“Community colleges and high schools would receive federal funds to create free, online courses in a program that is in the final stages of being drafted by the Obama administration. he program is part of a series of efforts to help community colleges reach more students and to link basic skills education to job training. The proposals are outlined in administration discussion drafts obtained by Inside Higher Ed. A formal announcement could come in the next few weeks” More on Inside Higher Ed
News
Now there is a resource for folks interesting in learning how to create and design accessible documents and websites and evaluate products for accessibility.
CSU ATI Professional Development Website is now available. It can be found at:
http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/
The site currently includes links to training materials developed by CSU campuses and outside agencies. Phase 2 will focus on developing video tutorials in the areas of greatest need so users can learn directly online.
The goal is to have a single source of training materials, resources and best practices that can be used by every campus.
I just heard about CopyGator, a free service designed to monitor your RSS feeds and find where your content has been republished in the blogosphere. They automatically notify you when a new post of yours is copied to another feed & show you how your content is being duplicated, quoted or plagiarized.
[Thanks, Nancy!]
On Friday, the CSU Council of Library Directors (COLD), based on recommendation of the Electronic Access to Information Resources (EAR) Committee, voiced support toward submitting an Expression of Interest to join the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). The CSU Expression of Interest includes a monetary pledge of funds toward HEP journals.
This initiative aims to convert high-quality HEP journals to open access.Funding bodies and libraries contribute to the SCOAP3 consortium, which in turn pays centrally for the peer-review articles. More information on the SCOAP3 initiative can be found at http://www.scoap3.org.
“On March 13, the library faculty at Oregon State University (OSU) announced the school has adopted its own, Harvard-like OA mandate, the first in the nation for a library faculty.” Read more at Library Journal
And on March 20th, “in a move aimed at broadening access to MIT’s research and scholarship, faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the Web.” In contrast to Harvards Open Access policy (which applied to the FAS faculty), the MIT vote is unique in that it applies across the whole university. Read more at MIT news
While I immerse myself in technology, I sometimes forget that there are many folks out there - including teaching faculty - that struggle with integrating technology with their teaching to enhance student learning.
Never fear - the University of Manitoba has launched an online “Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning” (HETL) that is specifically written for educators with suggestions on how to incorporate technologies in their teaching and learning activities.
As for me, I can particularly appreciate the info they’ve included on change cycles - whether it is warming folks up to the idea of a digital campus archive or negotiating the campus transition from paper to electronic theses - I frequently think about strategies to improve (and accelerate!) the diffusion and adoption of new ideas, processes and technologies.
Mike Miller and I will be participating in the webinar series on institutional repositories, organized by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS). We will be talking about how we have translated the value of an institutional repository to campus leaders, faculty and other key campus groups. There are several other interesting presentations in this same webinar series — check it out!
We all know how a computer works, right? But try explaining the basics to the uninitiated…not so easy.
Here’s what you do next time: send them to commoncraft. Folks at commoncraft present a 3 minute explanation of the basic parts that make computers work: hard drive, RAM and micro-processor. They also feature other tech-related topics “in plain English”.
Several resources are available for folks looking to make their Word and PDF documents ADA accessible. Here are a few resources that I’ve found particularly helpful.
Adobe Accessibility Training
http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/accessibility/training.html
Whether you want to learn how to access electronic information more effectively or how to create accessible content, there are a variety of training resources available from Adobe.
CSU Accessible Technology Initiative
http://ati.calstate.edu/
CSU individuals involved in the Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI) on campuses and the Chancellor’s Office to communicate and share information about Accessibility related topics. Recently, ATI sponsored a webinar on creating accessible PDF documents from Microsoft Word and have announced an upcoming webinar entitled “PDF Accessibility for Advanced Users” for March 2009.
Cal Poly ATI Resources
http://www.accessibility.calpoly.edu/instmaterials/index.html
Resources include how-tos on creating accessible Word documents, PDFs, Powerpoints and other eLearning materials. Information on closed captioning (video) and accessibility how-to videos and training are also available from this site.
Professional Development for Accessible Technology in the CSU
http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/access/
Photo by wonderferret
Recently, I was looking for a digital file and realized the only place I had stored it was on a zipdisk - which is completely inaccessible from my computers. As a digital archivist, I was cursing myself. I should have known better. If I had only migrated the information to an accessible medium, I lamented. Even so, would the files of yesteryear accurately render using today’s software?
CBS Sunday morning had an excellent story on datarot, outlining the issues of format obsolescence, access and migration issues. And they provided some good advice on the care and feeding of your digital files - migrate to new formats, refresh old media and store media in a cool, dust free location.
A few additional digital curation tips: keep a “hot copy” on an external backup harddrive and (contrary to what most think) do not forget that digital is a fragile medium. Just think of the time you lost all those iTunes songs or vacation photos when your hard drive crashed…!
Call me a heretic, but if the lights go out tomorrow, the only things you will be able to access are the hard copies. So think about how you will preserve your most treasured digital items. Existing technologies (such as paper & tape) might not be sexy, but they have proven themselves much more capable of persisting over time.
