Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

A number of laws have established precedence in issues of web accessibility. These laws continue to evolve and face legal challenges to establish benchmarks of web accessibility. Some laws related to web and information accessibility apply to just web sites and publications of the federal government. Others apply more broadly. Below are portions of the laws that may apply to web accessibility and higher education.
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On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, April 30th through May 2nd, IU departments, local businesses and the general public in Bloomington and Indianapolis all have access to a free Electronics Recycling day.  Thursday and Friday are reserved for businesses, schools, universities, and non-profit organizations.  Saturday is open to the general public.

All sorts of equipment will be accepted, and it's a great way to get rid of the electronic clutter without filling up the landfills.

For full details and to check out the website to see what kinds of equipment will be accepted here:

http://indiana.poweron.com

Businesses and IU departments need to pre-register.

NOTE: This event has ended, but keep an eye out for future eWaste recycling days.  And remember, in Bloomington, the Monroe Country Solid Waste Management will accept electronic items for a fee.  See their website for details.

Today a colleague of mine emailed me with a question about using Flip camera footage in a PowerPoint 2007 presentation. He was attempting to use the raw video files from his camera in a presentation but couldn't get them to work.

PowerPoint 2007 allows users to import the following video file formats: .asf, .avi, .mpg or .mpeg, and .wmv. Since the Flip camera produces an uncompressed .avi file, we should be able to import it. Right?

Wrong. The fact is that even if your video file has the correct file extension, it may not play correctly if the correct version of the codec is not installed on your computer, or if the file is not encoded in a format that is recognized by your version of Windows.

The Flip camera captures video in MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile format and saves the video as an .avi file. So, then, perhaps we just need to download a codec and then it will work in PowerPoint?

No, wrong again. The Flip camera video uses the 3iVX codec. It can be downloaded free from a number of different sites on the Internet, and it is also included when you download and install the Flip camera software. But, even after installing the 3iVX codec, it isn't possible to insert Flip camera clips into a PowerPoint 2007 presentation.
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NOTE: Special thanks to Jacob Farmer from Identity Management who helped extensively with the regular expression portion of this post.

If you missed the Adobe Infoshares with Adobe Senior Solutions Engineer Tim Plumer on Tuesday and Thursday, you missed a lot of great information.  Even someone like me, who thinks they know everything learned a thing or two about a thing or two.

One of the things that jumped out at me was GREP Styles in InDesign.  If you're not familiar with grep(traditionally spelled in all lower case on UNIX-based systems, but listed in capital letters in InDesign), it's a pattern matching tool used mainly in UNIX, but InDesign has added it's functionality to the Paragraph styles panel. grep allows us to search for a piece of text within a file, like so:

grep Adobe indesign.txt

The line above would search for the word "Adobe" inside the text file called "indesign.txt". Things get much more complicated when we involve regular expressions.  Regular expressions allow us to search for more specific information by including various symbols within the text.  For example:

grep ^Adobe

Would search for the word Adobe, but only at the beginning of a line(indicated by the '^' symbol). This is an incredibly simple example, and regular expressions are almost a programming language unto themselves.  For example:

\b(\w+)\s+(\1)\b

This regular expression will match duplicate words separated by any amount of whitespace. Often times, regular expressions are described as "Write once, read never" because they are so difficult to decipher once they are complete.

So why would an InDesign user care?

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Are you confused about whether to use Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Access to manage your data? This is understandable since both applications can perform similar functions. If you're having trouble choosing between Excel and Access, then this short video will help you get the right answers to the right questions. It will emphasize the best features of each and let you decide which of these programs will best meet your needs. To view this video, click here.

Note: Thanks to Ashley Endemann for recording this video.

Okay, so you've been recording grades in Oncourse all semester long, and you're about to send them off to the Registrar. But at the last moment you notice a small discrepancy - you expected that there would be a few more A+ grades; in fact, you know there should be more A+ grades!

What game is Oncourse playing? (more...)

One question that often comes up is, "Why can't I provide group grades in Assignments?"

I was playing around in Oncourse the other day, and it turns out there actually is a simple way to do this.

First, let's get this important operational detail out of the way. When you give the group assignment, you need to communicate clearly with your students how you want them to submit.  The best thing is for each group to choose in advance ONE person who will be responsible for submitting the assignment.  The worst thing is for each person to upload their own version of the assignment, leaving you to figure out which version is the official one.

Next, grading. Once the assignments have been submitted, one for each group, read the assignments and decide what the group grades will be.  In Oncourse, click the Grade link next to the title of the assignment.  You will see a page named, Submissions for "Name of Assignment Here". Beneath this title you should see a "View" dropdown box.  Click the little arrow to reveal the list of groups in your site, and choose one - let's say it's Group A.  The page should refresh and you will see only the members of Group A.

Now comes the simple part.  Just above the student list you should see a box labeled, Assign this grade to all participants without a grade. 

Type in the grade you want to assign for that group, and click the Assign button.

Voila! Your group has been graded! Wash, rinse, and repeat for the other groups.

Happy Grading!

In a recent training session on Excel basics, one panicked participant reported that she was suddenly unable to access or use any tools on the Insert tab of the ribbon. The majority of the icons there were gray. When the workshop assistant arrived on the scene, the participant and the assistant discovered the reason for the problem by looking at the top of the Excel window. The status of the worksheet displayed in the title bar:

 
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Let’s say that to make a point about the relationship between hot water usage and the size of the utility bill, you want to track how long your teenager spends in the shower. Or, in planning for a lawn care business, you want to track times required to mow lawns of various sizes. Excel would be a good tool for these kinds of tasks.
Excel’s ability to perform complex calculations is well known, but asking it to return simple time calculations can produce confusing results unless you understand all the factors involved.

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This is the first of what will be a regularly appearing column on the IT Training Tips blog.  The focus of this column will be to convey tips and tricks concerning IU's newly purchased WCMS. This week, being the first edition, is going to be pretty brief.

For those of you who are wondering what Cascade Server does, this column probably isn't for you, but I will at least tell you that Cascade Server is a Web Content Management System produced and sold by the Hannon Hill company in Atlanta Georgia.

For more information about how Indiana University is using Cascade Server, check out the Web Content Management Initiative site: http://www.indiana.edu/~wcms.

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