BuzzLion for the week of September 16

Posted on September 21, 2007 
Filed Under BuzzLion

The semester is in full swing for students. We in ETS are in perpetual full swing, and to prove it, here is the BuzzLion for the week of September 16….

Yvonne Clark is looking for feedback from Adobe Connect users regarding the new Connect support site. We encourage you to go to the above link and offer your thoughts.

“If you visit the site, let us know what you think — are the content and materials useful? Did you fine anything that will be helpful to the Penn State community?”

Cole Camplese contemplates what to do when you have too much of a good thing — in this case, it’s the explosion of blogs at Penn State and how to go through them all to find the ones that interest you the most. He also notes this is a great problem to have.

“The big issue for lots of people is finding these blogs. Yesterday the stats told me we have about 700 active blogs out there in the PSU Blog Cloud … finding them is tough.”

In his own entertaining style, Chris Stubbs takes a look at the latest Google app to hit the Internet.

“I’ve only had a few minutes to play with this bad boy so far, but in a word, Google Presentations, like everything else Google touches, is simple. The functionality is basic, with very few pre-built options for slide templates or themes, and no slide transitions that I could find. But regardless, its very easy to use, so it looks like we’ll be chalking up another win in the applications column for Google.”

ETS multimedia guru Dave Stong constantly finds new and interesting tools and techniques for graphic design. This week Dave discusses a way to improve Web graphics.

“This seems like it’s important information if you ever do web graphics. I’ve been at it for a dozen years, and it caught me completely unaware. An article at Sitepoint yesterday claimed that Fireworks was the only graphics application to take advantage of a little known capability specified for PNG-8. Fireworks can save a PNG-8 with more than one level of transparency and will be displayed in Internet Explorer version 6.”

Brett Bixler finds there are connections between……..effective instructional design and gardening? Read on.

“I seem to want to rely on informal, social learning when it comes to gardening, except in extreme cases. For example, last year, after three years of tomato wilt, I finally went to the net, looked it up, found a picture that matched the symptoms, read what to do, and next season implemented it. Took me five minutes to do so.”

Mary Janzen would like to learn more about what links faculty put in their ANGEL courses and invites you to share them.

“Please share with the community some of the types of Web resources you link to within your courses. In which of the above locations do you place the links? Do you organize them into categories?”

Brett Bixler posted an interesting chat transcript from a meeting on using Second Life for academic research.

“Some of the Penn State folks using Second Life met to discuss using SL for research, and what were the implications for following Institutional Review Board (IRB) standards. Leading the discussion was Professor Beliveau (Ed Lamoureux). Ed’s done some pioneering work in this area and had some good advice to share.”

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