iBerry

I’ve posted a rough summary of my talk at TEDxNYED on my connectivism site: Collapsing to Connections

TEKRI is hosting a conference on Making Sense of Social Media in Education, Government, and the Enterprise, April 25-26 in Edmonton. Dave Snowden is our keynote speaker.

We are issuing a call for presentations. Deadline is March 21.

The conference will run two days – Sunday is a social media bootcamp: a quick way to get up to speed on various emerging technologies and implications for organizations. Monday is the more typical conference day – keynote, panels, presentations.

It’s spring break here and some of us are in a sort of summer mode — an opportune moment for levity. Today we feature humorous YouTube videos. They all relate to technology, so you have permission to watch them at work. [go ahead]

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A Gadsden City Schools survey has confirmed what most of us already know from experience: Technology is a way of life for today’s young people. The school system in January put out a questionnaire at each of its 14 schools, quizzing students in every grade level from kindergarten through 12th about their use of technology at home. The results are impressive. Eighty-one percent of the 2,800

"My description of Singularity University after the first day," Nail said, "is that SU is a new Paul Revere, streaming in to warn humanity that technology is changing much faster than we could have previously imagined, and we'd better get ready." Even for someone like Nail, with a master's in engineering who helped run a company specializing in biotech and robotics, SU's subject matter was a

Microsoft warned of a new hole on Monday that could be exploited by attackers to take control of older Windows systems running Internet Explorer and for which proof-of-concept exploit code has been released publicly. The vulnerability affects Windows 2000-, XP- and Server 2003-based systems. It exists in the way that Visual Basic Scripting, or VBScript, interacts with Windows Help files,

I am always finding websites that I want to remember.
Luckily, Delicious.com is there to help me save and organize bookmarks.
One of the things it's great for is sharing lists of websites with students.
[read more]

In this issue, IT leaders envision the evolution of higher ed, educating everyone globally and openly, and the promise of hot projects such as Signals (academic analytics), CHANCE (teaching plus research), and open initiatives worldwide. Gain fresh insights and explore the latest views of technology in higher ed and how we're "Anticipating the Future of Higher Education."

A further look at the tech behind some of the big Lecture Capture apps, and their entry-level options and scalability.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been learning a bit about lecture capture systems. This week I take a closer look at a few specific products. I am particularly interested in those vendors whose products and licensing lend themselves to easy entry-level access to this technology, in a form that can easily scale up. 

       I am fascinated by the presentation and organization of Educause as a website, and in the theory of reflection upon its subject (educational and institutional technology) in which it engages.  In the spirit of informed, democratic, critical thinking, I would like to make some more general comments by way of focusing attention to several aspects of practice and the assumptions that might inform them:
      1.  The current economy of the United States appears ubiquitously dominated by price discrimination.  What is perhaps even more relevant is that the arbitrage mechanisms that ordinary control such price discrimination are either (largely) non-existent or have been rendered (a priori?) inoperable.

YouTube said Thursday that it will start automatically captioning videos on its site, opening up a huge share of its content to people who are hearing-impaired, and a first step in creating a network of videos that could be subtitled between many languages. For now, YouTube can only transcribe videos uploaded in English into text, which can then be translated into text captions in other languages

For students looking to temper sober textbook readings with a literary escape into the world of vampires and zombies, Oregon State University is loaning out Amazon Kindle electronic readers stocked with the latest in popular books.The Corvallis, Ore.-based university has found it too expensive to fill its Valley Library shelves with fiction and nonfiction books that students would read for fun,

Only about 70 percent of high school freshmen go on to graduate, the White House says. The Obama administration is offering a $900 million carrot to the nation’s school systems to tackle what many view as an abysmal dropout rate that threatens America’s ability to compete in the new global economy. But it’s the “stick” portion of the administration’s plan that has rankled many educators.

Last week we passed the whining stick and gave our readers the opportunity to tell us what irks them the most about their digital work environments. Responding to the poll question, "What aspect of your digital work-life do you find the most annoying?" here's how almost 200 fed-up readers responded:

In the post Updating Google Calendars from a Google Spreadsheet, I described a recipe for adding events to a Google Calendar from a Google Spreadsheet using Google Apps Script. After a quick chat with the person who was compiling a spreadsheet they wanted to use to populate a set of calendars, I revisited the script to make a few tweaks and hopefully increase its usability.

So here’s a glimpse of the spreadsheet they’re using to list dates for various campaigns and channels where related activity might occur. Firstly, we have some columns relating to the event or activity, and the dates on which they occur. The first column (added to calendar) is a control switch that identifies that the calendar details have been updated for that event:

Within the spreadsheet, I set the two date columns to have the Date type (from the Tools menu, set the Data Validation option to Date). I’m not sure how the spreadsheet is (correctly) identifying the US date format (MM-DD-YY) – maybe from a US timezone as a global setting for the spreadsheet?

As well as various other admin columns, there are columns relating to whether or not a channel will be used to support a particular event:

From what I could ascertain, the way the spreadsheet is supposed to work goes along the lines of: someone adds details of an event and the associated channels for the event to the spreadsheet. “Add” in a channel column says that event is to be added to that channel calendar. When the updating script is run, for each event it checks the control column A to see that an event hasn’t been added to the various channel calendars, and if it hasn’t checks the channel columns; if a channel column is set to “Add” the event details are added to that event calendar.

So – how do I need to modify the original script? Firstly, the original script use the default calendar. In this case, we need a separate calendar for each channel, so in Google Apps I created one calender per channel:

We can grab a calendar by name from a spreadsheet apps script using a call of the form:

var cal_broadcast=CalendarApp.openByName("broadcastDemo");

When the script runs, we need to grab the appropriate range of cells from the spreadsheet to see which calendars to update. For testing purposes, I only grabbed a few rows…

var startRow = 2; // First row of data to process var numRows = 4 // Number of rows to process var dataRange = sheet.getRange(startRow, 1, numRows, 26); var data = dataRange.getValues(); for (i in data) { var row = data[i]; var title = row[1]; var desc=row[15]; var added = row[col_added]; //Check to see if details for this event have been added to the calendar(s) var tstart = row[2]; //start time - I have defined the column in the spreadsheet as a Date type var tstop = row[3]; //start time - I have defined the column in the spreadsheet as a Date type var broadcast=row[col_broadcast]; // is this event one to "Add" to the broadcast calendar? var itunes=row[col_itunes]; // is this event one to "Add" to the itunes calendar? etc var youtube=row[col_youtube]; if (added!="Added") { //the calendar(s) have not been updated for this event if (broadcast=="Add") { cal_broadcast.createEvent(title, tstart,tstop, {description:desc}); //add the event to the "broadcast" calendar } if (itunes=="Add"){ cal_itunes.createEvent(title, tstart,tstop, {description:desc}); } // etc for each channel var v = parseInt(i)+2; // +2 is an offset to do with the numbering of rows and the "blank" header row 0; sheet.getRange(v, 1, 1, 1).setValue("Added"); //set the fact that we have updated the calendars for this event } }

In order to identify which columns to use to identify the broadcast, itunes, etc channels, I went defensive (the following bit of code comes before the previous snippet; what is does is to look at each column heading, and then set the column number for each channel appropriately based on its name; I should probably use a similar technique to identify the start/stop dates. What this approach does is accommodate changes to the spreadsheet in terms of the insertion of additional columns or the reordering of columns, for example, at a later date):

var ss=SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet(); var sheet=SpreadsheetApp.setActiveSheet(ss.getSheets()[0]); //need a routine to set active sheet by name? //go defensive var col_broadcast,col_itunes, col_youtube=1; var maxcols=sheet.getMaxColumns(); for (var j=1;j<=maxcols;j++){ var header= sheet.getRange(1, j, 1, 1).getValue(); switch(header){ case "Added to Google (Y/N/Hold)":col_added=j-1; case "Broadcast":col_broadcast=j-1; break; case "iTunes":col_itunes=j-1; break; case "YouTube": col_youtube=j-1; break; default: } }

Running the combined function thus searches the spreadsheet for the appropriate channel columns and control column, checks the control column for each event entry to ensure that the event hasn’t been added to the selected calendars, and then adds the event to the appropriate channel calendars if required.

Playing with the script, it seemed a little bit clunky, so I tweaked it to update the channel cells with the word “Added” if it had been set to Add, and the calendar had been updated:

if (broadcast=="Add") { cal_broadcast.createEvent(title, tstart,tstop, {description:desc}); dataRange.getCell(parseInt(i)+1,col_broadcast+1).setValue('Added'); // Replace "Add" with "Added"; +1 is offset for sheet numbering }

It also struck me that if the settings of a channel was updated to “Add” after that event was updated, that channel’s calendar would never get updated. So I created a variant of the updating function that would just run on a per column basis and update a calendar entry for an event if it was set to “Add”, rather than checking the control column:

function caltestAddtoCal_broadcast(){ caltestAddtoCal("broadcast"); } function caltestAddtoCal(addCal){ //... if (addCal!="") { if ((addCal=="broadcast")&&(broadcast=="Add")) { cal_broadcast.createEvent(title, tstart,tstop, {description:desc}); dataRange.getCell(parseInt(i)+1,col_broadcast+1).setValue('Added'); //+1 is offset for sheet numbering } // ... } }

What this means is is that a channel controller can update entries in their calendar by running the script just for that channel and adding “Add” to any event they want adding to the calendar, the list of “Added” entries showing which events have already been added to that calendar:

Having doodled a script that sort of works, it’s now time to hack it around it so it looks a little more elegant. Which means refactoring.. sigh… and another reprise in a day or two, I guess…?!

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If you're looking for an alternative to more traditional office suites, youmay wish to look at this version of OpenOffice. Their interface is similarto that of other programs, and it contains a spreadsheet application, a wordprocessor, and a presentation manager. OpenOffice also features blogpublishing assistance and compatibility with other applications and filetypes. This version can be used

Baylor College of Medicine is responsible for creating this educational online resource for students, teachers, and parents. The podcast feature of the website is a new one and offers "supplementary standards-based educational activities, research information, and links." The currently available podcasts are by produced by scientists from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI),