Recently in Useful Stuff Category

The May 9th Campus Technology includes "Best Practices in Emergency Communications" by Doug Gale. I think it's important for all of us working at colleges and universities to be aware of what constitute best practices in responding to these tragic situations and recommend this article. Here's a copy/paste that explains how the best practices were determined.

Supported by funding from the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Domestic Preparedness to the State of Florida, the University of Central Florida prepared a report on Emergency Communications Systems that provides a comprehensive discussion of the requirements for emergency communications and available solutions. They identify the three requirements for an alert system as:

1. Alert as many people and as quickly as possible in a normal condition
2. Alert as many people and as quickly as possible without power and phone service
3. Constantly deliver alerts to specific groups of people in different locations

Here are some other points made in the article that I found important. These bullets are just some of the key points and as you read it, you will undoubtedly find others. Feel free to comment on this entry.

• 50% of students and faculty would not immediately pick up a ringing phone and thus limiting the effectiveness of reverse 911 strategies.
• there is no single alert system that meets the all the needs of a single campus, let alone the needs of diverse campuses.
• alarm siren systems should only be used for emergencies and should only be tested once a semester.
• cell phones and wireless-capable laptops can be disruptive in a classroom environment, and many instructors ask that they not be turned off during class. Therefore a back-channel system like a siren is needed
• One problem generic to all voluntary systems is participation

I'm writing up this experience in case someone gets caught in the same thing and is Googling for answers. It took me many hours and unnecessary expense to come to this point.

Sunday morning around 07:30 I saw that my McAfee Security Center subscriptiong had expired. I logged in to my account, charged another year on my credit card, and began download the new version. During the download McAfee detected an earlier version which I instructed to uninstall. I went into Control Panel, uninstalled version 6 of the privacy service and spam killer, and the download continued. I completed the install and when completed, I lost my connectivity. I rebooted and got a error window that it could not find SPORDER.dll which it indicated was needed by iTunesHelper.exe and installing this DLL was recommended. I clicked okay and spent a good 8 hours the rest of Sunday dealing with five different Comcast techs and three McAfee techs. You can only chat with a McAfee tech for free. At one point I even spent $3.99 a minute with a McAfee tech rep who must have been in India. Each ran through her/his diagnostics. The first three Comcast reps told me it was McAfee; McAfee reps told me it was my ISP.

Wayne Brent alerted us to a video called "RSS in Plain English" from a resource called The Common Craft. Right now it is on the homepage to that link. You might go there in the future and need to poke around to find it. I believe the actual link location is http://www.blip.tv/file/205570/ but I can't verify it because the response time is so bad. It must be the hot item on the Web right now.

"RSS in Plain English" seems like a clear explanation about how you can use RSS 1.0 to subscribe to blogs and news sources. Doesn't get into RSS 2.0, which pushes audio and video for podcasts, but if one gets the gist of how RSS works for blogs and videos, they will make the connection for podcasts.

If you teach RSS, as I do in my Intro to IT course, you likely have students whose eyes glaze over and who come close to a falling into a catatonic state when you are trying to explain really simple syndication. Try this video. It's only 3:44 and fairly entertaining.

I took a few vacation days this week to go along with Louise to New Orleans while she was attending the Innovations 2007 conference. While looking through some of the materials that she picked up in the exhibits or were included with her registration materials was one that I think you will also find interesting.

There is a Coalition for Free Broadband Now and it is "promoting a public dialogue ... to ensure that all Americans have access to broadband service that is free, fast and family-friendly." You can read more about the idea and how it could take shape on the Coalition's website. In addition there is a webinar scheduled for April 5th that you can sign up for that is sponsored by M2Z networks.

I think you'll agree that this is an important issue. I was watching a movie called Did You Know? and one of its points is that the US ranks 20th in the world, behind Luxembourg, in broadband Internet penetration. This is a very good video, BTW, and if you've not seen it I highly recommend watching it.

Over the past few years a lot of academic institutions have attempted to implement dSpace or Fedora. These are bot open source software applications to building institutional repositories. The UA had a collaborative effort a couple years ago that Steve Buckler, Chris Johnson and library staff were involved in to implement dSpace. As far I know that has been tabled. If that is wrong, please comment to this message. Now what about Deep Blue?

This morning's Campus Technology IT Trends alerting service reported:

U-M Library Launches Deep Blue: More Access to U-M Scholarship

The University of Michigan is sharing more than 24,000 research items with the public via a new searchable Internet library system. This press release describes the site as "a customized version of the DSpace software created by MIT and Hewlett-Packard. It was designed and is managed by U-M's Library Information Technology group, standard-setters for quality research and innovation via initiatives ranging from Making of America to the Google Print project."

24,000 research items is extremely impressive. For many institutions, building it was not sufficient. Rights to the intellectual property being held by commercial publishers and an overall lack of particpation by content generators has hampered progress. In June of 2004, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article, "Papers Wanted: Online archives run by universities struggle to attract material," in which the challenges to build these repositories were reviewed. Perhaps UM's success indicates that the early barriers have been overcome?

Educause Learning Initiative has a resource entitled 7 Things You Should Know About ... . Each of the 7 Things has a two page PDF that focuses on What is it? Who's Doing it? How does it work? Why is it significant? What are the downsides? Where is it going? and What are the implications for teaching and learning.

The topics covered are Blogs, Video Blogging, Wikis, Podcasting, Clickers and Social Bookmarking. It is a handy, timely resource that many of us can use when trying to explain any of these to colleagues.

ELI explains its purpose for 7 Things as:

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) "7 Things You Should Know About..." series provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, how it works, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use ELI's "7 Things You Should Know About..." briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview, either for yourself or for colleagues who are pressed for time.