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Posts Tagged ‘Curricular Technologies’

Towards a Unified Curricular Technology UX

Posted in Academic Consulting Services Areas and Workgroups Curricular Technology ★ The Essentials
November 16th, 2009 by Alex Chapin

I recently created a version of the ShadowBox theme for Measure, an instance of Moodle used at Middlebury for online assessments.  As a starting point, I used the Anomaly Theme Pack, created by the Patrick Malley, the Themes Manager for Moodle.org and the Creative Director of the NewSchool Learning design shop.  I merged some of the styles and markup Patrick had developed with code from the WordPress ShadowBox theme to create a similar look and feel to the WordPress version.  This is a great example of the power of open source to build upon and synthesize the work of others (much of this theme designers current work in no longer open source…)

measure-theme-headerScreenshot of Measure ShadowBox theme header

The goal is to create a more unified user experience (UX) and make it easy for faculty and students to move from one platform to another.  You’ll noticed that Measure has links to WordPress and Segue in the upper right corner.  These same links can be put in the same place on WordPress blogs that use ShadowBox.  I’d also like to put these same links on all Segue sites to help with the transition away from Segue to other platforms.

google-header01As new platforms are introduced, they can be added in much the same way as Google Apps lists its various applications.

For more information about Measure, see the Measure Blog.

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Project Bamboo and Segue

Posted in Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure ★ The Essentials
October 10th, 2008 by Alex Chapin

Submitted by Alex Chapin

Sasha Woolson, a faculty member in the Spanish department, and I will be participating in workshop 2 of Project Bamboo, a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary initiative to define technology services needed to do research in arts and humanities. Faculty, librarians, computer scientists and information technologists from over 50 institutions/organizations will be attending. We will certainly talk about Segue as a resource in this area. I contributed to the project’s wiki a page on collaboration.

Adam has been refining the Segue user experience (UX) to make it easier to use and more efficient. Many of these changes are so subtle you might not notice them. For example, Segue now remembers which editing mode you prefer, the last used settings on certain features such as copy/paste and what sites you have visited recently. Special thanks to Brian Carson and Shel Sax for reporting bugs and helping us with these refinements. See the Segue changelog for more information.

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News from Curricular Technology: Segue v2 Goes Live, iPods remain popular, Measure used for on-line placement

Posted in Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure ★ The Essentials
September 6th, 2008 by Doreen Bernier

Submitted by Alex Chapin

Segue v2 went into production at Middlebury on August 18. Since then over 100 sites have been created in the new version (see: Segue Usage). To help people learn how to use Segue v2 we have made a number of screencast videos that demonstrate basic features and have been offering introductory workshops.

iPods were popular again this summer with the Language Schools. Jin Zhang of the Chinese School had her students produce weekly podcasts. A number of classes required students to complete weekly audio recording assignments. More language resources were reformatted for use on iPods and other mobile devices. For more details, see the iPods and 2nd Language Acquisition site.

Many students have been using Measure to take placement exams online. Measure is heavily used by the Language Schools for entrance and exit exams. Some academic year departments have also begun using it to place students in courses for the fall and spring semesters.

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