Thomas' Work Space

1. (Staff:) Using the departmental scanner which outputs PDF to a network share (that you can link from your desktop). The PDF is searchable at least
2. (Staff & Students:) Using only your desktop, at work or at home:
   1. MS-Office
      1. OneNote 2007/2010: paste image, right-click to access context menu, “extract text”.  Example (you can see it is quick and simple, but not error-free):
      2. Imaging components
      3. Google Apps can also OCR the files you upload to Google Docs. Choose from hard-drive icon for file uploads, context menu: “Settings” / “Convert text form uploaded PDF and image files”.

1. Tired of burning, lugging around, inserting, ejecting, or forgetting, losing, scratching and replacing CD- and DVD- media, or hard- and thumb drives to handle your large multimedia files? Do you have internet and web browser where you need to access and play your files? Then you can use UNCC Google Apps  instead.
2. Go to your UNCC Google Apps (you have to log into UNC)
3. Click on the Hard-drive-icon in the upper left and on “files”, select a video file:
   1. (many formats and underlying codecs supported, including Flash, MOV, AVI, WMV, MPG. File size limits: currently “every user is given 1GB of free storage space for files” (not enough for much HD footage, but difficult to upload, and didn’t Google Drive just increase this limit to 5GB, or does this not carry over to Google Apps? Stay tuned for updates), click “Start upload”..
4. Wait until upload is finished, and then, depending:
   1. if you want to share the file with colleagues, click on “share” (appears after “cancel”) and fill out the dialogue. You can share your file both
      1. inside the university community and
   2. outside of the university community:
   3. if you want to share the files with students in your course, there is a better way using Moodle Kaltura video upload;
   4. if you just want to play the file yourself (including to your students in the classroom), you are already done.
   5. Go to your files and click on the file in the list to play the video:
   6. Also, you can always “get your file back” by “Download”: (and note you can also prevent users from downloading the files. This is useful if you only want to temporarily share it, but later revoke permissions).
5. More help is available from the  from the  source
   1. How save files to your Google Docs
   2. How to play back video files in Google Docs

… and sent us a thick envelope chock-full of these very sweet handwritten thank-you notes.

I have twin nieces their age, so I know that it can take a bit to get them to write these notes (I am looking at you, Miss M…! ).

The little man on the screen they mention, that can talk in tongues is the Microsoft-Deskbot, and the headphones they mention were connected to a Sanako Study 1200 digital audio lab.

I hope we can upgrade all this to Windows 7 this summer, and that the Language Academy will be back next spring to admire it all…

		LRC intrigues Language Learners VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

1. Symptom: Audacity installation seems to complete without error, but attempting to start Audacity at the end of the installation process results in an error about bad environment with the above error code.
2. For your reference: It is has been the missing Visual C++ redistributable installation here in the past on staff computers.
3. Solution: Download and install the redistributable, then try restarting Audacity: It should start now.

1. If you go to our university calendar webpages, you may see
   1. 
   2. a top menu allowing you to select either Year,Month,Week, or Day
   3. a bottom right corner calendar icon (why not the well established ics icon?) which, changing with the view you selected, points to the same (directory) link as the views, but resolves to an ICS file when clicked in your browser
   4. The default action on click is an open/save option: either way, AFAIK, you will download and point your desktop calendar application (e.g. MS-Outlook) to this file. Even if you do this only per year, this is not only tedious, but the hope that nothing will change in the course of things seems futile.
2. The best way  that I have found to make this a live calendar subscription is this: in your ICS-compatible calendar application, where it asks you for the calendar URL, load one of the links provided under the calendar icon, e.g. that for the year. But before clicking “OK”, remove anything (= any filter) after “ical” portion of the link.
3. In MS-Outlook, this procedure looks like this:   , and the result looks like this:  
4. If you open the downloadable ICS, an open it (mental note: are there other iCAL readers to examine the data, short of loading the calendar into your desktop, phone or cloud calendar software?) you will notice that these calendars are a Drupal-based offering: “PRODID:-//Drupal iCal API//EN”
5. Sample Links
1. Calendar examples for your web browser: http://provost.uncc.edu/calendar,  http://registrar.uncc.edu/calendar
2. Calendar year ICS examples for your calendar reader: http://provost.uncc.edu/calendar/ical/2012, http://registrar.uncc.edu/calendar/ical/2012
3. The provost’s calendar includes the registrar’s calendar: Administrative and Academic. the color-coding will be lost in translation when loading via ICS. I have not found a way to load the Administrative calendar separately, to use my calendar application to manage the coloring. 
4. Are there more calendar pages that are of general interest?

1. Sanako Exam is an add-on at additional cost and not currently available in our setup.
   1. Sanako Exam teacher-created content is stored locally, file management beyond that is up to the user. This makes such polls less portable, but potentially sharing within a department might be easier.
   2. Student Results can be identified by student, and saved.
2. View here a screencast demo of how a Sanako Exam can be
   1. authored and
   2. deployed.

1. Panorama with computer numbering in lieu of a layout
2. 

1. You need to be set up as a proxy by the primary approver:
2. Once you have been set up as a proxy:  
3. you can follow the instructions for the dropdown on the approve times screen: 

The new reception desk is meant to secure the entrance to Coed436. To secure the circulation equipment, we do not let students into COED436 anymore, whether they are trying to check out equipment or for other reasons (except if they need to see the LRC coordinator). Hand all equipment to students over the counter. The door to Coed436 has to  be locked when the LRC Assistant leaves the reception desk (it always can be unlocked from inside).

We also carved out 2 small group work spaces in the LRC entrance area. They can be used by language tutors with their students, and by other small student groups, including for assigned film viewing. These work spaces currently do not have to be booked, but they can be. Bookings take precedence over walk-ins. Send meeting requests to LRCRoomCoed433c@uncc.edu (Group1 next to entrance), LRCRoomCoed433d@uncc.edu (Group 2)). The calendar on the reception desk will display the bookings.

We moved 3 more iMacs (with built-in web cameras) into the main classroom (currently available to students only when all other iMacs are in use). All the iMacs in the main classroom actually have now also their own “room”: LRCroomCoed433b@uncc.edu (iMacs), but we are not requiring this “room” to be booked (yet). We are considering this in an attempt to avoid pile-ups of students trying to take video recording assignment. First we monitor actual usage patterns, especially nearing assignment dead-lines.

New “rooms”, and other equipment types are highlighted in green on our list of bookable resources.

1. Learned today that we will begin offering Swahili in the Fall. Here is the place to plan how the LRC can better support it.
2. For starters, I am thinking of adding to the list of our custom configured languages for
3. Windows 7
4. Office 2010
5. Learning materials?
   1. Existing?
   1. FSI, naturally.
   2. There should be more need for producing learning materials in this LCTL.
      1. automated?
         1. Note that the Stuttgart TreeTagger has a Swahili parameter file (gzip compressed, Latin1). The Swahili parameter file was trained on the Helsinki Corpus of Swahili (HCS) and uses a simplified version of the HCS tagset. The HCS was created by Prof. Arvi Hurskainen by means of his Swahili Language Manager (SALAMA) which uses Lingsoft’s TWOL compiler for constructing morphological analysers and Connexor’s CG2 parser for syntactic disambiguation.