Last night my colleagues and I presented our semi-annual plenary break out on Academic Technology at Palomar College. It was well attended, but necessarily by only a small percentage of the enormous number of adjunct professors employed by the college. As a reference for those who did not attend, here is an encapsulated version. We conducted our workshop using the sandbox AT@PC workshop course we had developed. Each professor at Palomar College has an account on our sandbox system. We set the course up for self-enrollment through the Academic Technology Training course, also on the sandbox system. One...

If you have been alive and aware in the last half decade you have not missed the many hilarious Hitler parodies based on the bunker scene from the German language movie Downfall.  We see Hitler in his bunker receiving some unnerving news from his fatally nervous staff, Hitler asks the non-essential staff to leave the room (they listen in the hallway), Hitler flies into a rant over the news, finally spent, Hitler reflects cynically on the pitiful state of affairs. It is funny because the audio track is only faintly audible while the message is delivered via overlaid English subtitles.  What really...

This is a continuation of my interview with the Academic Technology Systems Administrators about technology planning at Palomar College.  In this part we focus on some rubber meets the road issues like paperless environments, AV technologies, telephony, and lots of other issues.  The written response of the technicians is provided in the post below, and the audio of an interview with them follows the post. Additional Questions for ATRC Staff 1.  Would you support a goal of creating a paperless environment at Palomar College, if it meant that you would not have access to printers and would have to rely...

The mud oozed from the court filings to the Southern District of New York once they were unsealed yesterday in the copyright dispute between Viacom and Google’s YouTube property, the V and G of our title.  The suit has been simmering for about three years, long enough, in fact, for Google to develop and deploy software that obviates the meat of the complaint.  Nevertheless, the New York Times has posted several of the juiciest court documents (warning, the documents are in embedded Scribd format, which gives some browsers/OSs fits). Viacom maintains that  “…YouTube … profit[ed]...

This post will be pretty Palomar College specific, but may help instructors from other schools with general concepts. As instructors develop course materials for students, they almost always find that there are supplemental documents that they want their students to read.  These are usually articles published in various journals.  A traditional approach has been to Xerox these articles and hand them out in class.  This has a couple of problems: 1,,) except for cases of spontaneous need, this is a copyright violation; and 2) it is expensive to Xerox so many documents.  Unfortunately this practice has...