Today I tuned into a DyKnow webcast in which several professors from another university talked about how they’re using laptops (without pen technology) instead of tablets. The audio was a little rough and I have to admit I didn’t learn much, but I think the audio capabilities are very promising.
If you’re not familiar with DyKnow, it’s a piece of software heavily used in education as a teaching aide. It combines various presentation technologies, presenting text and images, polling, chat, feedback, user submissions, along with monitoring software to block applications, web access, etc. It’s a pretty useful tool that has come a very long way since we first started using it.
I’d like to see how well this would work in a distance learning or online course application. It’s easy to post some notes, PowerPoint slides, and have a couple of assignments online for students to login and look at. I haven’t seen too many people using the internet for innovative ways to teach. If you didn’t catch it earlier, DyKnow has been working on the integration of audio along with its already useful software package. Now the audio wasn’t necessarily perfect in what I experienced today, but there were a lot of factors affecting that and I know it’s only going to get better in the future.
Just imagine the teaching possibilities of being able to interact with students from afar using DyKnow. Instead of posting some material and assigning some homework, teachers can now interact with their students with audio, video, text, etc. I think this is a big step in making online teaching worthwhile.
At work we’re looking to outfit one of our academic labs with touch screens to be DyKnow ready. Anybody have any recommendations for monitors? I know at DePauw they have these cool touch screens that adjust from being parallel with the desktop all the way to being perpendicular with the desktop. There’s a handy little lever in the back you pull to adjust them.
I now officially have my 3rd DyKnow User Group Meeting under my belt. For some reason I’m not always super excited about going, probably because I usually end up going by myself, but I always immensely enjoy being there. This year I found out that apparently everybody from DyKnow knows about my blog. I remember a year ago or so I was looking at my stats and saw a bunch of hits from their domain. I was a little intrigued but kinda forgot about it. Anyways, this has encouraged me to blog a bit more about some of the techie stuff I deal with.
This year they’ve started up a community web site for all of us users to populate with tips, tricks, etc, etc. I think this is a wonderful idea. I love being able to go to a forum for a software package and troubleshoot my problems using other peoples’ past experiences. I should be posting a few things as soon as my account gets activated. I also wrote up a little report to turn in to my jefe. If you’re interested in reading it, I’ve pasted it down below so as not to bore all you casual readers. Some of the formatting is a little off because things never transfer correctly from Word, but it’s still readable.
Continue reading ‘DyKnow UGM Summer 2007′
Last year in July I went to a DyKnow user group meeting by myself. When I got back my boss and I had a conversation
Boss: So do you have your receipts for me?
Me: Receipts? For what?
Boss: Food.
Me:
Boss: You did stop to get something to eat on the company dime, right?
Me: Uh……..no?
Boss: AMATEUR! Maybe you’ll learn next time.
Well, Monday was “next time” and I’d like to say I learned from my mistake. Jeremy went with me this time and we stopped at Denny’s on the way back. Turned my receipt in this morning and have already been reimbursed from petty cash. Lesson learned folks.
That’s right. I said it. And I mean it too. I just had two of the most amazing grilled cheese sandwiches ever to part my lips, get chewed by my molars and make it’s merry way to my belly. The only sad part is I’m now down to my last two pieces of bread. I really need to go out and buy some food.
Today’s been a pretty good day so far. This morning I had an hour long phone call where I got DyKnow stuff working server side and fixed the new client and everything. Just a couple more things to do, but I don’t have access to do it. I’ve been listening to a lot of RadioAsoell and right now I’m taking a 4hr lunch so I can head back later and then actually get some work done when there’s nobody there. Then I can also turn up my music and not be bothered.
Tomorrow Liz and I are heading to Funlumbus for a last minute visit of sorts. It should be good times. I should also be able to see Phil do his amazing selling of knives. I hear he starts talking and people start pulling out their wallets. Hopefully I don’t fall under his spell too. Other than that there’s a lot of chillin and hanging out on the menu.
Well, I think it’s high time I do some laundry with this long lunch.
Today was kind of a blah sorta day. I got to work early cause I was gonna go see Unleashed but that didn’t happen. Had some annoying things happen at work, then lunch time came….and glorious burritos. Things were on the up and up and I had all afternoon to create the presentation materials for the demo of some software/equipment I’m doing tomorrow for some profs. I had everything done….then silly DyKnow did it’s trick on me again and I accidentally lost all my work. That was it, I had had it. So I left. Played a game on my computer for an hour or so, lifted, came home, did dishes, made up more burritos and then headed back in to work to re-do what I had already done. Took me a couple hours, but I also took in some more of my CD’s and ripped them to my hd at work. I find I listen to more music at work than at home these days. Besides getting constantly interrupted while trying to work this afternoon I also had to drive a girl over to the health center cause she cut herself kinda deep on the mat cutter. People wonder why they don’t cut correctly. It’s cause people misuse it and try to force things when they don’t want to be forced. That’s when things get bent and hands slip and people get gouged by razor blades. An idea was proposed to buy a new one, hide it so general people don’t use it and then leave the old one out for general use. That sounds like a great idea, but I’d give it 3 weeks or less before the “nice” one will get left out and lots of people will use it or somebody will be snooping around where they shouldn’t, find it, and use it while the people supposedly policing this aren’t doing their job.
Well, let it be known that I bailed going to see a movie for sleep. I was just way too tired to go do something so I caught me a 4hr train called nap. I would really like to just lay back down and chill, but I got some things to finish up first for tomorrow morning. I wish my brain was up to speed. I bet a lot of these things would get done a lot faster.
Work was alright today. People were just pissing me off though. Some dude kept yelling the same thing over and over in the other part of the ETC because he obviously wasn’t being acknowledged by whomever. I wanted to walk out there and tell him to shut up. Then every adult type person that walked by and saw me either wearing a camo jacket or it laying on my chair had a comment like, “join the army?”, “get drafted?”, “ready to fight some iraquis?”, “ooooo - look at mr. army man”, “i can’t see you. where’d you go?” and so forth and so forth. Is it just me or are people really dumb sometimes? I’ve been wearing camo stuff my whole life. It’s officially my favorite color and when I was a kid and adults would tell me it’s not really a color I would default to green. I’ve also been getting stupid comments like that my whole life. I know it’s just the fact I’m low on sleep, my lungs aren’t back up to par, all the medicine I’m taking, etc. But dude - I think anybody would get tired of people coming by with their witty quips. Luckily since the medicine and stuff makes me not hungry, I don’t eat lunch so I can leave an hour earlier. So I got to jet at 3:30.
Tomorrow I’m giving a demo on tablets and showing off the DyKnow software. I just hope I can talk loud enough and clearly enough for people to understand me. Still working on getting back to talking normal. It also doesn’t help that the more I move around and talk, the more it tires me out. Oh well, the week is almost over. Oh yeah, and I’ll be showing up to that class again after my brief sabbatical. I was kinda sad to miss last thursday and didn’t really care on tuesday. I think I have to make up a quiz about sports. That shouldn’t be too bad.
News of the day -
My hermanito finally bought that mexican flag hard hat he’s been drooling over for ages. I can’t wait to see him wearing it. It’s gotta look awesome. Work flew by today which was nice. I figured out today I gotta lose 6.5 hrs from the extra I was there last week working on those new machines. Today for lunch I took some tortillas, put spaghetti sauce on them, covered them with little pepperonis and topped it off with cheese. It’s amazing how much tortillas, cheese and an oven can brighten your day.
On the way back from the DyKnow training session my boss was telling me about trying to walk his dog around town this morning. He was gonna make two laps but wimped out after just one. It sounded pretty hilarious to me, but that’s one of those things you probably shouldn’t laugh at when told. It has been pretty freaking cold though. If I didn’t wear my trusty hat and have the beard going I think I’d freeze to death.
Tonight for supper I whipped up some scrambled eggs with lots of onions and some mushrooms and made some tacos out of em. Time to go check on that cheesy garlic bread.
Hey it’s a post - “post 171″ world now. Nothing really seems different. It’s sorta like your birthday. It’s not like you feel any older…you just are. Well, not much has been happening. Still working on those stupid Tablet PCs. Put in 3hrs this morning working on them. We had to scrap the image I was working on and just try to install the DyKnow on top of the basic Gateway crap. Now I just have to cross my fingers that the wireless works in there on Monday. Supposedly they’ve had 50 people connecting to one WAP before. This cart has 30, but there’s gonna be a lot more bandwidth being used than when they had the 50 users. Oh well, we’ll find out I guess.
Today is official ‘get stuff done day’. I’m cleaning stuff, getting stuff picked up, organizing some things and listening to music. The lineup today has been Gipsy Kings, Postal Service, Eels, Elliot Smith and Muse so far. I also need to get some thank you notes written from Christmas stuff. I’m so behind.
Well, back from Columbus. Definitely a good trip. It’s always great hanging out with friends from college. Not that they’re way better than “other” friends or anything but I guess I’ll just stop trying to dig a hole on that one. Usually on these excursions we come up with a new quote or something like that. It’s weird how one phrase can just keep coming up over and over. I think our phrase this weekend was, “I haven’t lied for two days.” There was also this little dance thing but that’s pretty hard to convey in text. Made a trip to the Steak and Shake where ‘another pib dude?’ got started and visited Schmidt’s for a sausage buffet lunch where The Snake’s ‘meat headache’ happened. Got to see Ed and Annie but unfortunately missed Phil. Ed told us he got into a bit of a wreck Saturday morning so I hope he’s alright. He’s not in the hospital or anything - which is good. Had a good time tormenting Soulman’s cat, tossing the disc and watching Seinfeld, Simpsons and a couple movies. Now Soulman will probably spend the next week or so trying to figure out if we ‘borrowed’ anything.
Very thankful the power is still on and all that. Right now I’m busy getting all that laundry done that has piled up. I added an email thing off to the right. A few people have asked me what it is every once in a while and this’ll be one way for people to find it easily. I wrote it funny cause there’s those lovely bot-things that grab crap off of web sites and stuff. Also fixed the link for Griff’s blog.
Got in on a ‘religion’ conversation on another blog. Always love hearing what people have to say about that kind of stuff. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes. Unfortunately a lot of conversations like these don’t go anywhere because the people involved can’t calmly and civilly debate/discuss.
Looks like I get to clean some stuff up and get geared up for another exciting week of work. I think I need to get a set of 30 new tablet PC’s up and ready to go for Dyknow Vision. It’s this cool thing where the Prof’s screen is shown and he/she can draw whatever since it’s a tablet PC. They can also pull up any student’s screen to show the class an example. This can also be used to make sure students are actually working instead of just spacing off in class. Definitely not something useful for every class, but a great resource nonetheless.
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