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Room and Equipment handling using MS-Exchange Resource Mailboxes: Configuration with OWA instead of PowerShell

2011/08/30 1 comment
  1. As once can easily find documented for MS-Exchange 2007, if you are the owner of the mailbox, you can use the OWA-feature “open other mailbox”.owa-open-other-mailbox1
  2. As impersonated user  for this mailbox owa-open-other-mailbox2, you can access the “Options / Settings”:
  3. for the “resource” scheduling owa-open-other-mailbox-resource-mailbox-options-scheduling
  4. for its “calendar”
  5. owa-open-other-mailbox-resource-mailbox-options-calendar
  6. This is maybe not as much fun as PowerShell’s Set-MailboxCalendarSettings and set-CalendarProcessing (click as you go, no batching), but easier on your MS-Exchange admin Smile and especially practical for quick modifications and tests,
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-manager, documentation, e-infrastructure, service-is-library Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Resource Calendaring: LRC resources in the Global Address List (GAL)

2011/08/30 3 comments
    1. Open the GAL for resources by clicking on “Resources” in a meeting request, like here:owa-window-new-meeting-request-resources-marked
  1. You will find an equivalent of the LRC bookable resources list in Outlook’s/O’WA’s Global Address List.
  2. In the GAL,you can  filter by recipient type: outlook-gal-rooms
    1. the result, in outlook: outlook-gal-room-list
  3. for LRC resources, especially other than rooms, it is easier to filter by name(all LRC resource names start with “LRC”) – the result,
    1. in Outlook:gal-lrc-resources
    2. in OWA you will see the GAL as part of the address book owa-lcr-rooms-GAL
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Resource Calendaring: How to cancel meetings in OWA

2011/08/30 4 comments
    1. View instead a short screencast how to cancel meeting requests in OWA.
    2. Or: You start out with a meeting request conversation like this, showing:
      1. a request send from account LRC help (example)
      2. an accepted meeting response  from the resource (e.g. the room) account
    3. owa-cancel-sent-items-meeeting-request-icon-vs-mail-icon
    4. to cancel that meeting, you can go to your (!) calendar in OWA,
      1. select (click on) the meeting and choose “delete”
        1. either  from the context menu after right-click the meeting
          1. or  from the ribbon after selecting the meeting
        2. if the meeting was repeating/recurring, you will be given the option to
            1. cancel this occurrence
            2. cancel all future occurrences
            3. cancel all occurrences (be CAREFUL not to delete past meetings that have taken place; cancel all future meetings in a series by updating the meeting series end time (leaves past meetings of the series intact))owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-delete-series
    5. you can also just open the meeting and choose from the top menu the “Cancel meeting” button, then press menu button: “Send update”:
      1. owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-occurance-open-ribbon-cancel
        1. Again, for recurring/repeating meetings, you will be asked to confirm what exactly you want to cancel, the individual occurrence or the entire series of meetings:  owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-occurance-open-ribbon-cancel-dialog
      2. You have the opportunity to include an informative note in your update before sending.
      3. owa-cancel-calendar-meeting-occurance-open-ribbon-cancel2
    6. After the cancellation has gone through, this is how the results will look like in the e-paper trail:
      1. “sent items” owa-cancel-sent-items-meeeting-request-icon-vs-mail-icon
      2. a cancelled meeting conversation in your “inbox” in “conversation view”: owa-cancel-conversation-views-meeting-request-icons-accepted-declined-canceled-icon
      3. Here is a complete icon legend: 

        4. owa-cancel-conversation-views-meeting-request-icons-accepted-declined-canceled-icon-marked

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, Screencasts, service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

LRC Outlook/Exchange 2010 Resource Calendaring: How staff view resource “Calendars from your organization” in OWA

2011/08/30 6 comments
  1. Note: Students that have not been specifically invited to share a calendar, must use (staff may also) this approach to view calendars, to avoid a permission problem .
  2. Staff can load resource calendars, but as somebody who books the resource (except where you still cannot book/schedule/sign up: Tutors), you normally neither need nor want to (unless you manage the resources).
    1. To preview the free/busy schedule of the resource, use the scheduling assistant instead.
    2. To make sure that you have booked the resource, load your OWN calendar instead: Since it is you who “meets” with the resource, your meeting will be reflected on there. If you also loaded the resource’s calendar, you would see your “meeting” twice. A meeting always appears in the calendar of all “participants” – only that, other than for resource calendars, you normally do not view the calendar of the other participants who are “human resources”(or maybe you are, at least in the scheduling assistant, but not with details beyond “busy”).meeting-request-view-in-calendar-both-personal&resource_thumb_thumb
    3. You may want to load the resource calendar to learn details about the other “meetings”of the resource (e.g.  which conflicting meeting organizer you can contact in an emergency, or to know how many tentative meeting requests are already pending for a tutor). Below is how:
  3. Similarly to in Outlook (desktop): outlook-mycalendars-shared-calendars-open, in OWA, click on the lower left “Calendar-icon” calendar-iconto unfold the “My Calendars” list my-calendar-icon  in the left pane, then right-click on “My Calendars”, choose “Add Calendar”owa-mycalendars-add1 .
  4. put (part of) the name, click “ok”owa-mycalendars-add2
  5. if there are multiple matches, select the correct one (you can only select one at a time)owa-mycalendars-add3
  6. press “OK” again: owa-mycalendars-add5-search.
  7. As explained above, there is little reason to go overboard and add too many calendars, unless you have to manage: lrc-calendars-outlook
  8. However, you can also easily remove calendars, through the context menu item “Remove shared calendar” owa-mycalendars-add9-remove
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, service-is-library, training Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

List of LRC rooms, equipment & tutor hours that can be booked or checked out

2011/08/21 10 comments

The LRC has 98 resources (in black letters and green (NEW Winter2012) versus purple is w/o email address and booking is still paper-based; yellowis broken;red: is missing), that, per new procedure since Fall 2011 (explained in one screenshot), from NINERMAIL or MS-Outlook (Desktop), using their email address listed in column address@uncc.edu, can

  1. be booked online by sending meeting requests (all, except ccurrently tutors&LRC assistants. See column “users” for who is allowed to book).
  2. or whose schedule can be viewed (all by staff; the calendars that can be viewed/subscribed to by students are indicated by “View” below)

Note that as of Winter 2012, physical items can only be picked up and returned when the CIRCULATION window LRCCOED436 is open which is less often than the LRCAssistant is present at the RECEPTION desk. Please check both calendars (solid color = service available = good ) before booking AND (latebreaking changes) before picking up.

The following table comprises only rooms, hardware and “human resources” of the LRC. The LRC’s physical media and learning materials can be checked out using a different system.

In the table, the column “program” explains which department and study program this resource is available for (the LRC supports LCS, and film studies there in particular, and ELTI), “user” who within the study program is allowed to book the resource (teacher, students, LRC staff, including both assistants and tutors), “resource type” whether the resource is a room/office hour, or a piece of movable equipment,  “address@uncc.edu” which email address to send a meeting request to (shortform because of NINERMAIL length restriction), “display name” which searchable name you can find the email address under in NINERMAIL (includes tutors’s languages, explanation of room, camera and other equipment type), “make and model+manual field” the make and model of equipment items, including a link to the online maniual, if applciable, “calendar” a link to the publically viewable calendar of the resource, “max hours” the maximum duration a resource can be booked for (in hours, or 0 if there is no limit), and the “components” columns contain a parts list  for movable resources.

You can also filter, by clicking on the column header triangles, or enlarge (or hold CTRL and press +), or, if you are friends with the UNCC-LRC, edit.

Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, e-infrastructure, faculty-equipment, film-studies-equipment, Metrics, service-is-library Tags: ,

How to efficiently find help on this blog

2011/06/10 Leave a comment
  1. Searching
    1. Full-text search: quick, even though dumb (“Computers are only machines…”). It may not return the most relevant results. wordpress-fulltext-search
    2. Human-curated search: The author adds metadata to his posts as he sees fit. The metadata vocabulary is somewhat stable from past experience, but may change (”The author is only a human.”  Smile). You effectively execute a humanly-curated search when clicking in the right column on either
      1. a tag link, e.g. wordpress-tag https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/
      2. a category link, e.g. wordpress-category
    3. Humanly-curated and Boolean AND search combined: This can be powerful in drilling down to an answer to a specific problem – provided there is one on the blog.
      1. Even though there is no easily clickable interface for this, by building URLs in the web browser address bar address-bar-multi-tag-search, combining tags or categories with the plus-sign, you can execute an AND-search against multiple tags(or categories) on WordPress.com
      2. Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/ finds posts that the author related to both Moodle and eRepository. This can be especially useful for searching the FAQs: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/faq+[add your problem-technology-tag here, e.g. Audacity]/
  2. Notifications: Subscribe to RSS-feeds to receive timely updates on the topics that matter most to you.  Both
    1. WordPress.com, providing RSS-feeds for all categories and tags (click on a tag or category link and find the wordpress-rss-linkicon, it will link to the RSS feed – Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle/feed/) – watch either the webpage or your browser GUI for orange RSS icons you can click on to initiate a subscription  -and also for multiple categories/tags (even though this feature is even better hidden, you need to construct a URL in your browser address bar. Example: https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/tag/moodle+erepository/feed/). If you want to go beyond our own metadata, WordPress allows also for subscribing to your own searches via RSS: “To keep up with your favorite search results we offer an RSS feed for all search results. Simply click the Follow this search via RSS link in the side bar of any search results page to subscribe to updates in the search result”, consult the WordPress search documentation.
    2. and MS-Outlook, making RSS-subscriptions look familiar like email (of importance in certain environments), greatly facilitate this.
  3. Text-messaging: Get synchronous human help through the Moodle-Wimba Room link. wimba-room-quicklinks
Categories: blog, e-infrastructure, service-is-documenting Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Potential Moodle-compatible replacements for Wimba Voice

2011/05/05 Leave a comment

With the demise of Wimba Voice on campus, Languages and Culture Studies lost some of their online learning acitivities and are still looking for a replacement, perferably within Moodle.

I have looked through some options and would recommend the following applications for a test install:

1. NanoGong, free (as in kittens). More info here:

https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/introduction-of-nanogong-free-open-source-voice-recorder-for-moodle/

2. WebSwami, a language learning platform, not free, and can also record video, and do much more. More info here:

https://plagwitz.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/webswami-a-moodle-compatible-language-learning-platform-for-self-access-homework-asynchronous-distance-learning/

Categories: e-languages, Greek (ancient), service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, software Tags: , ,

Introduction of NanoGong, free open source voice recorder for Moodle

2011/05/05 2 comments
  • This is a brief summary outline of NanoGong (which has just been upgraded to version 4.1, which includes an installation file for our current Moodle version 1.9.8), would be a good audio recording add-on for language learning to install in our Moodle learning system. What follows is  compiled from various online sources:
    1. “NanoGong is an applet that can be used by someone to record, playback and save their voice, in a web page. When the recording is played back the user can speed up or slow down the sound without changing it. The speeded up or slowed down version of the recorded sound can be saved to the user’s hard disk, if he/she wishes
    2. There are special features for programmers, such as the ability to show or hide parts of the NanoGong interface or to completely control what the applet does.
    3. The NanoGong applet has been released as an open source project since version 3. The picture below shows the NanoGong applet with all components shown. “
    4. nanogong-interface
    5. “NanoGong provides a very simple and transparent voice support for Moodle. Using a NanoGong activity and a NanoGong filter NanoGong provides two different types of voice support for Moodle”:
    6. “An extended HTML editor which supports voice-enriched content”, “ enabling a voice recording option for virtually any Moodle activity entry that uses the wysiwyg toolbar”, as you can see  here:
    7. nanogong-htmlarea
    8. ”A NanoGong activity which allows students to submit voice messages to their teachers”:
    9. nanogong-acttivity2
  • Questions remain:
    1. You can customize the recorder applet: Need to check whether this includes the timestretching capability, given that language teachers can be averse to student-controlled,
    2. Need to check for capability of downloading batches of submissions from the student class and grade it with time-saving techniques, like described here using Audacity. A more sophisticated example that testifies to the same features required to get graders adopt increasing audio student submissions was Web Audio Lab, an authoring system for developing interactive audio-based language courses (Language Resource Center, Cornell University. 2003-2007): web-audio-lab-grading-interface-FIG025_print1
    3. web-audio-lab-grading-interface2
    4. How could one implement a dual-track recorder using NanoGong, with the program track providing aural cues for a more natural oral interaction?
    5. Requires JAVA (test compatibility).
    6. There is no Moodle 2.0 version yet.
    7. NanoGong seems “a derivative of the Gong standalone voice board”  – without similar requirements and issues? Gong can also be integrated into Moodle, seems more advanced, but also much more difficult to implement (requires a tomkat server; problems have been reported with losing course deletion functionality in Moodle, the authentication pass-through not working from Moodle and the audio graph not working in Moodle).
    8. As with any open source project, there are some move Ifs.
    9. However, Nanogong seems the free audio recording plug-in for Moodle which is currently most favored.
Categories: e-languages, service-is-evaluating-learning-tools, software Tags: , , ,