Mika.Seppala's blog
Podcasting Problems
I got wrong advice. Or perhaps I asked a wrong question.
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ICMI and ICME: Mathematics Education at a Crossroads
I am right now taking part in the ICME 11 conference, the most important international meeting of mathematics educators. ICME conferences meet every four years. This time the meeting is taking place in Monterrey, Mexico. Together with Olga Caprotti I organized a workshop entitled eLearning Mathematics and participated in the activities of the meeting in general.
Quicktime bug
I have been creating Podcasts using Keynote and iMovie. This has been working fine, and I have created podcasts that cover a basic calculus course completely.
Yesterday I needed to create another podcast. I started my Keynote, produced and recorded the presentation, and exported it to Quicktime. But no sound. The recording did not play anymore when the presentation was exported to Quicktime.
I found out that the culprit was the new version (4.5) of Quicktime. See
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BlackBoard Blues
This semester I have been teaching two large sections of calculus I at Florida State University. FSU is a big time BlackBoard user. The system has been in use for many years and always worked fine. Until this week. This is also the last week of classes. Final examinations are next week. Hence this week is extremely busy time students using BlackBoard to prepare for the final examinations or to submit course work. Hence closing down BlackBoard and restarting it is not really an option.
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Macgic
The Department at FSU recently replaced some old computers with new ones. Almost all secretaries got new Macs with large screens. The result has been that some secretaries stay at work much longer than needed. It is so nice to work with the new computers, was the comment of one secretary.
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Mac Keynote pdf bug
Working on the bleeding edge will lead to some cuts every once in a while. I report hereby one such situation for the convenience of those who may want to follow my advice regarding the the production of mp4 movies out of PP files using Keynote.
Blogging directly from Flock
It is not what you know but what you can learn! It seems that, in order to be able to surf in the high waves of information technology, one must be prepared to take up new things almost on daily bases. When the WebALT project started I had the motto that "we are sailors, not the wind." By that I meant that the best we can possibly do is to take advantage of the developments in the field, and, perhaps, add little ingredient of our own.
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From Garage Calculus to Calculus Movies
I have earlier reported in this blog about using GrageBand, a component of Apple’s iLife 08, to produce Calculus Podcasts. While GarageBand allows the convenient editing of the soundtrack, the quality of graphics that GarageBand supports, is not good enough for Calculus Podcasts.
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GLOG, BLOG, POD and Teach
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM) explains the abbreviation RTFM as “Read the Fucking Manual” and lists almost 40 equivalent expressions like GLOG for “Go Look on Google.” The multitude of such abbreviations simply tells us that people do not have the patience to learn before starting to use computers. I almost never read the booklets entitled “Read This First” when opening a package and starting to use a new computer or other similar device. I assume that it will be self explanatory, and that I will be able to use these devices right out of the box.
Garage Calculus
New ideas come from the kids. Some time ago I promised to my daughter to get her a microphone if she improves her grades a lot. Now she got her report, and I had to take her to a professional music store to buy the microphone. She got an AUDIX OM 2 microphone. We also got an USB Audio Capture device (EDIROL, UA-25, USB powered).
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