Thomas' Work Space

How to restart the LRC student printer station

2011/11/16 plagwitz Leave a comment

On the computer keyboard of the print release station computer, press the windows-key.
This will bring up ("It’s a Windows system! I know this!") the Start Menu.
Choose Shutdown/ Restart from there.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, printer Tags: FAQs, printing

Calendaring: How to view all your Moodle course calendars in one place (like live@edu, Google calendar or MS-Outlook)

2011/11/16 plagwitz Leave a comment

UPDATE: this does work, just make sure to give it some time to update AND to have actual appointments in the time window (length of that window is a setting you can change in Moodle) that you are trying to display.
Static inclusion of syllabus deadlines in your calendar
1. Go to your Moodle Course / “Go to calendar…” / select from dropdown: “Upcoming Events”: “All courses”/ click on “Export Calendar/. Open with MS-Outlook (fails in IE8).
2. Here is showing how: screencast demo loading Moodle’s iCal into MS-Outlook (desktop).
3. This is a static export of all your Moodle calendar information – taught and enrolled courses combined (despite showing in each of your courses. The dropdown: “Upcoming Events” does default to the current course, though).
4. The utility of this (= what “all” comprises, and how helpful the event information is) depends on how the course designers use the Moodle calendar functionality – or allow Moodle to do it for them: For setting a start/end (= deadline) for any assignment or assessment automagically adds this event to the Moodle course calendar.
A potentially even more useful dynamic subscription(that will reflect late-breaking changes, like extended deadlines in your courses or additional assignments)
1. you can get if you right click on and choose “Copy link” from the context menu.
2. I have not found a way to feed the Moodle iCal link manually into MS-Outlook 2010 (Shared Calendars / Add Calendar / From Internet) or OWA (different problem comes and goes. Just subscribe while problem is gone ). In MS-Outlook, you can subscribe to this link via menu:tools / tab:internet calendars / button: new / dialogue new internet calendar subscription / paste the URL you copied.
3. Don’t forget to rename your calendar to something more useful than the default, like “My classes”, by right-clicking and choosing “Rename”in OWA or “Properties” in Outlook2010.
5. Your syllabus deadlines are now always only two clicks away in your Ninermail:
  1. click on “Calendar”
  2. click on checkbox “Moodle”.
What seems not possible with any current version of Moodle is editing/updating your calendar in MS-Outlook and having the changes synch with Moodle, or any import actually – only the opposite direction works. So the tool is more useful for students (who don’t need to edit) than teachers (but still a nice aggregator of teaching information for the latter).
More on Calendar you can find in the official 1.9 Moodle calendar doc and FAQ.
I would prefer to use other calendaring software, but the export options of the Moodle (1.9 and 2.)) calendars are limiting. So I also find myself adjusting the settings when using the Moodle calendar:

Adjusting these settings may also fix the following error in OWA which reads like ICS link is invalid/broken, but may only mean that no events where returned for the time window that Moodle defaults to (with performance reasons, which, however, does not apply if Moodle does not have to return *any* events to your request). In other words: Try expanding the time window for events, e.g. to include the full term.

Categories: audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure Tags: calendaring, moodle, ms-outlook

Is there a better way to cross-link within Joomla?

2011/11/15 plagwitz Leave a comment

I find my best bet to find anything in the hyperlink dialogue is to go to the published site and search for the article. Here I finally found the article in questions, knowing that it lived (“had been filed”?) in “uncategorized”, which the site search results kindly let me know:
Obviously you do want to use the internal URL which should survive DNS-related changes.

Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, e-infrastructure Tags: joomla

Microsoft Contextual Translator

2011/11/14 plagwitz Leave a comment

Certainly an advance over the MS-Word thesaurus (unlike the MS-Word 2007 and up spell check, still not contextual). Does this work at least well enough to serve as a fruitful pedagogical exercise: “Which phrase does not belong in the group?”

Categories: Advanced, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, Beginner, e-languages, English, Intermediate, Speaking, websites, Writing Tags: links, thesaurus

How students access language learning materials on the Library ereserves system

2011/11/11 plagwitz Leave a comment

Note the important update in red below.
This has been tested at post date with Firefox. ereserves seems to be not compatible with Internet Explorer 8: i
On the Library home page, from the top menu: “Research & Course Help”, choose menu item: “Course Reserves” (or, if this menu changes again, I have a hunch that deeplinking may be more stable: http://library.uncc.edu/caos/coursereserve, what’s in a URL…),
sign in with your Ninernet ID,
enter search term
1. select from the dropdown “search by name”, an enter part of your course name in the textbox,
2. or click on tab:”Course Reserves Pages by Instructor”, and from the dropdown, select your instructor,
click search,
then select your course from the results grid.
Enter the password, which has been given to your by your instructor.
In the results grid, click on the desired chapter and tracks. Note: You need to disable your web browser”s “popup blocker”.
In the popup window, click on link: “More information”,
when offered, , like in this screenshot:
you cannot save the file, or rather: only a text file with links to the audio which you cannot play, like rtsp://dlib4.uncc.edu:554/e_reserves/CD1bonneforme12-16.rm). That is by design.
Instead of trying to save, select to “open” the file. You need have a streaming audio playing software installed, like Real Player or the open source VLC-Player.
instead of VLC, as offered by default, like so :
choose “Open with”, “Other”, pick “RealPlayer” from the list, like so:
Here is a more on what does not work with ereserves. The only combination I could get to work with eReserves streaming audio is – see resulting screencast (requires Windows Media Player) of streaming a long file successfully – is RealPlayer 14, Firefox 3.6 on Windows XP3, and that only after resetting the Winsock catalog which I can do for the entire LRC only nownext time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible.

Categories: audience-is-students, e-languages, learning-materials, library-unit, Screencasts, service-is-library, websites Tags: ereserves

Streaming Problems with Realmedia via RTSP from ereserves with VLC Player (and Internet Explorer. And NetOp School)

2011/11/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

VLC-player
1. version 1.1.9, but also currently newest 1.1.11 as well on Windows CXP SP 3
2. opens from IE8 and Firefox 3.6
3. but is not able to play files (tested even multi) through. Rather, it nicely falls on its face, with the audio stream simply appearing to stop, mid-sentence, after 2:38 (pretty consistently – a buffering bug? A great way to slip through pre-testing).
4. In the LRC, I could hardly bring the taskswitcher up, let alone (15 minutes of waiting) the task manager, to even find that vlc.exe is the culprit, with a CPU utilization of 99% solid (Ouch!).
5. Not quite so bad in the office computer where it hovered slightly above 25%, maybe busying only one CPU core.
My Google searches do not find anything quite similar.
RealPlayer 14 to the rescue?
1. In IE8, RealPlayer does not open when clicking on the web page link with the RM file which causes a dialogue to open if VLC-player is the default player, rather a strange unplayable content error..
3. In Firefox, RealPlayer open and plays (and pre-buffers) the stream completely.
4. Note that ereserves “download as zip” cannot serve as a workaround: gives you only the links like http://dlib4.uncc.edu/streaming/media_play.php?file=9364cb66b9e1cae26aed0f471e9eab5b, which require you to re-authenticate, even if in the same browser session, and do not redirect to the resource, neither audio nor web page form which you could launch the audio (in short, I do not get what this download as zip is good for)
5. Next Problem: This may work on my office computer. In the lab we have NetOp School installed. That adds another layer of NetOp School problems which look like they can be resolved ~~next time the lab is reimaged. For now, use instead audio from Moodle metacourses where possible.~~ next time I get around to design and run a Symantec-Ghost Software and File Action on the computers (all LRC lab PCs) and test the result (on PC10) which was now.