Alex Chapin

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New Segue Features

Categories: News
This is the audio of a presentation I did for students who staff the Library and Information Services (LIS) Helpdesk on new features introduced to Segue in version 1.5.

In demonstrating new features of Segue, this presentation refers to the following sites:
Segue Project Page
Educational Technology (this site)
iPods in Education
Alex Chapin

Segue Documentation Updated

Categories: News
We recently updated Segue documentation.  See:
https://segue.middlebury.edu/resolver/segue1/site/segueIn addition to describing new features such as blogging, podcastingand RSS, we have also added more”how to” documentation that provides step by step instructionsBTW, other institutions have also started to create Segue documentation included Kenyon College and and the University of Illinois.
Segue Help…
Creating a Site
Creating a Course Site
Using Pages and Sections
Blogging with Segue
Podcasting with Segue
Creating Associated Sites and Participant Lists
Assigning Permisions to Other Participants
Using Categories and Tagging
Using RSS
Creating a Presentation
Enabling Discussion and Assessment
Changing Theme Settings

Segue 1.5 released

Categories: News

December 22, 2005

Segue version 1.5 has been released on SourceForge and is now running at Middlebury College. This version fixes some bugs, makes some user interface changes, and adds a few new features including:

  • Sidebar Navigation – Segue pages links can be displayed in either the left or right sidebar
  • Sidebar Content blocks – HTML content can be displayed in either sidebar column
  • Sidebar RSS feeds – RSS feeds can now be displayed in sidebar columns.
  • Categories – Segue has always allowed users to categorize content blocks. this version allows for multiple tags for any given block and introduces a category page type that will display all blocks in a given category
  • Participant List – Site owners can now display a list of all the participants and editors in a given site. If a site has associated sites (i.e. sites for participants that are associated with the site), then links to these sites are automatically created.
  • Presentation Mode – Segue pages that is set to display one content block at a time can function as slide shows and include pagination and a select menu that allows users to jump to any given slide

NITLE Digital Asset Management Symposium

Categories: News

December 4, 2005

Adam and I attended a digital asset management (DAM) symposium in Atlanta hosted by the NITLE and the ASC Technology Center. Among the DAM systems presented included CONTENTdm, BEPress, ARTstor, MDID, Luna, DSpace and Fedora.

CONTENTdm seemed to be the most commonly used system with a good user interface for metadata and reasonable support for various media types. Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) was popular amongst institutions whose assets were primarily images. For asset collections of primarily textual material, BEPress was popular. DSpace was favored when there were diverse collections and a need for archiving and workflow management.

Fedora remains one of the most widely respected systems, seeming to provide the most flexible architecture for managing a wide variety of digital objects. It is also finally becoming possible to use with the recent development of applications for creating and managing collections in Fedora including ELATED and more recently FEZ. This latter product may be particularly interesting to Middlebury since it uses PHP and MySQL and offers the tools needed to maintain an institutional repository much like DSpace.

ACTFL Conference

Categories: News

November 21, 2005

I have yet another presentation on iPod in education, this time focusing on iPods and 2nd Language Acquisition at the American Council on Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL) annual conference in Baltimore.

(The iPods in Education site now contains podcasts from 4 different presentations I gave on iPods including a presentation to Language Schools directors, presentations at a NERCOMP SIG on Emerging Technologies, a Podcasting seminar at the CET, and most recently the audio from my ACTFL presentation)

NITLE seminar on Podcasting

Categories: News

November 11, 2005

I gave a presentation on iPods and podcasting at a seminar on podcasting at the Center for Educational Technology in Middlebury. Other presenters included Bryan Alexander, the NITLE Director of Emerging Technologies, Mark Pearson from Earlham College, James Fadden from Allegheny College and Barbara Ganley from Middlebury.

Nercomp SIG: Emerging Trends and Technologies

Categories: News
October 28, 2005Shel
Sax and I gave a short presentation on iPods at Middlebury yesterday at
a Nercomp Special Interest Group (SIG) conference in Bolton MA
organized by Shel and Bryan Alexander. Have added slides of my
presentation to my iPods in Education
site. Shel discussed the logistics and assessment of the Language
School iPod Pilot project. Dave Guertin showed some of his work in scientific visualization and Bryan Alexander touched on all sorts of emerging technologies a few of which he has included in his presentation site.

Others presenters include Brian Lamb
from who has been promoting MovableType blogs to faculty and students
at the University of British Columbia and has developed an interesting tool for aggregating RSS feeds and Joel Foreman from George Mason University discussed gaming, particularly MMOGs and how these could be used in education.

Educause 2005 Annual Conference

Categories: News

October 22, 2005

The Educause 2005 annual conference was held in Orlando, Florida October 18-21. 2005 There were a total of 144 concurrent sessions over three days, three general sessions and a eight featured speakers. Over 7,500 people attended the conference whose theme was “Transforming the Academy: Dreams and Reality”. I did a poster session on “Managing Evolving Content Along a Publication Continuum.”

Big topic at the conference was the merger of Blackboard and WebCT. In many ways, rather than stifling competition in the market, it seemed to heighten it as other CMS/LMS developers presented alternatives that seemed more flexible and open including Angel, Desire2Learn and eCollege and Sakai.

Spoke at length with developers of HarvestRoad Hive, a federated repository management system that is gaining in popularity. This system will save content from growing number of course and learning management systems including Blackboard/WebCT, Angel, Sakai, Moodle and others. Because it is independent of these content management systems , there is less danger of lock in to a given system and more flexible access to this content from a variety systems.

Quite a few presentations of application frameworks including Sakai and OpenACS. More and more open source CMS are built using such frameworks because they allow other developers to extend or add new functionality that can be shared with the entire developer and user communities.

Curricular Technologies at Middlebury

Categories: News

October 10, 2005

We have just posted the audio of a presentation on Curricular Technologies at Middlebury College given by Alex Chapin and Adam Franco to staff from Library and Information Services (LIS). See:
Podcasts > Curricular Technologies at Middlebury

CALICO 2005 Annual Conference

Categories: News

May 19-22, 2005

Alex Chapin did a presentation on Segue as a multilingual course management system at the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortuim (CALICO) Conference the the Michegan State University in East Lansing, MI.