The upcoming town hall informational sessions and vendor
demonstrations of the new LMS candidates (the potential replacements
for WebCT) are coming soon.

You can find the dates/times/locations for the town meetings and vendor demonstrations at the project’s website http://www.cofc.edu/it/tlt/lms/.
This site also includes sections for the project overview, Q & A,
timeline, and updates.

I am including both the town hall and the demonstration dates, times and locations below.

Town Hall Informational Sessions
4 individual sessions have been scheduled to accommodate faculty’s teaching schedules

February 11 (Mon) Tate 202 11:00-12:00 and 12:00-1:00
February 12 (Tues) Tate 202 10:50-11:50 and 12:15-1:15

Vendor Demonstrations
Feel free to come and go as schedules permit.  All sessions will be held in in Beatty Center, Wachovia Auditorium

February 18th from 2-5: Moodle – Moodle 1.8.4 demonstrated by MoodleRooms
February 20th from 2-5: Sakai  – Sakai 2.4.1 demonstrated by Serensoft
February 26th from 3-5: Blackboard – Blackboard Learning System
February 28th from 3-5: ANGEL Learning – ANGEL Learning Management Suite 7
February 29th from 2-4: Desire2Learn – Desire2Learn Learning Environment

Powered by ScribeFire.

The Addlestone Library Thursday at @ Three Sessions kick off this Thursday with a session on basic web editing using Nvu.  Not only is it the easiest web editor to spell, Nvu is also an easy to learn open source web editor.  If you want to know how to edit web pages from scratch without ANY prior knowledge, experience or clue, come to this session and learn how.  Descriptions of this and additional sessions are listed below.

Sessions will be held in Addlestone room 120 from 3 – 4:30pm.  Class size is limited to 22 pre-registered attendees per session.  Participants may register for a session by contacting Jared Seay via email with subject line: LIBRARY SESSIONS (seayj@cofc.edu) or leaving a voice mail (953- 1428) and indicating the session and date they wish to attend.

January 31st: Thursday @ 3-4:30pm in Addlestone 120
“Who do that Nvu like you do?”  with Jared Seay

Nvu is a new open source web editor that looks very similar to Composer with more bells and whistles.  If you have no clue what Composer is, forget that first sentence and come to this session anyway.  You will learn how to painlessly create web pages from scratch with this free downloadable software. No prior experience with web editing, technical expertise or knowledge of HTML (or any other multiple letter acronyms) necessary. This session will be repeated on February 21.

February 7th:  Thursday @ 3-4:30pm in Addlestone 120
Google For Scholars with Sheila Seaman
This session will feature of a wide variety of techniques and resources to support College level research including:

Google Scholar

Google Books

Advanced search techniques for Yahoo! and Google

A search engine that searches only .edu sites

Links for locating images and multimedia

Hands on searching throughout the class

February 14th:  Thursday @ 3-4:30pm in Addlestone 120
Basic PowerPoint for Lovers (and everyone else) with Jared Seay

Nothing says “I love you more than technology itself” more than a Valentine PowerPoint presentation.  This session will not only give you the ability to effortlessly impress your Valentine (or not), but show you how you can do even more useful things. Learn how to create a PowerPoint presentation from scratch by creating slides that include graphics, animations, and hyperlinks.  No prior experience (or great knowledge of) PowerPoint necessary or expected.

February 21st: Thursday @ 3-4:30pm in Addlestone 120
“Who do that Nvu like you do?”  with Jared Seay (repeat from Jan 28)

Nvu is a new open source web editor that looks very similar to Composer with more bells and whistles.  If you have no clue what Composer is, forget that first sentence and come to this session anyway.  You will learn how to painlessly create web pages from scratch with this free downloadable software.  No prior experience with web editing, technical expertise or knowledge of HTML (or any other multiple letter acronyms) necessary.  This session is a repeat of the one of January 31.

All Sessions will be held in Addlestone room 120 from 3 – 4:30pm.  Class size is limited to 22 pre-registered attendees per session.  Participants may register for a session by contacting Jared Seay via email with subject line: LIBRARY SESSIONS (seayj@cofc.edu) or leaving a voice mail (953- 1428) and indicating the session and date they wish to attend.

Additional sessions will be posted

Coming Soon: MS Excel for the Clueless and Hyperlink Heaven: Blink and Link

For more information contact:
Jared A. Seay, Reference Librarian
Head, Media Collections
Addlestone Library
College of Charleston
Charleston, SC 29424
Reference Office: 843-953-1428
Media Collections: 843-953-8040
Email: seayj@cofc.edu
Web: www.cofc.edu/~seay

with Cara Delay, assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston.

Are you looking for intelligent conversations where feminism isn’t a bad word? Or just want to know what feminism is? Join us at Third Thursdays, a monthly series of informal conversational salons for campus and community.

This month Cara Delay will share the insights and techniques that are hot in women’s history.

• WHEN: Thursday, January 17, 2008, 5:00-6:30 p.m.
• WHERE: Arnold Hall in the Jewish Studies Building, 96 Wentworth St.

Free and open to the public.

Women’s and Gender Studies at the College of Charleston
Maybank Hall, 119
Charleston,, South Carolina 29424
843-953-2280
www.cofc.edu/wgs

Presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Barack Obama will speak as part of the Department of Communication’s Bully Pulpit Series on Thursday, January 10, on the College of Charleston downtown campus.

This event will take place outdoors in the historic Cistern Yard, in front of Randolph Hall at the corner of St. Philip Street and George Street. Gates open at 11:00 a.m. Late arrivals may be directed to overflow seating.

A ticket is required to attend this event. All tickets are free. A large block of tickets will be distributed to College of Charleston students. Tickets cannot be reserved via phone or e-mail.

Beginning on Wednesday, January 9, at 9:00 a.m., students, faculty, and staff of the College may pick up tickets for this event at the Stern Student Center Information Desk on a first-come, first-served basis. A College of Charleston photo ID is required to pick up tickets. Until all tickets are distributed, each student, faculty, and staff member may have up to two tickets. The Information Desk will end ticket distribution no later than 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 9.

The Obama campaign also will be distributing tickets for this event. For information, please visit the website:

http://sc.barackobama.com

For more information about the Bully Pulpit Series, please visit the website:

http://www.cofc.edu/bullypulpit

Please address questions about Senator Obama’s visit or the Bully Pulpit Series to the Department of Communication at 843.953.7017.

_______

Michael Haskins
Executive Vice President, External Relations
Division of Marketing and Communications
College of Charleston
Charleston, SC 29424
p: 843.953.6461
f: 843.953.5663
e: haskinsm@cofc.edu

Street Address
175 Calhoun St, Room 223
Charleston, SC 29401

Recently I was asked how to download a YouTube video and save it to a USB flash drive that could be played in a Technology Classroom.

The downloaded video files are generally in FLV format (Flash Video) which is an Adobe standard for video compression that has become the web standard for delivering online video (replacing Apple QuickTime, AVI, Windows Media and Real rm formats). Why? because Flash Video can be viewed inside Macromedia Flash Players which is shipped by default with most web browsers. The Problem? The FLV files have to be converted to another format if they are downloaded and viewed on your computer (or in this case a technology classroom).

As I was looking around I found a new program (new to me) at http://www.mediaconverter.org/ that allows you to download the file directly from YouTube (or Dailymotion, MetaCafe, Veoh, LiveVideo, Blip.tv and others) and convert it online.

I tested it using a YouTube VLOG file from a classmate and found that it has different saving options (I chose .mov for a Quicktime file but if you are going to use it in a PC technology classroom at the College you might want to use a .avi file instead since I am not positive that they have installed a FLV viewer on the classroom image and the default is likely to be Windows Media for the PC Technology Classrooms and Quicktime for the Apple Technology Rooms)

The conversion took about 10 minutes (for the download and conversion – so if you use this you might want to open it up and get it started and move to something else while it is working).

Some things to note:

• The quality is compressed so that you can fit it on a USB key ( the test file was 13meg – given this, the video won’t look good full screen)
• If you need full screen quality you should really download the file to your computer and convert is using a video file conversion program or download a FLV player to your laptop.  I suggest
  • Mozilla’s video-downloader add-in to capture the video. It can be downloaded at: http://lifehacker.com/software/downloads/download-of-the-day–video-downloader-firefox-extension-170659.php)
  • iSquint for converting the files. iSquint can be downloaded at: http://www.isquint.org/
  • FLV Player to view downloaded videos from your local machine.  Another nice alternative is the Riva FLV player.

Curious? Take a second to look at 10 Interesting Things You Can Do with YouTube or Google Videos. The article includes helpful tips on find free Flash (FLV) players and provides advice on how to split a large FLV file into smaller playable video clips.