I learned a new word the other day:

phe·nol·o·gy n.

1. The scientific study of periodic biological phenomena, such as flowering, breeding, and migration, in relation to climatic conditions.
2. The relationship between a periodic biological phenomenon and climatic conditions.

Over on the place site, there is an area devoted to the phenology of Shelburne, VT. Poeple can send in observations of their local environment, and they get listed on the site for all to see.

It’s been a bit quiet around here lately … too quiet. So quiet that I think I’ve been on the verge of becoming a Bad Blogger. This has partly to do with the fact that I am now posting to the CTL blog, so some posts that would have been going here are, and will be, showing up there.

However, at the risk of becoming even less focused, I’ve recently started a new blog project. It’s actually more of a podcast/screencast project, and despite the cheesy name, I’m hoping to use it as a place to store, categorize, and disseminate instructional material. As always, comments, suggestions, and criticisms are welcome. Enjoy!

During our recent colleague tea session on web tools in the classroom, we talked about ideas for using images on the web in the classroom. Image repositories were discussed. Scott McLaughlin from Archeology (and History, and Education), mentioned that some of his class projects include field work such as taking pictures and creating rubbings of gravestones. This made me think of the online photo sharing service Flickr as a possible image collection and organization tool. Here are some of my thoughts on how this might work, the benefits and possible pitfalls that might be involved in such an endeavor.

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Okay, so I haven’t used a pirate-themed title here in a while. Now that that’s out of my system, I just wanted to make a quick note about the brand new CTL blog. Some of the stuff we’ll be posting over there include materials from workshops, as well as links and discussions of tools and resources we come across. You can find out a little more about it in the welcome post. To get your daily dose of the “lighter” side of CTL served up piping hot, you can also subscribe to the main feed as well as comment feeds in your favorite reader. Enjoy!

Last week, Rob brought to my attention a post asking about displaying math equations in flash on the ever-so-chatty Chattyfig Flashcoders list.

Since I had just been doing some research on the subject, it seemed like a good opportunity to pull together my notes. Here goes.

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With an eye to improving the useability of MT on campus, I’ve come across a few plugins that I’ll be investigating. The last one may have some odd license issues, so it might not pan out, but we’ll see.

• spamlookup
• enclosures
• MT-PhotoGallery
• Feeds.App

Some of these have impacts on upcoming projects, while others are addressing existing concerns, such as spam. The spamlookup plugin sounds quite promising, especially since MT hasn’t yet implemented a real spam management solution, instead taking a spam prevention approach. While the effectiveness of these approaches is a discussion in and of itself, I am inclined to agree with the former, and thus am looking forward to playing around with this plugin.

UPDATE: Spamlookup, though we installed it, is included in the default MT 3.2 upgrade. Enclosures is running fine, and people-are-a-podcastin’. I’m not convinced of the usefulness of the photogallery plugin, and it looked a little awkward to install and use anyway, so I’m giving up on that one. Feeds.App sounds pretty useful, but I’m still not sold on the license, and the justification for spending the $$.

I’ve set a few themes up for MT, and with gracious help from CIT’s Mike Austin & Jim Lawson installed the necessary plug-ins to make them work. Here are some instructions for installing a theme on your MT account.

NOTE: The following should be considered to be in “Draft” form, and has not been fully tested. Once it has gone through more thorough testing, I’ll move it over to the Blogging@UVM site. Also, as with any such process where data might be overwritten, you may want to backup your existing content (see import/export in the MT documentation).

UPDATE: These instructions have moved. The documentation you see here remains for archive purposes only, and should be considered out of date. (more…)

Purpose: Create electronic slide viewer that is portable, flexible, allows for annotation of slides, and side-by-side layout of images.

Implementation/Tools: Flash interface (largely written in ActionScript 2.0) for end user (instructor presenting/students viewing), PHP/MySQL backend to create/organize individual presentations.

Features: Users can “Zoom in” on individual images; instructor can save a “snapshot” of the presentation and generate a zip file of it for download; images can be sub-titled; descriptive notes can be displayed; platform independent (requires only a browser and recent version of flash).

Last spring, Bill Mierse came to us looking for a way to enhance his Art History lectures - something which would allow him to do more than the traditional slide projector could. While he had been thinking about digitizing them somehow, he wasn’t sure how to go about it.

With assistance from students in the TechCATs program, we scanned in over 400 slides and uploaded them into CONTENTdm (a digital database/repository product recently purchased by UVM Libraries).

At the same time, we worked with Bill to develop presentation software with which he could build annotated slide shows for use in class, using the images in CONTENTdm. With a few clicks, he can publish these slide shows onto the course web site for the students to review.

We will soon be working with another faculty member who teaches the same course, but with a number of different images. With this software they can pool all of their images into CONTENTdm, and yet build personalized, annotated presentations that can be archived and displayed online. In addition to Art 005 (Bill’s course), other faculty members have also begun using CONTENTdm for their courses, which include Art 006, Art 196, and Art 172.

Purpose: Provide a series of interactive tutorials for use in math018.

Implementation: Flash UI, PHP/MySQL/XML backend.

Features: Users (students) can be tracked in terms of how they use the materials; tutorials can provide a series of self tests for students;