If your computers are on for much of the day, you might want to consider downloading the BOINC software and choosing one or more projects. There are many projects out there, so look through them and add the ones that fit your view of helping out.
Here’s a video of just one of the projects out there (and it has 5 different applications)!:
You can run multiple projects and set the percentage of time for each.
MacWorld is reporting PayPal’s claim that Safari is not a “safe” browser. Sorry PayPal, the problem lies in how people deal with email, not with the browser. Anyone clicking on any link in an email message is asking for trouble. If you need that link, copy it, paste it, and then read the URL carefully. If you don’t recognize the domain or the directories after it, don’t use it. You can get to the site using your bookmarks to be safe.
I wrote an entry on identifying phishing last year (sorry, it looks like the quiz is gone; you may have to look elsewhere for more information). Be careful out there…
For most of the past 10 months or so I have been doing my best to use NeoOffice for my word processing and spreadsheet needs. I have to say that, with only one notable exception (a bug in an earlier version caused some characters to display strangely; that was cleared up quickly), it is both solid in its stability and robust in features.
NeoOffice is an Open Source package for Mac designed to work with the same (and possible more) kinds of documents as Microsoft Office. NeoOffice’s origins come from OpenOffice.org (if you’re a Windows or Linux user, that’s the place to go). Here’s the blurb from the NeoOffice site:
NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.
Released as free, open source software under the GNU General Public License (GPL), NeoOffice is fully functional and stable enough for everyday use. The software is actively developed, so improvements and small updates are made available on a regular basis.
I’ll write up some more on this great package. In the meantime, check it out…
Since I was away from teaching and researching in Japan for a year, I have missed out on seeing what’s new with the learning management system (LMS) moodle (most tertiary institutions in the U.S. have a commercial LMS like Blackboard already in place; no need for people to look for their own solutions). JALTCALL 2007 was able to fill my moodle jones in a positive way.
There were three moodle workshops on Saturday and a moodle reader presentation on Sunday, and I’ll try my best to do them justice here. The morning workshop was put together by William (Bill) Burgos of manabu3, a moodle partner. He talked about adding multimedia files to moodle’s quizzes (the quiz function is one of the modules in moodle). Bill described some of the basics for file sizes and manipulation, and recommended some freeware and/or open source applications to help out. He demonstrated uploading multimedia files of various kinds and showed us how to link to them for particular questions in quizzes. He showed a nifty trick by adding a space character so the file is embedded into the question itself. This trick is on my list of things to try out. We were all able to log into a sample course and try some things out for ourselves. We were also provided with a helpful handout and a CD chock full of material. Thanks for the cool workshop, Bill!
The afternoon session started off with a great workshop on adding to/modifying/tweaking moodle for your own purposes. This was a fast-paced workshop, so my notes (and often the handout) do not include a name for an attribution. At one level, modules can be added, deleted, and modified to suit users’ needs. Some of the modules with an English-teacher-in-Japan background include Hot Potatoes, lecture feedback, project, and self-study. I do not understand why a Hot Potatoes (HP) module has been created. HP restricts users to quizzes which are open to the public only; why bother with this when the moodle quiz module works fine? Paul Daniels talked about his development of several modules. The presentation module allows teachers to convert their PowerPoint presentations to Flash for easy viewing. The media blog module adds voice recording and other media support to the blog modules. He also talked about seating chart and freemail modules. I believe none of these are quite ready for primetime, but they are well on their way. Gordon Bateson then took the floor to show off some of his very, very cool tweaks. How many times have you spent teaching your students to register with moodle using a capital letter for the first letter of both first and last names and ended up with all small case or all large case? Gordon’s cool tweak not only changes it to the proper format, but it also eliminates the long vowels that are unnecessary in romanized Japanese. Gordon got a big oooohhh during the workshop for that one. He also had a tweak for unique cell phone addresses that is a kind of override for moodle’s email address check. To be honest, at this point, my head was spinning from all I had seen in this workshop, and my notes come to an abrupt end. But if you want to see some of this stuff, the workshop materials are available at: http://englishforum.sgu.ac.jp/downloads/jaltcall2007/. I have to conclude this section with a two thumbs up on this presentation, as it was the first that I saw that went far beyond the “moodle has forums, and quizzes, and…” so typical of recent JALTCALL conferences. At the party on Saturday, I put in a request to the JALTCALL powers-that-be to have more of these higher level presentations and workshops. I am always ready to take my skills to the next level. The future indeed looks bright for the moodle platform.
The final moodle workshop of the day was by Peter Ruthven-Stuart on how to get moodling. We got two handouts on moodle and one for a reading activity, and lots of hands-on time with moodle; my notes are sparse on Peter’s presentation for that reason. The first handout (sorry, I cannot find a link to it) describes in clear detail (without the technical parts) what one should do to get a moodle installation up and running. If you don’t know how to do this, you might want to contact him to get his handout. The second handout walked everyone through logging into a moodle course that was already set up. Peter set up accounts beforehand with user names, passwords (that were the same as the user names), and some fake names. For anyone setting up their own workshop, this seemed to be a great way to do it. Once users logged in, they could change both their fake names and their passwords. I’m guessing these were all created in a text or spreadsheet file and uploaded later. We were then led through some of the many activities that were set up for us: various pre-reading activities for a short article, vocabulary-building activities, quizzes, and many others. All in all, it was a great workshop, jam-packed with lots of hands-on activities.
On Sunday, Tom Robb, of Kyoto Sangyo University, talked about the development of his moodle reader module. This module, not yet ready for prime time, is designed to help students keep track of what they have read as well as give teachers a way to check students’ progress. Students will be able to use the module to choose the book they read and take a quiz on the book’s content. Students scoring more than 60% will receive credit and be awarded points based on the level of the book. Tom is working with publishers to use the tests that publishers have already created. This module could go a long towards helping students and teachers keep an eye on reading progress.
Whew! I guess that’s about all I have on moodle for now…
The conference kicked off Friday evening with six workshops held in two computer labs in the very modern Building 8. For the first one, I choose Brian Teaman’s machine-aided spoken language evaluation (MASLE) presentation. The system is designed so that students can record their voices on their computers according to some predefined texts. Then the results can be evaluated in one or two ways: by hand by the teacher or other evaluator, or by machine. Brian has added a speech recognition engine to check student recordings. Evaluating with the group at the presentation, the sample of ten recordings took us just under 5 minutes to do ‘by hand.’ The machine evaluation took about 2 seconds! The output still needs to be massaged into a readable form, and the machine’s results should use more of the available range (most of these results came out either .01 or .97, with nothing in between). However, once these are taken care of, the time factor of evaluating hundreds of your students’ speaking tests could be reduced greatly.
We were then given a chance to try the system ourselves. There were some technical difficulties because of the university’s network/firewall/gremlins. We were able to record our voices using the system, but we were not able to upload the files for a machine evaluation.
Interesting work, Brian! Keep us posted.
Here’s a great video of our favorite tech guys. Stay until the end; you won’t be disappointed! Enjoy!
Here we are at Waseda University in the middle of Tokyo. Several of us are now at our third workshop at JALTCALL 2007 looking into the world of Web 2.0 Tools for teaching and learning English. Some of us are blogging about the experience, and we’re going to link them together. The presenter is Marc Sheffner from Tezukayama University. We started with creating a Blogger account, moved on to changing the language, and customizing our templates for that cool look!
We then moved to Google Reader to sign up the blogs that we wrote. We were asked to get the feeds from our neighbors and add them as well. I now have a nice list of feeds to go nuts with. Students can then add each other’s RSS feeds to keep track of what everyone is writing. Bloglines is another reader that was mentioned.
We then moved on to another Web 2.0 tool: del.icio.us. This is the place to keep your bookmarks. At first it may seem like a lot of trouble, but if you use different browsers or move between different computers, you can access these bookmarks anytime anywhere (as long as the Internet is up where you are). Another bonus: tagging. You may have created many different folders to keep your bookmarks, but the sites you want to bookmark may fall under several categories. Tagging your bookmarks allows you to have multiple categories for your bookmarks. You can also share selected bookmarks with selected friends, colleagues, and students.
Thanks for the interesting presentation, Marc. I hope we weren’t too noisy over on the side. 
The folks over at Lifehack.org have put together a cool list of tips and hacks you can use to speed things up when you’re using the browser Firefox. The tips include both keyboard and mouse shortcuts, managing your bookmarks, and reducing how much memory the browser burns up. The hacks (please be sure you know what you’re doing) include accessing the about:config page and opening up more pipes for quicker downloads with broadband connections.
I’ve just discovered (via Hawk Wings; there’s a nice run-down of the things you can do with DoIt) a cool-looking tool called DoIt for the Mac. It seems you can set up categories/contexts and have the program give you reminders. One cool feature appears to be the ability to link to files or URLs on your computer, and clicking the links take you to that file or Web page. Another allows you to use your Address Book to bring up phone numbers or email addresses when the time comes to make that call or write that message. Still another allows you to bring it all together with a Quicksilver plug-in.
A Couple of Apologies
Monday, February 12th, 2007I have to say that I’ve been pretty bad at keeping up with the blogging. Sorry about that. Content is king, as they say, and I have not set my mind to the task of taking notes or keeping track of interesting ideas. Here is my pledge: I will be a better blogger starting now.
Second apology: even though it is a small thing on the blog settings, I did not set the configuration to allow new people to sign up themselves. Sorry about that. You still need to register to add a comment (I will not change this after seeing the comment spam that is out there), and I will need to approve the first few comments, just to make sure. If any comments come in, I will evaluate the system settings and take it from there.
Tags: blog, metacomment
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