UBC Arts ISIT Blog

Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), from a web developer's perspective, is a vast improvement over IE6 as it is much more compliant with respect to web standards. For instance, the following site, democracy.arts.ubc.ca, renders the navigational roll-over states properly in Opera, Safari, Firefox and IE7 but the the roll-over states do not function in previous versions of IE (due too poor support for CSS). Lack of compliancy is quite frustrating for web developers however as more and more users upgrade to IE7 hopefully in the near future there will be less need to support previous versions. In order to test multiple versions of IE on the same PC it is necessary to run several instances of IE. Doing so could be quite cumbersome were it not for excellent tools like this installer that automates the process of installing and running multiple versions.

I filmed a little on a digital still camera with video capabilities last week. I was left with 3 .mpeg files that I wished to convert to .mp4. I tried out a new software caleld Visual Hub (sorry, it's only Mac compatible) which allows for easy file format conversion. I had the option of converting my .mpeg to .dv, .mov, .mp4, etc. The site: http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/ provides a trial version that limits the conversion to 2 minute clips only. Luckily, my clips were all under 2 minutes. The conversion took some time, but I was left with 3 fairly decent quality .mp4 files.

Next, I wanted to try its conversion to DVD tool. I used my original .mpeg files and ran the conversion for 'DVD' with all 3 clips. It took a long time for the program to convert .mpeg to the DVD format and it did lose a bit of quality because the file was already too compressed for DVD quality. However, once the program had finished converting my 3 clips, I was left with a fully authored (with a very simple menu) DVD image with 3 chapters. I dropped the image into my the basic dvd burning software that came with my Mac and I had a finished DVD.

It's a decent tool for converting files. It's $23.32 (US) unless you always have short video clips in which case the trial version will work just fine for you.

I was looking at the Calendar tool in both WebCT CE 4.1 and Vista 4. I liked how Vista 4 gives the builder/designer the ability to have calendar entries repeat on certain days so that reoccuring office hours, for example, did not have to be entered in every day. However, one instructor I was speaking with mentioned how he would like to have his calendar entries repeat in other WebCT courses he is teaching. For example, currently, he has to manually enter identical events in 4 different WebCT courses. Having the ability for automatic repeat across courses would save him the time and effort of tedious manual entry.

I played around with Second Life yesterday. There has been much talk about how Second Life can be used to enhance the teaching and learning experience so I thought I would take a look. As a newbie to 3D worlds, it took me some time to set up my avatar and figure out how to make it walk, sit, fly, etc. I liked how I could alter my avatar anyway that I liked (i.e. body shape, hair colour, skin colour, etc). I also liked how I was immediately on Orientation Island. I liked how the island was structured as a learning environment with popup textual help documentation showing the basic steps. I appreciated the linear design (I had to follow the arrows on the island in order to go through all the initial steps), as it prohibited me from getting lost on the island.

After finishing the tasks on Orientation Island, I began to explore on my own by typing in various search queries on the map and teleporting myself to the locations that seemed interesting. The world is quite vast and a newbie can easily get lost if they start to roam aimlessly as I did. I didn't run into any 'educational' sites but that is probably because most of them have restricted access. I did walk through Las Vegas and thought the replicated buildings were quite impressive.

Finally, I ventured over to Buchanan Island (restricted site as well), built by UBC's Faculty of Arts ISIT unit for Arts faculty and students to showcase their work and use it for the students' learning experience. At first, I got lost on the island as I wasn't sure how to move from building to building but I finally figured out that flying was the best way to travel.

If only we had wings in our first lives to help us move across distance at rapid speeds.

Final note, a colleague of mine tried running Second Life on his new mac book pro but it kept crashing. He thought this might be due to the intel mac processor but we're not sure.

We have recently upgraded our version of the TYPO3 Content Management System (CMS). Among other features in the upgrade, the use of AJAX improves the responsiveness and usability of the application. TYPO3 is just one of several CMSs as well as blogging/web publishing systems deployed on campus. At the last e-Strategy Town Hall I attended a workshop on WordPress, which is used to publish the e-Strategy Update. It was quite informative to see what other units are doing on campus and I will definitely attend again this year.

ITServices finally has our new Vista Training environment ready. This environment will be used for the initial migration/conversion from CE4.1 to Vista 4. We migrated a Japanese course that was encoded in UTF-8 from CE4.1 to Vista 4. Data was truncated and some links have been duplicated which were minor problems. However, there was a major problem with the assessments. The browser is automatically detecting the encoding to be UTF-8 but the Japapese characters weren't displaying properly. The course originally in CE4.1 is UTF-8 and displays correctly without changing any of the encoding. In Vista 4 when the encoding is already in UTF-8, I switched the encoding to Japanese (shift-JIS) but the characters still did not display properly.

With the migrated short answer quiz questions, we also noticed that if we left the field blank to move to the next question, the browser says that the session has expired and you can't go to any other question except the first question. If you fill in the blank field with any characters, the session will not expire and it'll move on to the next question. The result was another shocker because you would assume that if students don't have an answer to a question that they'd skip the question instead of filling in any "dummy" values.

ITServices will be contacting WebCT about the problem and hopefully there will be a solution to the problem. In our initial Vista 3 pilot, I ran into similiar problems and WebCT already knew about them. They claim they've fixed the problem yet it doesn't seem like there was much improvement from Vist 3 to 4. In fact, I'm curious to know if other institutions have run into similiar problems when Asian courses were migrated over. Please send me a note if you have any experiences you'd like to share with your successfull/unsuccessfull migration.