PDFs made easy

I've given a couple workshops/ presentations on a few tools people can use to work with PDFs. I've covered free tools, open source tools, and web-based tools, intentionally leaving out discussion of Adobe Acrobat, as I feel it's over-priced and most people don't need it.

I also created a bookmark-shaped handout/ready reference for attendees, so they could recall a little of what I had shown them.

I had about 30 attendees, which for a tech presentation around here is phenomenal. I have several people ask for follow-up help and one department couldn't attend and asked me to give the presentation to them.

Assistive and Adaptive Technologies

Last year, after much back and forth with various people, a man from a local school district contacted me about doing a presentation on technology we use to support disability services. I agreed to give the presentation.

My College's Disability Services Accessibility Technology on Prezi

It actually turns out that he was originally looking for someone who had worked at University of Colorado, not Colorado College at all!

Knowing where to look

Sarah had opened the blank schedule from her email on her PC and proceeded to fill it in during the scheduling meeting. She happily hit save every once in a while, thinking her document was safe. She closed it at the end of the meeting, but unfortunately couldn't find it again. So she came looking for me, but I was elsewhere on campus.
She brought the laptop down to the helpdesk, where the did a search for the file, among other things, for a reported hour and a half. They could not find the file. When I heard about the loss, I went and asked Sarah if she still needed help.
I, too, tried searching for it, but just went to the IE temp files directory and looked through the seven or eight files that were likely to be her schedule. I opened them all up and lo and behold, there it was. She was quite thankful and later that day she called me genius to several other people.

Awesome things you can do online for free

Late last semester (or perhaps during the week after winter break) my team discussed what workshops we should give this semester. I'd already done a PDF workshop (at the end of last year and a variation last semester) and no one was volunteering to do something that first block, so I volunteered to give a workshop along the lines of "Awesome things you can do online for free" about web 2.0 services and other stuff that can make life easier. TO shake things up (and instead of printing a handout) I created a PROWL site to organize the presentation and link to the sites and services. I used it in my presentation and tailored the presentation to the interests of the group in attendance.
It's been interesting to try and go back and find links I've used before and I'm really disappointed that facebook bought drop.io and shut them down to integrate parts. drop.io was a really useful service for many, many things.

Lessons learned:

• If you plan too much content, of course you won't present it all. 
• But that's not necessarily a bad thing. I had more than I could present, but, I was able to present something interesting for everyone there.
•  You can over-prepare. I'm not sure how long I spent practicing, organizing my sources and setting up the equipment ahead of time, but if no one had shown up (as occasionally happens around here), it would have been a shame I had spent all that time preparing. 
• Moodle is not best suited for a descriptive link repository. 

Science student personal web page assignment

From two to five times a year I give a "How to use Contribute to complete your personal web page assignment" workshop. I usually have from one to three students come in late and need help catching up. Often times, one or more students will skip a step and not be able to save heir work.
The assignment is to create a website (or page) with the following requirements:

• A picture of the student
• A list of 10 links the student used for class
• A copy of the student's resumé
• (optional) A copy of the student's final paper

In order to successfully complete the assignment and get credit, the student's image and name must be linked properly on the professor's website (pre-linked to standard-named link), the student must successfully request (and automatically receive) their network web drive, correctly map said network web drive (pre-mapped, but not really. Its linked to the student webroot as opposed to the student's sub-directory), and they must save their site's first page as index or welcome with the appropriate file extension.
Naturally, the student must also be able to create text on a web page, make a link, insert an image and hopefully create subpages and link to documents. Contribute does all these things fairly easily, but it is somewhat restrictive and forces the student to choose a template. If they want to change the template, they need to start all over.
Also, they need to set up the Contribute website connection on every different computer they use to edit their site. This isn't a concern if they do it all in one sitting, but most work on it at least twice.
It seems to me that most web publishing is not done in html and flat files anymore. It's done dynamically through blogs or other content management systems.

Lessons learned:

• Students don't really look at documentation
• One or two students will want to do things more powerfully than the software allows
• Even with a follow-up workshop, one to a few students will request help at the end of the block
• Macromedia Contribute 3 has a very unfortunate error which doesn't seem to be in Adobe Contribute CS3 and Contribute CS5 seems to have changed very little
• Most students really like the "artist's portfolio" template

CMS Testing

So the CMS (content management system) selection process has been less than stellar. The biggest lessons I've learned are:

Art History Thesis work

Every year, the Art History theses are due around this time or later. Every year, I have a few students feverishly working on their thesis and trying to get it printed on the day it is due. Over the past few years, I've held workshops for the students on how to successfully and easily format their thesis. Generally, I've held one workshop for them towards the beginning of the year and one more towards the end of the year at the beginning of the block before the thesis is due.

I did that this year, too. Unfortunately, these thesis students didn't learn anything from the workshops and have asked me for individual help. The students ask for help with the following: