Category: Students

Faculty/Staff, Software, Students, Tips

Windows 8 Announcement

Seth

Microsoft released Windows 8 on October 26th, 2012 and most Windows hardware vendors are now shipping systems with Windows 8 installed. ITS Recommendation Information Technology Services (ITS) will support Windows 8 for our clients, including off-campus students, on new systems that ship with Windows 8 pre-installed. ITS strongly recommends that College community members thinking of upgrading to Windows 8 adopt a “wait and see” approach, continuing to use earlier supported versions of Windows (Windows 7 SP1 and Windows XP SP3) until the initial bugs and compatibility issues in Windows 8 are identified and fixed. It is ITS policy to test … Continue reading Windows 8 Announcement

Academic Technology, Open-Source, Students

Open-Source Textbooks Aim to Curb Education Costs

admin

A recent article appearing in The New York Times highlights progress in the open-source textbook movement by Connexions, “a dynamic digital educational ecosystem” based at Rice University in Houston. Over the next few months, Connexions, via OpenStax College, will provide an initial offering of freely available textbooks covering physics, sociology, introductory biology, anatomy, and physiology. Connexions’ director, Richard Baraniuk, said, “if we capture just 10 percent of the market with these first five textbooks” students in the United States could save $90 million over the next five years. The content, provided using an open license, will allow faculty to freely customize … Continue reading Open-Source Textbooks Aim to Curb Education Costs

Academic Technology, Software, Students

Kaleidagraph 4.1.2 for OS X Lion (10.7) now available

Mark Davis

ITS has just made Kaleidagraph 4.1.2 for Lion available from the ITS software page for all College faculty, staff and students to use. This latest update offers the following enhancements: Added support for the Intel Macintosh. The installer will install the correct version based on the processor in your computer. Bitmap file export such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF now uses QuickTime to generate the export files. As a result, several new options are available for some of the formats such as byte ordering, LZW compression, and variable JPEG export quality. High Resolution TIFF images are exported with … Continue reading Kaleidagraph 4.1.2 for OS X Lion (10.7) now available

Mobile Devices, Social Media, Students

Student use of Mobile Devices, Social Networking, and More

MK

Tomorrow’s Professor recently posted Timeslicing in the Classroom, an excerpt from The New Digital Shoreline: How Web 2.0 and Millennials Are Revolutionizing Higher Education, by Roger McHaney, that explores how students are bringing technology to the classroom. The excerpt addresses the following topics: Video Recording Audio Recording Wikis Blogs Twitter Social Networking Cell & Smart Phones Instant Messaging & Texting Live Streaming Tablets Additional Resources: Timeslicing in the Classroom Tomorrow’s Professer Listen to Dr. Roger McHaney discuss the The New Digital Shoreline Continue reading Student use of Mobile Devices, Social Networking, and More

Network, Students, Telephones

Shifting Funds from Student Voice Mail Services to Internet Bandwidth for Students

MK

PLEASE NOTE:  STUDENT RESIDENCE HALL PHONES ARE NOT AFFECTED BY THIS CHANGE After studying the voice mail usage logs and consulting with available students, we have decided to redirect the funds previously spent on student voice mail services and purchase additional Internet bandwidth instead. Eliminating student voice mail will save $9,000 per year in maintenance fees, and this will fund a 50% increase in bandwidth available to students.  This fall, we will move from 200MB to 300MB in Internet bandwidth for students. Student use of the voice mail service connected to the residence hall phones has declined to very near … Continue reading Shifting Funds from Student Voice Mail Services to Internet Bandwidth for Students

Academic Technology, Faculty/Staff, Software, Students, Workshops and Training

R Statistical Software Training

Andrew Ruether

R is a free statistics program widely used at Swarthmore (and the rest of the world, too).  If you would like to learn more about how to use R, ITS will be hosting a series of web training sessions from the National Institute from Computational Sciences.  The sessions take place every Wednesday at 3PM from June 22 to July 6, 2011.  The topics are: June 22 – Introduction to R June 29 – R graphing with ggplot2 July 6 – Parallel computing with R Contact Andrew Ruether (aruethe2, x8254) if you would like to attend any of the sessions. Continue reading R Statistical Software Training