Learning the World

A discussion of Lafayette’s upcoming conversion from Blackboard to Moodle leads off this week’s edition of the ITS Coffee Break. In Tech News, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley review “Confessions of a Podcast Junkie”, an EDUCAUSE article by Carie Windham that the discusses the advantages of combining podcasting with teaching and talk about Case Western Reserve University’s virtual campus in Second Life. In Help News, they announce ITS’s new “Windows Vista” resource page and offer a preview of upcoming summer workshops.

There are several ways to get the podcast:

• Download the MP3 directly
• Subscribe to the Soapbox podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
• Subscribe to the Soapbox feed via iTunes

I just found a podcast dedicated to all things Drupal: the Lullabot Podcast. It talks about the ongoing development work on the CMS, popular modules, deprecated practices, and interviews with people and companies using Drupal professionally.

I discovered it via the Drupal account on Twitter, once again showing that the microblogging service can actually be useful.

Some folks have put together a Drupal distribution designed for use in education. It uses the latest Drupal build, and I’m thinking of throwing an install of it on one of our test servers to see how it looks compared to Soapbox, which is running an older version of Drupal and which doesn’t have quite so many bells and whistles (and optional modules installed).

This week on the Coffee Break, hosts Ken Newquist and Courtney Bentley discuss ITS’s recommendations regarding using Windows Vista at Lafayette, discover how some librarians are learning all about Web 2.0, look at the Mashtracker web site for following cutting edge web technology news, and talk about faculty new computer options. They round out the show with announcements about three new ITS Brown Bags covering the virtual world Second Life, the open source course management software Moodle, and the latest developments on the World Wide Web.

There are several ways to get the podcast:

• Download the MP3 directly
• Subscribe to the Soapbox podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
• Subscribe to the Soapbox feed via iTunes

The notes from my “Second Life Field Trip” brown bag are available online.

Unfortunately, our recording of the session didn’t work out, so I’m going to re-record an abbreviated version when I have a chance.