removing all Word plist files and reinstalling without any luck, I went ahead and removed the pdfmaker.dot from Microsoft Office > Office > StartUp > Word and it worked! I also removed the pdfmaker.xla and pdfmaker.pot files. I hadn't had any problems prior to today, after I had attempted to create a pdf file from Word - unsuccessfully. I am rather unhappy that I cannot create a Word file on my mac and make a pdf that properly adds bookmarks in new sections as it does on a windows machine. It seems that Acrobat runs much more smoothly on windows than on mac - which is rather unfortunate.

I read this article from InformationWeek March 27, 2006 for the spyware section of my class, Online Learning and Teaching. It completely opened my eyes.

I never really thought about a batterer using spyware to track the movement's of his wife from women's shelter to women's shelter. However, after reading the article I googled the Michigan case mentioned and came across another website: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/vaw02/module5.html It is the Violence Against Women on the Internet site developed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

According to the website:

"Increased access is making technology an important resource for victims of domestic violence. However, if not understood and used strategically, technology may increase their danger. Most victims of abuse do not know how to safely navigate technology resources to access help without increasing their risk of further abuse." (Accessed June 13, 2006)

I always viewed spyware, adware, and unsolicited emails as nuisances that are just a new part of life in the cyber era. After reading this article and visiting the subsequent website, I have a new appreciation for the importance of knowing what is on your personal computer and how it got there. I also want to find a way to get involved with a local women's shelter to help educate these women on knowing what is on their computer and how they can remove their own technological tracks.

The Cross Media Annotation System, or xMAS, was presented by Professor Peter S. Donaldson, the Director of the MIT Shakespeare Project. According to Donaldson:

XMAS has been in use at MIT for several terms, has worked very well to support online student discussions that include video examples, multimedia essays, in class presentations and online instructor comment on student work. The ability to include precisely defined visual evidence in work on Shakespeare films has transformed my own teaching and we are now planning a two year project to distribute the system to sites outside MIT.

Donaldson uses the software extensively in both his Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Film classes. Instead of having the students passively watch clips in class and comment on them, he is having his students create multimedia essays by using the xMAS software and their own clips. I really liked the fact that Donaldson begins rather small with the video clips, but soon has his students using the clips to support their essays. By the end of class, students have to create a term paper without the support of the clips. By this time they have sharpened their skills in selecting the exact scene from the film that makes their point. Now, the visual stimulus is removed for their reader and they must use their skills in writing to describe the precise moment to which they are referring.

I can imagine a film class using xMAS for deeper study of cinematic technique. Students would be responsible for pulling clips that are examples of various kinds of camera shots or editing effects that provide new meaning for the viewer. I can also see xMAS used in a writing class. It would be interesting to use a film like Crash or Taxi Driver as the basis for multimedia essays, longer works of writing and a term paper.

I'll have to download the software and see how this works. We may need to set up an xMAS server at UR.

UBC has a few learning objects worth exploring, collected onto one nice page. I'm particularly interested in seeing the timeline tool. The image annotation tool looks pretty interesting too.

I'm just starting to go through the document on What's New in SMART Board Software 9.5. The gallery seems pretty interesting, since it now links with the vendor's web site to give users access to a growing library of objects for their presentations. My one frustration is that they don't have a User Guide. I'm at the point where I'd like to go back over everything to make sure I understand how it all works. But their web site insists that their "greatly improved and comprehensive Help file" makes it possible for them to stop updating the User Guide.

Shame on them. They're cutting corners financially by assuming that the function of application Help files and a User Guide are the same.

Still, I'll try to slog on through. The interactivity of the boards is what faculty seem to be using most but I suspect we could promote some of these other features more with a positive impact on the classroom.

(I've bitten the bullet and am posting this from a trial version of ecto on my Mac. If you're reading this, it means I got it to work.)

1. Spry Framework Overview - this includes an example of a photo gallery that is quite amazing
2. Download Adobe's Spry Framework
3. Spry Wiki

The Symposium on Technology in Undergraduate Science Education will focus on the use of technology in introductory science courses as a tool for addressing heterogeneous student backgrounds. Presenters will discuss issues surrounding the implementation of technology in the classroom.

collates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.

I am a Web 2.0 skeptic. There's more enthusiasm than reality out there right now, and while I think it's important to have a picture of what's possible, I step back when I see proponents floating off with the hype.

That said, it's difficult to keep up with everything that's going on out there in the socially connected web. Web2.0List seems to be an efficient way to track what's going on. The site is a list of sites that embody one or more aspects of the Web 2.0 ideal.

One site they mention is mynoteIT, a place that students can use to automatically save and share their notes. Of course, all the usual suspects (Flikr, Skype, del.icio.us, Technorati) are there too. So it's a good index to watch. And it wouldn't be Web 2.0 if they didn't have their own social bits - comments for entries, ratings and a tag cloud.

All they need is an RSS feed!

• MobHappy - a blog by Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino on mobile technology.
• The MobilED Initiative - This is a project that is using mobile phones in South Africa in the classroom. Each MobilED kit includes a number of mobile phones that the teacher can use in the classroom as well as a resource kit to provide ideas for lesson plans. They are using SMS technology to query wikipedia and receive the answer back on their mobile phones. The scenarios page shows a number of videos that demonstrate how the technology is being used.
• VCU is having a Mobile Technology Fair on April 6
• A Mobile Cause - an article on incorporating handhelds into the classroom
• Podner - batch converts video to iPod formats without QuickTime Pro [Mac shareware]

"Colleges That Change Lives : 40 Schools You Should Know About Even If You're Not a Straight-A Student" (Loren Pope)

• http://www.csszengarden.com/
• http://www.lifehacker.com/software/css/40-css-layout-templates-ready-for-download-160713.php
• http://css.maxdesign.com.au/index.htm
• http://www.positioniseverything.net/
• http://www.alistapart.com/

We had a fun time yesterday updating our ColdFusion which is currently deployed under Tomcat. So, I wanted to document what we did to make it an easier transition on the production box.

First, download the file. We downloaded the English Java Installer JAR, 142.24 MB. Although it says that you should download the complete file from the trial center, the complete file with the updater applied may be obtained from the above link. Use java -jar to unpack the cfusion.war file from the jar file.

The only thing currently in the ROOT directory is the index.jsp file and some images for the Tomcat Manager. There is no index.jsp file in the cfusion directory. So, you will keep the functionality of your Tomcat manager. **Note** if you already have cfusion deployed in the ROOT directory or anywhere else, you can back up the neo-query.xml file (/ROOT/WEB-INF/fcfusion/lib). This is the file that contains all of your datasources. If you are going to redeploy your web application, these will disappear. So, simply making a backup of your neo-query.xml file will save a little time later.

Use jar -xvf to unpack all of the contents of the cfusion.war into /ROOT

Copy the setenv.sh script below to the tomcat_root/bin directory

Disable directory browsing in the server in the tomcat web.xml file by changing the listings settings from the default of true to false.

Modify the jk.conf file to contain /CFIDE

Remove any symbolic links to the CFIDE from the webroot.

Restart Tomcat and the webserver.

Open up your ColdFusion administrator and go to the page. If you see things, you are in business, if you have some complaints, check the links below that we used to hack together the setenv.sh script.

In order to now get the CF Administrator to run as well as the charting components, we referenced the following pages:

1. Installing ColdFusionMX for J2EE on Tomcat http://www.macromedia.com/support/coldfusion/j2ee/phase2-tomcat-deploy.html
2. Macromedia ColdFusion Technote: ColdFusion MX: Using cfchart or other graphics rendering objects on Unix platforms with JVM 1.4.1 or higher http://www.macromedia.com/go/tn_18747
3. Macromedia ColdFusion TechNote: ColdFusion MX 7: 'Graphing service is not available' error when accessing the ColdFusion Administrator http://www.macromedia.com/go/ceb0e519
4. Strange Error Messages and Headless Systems: http://www.alagad.com/index.cfm/name-aicheadless
5. Coercing the Alagad Image Component to Work on Headless Systems http://www.doughughes.net/index.cfm?event=viewEntry&entryI=29

# Establish variables

JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java"

CF_HOME="/opt/tomcat/webapps/cfusion"

CF_WEB_INF=$CF_HOME/WEB-INF

# Add binary file directories to system path

CF_SHARED_LIB=$CF_WEB_INF/cfusion/lib

CF_SHARED_LIBS=$CF_SHARED_LIB:$CF_SHARED_LIB/_ilnx21/bin

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$CF_SHARED_LIBS:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

# Establish security JVM options (all on one line).

CF_SECURITY_JVM_OPTIONS="-Djava.security.manager

-Djava.security.policy=$CF_WEB_INF/cfusion/lib/coldfusion.policy

-Djava.security.auth.policy=$CF_WEB_INF/cfusion/lib/neo_jaas.policy"

# Establish graphics JVM options (all on one line).

CF_GRAPHICS_JVM_OPTIONS="-Xbootclasspath/a:$JAVA_HOME/lib/tools.jar:

$JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/rt.jar:$JAVA_HOME/lib/dt.jar:$JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/i18n.jar:

$CF_WEB_INF/cfusion/lib/webchartsJava2D.jar

-Djava.awt.headless=true"

# Set JVM options for CORBA. Use if vbjorb.jar is not in your JRE's

# lib/ext directory. If used, append $CF_CORBA_JVM_OPTIONS to 
CF_JVM_OPTIONS

# CF_CORBA_JVM_OPTIONS=-Xbootclasspath/a:"$CF_WEB_INF/lib/vbjorb.jar"

CF_JVM_OPTIONS="$CF_SECURITY_JVM_OPTIONS $CF_GRAPHICS_JVM_OPTIONS"

JAVA_OPTS="$CF_JVM_OPTIONS -Xms128m -Xmx256m"

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Phew!

The Banner 7 upgrade got under way this evening at 5 PM. For the next two days it will be round-the-clock madness while the database and application are upgraded.

What's especially commendable is that they're blogging the upgrade experience. Quite commendable, even if they did go off campus for a blog.

Good luck for the Banner 7 upgrade. We'll be watching from the Library!