The topic at this week's session of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays is "Student-created Video". Stop by and learn about what can result when you put cameras in your pupils' hands.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Bass Library, L01
Here's a Yale resource you might not know about--the Film Study Center. It has over 20,000 films in its collection, in formats ranging from good old fashioned celluloid to cutting edge Blu-ray. If you're a student or a professor, you can check them out and bring them home (well, most of them anyway), and if you're not you can view them there in one of their two viewing rooms or in one of their twelve viewing booths. To see what they've got, search their collection either in Orbis and in their own database.
The best thing, if you ask me, is their clip capture service. If you want a film clip to stick into your PowerPoint, for a class lecture or maybe for a research talk, you can get it with the clip capture service no problem. You can do it yourself or just have them do it for you. And of course you don't have to be a film scholar to incorporate video into a class or talk. Film clips liven up talks about literature or history, and why not even science? A little video interspersed among those bar graphs might be just what you need to jolt your audience to life!
This week's workshop at StatLab is aimed primarily at those who have little or no statistics background but will need to incorporate data analysis into their papers, i.e. senior thesis writers, beginning grad students, and professors who haven't taken statistics since grad school. The workshop will cover fundamental questions of statistics such as these:
- What is regression?
- Correlation or causation?
- What is
significant?
The primary software applications used will be SPSS and Stata. This workshop presumes understanding of basic research methods and will focus on quantitative analysis.
Friday, October 24, 2008
3:00 to 4:30
124 Prospect Street, Basement
Stop by the School of Engineering Student Center on Monday, November 3, 2008, at 12:00 p.m., for an introduction to high performance computing at Yale. You'll learn about Yale's high performance computing facilities plus how to request and manage accounts, get help, submit jobs, and interact with the PBS queue. The session will also include an overview of the software and tools available on Yale's clusters, including compilers, MPI libraries, mathematical libraries and the Totalview debugger.
Monday, November 3, 2008
12:00 to 1:00 p.m.
Engineering Student Center, Dunham Laboratory
Presentations by Paul Gluhosky, David Frioni, and Brian Dobbins
A light lunch will be served.
This week's workshop at StatLab is on Matlab, which is comprised of a high-level language and interactive environment with a relatively shallow learning curve when compared to traditional programming languages such as C, C++, and Fortran. MatLab is the de facto application for econometrics and visual modeling of algorithms. This class offers a very basic introduction to the application GUI and coding mechanisms. Basic statistical understanding is expected.
Friday, October 17, 2008
3:00 to 4:30
124 Prospect Street, Basement
The topic at the next session of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays is "New Ways of Teaching with Images". Come join our eclectic mix of people from the faculty, the library, and ITS to learn about and talk about the pedagogical possibilities of pictures.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
1:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Bass Library, L01
A post on Bitesize Bio got me bouncing around the web and eventually to the Wikipedia entry on PubMed. Down near the bottom of the page I found links to a bunch of alternative interfaces for the venerable index. There's GoPubMed, which organizes your search results, and which the Bitesize Bio post was about. There's eTBlast, which lets you an entire paragraph instead of individual search terms. And then there's the one with the name that cracked me up, ShrubMed, which focuses on herbal and internal medicine.
This week's workshop at StatLab is on SAS, an extremely powerful suite of statistical and data mining packages that can be very useful - when not overwhelming. SAS is the gold standard in publishing for clinical, medical and marketing data analysis, and it's free for Yale Students. This class offers a basic introduction to the SAS's interface and coding mechanisms. Basic statistical understanding is expected.
Friday, October 10, 2008
3:00 to 4:30
124 Prospect Street, Basement
This week's edition of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays session will highlight wikis as teaching tools. A wiki is a page or set of web pages designed to allow anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content. The collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are now being used to create collaborative websites for teaching purposes.
Matt Regan, Instructional Technologist in the Instructional Technology Group, will introduce wikis, and Anders Winroth, Professor of Medieval European History, will discuss his use of a wiki in History 210. Winroth's wiki, Early Medieval WikiDiki (short for WikiDictionary), is a useful internet encyclopedia for students studying early medieval Europe and an even more useful learning experience for the students who wrote and edited it. Gloria Hardman, Classes*v2 Support at CMI, will also attend to respond to questions and discuss the collaboration with Professor Winroth in creating the wiki in the Classes*v2 site.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
1:00 p.m.
Bass Library, Room L01
The next Map Collection workshop will be "Finding GIS Data and Preparing It For Use." It will be held on Wednesday, October 1, 2008, from 1:00 p.m to 4:00 p.m, in room L06 of the Bass Library. Here's some more information:
Geographic data can come from a variety of sources, including your own database files and spreadsheets, federal, state and local governmental agencies and commercial vendors. This workshop will focus upon dependable sources of commonly used GIS data, common data file formats, projections & coordinate systems, scale, aggregation, metadata, and issues of sources and citation. Special Attention will be given to downloading and preparing Census data for use in GIS software.
Please register.
From the web site for Yale University Library News:
The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library and the Kline Science Library have purchased access to more than 2,000 e-books in the Springer Medicine and Life Sciences packages. They can be accessed through SpringerLink. Each title will eventually be represented in Orbis, Yale Library's online catalog.
You've of course heard of wikis and databases, and maybe you've even wondered for a moment how you might use these latest and greatest web tools for research. Well, if you'd like to see an example, click on over to The Modernism Lab. It's a great illustration of how the web can be used to leverage the collaborative efforts of a group of researchers and to manage the output of their research and analysis. The project is the work of Prof. Pericles Lewis from the Department of English and the Instructional Technology Group.
ITG hopes to use what they've learned from building The Modernism Lab to build similar web sites in support of other teaching and research efforts at Yale. They've named this nascent platform Ynote, and they'll be talking about it at next week's session of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays. Their presentation is next Tuesday (of course), September 30, 2008, at 1:00 p.m., in the Bass Library, room L01.
Here are two more tools you can try out to keep files and folders synchronized among computers. Both are Windows only, and I haven't tried either.
ArcGIS is powerful software for mapping geospatial data, and it's available for free to everyone at Yale. Stacey Maples over at the Map Collection will run a series of workshops this fall on using ArcGIS. The subject matter will range from a general, hands-on introduction to more in-depth topics such as displaying data collected with a GPS. Register here.
The library has scheduled this fall's EndNote workshops. There are two, and the first one has already filled up, so if you want a spot you should probably register for that second one right now!
(Just in case you don't know, EndNote is software for managing references and creating bibliographies. The library has a ton of information about it on their web site, including about a dozen video tutorials.)
Teaching with Technology Tuesdays is a seminar series hosted by the Collaborative Learning Center over at Bass Library. The talks are introductions to new technologies and how they can be used to enhance instruction. Many of the talks focus on how to use the latest web technologies to get words, images, or video out to the world, and what researcher doesn't want to do that more effectively? This week's session was about how Yale professors are using Facebook to deliver materials to their classes and to foster interaction. Next week is about geospatial data collection. Here's the schedule for the semester, and if you can't make it, you can always read about what you missed on the CLC blog.
StatLab will host a workshp on Stata on September 19. (That's tomorrow!) It will run from 3:00 to 4:30 and be held in the basement of Brewster Hall, 124 Prospect Street.
Stata is a popular integrated statistical program used by academic researchers across campus, especially in economics, political science, and EPH. This class offers a very basic introduction to the application GUI and coding mechanisms. Basic statistical understanding is expected.
The full schedule of this fall's StatLab workshops is here.
I posted a couple of days ago about methods for synchronizing files between computers, and I'd like to tell you a little more about a couple of the options I mentioned, FolderShare and Dropbox.
FolderShare is a product that Microsoft acquired a few years ago. Its full name is Windows Live FolderShare. To use it, you specify a folder on each computer that you would like to synchronize. For instance, you might want the Documents folder on your office computer synchronized with the Documents folder on your home computer. Once you've set that up, if you add a file to the Documents folder on one computer, FolderShare copies it to the other computer. Same if you delete or change a file. And you can specify up to ten folders to synchronize.
I tried FolderShare a couple of years ago, but I didn't use it for very long. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think it did a few things with a few files that I wasn't comfortable with, and you have to be really confident in software that automatically overwrites and deletes files. I remember writing them about the problem, and I think they said that it didn't work that well with the latest version of Mac OS X, but like I said, it was a pretty long time ago.
As for Dropbox, I've been using it for three days and I like it a lot. Unlike FolderShare, in which you specify existing folders to synchronize, Dropbox creates a folder (named DropBox) on each computer and sychronizes only that folder. I like this because it makes it easier to specify and limit the files that Dropbox is synchronizing. (Of course there's no reason you couldn't create a special folder just for synchronizing via FolderShare.)
There's another big difference between Dropbox and FolderShare. FolderShare is peer-to-peer, which means that there's no middleman handling the files between your two computers. With Dropbox, by contrast, the files in your Dropbox folder are first copied from your computer to a Dropbox computer and then to your other computer. This is kind of cool because it means you can access the files in your Dropbox folder using the Dropbox website if you happen to be away from both your computers. On the other hand, you might not like the idea of some company out there having copies of your files.
I just learned of this resource in an email from its director, Dr. David R. Soll at the University of Iowa. Here's what he wrote:
Dear Fellow Biologist,
I need your assistance!
The problem. Besides my duties as a professor and research scientist, I am the director of The Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank (DSHB), a non-profit National Resource developed by the NIH. The DSHB banks and distributes hybridomas and the monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) they produce at cost (e.g., $25, rather than $250 to $700, per ml of supernatant, and $135 rather than $350 to $450 for hybridoma cell lines). Our collection is mainly against animal cell targets. Last year we filled approximately 27,000 orders for hybridomas or antibodies worldwide. Recently we were selected to bank and distribute all of the hybridomas that will be produced by the National Cancer Institute Clinical Proteomic Diagnostics Initiative, an estimated 10,000 hybridomas.
So why am I contacting you? The DSHB is still not being utilized by all of the biologists who could benefit from it. This is a concern, especially in this time of decreased funding when every penny counts. If you are not already familiar with the DSHB, check out our website (below).
If you are a virologist or microbiologist, we would like your help in a new venture. The DSHB has now embarked on a new mission, to generate a second bank, the DSHB-Microbe, that will collect, maintain and distribute at cost hybridomas and their mAbs against antigens of viruses, bacteria, fungi and protozoa. It will provide you with relevant hybridomas and mAbs at a fraction of the commercial price and relieve those of you who have made hybridomas from the burden of maintenance and distribution. Most importantly, it will facilitate research on viruses and microbes, as the DSHB has done for animal cell research.
Use us. And, help us grow. If you have generated any hybridomas against animal cell antigens or against viral, bacterial, fungal or protozoan antigens, bank them with us for distribution. Remember that we will distribute them, but you still own and can commercialize them; customers cannot. Also, if you know of hybridomas that you would like made available at low cost and high quality, let us know their names, their target molecules, and the scientists who generated them. We will contact the scientists and try to secure the hybridomas for DSHB/DSHB-Microbe distribution. Thanks very much for your help.
See our web page: http://dshb.biology.uiowa.edu
Best regards,
David R. Soll
Emil Witschi/Carver Professor of Biology
Director, Developmental Studies Hybridoma Bank
The University of Iowa
Department of Biology
I get asked pretty often about synchronizing files across multiple computers. You know, synchronizing an office machine with a home machine, or a desktop with a laptop, or maybe even one laptop with another. This can be tricky, because when you copy files from one drive to another, you run the risk of overwriting your latest version with an older one. What's the best thing to do? Here are a few ideas:
- Avoid the problem altogether by using only one computer. If you can handle lugging it around everywhere, use just your laptop. You'll always have all your stuff with you, and you won't have to worry about whether you're working on the latest version. Maybe even get yourself a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for home and for office. Sure, it's an extra expense, but it'll cost less than another computer.
- Keep all your working files on a flash drive or an external hard drive. Work only on those copies and not on copies on your internal hard drives.
- If you're guaranteed a network connection, keep all your working files on Pantheon. Don't know about Pantheon? Everyone at Yale has a Pantheon account, with 500 GB of storage. It's a snap to mount on your desktop from anywhere.
- Use FolderShare or DropBox. I tried out FolderShare a couple of years ago and wasn't completely comfortable with it, but maybe it's improved. I just heard about DropBox today, and I'll be test driving it this week. So far so good.
- If you feel right at home on a command line, try Unison. I used to use this, and I had a lot of confidence in it, but I'm no sysadmin, and I had to do a lot of background research just to be able to comprehend the manual.
