FACULTY SPOTLIGHT:DIGITAL VIDEO EDITING FOR DVD PRODUCTION Marcia Ladendorff, Honors Program Listen Now  |
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If you are interested in learning more about video editing and production we invite you to stop by and talk with us, or visit CIRT's Digital Video webpage. |
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| eBOOKS AND TEXTBOOK AFFORDABILITY Deb Miller, Director deb.miller@unf.edu Listen Now |
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Another option to decrease textbook costs for students is the adoption of e-books. Electronic versions of textbooks are typically less expensive than print versions and offer far greater flexibility. Depending on the platform, capabilities usually include basic enhancements like searching, note-taking, and highlighting. Publishers are now trying to jump-start adoption of electronic texts by developing more sophisticated capabilities such as built-in dictionaries, problem sets with self-grading options, and options for sharing notes with classmates. There have been some interesting headlines about e-books and e-book readers in recent months, so I wanted to share those highlights with you along with links to further reading. Amazon has unveiled a larger version of their popular Kindle, the DX, which offers a better display graphic-rich material, such as textbooks, which typically contain a large number of diagrams or illustrations. Its auto-rotating screen turns maps and tables into full-landscape width. Amazon is sponsoring a pilot of the Kindle DX at five universities this fall, including Arizona State, Princeton, Case Western , Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. The project aims to compare student experiences between courses using the Kindle and those using traditional texts and identify courses for which the Kindle is a good alternative to traditional texts. Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch are also an option as an ebook reader, for those who can handle the small screen size. A multitude of Apps are available to display electronic books, from major publishers, independent companies, and even a Kindle reader app. Blackboard ™ announced a Building Block that will allow materials from within the CMS to be sent to Kindle readers as electronic documents. The University Press of Florida is partnering with the state-supported Orange Grove digital repository to provide free textbooks to students at Florida's colleges and universities, with a goal supplying textbooks suitable for all of the general education courses within five years. Computers can also display many of the above-mentioned electronic book formats. Whether one “flavor” of e-Books will emerge and dominate the market is anyone’s guess, but what’s clear is that digital versions of textbooks are becoming more powerful and more popular. If you’re interested in learning more, use the links below as a starting point. You may also want to contact your publishing rep to see if they offer a digital version of the text you use and if so, consider giving students a choice. If you’re interested in exploring the interface yourself, CIRT has a Kindle and an iPod touch available for checkout.
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For a complete list of our fall events, please visit: Also, check out our past events and handouts, sortable by topic: |
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| FREE STUFF: ELLUMINATE VROOMS Dave Wilson, Coordinator of Educational Media, david.wilson@unf.edu Listen Now  |
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It's the start of another semester and I have a great free tool to share with you, Elluminate vRooms. Elluminate sponsors a free online social networking site for educators called LearnCentral.org. It's kind of like Linkedin, but specifically for educators. When you create an account on LearnCentral you get access to a vRoom for up to three people, including yourself. A vRoom is an online meeting place that gives you several different methods to communicate and share information. I'm starting to think of my vRoom as my online communication swiss army knife. You can use it for everything from a video meeting to an impromptu lesson on how to use SPSS. For those of you familiar with Elluminate, a vRoom is exactly the same thing, but without the feature to record your session and the limit of three users.
There are three main tools for communicating in a vRoom. They are text, audio, and video. The text tool lets you type in a message. When you press the enter key everyone in the vRoom sees the message. You have probably used this in the past to talk with tech support over the web or in Internet relay chat(IRC). If your computer has a microphone you can use the Audio tool to talk to the other people in your vRoom. The Audio tool works in a similar way as a telephone. More than one person can talk at the same time. This works a lot like Skype. The final communication tool is video. If your computer has a webcam you can video chat with the other people in the room. You can set the quality of the video you are transmitting so it will work well with your internet connection. People watching the video can set the quality of the video too. You may be on campus recording the best quality video in a vRoom with a student who is using a slower internet connection, watching a lower quality version. |
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| BLACKBOARD NEWS: UPGRADE Erin Soles, Coordinator of Instructional Design, esoles@unf.edu Listen Now |
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Here are a couple of tips that instructors will find useful in the new system. Also, look for a Blackboard tip in Campus Update each Friday:
For the latest information on Blackboard including announcements, status updates, upgrade information, and important system information, visit the UNF Bb Blog at http://unfbb.blogspot.com/. |
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| WHAT'S NEW IN CIRT | ||
New face! We have a new staff member, Michael Boyles, who came to us with the reorganization of the Fine Arts Center. He is continuing to support their events, and also providing graphic design services for faculty and academic departments. Michael received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Florida State University and has accumulated more than 25 years of eclectic experiences. Michael's design credentials cover a multitude of disciplines that incorporate print, environmental design, signage, trade shows, product design, package design, illustration and Web design. He has been with UNF since 2004, working with the Fine Arts Center. Michael is a founding member and past president of The American Institute of Graphic Arts/Jacksonville Chapter. He has taught graphic design and concept for more than 20 years at the college level, as well as advertising, illustration and color theory at Florida State University and Florida Community College at Jacksonville. We are thrilled to have Michael join us, so please stop by to say hi.
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Professor Marcia Ladendorff, of UNF’s Honors program, took several UNF engineering students to the Tamale Children's Home for three weeks in May 2009 as part of the Ghana Project. The Ghana Project focuses on sustainable development in engineering, healthcare, and democratic action. During this trip, students made several improvements to the school’s nursery, enhancing the rainwater harvesting system, installing a water drainage system and a garbage containment site. They also upgraded the outdoor play area. The drainage solutions will eliminate standing water around the home, which is a breeding ground for mosquitoes that infect the children with life-threatening malaria. Water storage improvements will reduce intestinal infections, which the children get from drinking rain water containing high levels of bacteria. At the conclusion of the trip, Ladendorff filmed the students giving a narrated tour of the improvements they had made, as well as an interview with the director of the Tamale Children's Home, Mdme Quainoo. The director spoke about the positive impact of the changes the students made on her ability to do her job and on the quality of life for the children. 
Ladendorff wanted to use the video to document the project’s work and be able to distribute it to others in the form of a DVD. In order to prepare the video footage for the DVD, CIRT staff helped Ladendorff capture the raw video into iMovie '09 for editing. During the editing process she worked with multiple shots, combining the student's narration with illustrative video recorded at a later time. She also added fades between segments, adjusted the audio volume for each segment, added images and titles, and recorded an introduction. Ladendorff then published the video to DVD using iDVD. She also used the DVD duplicator in CIRT to automate the creation of 50 copies. 
In 2008 the Florida Legislature passed a law (
There are many changes to Blackboard now that the upgrade from Blackboard Academic Suite version 7.3 to Blackboard Learn version 9.0 is complete. Blackboard 9 offers several new features including a new user interface, a new Control Panel available from the main course page, assignment options including group assignments and multiple attempts, multiple group creation using group sets and a redesigned Grade Center with inline editing options and multiple calculated columns. Although a major upgrade before the fall semester may seem difficult, the upgrade was necessary as Blackboard will discontinue full support of Blackboard Academic Suite, Release 7.3 on October 1, 2009. 
As part of the university's response to the likely impact of the current outbreak of the H1N1 flu, and at the direction of the provost, CIRT has developed a website to inform faculty of the range of possible course delivery options available for responding to these challenges:
There is a lot going on in CIRT this fall! 
New equipment! Over the summer, CIRT made a variety of equipment purchases. We have upgraded several of our laptops and also now have a netbook available for checkout. A new hard drive camcorder offers enhanced capabilities for high definition and extending recording, often with reduced post-production time. We also have some new small items available for experimentation, including digital tablets, a Kindle, and a new iPod Nano, with built-in video recorder.This newsletter is a publication of the
Center for Instruction & Research Technology at the University of North Florida.
Deb Miller, Editor
Please direct any comments or questions to cirtlab@unf.edu