Tech news dominates the podcast as Courtney Bentley and Ken Newquist talk about Blackboard's elearning patent victory over Desire2Learn, a Tennessee bill that wants to force colleges to prevent online file sharing, Google's new forms tool, the death of HD DVD at the hands of Sony's Blu-Ray format, and a controversial new college gossip web site. In Help News, they look at how to generate a public RSS feed using tags in Google Reader, and preview upcoming technology workshops and brown bags sponsored by ITS.

Getting the Podcast

There are several ways to get the podcast:

• Download the MP3 directly
• Subscribe to the Soapbox podcast rss feed using an aggregator (you only need to do this once; subsequent shows should download automatically)
• Subscribe to the Soapbox feed via iTunes

Show Notes

ITS News

• Waypoint Assessment Pilot in Moodle
• DrupalCon Boston
  • Ken Newquist and Jason Alleyare going to DrupalCon. Expect blogging on Soapbox.
    http://boston2008.drupalcon.or

Tech News

• Blackboard wins patent lawsuit
  • http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/25/2345211
• Tennessee Eyes Bill to Make Colleges Stop Online File Sharing
  • http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2770
• Google Forms
  • Google will let you create a form that will then enter data into a spreadsheet. Excllent!
  • http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-sharing-spreadsheets-start.html
• HD Wars: Blu-Ray Beats HD-DVD
  • http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/070624/2dvd.htm
• JuicyCampus
  • A gossip web site is causing contraversey at Cornell, Pepperdine University, Loyola Marymount University.
  • http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2736/web-site-promising-juicy-campus-gossip-faces-backlash

Help News

• Google Reader Tip
  • You may already know that you can click the "share" icon in Google Reader and have it appear in a public feed. But you can also tag items in your feed with a keyword, and then make the keyword's feed available.
  • http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/09919947475341026676/label/coffeebreak
• Workshops
  • Many, many workshops are coming up.
  • Mapping on the web, Outlook, Photoshop, Illustrator, Moodle for Departments and Organizations, Recording Audio and Creating Podcasts
    • Calendar: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/pages/calendar/
    • Register: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~its/help/workshop/registration
• Upcoming brownbags topics
• Clickers in the Classroom
  • 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m., Wednesday, March 12, 2008
  • Gendebien Room, Skillman Library
  • Chris Ruebeck, Assistant Professor of Economics, will share his experience this semester using the audience response system, CPS from eInstruction, with his 100-student Economics 101 class. See first-hand what makes "clickers" a reasonable yet powerful teaching and learning tool. Lunch will be provided by ITS.
• Coming up: Second Life, Podcasting. Complete schedule available soon

Contact Us

• itsblog@lafayette.edu