Learning the World

I participated in a webcast on authentication and authorization to iTunes U at MacLearning.org today. Presenters included:

• Eric Bailey, Senior Engineering Mgr. iTunes U, Apple Inc.
• Ken Newquist, Web Application Specialist, Lafayette College
• Paul Edminster, Web Manager, Gonzaga University

I focused on how we tied our Novell eDirectory-based LDAP into iTunes U while Paul talked about how his school integrated iTunes U into Blackboard via a building block. Finally, Eric talked about basic structure and credentials within iTunes U as well as the nifty new web services.

A video of the webcast will be posted to the site in 2 weeks or so; I’ll post a link when it’s available.

News about the extension of the Leopard Shorts deadline and an announcement about Podcamp Philly at Drexel University lead off the March 26 edition of the ITS Coffee Break. In Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss the ed-cast directory of education podcasts, uncover wireless networks with the Mac OS X wifi detector iStumbler and review the latest iteration of Yahoo Widgets. Finally in Listen in iTunes or download it from Soapbox.

I had to use Keynote (Apple’s PowerPoint-like software for the Mac) for the first time today. Here are some random lessons learned while figuring out how to use it:

• To insert an image, you have to use the “Media” button, and then go through one of the iMedia apps (iPhoto, iMovie, etc.) It’s annoying that you can’t simply drag and drop from the desktop or browse the file structure for the image you want to use
• To cut and paste text from Word to Keynote while retaining Keynote’s formatting, you need copy the text and then right-click in Keynote to select “Paste and Match Style”.
• I haven’t found an easy way to create a new page based on a new master slide. Simply creating a “new slide” causes it to be formatted as its predecessor, which is not always what I want.
• Keynote uses Mac OS X’s built-in spell check; the same “check as I type” option I set in Safari carried over into Keynote without me even noticing.

By default, Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets reside within Dashboard, a hidden space you reveal by clicking a short cut link or key. You can, however, force Mac OS X to detach a widget from Dashboard:

1. Open Terminal
2. Type: defaults write com.apple.Dashboard devmodeYES
3. Quit Terminal then press F12 to expose Dashboard
4. To force a Widget to stay open, click and hold on it while pressing F12 again.

The co-worker who told me about this trick says you may have to login/out a couple of times to get it to work.

On a related note, Yahoo’s just released Yahoo Widgets 4, which is a much slicker, updated version of their own widget engine (which was known as Konfabulator before Yahoo bought it). Yahoo Widgets run under Mac OS X or Windows XP/Vista and do much of what the Dashboard and Vista Widgets engines do (and in some cases, Dashboard widgets have been ported to run under Yahoo’s engine).

Elgg is an open source social networking web app designed for use in higher education. I’ve played with it a little here and there, but haven’t done a heck of a lot with it (you can see it in action at EduSpaces).

Of course, there are a lot of these kinds of services out there (Facebook and MySpace obviously come to mind first) so what’s different about Elgg? For one thing, colleges and universities can deploy this software to bring a social networking approach to their campus web apps. Instead of relying entirely on something like Blackboard or even Moodle, you can use Elgg to friend people, set up spontaneous groups, share files, etc., and do it in such a way as to not tie it to a specific commercial platform like MySpace.

But there’s more to it than that. The new push with Elgg seems to be to give it ePortfolio and presentation capabilities, allowing you to easily track, organize and promote your work online. This article on Nuclear Sledgehammer gives a brief overview of the idea. It’s an interesting read, and when I have a spare moment I plan on returning to EduSpaces to see exactly how you’d go about doing some of this stuff.

Interested in web accessibility? Check out the notes and files for my recent Web Accessibility Workshop at Lafayette. It’s got a bunch of excellent accessibility related tips and links, including tools for evaluating potential problems with your site.

I upgraded my personal web site to Drupal 5.1 from Drupal 4.7 last week. The process went more smoothly than I expected; the majority of problems I experienced were related to my old 4.7-centric theme and a bit of a coding hack I did for my primary navigation on the site. I’m experiencing a few lingering CSS issues, namely none of the Ajax-collapsible menus will collapse and the editing blocks for forms aren’t lining up properly.

Rather than try and rework the existing theme (which itself was based on someone else’s 4.6 theme) into compliance with Drupal 5.1, I’m planning on starting from scratch with the new “Zen” theme. Zen was inspired by the CSS Zen Garden, and is designed to be modified — it includes a well-documented template and CSS file, which should make modifying things far easier. I wish it included Photoshop or PNG versions of all of its graphics so that the minor editorial graphics (like those use in the tertiary navigation) could be easily modified, but I love the concept — this is exactly what Drupal needed.

Bringing it back to education, Drupal powers two very difference sites at Lafayette: the Information Technology Services web site, in which it serves as a straight-forward, taxonomy-driven content management system, and Soapbox, which is our ongoing experiment with a community blogging platform.

Based on my experiences with my own site, I’m looking forward to upgrading Lafayette’s Drupal installations. The administrative interface for 5.1 is much cleaner and easier to navigate, and the collapsible admin field help keep pages streamlined when in edit mode.

A lingering problem we’ve had with Drupal refusing to obey the “break” tag in PHP pages is solved by the Node Teaser module, which lets you have a separate introductory teaser for a page or story (a la WordPress) while Secure Pages allows for secure logins without the hacks I’ve been forced to use in the past.

I haven’t found a particularly good image management option for Drupal yet, but there are a number of new options I plan on trying out. I’m also going to give the Audio module another whirl; it looks like a much more robust solution for podcasting than the default RSS 2.0 feeds that core Drupal creates.

Finally, the Views module offers some exciting possibilities with regards to displaying lists of content — Drupal’s default behavior is to list content as header-link-teaser, which works fine for blogs but can be problematic when you have 10+ pages worth of documents and want to be able quickly list and browse them. Views allows you to customize node lists within Drupal, and looks like the perfect solution to this usability problem.

My home wireless network was driving me crazy yesterday, so I decided to look around for some utilities that might help me diagnose the problem. I  iStumbler, a wifi network detector for Mac OS X.

In addition to displaying all the wireless networks that your Mac can see, it also tells you what channel a given network is operating and percentages for that networks signal strength and noise. It allowed me to see at a glance what channels my neighbors’ myriad networks were operating at, and then I reset my own network’s channel to something that wasn’t being used. We’ll have to wait and see if that helps the network’s reliability, but it can’t hurt to try.

A great video explaining the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. I’d love to see something like this submitted for Leopard Shorts. I’d also like to find more instructional videos like this; if anyone has some, please post a comment.

Finally, this post really serves as a test of using WordPress Mu’s built-in YouTube support; I click the “YouTube” button, it asked for the clip ID (6gmP4nk0EOE) and then it did the rest.

Congress voted to move Daylight Saving Time up by two weeks and in this week’s Coffee Break host Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss the implications that has for your computers. In Tech News they discuss Google’s opening of Gmail to the general public, assess the tech-savvy of various presidential candidates at TechPresident.com and speculate on Middlebury College’s decision to ban Wikipedia as an academic source. In Help News, Courtney reviews how to connect a Nintendo Wii to the campus network and gives a rundown of upcoming workshops. Get the podcast