Edugeek

Trying to embed a video.

YouTube Video

Maybe you’ve heard of Twitter a bit lately. Or maybe you’ve been living under a great big rock for the past several months. If Oprah has discovered it, then everyone has discovered it.

I use Twitter and I like it. However, I don’t really think Twitter is very useful for communicating about work stuff with the people that you work with. Twitter is great for communicating with people all over the world – but not so good for targeted communciations. That’s where Yammer comes in. Yammer works very much the same way that Twitter does, except that you can restrict it for use by people who have the same e-mail domain that you have.

“Yammer is a tool used to communicate, share, and stay in touch with others in your organization through the exchange of short frequent messages. These messages are aggregated into a feed that is private to your network. Only others with confirmed email addresses from your organization can view and post messages to your feed.” (from the Yammer website)

Our Yammer network name is the lsc.edu, the same as our e-mail address. You can only log in to the LSC Yammer network if you have verified that you have a valid @lsc.edu e-mail address. Once you have verified your e-mail address, you can log in to the network to view and post messages.

Eight of us have been experimenting with Yammer for a few weeks and now we’d like to extend the invitation to any other LSC empoyees who would like to join the network. Here’s how to do that.

Step 1: Go to Yammer.com and click the sign up link. Enter your work e-mail address ending with lsc.edu

Step 2: Check your LSC e-mail account for the automatic e-mail sent by Yammer.

Step 3: Click on the link in the e-mail from Yammer and fill in the boxes as shown below to complete your account creation. Photos are optional, but recommended since this is a private network. Create your own password that you will use to log in to Yammer.

Step 4: This is optional (use skip link if desired). Yammer can create an organization chart of the people in the network. We will not be relying on this chart for accuracy.

Step 5: You will see the people who are already a part of the LSC network. At this point you can choose to follow any, all, or none of these people. “Following” someone means that you will see their messages when they post something. They don’t automatically follow you back, but they can choose to do so. You need followers to have a network. You can always add people or remove them later on.

Step 6: If you use Firefox for your browser you will have the chance to add the Firefox extension for Yammer. Skip this step unless you want an easy way to see messages in your Firefox browser.

Step 7: You will now see you Yammer home page where you can post a message, or read messages from the people you chose to follow.

Step 8: Another optional step is to create a private group. If you want to be able to send messages to just people in your department, a group would be the way to do that without the rest of the LSC network reading those messages. You could have a group for a committee, or any other reason that you might want private communications with one or more other people.

That is all for now. Start Yammering.

We will be launching our new website and our new name for what has previously been called the LSC Virtual Campus. Starting on April 30, 2008 we will be called Lake Superior Connect. Our new website is pictured below:

We believe that this site will be more useful and more modern. A team of college representatives worked very hard to create this site under the direction of Steve Fudally, the Director of Web and Information Services.

The most immediate change that students and faculty will see is that the login to Desire2Learn looks different. You’ll find the new login fields in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, as shown below:

Just as a reminder for some of us with short memories, this is the top page of the website that is being replaced:

Students taking online classes at LSC are asked to submit the class evaluation survey during the period of May 1 – 14, 2007. The surveys are completely confidential and instructors will not receive the results until a few weeks after the end of the semester.

These surveys contain ten questions and should only take 3 or 4 minutes of your time.

To access the surveys, expand the listing called Surveys for the Spring 2007 semester listing, as shown below: (Click on images to view larger photo)

Then click on the survey that you want to enter and submit.

Turns out that the Chinese won’t be reading our blogs here at LSC. You can go to the Great Firewall of China website to see if any URL is blocked in China. One thing I found on my trips over there is that things are not always bloacked in every location. However, it appears the the LSC blog site is blocked. Darn, and I was counting on some of those 1.3 billion people to drive up my page view numbers in the future.

Gary Kruchowski and I are putting together a series of blog training classes for both employees and students.

The first session will be for employees, and especially targeted at those employees who are looking for an easy way to read entries from multiple blogs … such as faculty who have a whole class of bloggers. It is easy to keep up on new blog posts from a large number of blogs if you use the right tools.

Reading Blogs – How to Use a Blog Aggregator
Friday, February 9, 2007
1:00 – 2:00, room E2402
This session will be repeated at least one more time – date and time to be announced.

In this session you will learn how to setup a Bloglines account, how to add feeds to the account so that you can easily see when a new blog entry has been posted, and how to organize the account for maximum efficiency.

Gary K will be leading some sessions in the near future for how to write blog posts and utilize the functionality of the blogs. Stay tuned for more info about these sessions.

The LSC Blogs received a new plug-in the other day. It is the Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA). I do not have it activated on this blog, and I probably won’t be doing so. Can’t say that I care for it much. Here’s a bunch of people who don’t like it at all.

On all of these plug-ins, the default setting is for them NOT to be activated. The only way that they will appear on your site is if you decide to activate them on the Plug-ins page.

If you are annoyed (like I am) by the Snaps other sites, then you can globally turn this feature off (disable) in either of two ways: 1) Click the options link in the top-right corner of one of the pop-up bubbles, select to disable for ALL sites, or 2) The other way is to visit the SPA FAQ, also available from the above box, or directly at\ http://www.snap.com/about/spa_faq.php#2

Do a Google search, you’ll find lots of info about this, both pro and con. BD

Update 2/3/07: in case this doesn’t make sense to you, be advised that the blog administrator disabled the Snap Preview shortly after this post was made.

Steve was having a hard time posting an mp3 file to his new blog site. Here is an example of an mp3 embedded with a flash player in a post.

Total Consciousness

First step is to make sure you have activated the audio player plug-in on your dashboard.

In the Audio Player Options (this tab will only appear after you have activated the plug-in above), I suggest that you choose the third option as shown below. This will replace all links to mp3 files with the flash audio player. Make sure you save your changes.

Now you are ready to embed an mp3 file into a post. In the Write Post editor, Browse to find the mp3 file on your computer and then upload the file.

Browse to the uploaded file and then click on the file link to select it.

To link the mp3 file in your post, choose the “Send to editor” in the drop-down menu of choices.

If you go back to the audio player options, you can play around with the color combination for your embedded players to your hearts content. If you have problems with this, then I failed miserably at this attempt at instruction. Good luck!

The LSC web team has installed various plugins to the WordPress blogging site. Most of these can be very useful depending on your blogging intention. One plug-in that you don’t need to activate is the “List-All” item that will create a list of all blogs on a WPMU (WordPress Multi-User) site. That plug-in was needed for site management, but not for individual blog management.

The first two I’ll talk about have to do with monitoring the amount of traffic to your site. Most bloggers want to know whether anyone is reading their stuff. This requires some sort of stats or analytics monitoring. For someone who already uses the free Google Analytics service, you can easily activate Google Analytics on your LSC blog by activating the plugin and then following the very simple on-screen directions.

For the less geeky (not already a Google Analytics user), you might just want to activate the Fire Stats plugin which will give you a viewer report right on the blog dashboard. It will tell you the number of unique hits, total hits, unique hits in last 24 hours, where the viewers came from (referrer link), most popular pages, browsers used, operating systems used, a “Hits Table” with much more detail about the blog readers.

On your dashboard, click on the Plugins tab. All available plugins are NOT active by default. Click the Activate link for any that you want to use.

Upload your video to Google Video. Embed HTML code here in Wordpress following this process. NOTE: this video is from 2005 and is no longer completely accurate.