What is “cetrk.com”?
If you are looking through the code on your site and find a mysterious call to a javascript in the domain “cetrk.com,” you may wonder what it is and if it is a malicious script
Continue readingMonth: May 2010
Enhancing Learning through Technology – Part 2
Scenario-based learning can teach decision-making and thinking processes. Here is an example of the “Labyrinth” scenario-based learning system created in a Scottish medical school which features low fidelity simulations created with just text and pictures – but with great effect.
Each page describes what’s going on and gives a choice of action.
Here you are a doctor doing rounds and a nurse comes in with news about a patient who is increasingly breathless. Your choice here is “Stick with the rounds” or “Ask to see the patient”
If you stick with the rounds, you start wondering if you are doing the right thing, and are soon brought back to the right track -going to see the patient.
Continue readingMultiple JW players on a page, revised for JW Player 4.7
The JW Player is a very popular open-source media player which not only supports many video, audio and image formats, but has many scriptable behaviors. Here we’ll make use of the JavaScript API to generate as many players as you want on a page. The generated players all have separate event listeners to keep them from interfering with each other. Events or actions executed in one player do not affect others.
Article Outline
This is a new version of that was compatible with an earlier version of the JW Player. This one has been updated to work with JW Player 4.7.761 and later.
Enhancing Learning through Technology – Part I
This is a talk I gave recently to a group of educator/trainers within the U of M Health System. Although it contains many UMHS-specific references, the concepts outlined in it can be applied to other training environments as well. There’s nothing particularly original here, just some suggestions for how to select among different technologies commonly available. This was the first part of a two-part presentation. The second part featured tips for creating engagement and improving digital photography.
Best Practice Showcase: Enhancing Learning through Technology
Our team has lots of tools you can use to create online training. There are so many choices, in fact, that it can be difficult to decide which to select when you’re starting a new project.
To help you sort through all the options, I’m going to give you some typical instructional situations and suggest tools that might best support them, without breaking the budget in the process. These are all things you can use – they don’t require a computer science degree to get a good result!
Continue readingDefeat the IE 7 z-index bug
The z-index bug in action
Although Internet Explorer 8 has been widely adopted, IE 7 is still the browser in use at my office, so all new projects must be compatible with it. Even though IE7 was already obsolete when we adopted it, it was a wonderful change from IE 6, because of the reduced need for CSS and javascript hacks, workarounds and compromises in general.
So it was a surprise to realize that an old Internet Explorer 6 stylesheet problem, the “z-index bug” still lingers on. You’ll know you’ve hit this bug when your drop-down menus fall UNDER elements that are lower down on the page. (…I should add: and there are no iframes or frames on the page).
There are several sites that do a fantastic job of telling you exactly why this happens. I’m just going to tell you how to fix it. In fact, if you want to jump to the fix right now, click here
Continue readingFirefox and Java/SCORM issues
Our LMS uses Java applets to transmit SCORM data back and forth between learning activity and the LMS. Sometimes this causes problems, because Java security on various browsers is increasingly strict. However we can usually
Continue readingHow and why to #quitFacebook
After logging in to Facebook yesterday and seeing yet another notice about how Facebook is going to swap my data with just about any site they feel like, I realized I don’t want to have to check their extremely complicated privacy settings every week or two to make sure they haven’t changed something I care about.
Besides being an incredible waste of time, it’s futile: they have made a practice of making significantly bad changes you can’t do anything about. Some of these changes can have real consequences down the road, and I just don’t need that. Moreover, it is not clear what real effect the settings have, in practice. So, since I didn’t grow up with Facebook and I’m not going to go through social withdrawal, it’s out.
Continue readingAdd comments to Google Docs
For some reason it took me a while to figure out how to add a comment into a Google doc. I’m not sure why: the comments function is right under the Insert menu where it
Continue readingSet up Mail.app to handle ALL your email accounts, including Groupwise
A lot of people are unaware that it’s possible to set up multiple email accounts on Mail.app. You can even add your office GroupWise account! This is true for most mail clients, including Entourage and Outlook, but I’m just going to discuss Mail.app here, since everyone’s getting iPads these days, it seems…
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Best Groupwise calendar app for iPad so far…
Novell’s Groupwise version 7 is not compatible with the iCalendar (.ics) format. This makes viewing your Groupwise calendar a challenge on an iPhone or iPad.
In the past, I’ve used a kludgy method of syncing my Groupwise calendar to iCal by delegating any received appointments to a Google calendar, then subscribing to that calendar with iCal. This was hardly a perfect system: appointments would get missed or doubled sometimes. So it was nice to finally find a better solution: “GW Calendar” from Ghost Pattern Software.
GW Calendar allows you to see your Groupwise calendar in realtime in either one-day or week views. It also allows you to forward, accept and decline meetings, but not create new ones or do busy searches. There is no month view yet. And most importantly, no Push notification of upcoming meetings. However it is quite useful for accurate viewing of your Groupwise calendar over the next few days.
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