Video Display Resolution Information

We located this useful information visualization to reference when thinking about video resolutions. This can be very useful when doing digital video conversion, and when deciding which video format/size to convert to. This image was initially found on Wikipedia, and we have adapted it slightly for our purposes...

Here is the original image.

iPhone Developer University Program

This week Apple launched a new free iPhone Developer University Program.  The program was created specifically for "higher education institutions interested in introducing curriculum for developing iPhone or iPod Touch applications".

The program will allow instructors to create student development teams of up to 200 students. Additionally the program will offer development resources, tools for testing, debugging and optimizing, as well as providing various methods for sharing and distributing newly created app, such as the ability to share applications within the student development team via email or private website, or distribute through the App Store.

This program may have very interesting ramifications for the availability of interesting specialized applications for teaching and learning, as well as pedagogical benefits for students to develop real world mobile applications.  The Office of Instructional Consulting will be watching these developments very closely...

For more information: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/university.html  

Afraid to use Endnote? Here are some tricks...

Endnote may seem complicated. However, once you learn a couple of tricks, it becomes a nice, helpful software that can solve most of your citation management problems. Here are those tricks:

1) Use Endnote in collaboration with Scholar Google: If you go to Scholar Preferences and turn on and change "show links to import citations into" option to "Endnote", you will see an "import into Endnote" link at the end of each search result. This will help you to import the citation directly into your library.

2) Attach your articles to citations: When you download the .pdf file for an article attach it to the corresponding citation entry in Endnote by right clicking on the entry and selecting "File Attachments". This way, the next time you want to read the article, you can search for it with some keywords and open it from Endnote.

3) Keep the Endnote library and article folder in the same folder: If you put all the .pdf files in a folder and locate this folder in the same folder with the Endnote library, then you can move the big folder around. Moving the big folder will not affect the links from the Endnote citation entries to .pdf files because the links are relative.

Turnitin.com announces support for 31 languages

This Message was recently sent by Turnitin.com:

We are pleased to announce Turnitin Global with vastly IMPROVED and EXPANDED handling of non-English languages!

Turnitin Global now handles text correctly in 31 languages in addition to English:

Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmal, Nynorsk), Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish.

This means that papers submitted via global.turnitin.com will generate an Originality Report with no question marks or odd character strings replacing "special" characters.

This also means we are indexing many additional websites that contain those languages against which we compare submitted papers.

To try this capability, you must sign in through global.turnitin.com (using your regular login information). Anything that is created or submitted through global.turnitin.com will also be available in www.turnitin.com (albeit with the current service's text display limitations).

By the end of October, this capability will be fully operational for all Turnitin users without having to use global.turnitin.com.

Note that while we are in the process of translating the Turnitin interface into many languages, it has not yet been translated to each of the above languages. Watch for additional announcements.

Note also that we do not translate the paper that is submitted in any way (e.g. we don't translate it to English and try to find more matches).

Please feel free to contact the Turnitin helpdesk if you have any additional questions regarding Turnitin Global.

Open Source CMS review

Here is a recent review of the most popular open source Content Management Systems (CMSs) from the Adobe Edge newsletter. I found it very useful in getting an up-to-date accounting of where these tools currently stand. It is always a plus when one agrees with the commentary ;) The discussion is somewhat geared for the business/e-commerce world, but I think the review and comparison is still quite helpful for those of us in the world of higher education. You may find the open source CMS review here.

Google's New Learning Managment System (LMS)?

Over the past couple of years I've been waiting, wondering if Google would step forward and provide an interesting alternative to the lineup of LMSs and CMSs. It seems all the elements were there in the Google suite of tools, we just needed a nice wrapper to put it all together...

Google Apps has been 'growing up' over the past year or so and I have been watching and hoping. In recent months the Google Apps team has made significant steps toward the higher education and k-12 arena. The announcement by Google at Educause in October 2006 along with a very successful implementation at Arizona State University, and most importantly, the recent inclusion of Google Sites into the lineup provide a promising glimpse at what Google may be able to offer in the way of a Learning management system. I and my colleagues here at Indiana University are currently conducting a comparative evaluation and exploring the use of Google Apps for educational use.

I can't help but wonder if, or in what ways, Google Apps will compete with Indiana University implementation of Sakai, their community source learning management system?

New Versions of MS Office for Mac!

MS Office 2008 for Mac now available!

Although MS Office 2007 for Windows has been available for a while, it's been a long time coming for those on the Mac-side of things, but Microsoft has finally released Office 2008 for Mac. The being made available is Office 2008 Standard and is freely available for all IU affiliates. For the IU community both Windows and Mac versions of MS Office are available for download at the IUware website.

The new version of Office 2008 for Mac has many new features all which bring it up to similar functionality with MS Office 2007 for Windows. This new version is completely compatible with MS Office 2007 for Windows files (docx, xlsx, pptx).

Best,
- IC Staff


UPDATE (02/05/2008):

This IUware installer incorporates a custom fix for the security issue detailed in the following article: Security issue in MS Office 2008 Installer for Mac.

The original installer provided by Microsoft to IUware prior to 02/05/08 did not contain this fix. If you have previously installed Office 2008 you should run this custom installer found here: Office 2008 Standard Security Fix.

Thanks,
-IC Staff