Welcome back faculty members (if, in fact, you took off the summer at all) to the fall 2011 semester. We have been quite busy and are starting to feel growing pains with our systems. It also seems as though no matter how much time we have to do things, we always need about two more weeks. I bet most of you are feeling the same way about the semester about to begin. Your new Academic Technology Coordinator is Dr. Lillian Payn. Please contact Lillian at ext. 3626 if you have needs or concerns related to Academic Technology. We have upgraded the Blackboard system over the summer to version 9.1, Service...

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...

Time is running out on our old video server, the one we fondly know as “Venus.”  Beginning January 1 this year we began the conversion to a new set of streaming servers, known, more prosaically as “Streaming.”  Converting to a new server platform is not big news, however.  The big news is we have been in the midst of converting all the streaming media we deliver for instructional pusposes to a new Silverlight platform.  As part of the process, we are getting it all captioned for the web as well, which adds to the time it takes to encode it, but also adds educational value to...

Yesterday we announced our new streaming media procedures (http://wp.me/pJFAR-P).  Go to http://www.palomar.edu/atrc/streamingmedia.htm to walk through the procedure.  Note that you will not be able to login to the media catalog without Palomar College credentials. Today, in this location, I would like to provide resources to those more generally interested in copyright provisions in general and the TEACH Act of 2002 in particular.  Here they are: Let’s start with the foundation.  The copyright law in the US, while mentioned in the Constitution, can be specifically found in Title 17 of the US...