Faculty feature: Nature of Mathematics
July 27, 2010
Bill Ross, professor of mathematics, has embraced the blog as a platform for his newly created first-year seminar course, Nature of Mathematics. Inspired by Jake Kulstad’s workshop Blogging to Supplement Course Work, Bill created a Wordpress blog. It will stand as a web site housing his syllabus, lecture notes, assignments and references to required readings.
Bill’s extensive lecture notes section will undoubtedly serve as an invaluable resource to his students — and likely those outside the class who want to further their understanding of the mathematical concepts he covers.
As far as technology goes, Bill’s even tasked his students with creating several video proofs. I look forward to watching those and learning about the variety of technologies that students use to capture and produce them.
The semester hasn’t even started, and Nature of Mathematics has already become a model blogs for UR faculty using the blog as a course management tool.
Faculty feature: ‘Heroes’ blog
July 21, 2010
In February of 2010, Scott Allison, professor of psychology at UR, wanted to start blogging on the characteristics of heroes to promote his new book, Heroes: What They Do and Why We Need Them, co-written with leadership professor George Goethals. To get started, he made an appointment with his technology liaison, Allison Czapracki, who presented him with blogging options and taught him some best practices of blogging, a little bit about HTML and Google Analytics, and ways to incorporate multimedia into the blog. Scott chose to use the Wordpress platform, and hit the ground running.
In just five months, he’s written 50 heroes pieces, reaching a worldwide audience on his blog and garnering nearly 3,000 Twitter followers. Congratulations, Scott!
In 2010-2011, Scott is integrating blogging into his two “Heroes and Villains” classes, a first-year seminar and a senior seminar that focus on the significance of heroes and how they shape society. Scott said that students in both classes will be required to read entries from and leave comments on the Heroes blog, and will be blogging about similar heroes and linking to Heroes posts.
To read Scott’s blog, check out Heroes Today.
Follow Scott on Twitter: @heroestoday
Distracted Much?
July 19, 2010
Do you often find yourself trying to be productive but getting sidetracked by Wikipedia, The New York Times, or (gasp) Farmville?
Brian Croxall of The Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker describes six apps that can help boost your productivity while working electronically. Most are for the Mac, though Freedom runs on Mac or Windows. I tested out SelfControl, a free Mac app that let me blacklist web sites for a designated period of time. The blacklisting can’t be undone by uninstalling or rebooting. Since I’m not addicted to Facebook and wouldn’t miss access to it, I chose to lock myself out of it for a few hours. I received an error when I tried to access the site. I think I’ll like TimeOut, too: It makes you take short breaks from your computer at intervals you set, precluding you from doing anything on your Mac.
6 Ways to Avoid Letting Your Computer Distract You [Chronicle of Higher Education]
Powerpoint 2007 with Multimedia
July 14, 2010
Here are the links provided in the “PowerPoint 2007 with Multimedia” workshop:
My PowerPoint Handout can be downloaded for future reference.
Download this sample PowerPoint File: PowerPoint2007
Download this file for sample graphs: Excel 2007.xlsx
Safari Books can be consulted for more information – Access via library Research Databases
Presentation Zen is an excellent reference, check it out here!
Ribbon Customizer is an interesting tool to check out if you don’t like the Office Ribbon.
Do you have the Compatibility Pack installed on your non-Office 2007 Computers?
Excel Tips and Tricks:
July 12, 2010
Here are the links provided in the “Introduction to Excel 2007″ workshop:
Download this file: Excel Sample Files
VTC – www.VTC.com — Email me if you would like an account
Safari Books – Access via library Research Databases
Ribbon Customizer
Do you have the Compatibility Pack installed on your non-Office 2007 Computers?
Useful Tips and Blogs… Check them out:
http://chandoo.org
http://excel2007.tips.net
http://spreadsheets.about.com
office.microsoft.com
Quick-start guide to making three types of charts:
Start by highlighting the data you want to chart (as shown with the black outline), go to the “insert” tab, and select the appropriate chart for you data arrangement. These examples have not been edited, and still need to be cleaned up and have their axes labeled. The point is this: If you start with your data properly organized and labeled in your worksheet, it will make the chart-creation process go much more smoothly.
Simple Bar Chart (the legend is redundant and can be deleted):
Complex Bar Chart with legend:
Quick Scatterplot:
