problem – Kent Matsueda

iPad Only?!

Updates: see the comments below this post…

Two days ago, I took my work laptop into the shop for warrantee work on the keyboard. Since then, I’ve been doing almost all of my work on my iPad. I have a personal iMac that I could use, but mostly as an experiment I wanted to see if I could use my iPad for work. It’s generally been a success.

Not surprisingly, there are a few things I cannot do.

I logged in with my personal iMac to view a course assignment that featured the WC Peer Eval tool. It is an antiquated tool and would not run in Chrome or Safari on my iPad.
I’m limited by what I can do in the Smartsheet app, so I have to make sure I’m using it in Safari.
A number of the hot-keys do not work the way I expect, so I’m not as fast performing a number of functions I’m used to.
I use my iPhone for Zoom, mounted on a stand above my iPad because the built-in camera on my iPad has me “looking down” at everyone. My camera also cuts out whenever I switch to a different app during a meeting to do things like update or view the meeting notes.
I’ve lost the ability to keep a large array of items in my clipboard. Having an app to do that on my laptop saves me a lot of time on certain tasks. Thankfully, the MacOS ecosystem allows me to copy something on my iPhone and paste it immediately onto my iPad without having to do anything.

I am surprised that the smaller screen really isn’t a big problem, but I’m used to working around that. Unlike many of my peers, I haven’t used an external monitor once since we switched to remote work back in the spring.

Using the College’s virtual machine also helps because it allows me to access a “full desktop” right from my iPad.

What’s the purpose or benefit? Well, I have a lot more confidence and knowledge of being able to work remotely with very little while not having to sacrifice any productivity.

Troubles with O365 Permissions and OneNote

Jon was having issues with not being able to edit pages in our team’s OneNote notebook. He reminded me that we dealt with something similar when he first started working here and that I was able to fix that issue pretty quickly, but something must have changed since then because those pages are a subset of the larger notebook that we’re now having issues with.

We believe we have a working solution: SharePoint > Site Contents > Site Assets > Options > Share > Who would you like this link to work for? Specific People > Apply > [add email address] > Send.

This appeared to work for his laptop and iPad when accessing OneNote using the web interface, not the native apps. Hopefully this is the solution we’re looking for. We’ll know in our upcoming Weekly Office Meeting.

I tried a slightly different approach that worked temporarily, but didn’t lead to a permanent fix: SharePoint > Site Contents > Site Assets > Options > Manage access > adjust permissions to “Can edit.”

Where’s my site?

A couple of days ago, I went to return to my blog to post something about participating in Jake’s ADG back in August, when to my surprise, I had lost access to my site! It looked like it was deleted 🙁

The support team at CampusPress quickly restored my with a brief explanation, “This looks like a strange cache issue that shouldn’t happen again.” Well, I hope not.

They are actually still looking into the problem because I cannot view the site from my list of sites. I’ve recorded a screencast of the problem: https://youtu.be/mahzuW5qYos. Hopefully, they will be able to fix the problem quickly.

This raises a couple of new questions.

What is my backup strategy? I don’t have one now, but you can bet that I’m going to look into how I can export my site and save archives of it if possible. WordPress is capable of that.
Are there any other missing sites? I can’t seem to find any missing sites, but I might just be forgetting something.

UPDATE! I just realized that my site was listed there, but with the same title as the “main” sites.psu.edu site. So, what I thought was a duplicate before is actually my site. I have to see if I can rename the listing so that it stands out differently, but it looks like things might be OK.

Fire drill fiasco?

We just had to evac IST and objectively speaking, there are a number of issues I think we need to address (not necessarily in any order).

We have to update the safety monitors for each section of the building. A lot of us just went through office moves and our responsibilities may have changed since then.
We have to update everyone about meeting points, shelter spots, and how to manage students.
We need to figure out a plan for the bridge. When is the bridge closed? How do we close off traffic? What about the street traffic? I know we cannot do anything legally about the street traffic, but that is a serious vulnerability as well.
We need 2-way comms between safety monitors. Instant communication among the entire group and independent of cellphone towers.
We may need to consider emergency lighting in the building. I just took a look around and I didn’t see a thing.
We may need to be clear about egress routes and temporary signage for elevators.
We need to make sure all faculty and staff know about evacuating the building when the alarm goes off.
We need a way to inform people about when it is OK and not OK to enter the building.
As the SAC represents different areas, the safety monitors should be responsible for informing their respective areas of any changes or reminders of what to do in threat situations. Our goal should be to develop an aware and able individual, not allow a sheep-mentality that looks to authority for well being.
What happens after 5 PM? Who’s around to assist the students then? Perhaps we should assess and determine the preparedness of the students as a whole.
What about coordinating with EECS on the other side of the building?

I should mention that I am one of the safety monitors, or at least I was before my office move, so much of this is my responsibility. Ultimately, we have a whole program in Security and Risk Analysis here at the College. It would be a shame to have something happen and not be as prepared as we could have been.

I don’t want to sound entirely negative. Lisa Ammerman and Peggy Stanton have done a great job organizing the safety monitors on our side of the building and we’ll continue to look to them for future leadership.

iOS App Bloat

I have downloaded hundreds of apps which isn’t a lot, but managing them across multiple devices and platforms can be a huge pain. I’m all for downloading an trying new apps, but I need a way to reduce the clutter. I just got an iPad and am finally dealing with this head on by hiding unused apps in iTunes. Doing so, will make that app unavailable in the future to other machines and devices. I won’t solve my problem entirely, but it’s going in the right direction. I found this article that does a pretty good job describing the process and implications of hiding purchases. I still have new apps to purchase on top of all of this.

My Process:

check out the app on a device
delete app from device
delete app from iTunes
hide app from iTunes Store
repeat

Accessibility: Triage Web Remediation

Christian gave a great presentation about how the PSU community can triage (turn one huge problem into a queue of smaller, more manageable problems handled through an iterative process) our commitment to the NFB agreement.I’ve posted my initial notes online.I…

I’ve posted my initial notes online.

I had a number of questions, but the big one for us would be: Does triage apply to our course content? We would expect that the “long tail” of any of our given courses would look different from a “normal” website since every page should expect to see significant traffic. How do we even go about gathering data on web traffic? Should we be using Google Analytics?

Using a patch cable to record system audio

This is the method I used to record system audio while creating Captivate and other screencasting movies using software that doesn’t provide drivers to capture that audio. By system audio, I’m referring to any sound that isn’t external to the computer. More specifically, it could be a YouTube video I’m trying to capture, or a project from Audacity, or even the playback of a segment from Adobe Connect 8.

purchase a patch cable (example from Radioshack)
plug the patch cable in to connect the headphone (out) and mic (in) jacks – I have a docking station that has jacks that I use for this technique; they are visible in the far right-hand side of the image below
temporarily set the playback or audio out settings to the headphone jack (“Speakers / Headphones” option visible below)
set/verify that your system will capture audio via the mic jack (“Dock Mic” option visible below)
record your desktop content
return the audio out settings to their original output (USB headset in my case) so that you can listen to your newly recorded content

I just leave the cable installed on the dock so that I only have to adjust the output source whenever I want to capture system audio.

Audacity is a great tool for testing out a quick recording. Keep in mind that some of the names for the input/outputs may appear differently.

I did test the audio capture and I didn’t seem to have any sync issues.

A tough time for Outreach

I was in a “VP Awards” meeting this morning with Craig Weidemann, the VP for PSU Outreach. I was a little surprised at first that he began the meeting with a question about morale around Outreach in the context of these awards. One of the things I like about working with Craig is that he wanted to hear what everyone in the room had to say about the topic.

We had a pretty frank discussion about the recent organizational-change impacts here at Outreach. We agreed that recognition and awards are important in this time of transition for Outreach. Craig followed-up with an accurate analogy that stressed the importance of tradition and recognition of the things that mean a lot to us in spite of what is a stressful time for many.

Someone was brave enough to share some personal and professional reflections on the effect of a few lay-offs around the organization and a message they had received that it would be a good idea to “seek other employment.” They asked the question to consider the impact of getting an award while you’re standing in the unemployment line.

After some discussion, my response was that “good work is good work” and that recognizing someone is not dependent on whether they were laid-off. Craig added something to the effect that lay-offs are different than firings.

Here in the World Campus, many things haven’t changed since before the RESET. However, I work a lot with others from different units. Some of these units don’t exist anymore. Some don’t have job descriptions yet. It was interesting to note that it appeared that 4 of the 11 of us in the meeting have either been laid-off or have dealt with the impacts of loved ones that were laid off. Since my wife doesn’t work right now, I can’t even gauge the impact of me losing my job.

So when I hear “I’m so busy,” I can’t help but think “be happy to be so ‘busy’ and more importantly what can I be doing to do my best, push my own boundaries, and make life/work better for others?”

Not having taken the Authentic Conversations training yet, I don’t yet understand the connection between us being “authentic” with one another and new changes to our culture (can true cultural change be mandated?), since I never saw that as an operational problem in the committees, cross-functional teams, and in my day-to-day work. If someone had just come by and asked me, I would say that we have other problems, but talking is one of them. People here love to talk. All one has to do, simplistically speaking, is listen, ask questions and take action-planned, collaborative, and timely. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself before the training.
<!–Saying good bye to colleagues
OHR has helped to place 7 of the 8 PSPB workers that were laid-off
4 of 11 have either been laid-off before or have been effected by it
i am the only one working in my family
craig: difficult balance between living in the numbers and focusing on our great work
awards look good on a resume
people falling through the cracks
are we at square one?
wake-up call this morning–>

RHS 301 Student having problems Copying&Pasting from Word into MT4

I’ve been trading emails with a student who’s apparently having problems moving content generated in a desktop word processor, I think it is Word, into his MT4 blog. I just made a test and things look good for me. So I’ve asked for his URL and original document. He worked with the Helpdesk after speaking with Linas and suggested that he use WordPad as an intermediary. That apparently helped, but didn’t solve his problems. I won’t be able to offer any additional assistance unless I see his originals.

Anyone else having problems with copying and pasting docs from the desktop into MT4?

Example from this document (Blooms and Question Types.docx):

E-learning and Assessment

Version 4.

Reference http://wiscinfo.doit.wisc.edu/teaching-academy/Assistance/course/questions.htm

The education strategy (March 2004) has highlighted that Bristol University:-

1. Is a “research intensive” university where the student learning experience is informed by research and is delivered by research active staff.

2. Wishes to retain its high quality teaching.

3. Needs to widen access and to look at diverse progression routes into HE.

4. Needs to expand postgraduate numbers – particularly on taught masters programmes

5. To retain their highly rated international research output and to deliver high quality teaching, requires that teaching is cost effective.

Whilst E-learning has a relevance to all of these points, this paper will focus on point 5 i.e. the requirement for teaching to be cost effective. The contribution of E-learning to assessment is a major area where substantial gains in efficiency can be achieved.

Currently staff spend a significant amount of time

1. setting examinations

2. ensuring that they match course learning objectives,

3. liasing with the external examiner

4. marking

5. exam related student administration

Much of this activity is repeated at least twice per year and sadly the outcome is often only summative rather than formative. Several staff within the university have already adopted CAA (computer aided assessment) as a means of addressing this problem and have found pedagogic as well as efficiency gains. However this approach has not yet become embedded. Reasons for this limited uptake include:-

MT4 doesn’t like PNG’s

Just a little head’s up to my fellow ePortfolio bloggers… I just discovered that MT4 prefers JPG images over PNG’s. If you try to add a PNG and want to have MT4 create a thumbnail, you’ll get an error. Just…

When uploading your images, I highly recommend saving the images into a folder called “images” so that your root directory doesn’t get mobbed with random images. You’ll have to type in the name of your folder every time however and the folder doesn’t show up when you click on the “Choose Folder” list in MT4, but rest assured, it is there.
You may also want to clean up the HTML a little bit. Just switch the editor into “HTML mode” and delete “<br /> <div><br /></div>” or similar extra code at the bottom of your page.