Author Archives: jalley

The invisible God

By jalley | Published: September 7, 2009
My heart was racing when my wife told me the story of my daughter explaining how God is in her school everyday and that he’s invisible. She said they talk about it each day when they look at the flag. I instantly thought, “Oh my, her teacher is telling them they can think about God [...]
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Using YouTube in PowerPoint

By jalley | Published: May 13, 2008
Embedding YouTube into a PowerPoint is a mostly painless process. It also looks to fall within YouTube’s Terms of Use (#5) since the video is simply embedded within a presentation and not hosted on a local computer. However, if you know you will not have access to the Web during your presentation then you have [...]
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MacBook Air: My initial take

By jalley | Published: April 4, 2008
Ah, the power of Twitter. I mentioned earlier today on Twitter that I would need to pass along the MacBook Air we have circulating in the department and how I would miss the little bugger. One of my W&M colleagues, @witchyrichy, asked me to comment more about it’s “Airness,” especially as it relates to travel. The [...]
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A finer way of seeing the forest through the trees

By jalley | Published: March 26, 2008
Marybeth shared this quote with me as she knows I’ve been struggling with some things going back and forth in that melon of mine. “One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” Andre Gide
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Digital Audio Workshop

By jalley | Published: March 12, 2008
I had been anticipating attending this Digital Audio Workshop, a NITLE workshop, in Bryn Mawr for a few months, but my daughter woke up not quite ready to return to school. Thankfully, my wife offered to stay home with her yet another day, so I made it, albeit 45 minutes late. Here are just a few [...]
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CPS Brown Bag Questions

By jalley | Published: March 10, 2008
What do you see as the single-most reason for using an audience response system? Helps keep students engaged during class. Allows me to immediately learn if students just “got” whatever objective I was trying to teach. It’s a quicker way to record students’ responses on a brief quiz. Makes me look cool among my peers. Nothing. What is the single-most reason [...]
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Session 2: Drupal showcase

By jalley | Published: March 6, 2008
What is Drupal? Content management system Community management system Web application framework What do you want it to be? Who is using Drupal Open source community Start-ups Education Medical News and media Non-profit Government Politics IBM (intranet), Yahoo, Discovery, Forbes, Adobe, Pfizer, Best Buy, Popular Science, the Onion, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Warner Brothers, Grateful Dead, Playboy, NATO, Edutopia and the George Lucas Foundation, MIT, Harvard, Greenpeace, DC Comics What are they [...]
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Session 1: IA in Drupal

By jalley | Published: March 6, 2008
Use color coded graphic organizer to mimic colors used in related content types/categories. Wire frame only the important pages and not all of them. Use an Excel file (content matrix) to match the fields used on the type of Drupal page to get a better sense of what content is needed. Maintain a glossary of terms used [...]
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Session 2: Drupal as a GIS mapping platform

By jalley | Published: March 5, 2008
Modules Location – accepts address locations Gmap – displays location stuff in an embedded Google map Common way of displaying GIS stuffin Drupal: Location+Gmap+Views Example: http://www.chicagoancestors.org/ New module coming: Geo will allow to display lines and polygons and not just points.
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Session 1: OpenLaszlo and JQuery

By jalley | Published: March 5, 2008
OpenLazlo A write once, deploy to many app, which can translate into providing Flash 7/8 or DHTML content to Drupal. Looks like OpenLazlo can take the XML from a view and display a Flash-based element. jQuery Need to know Javascript (no) and CSS (yes) Does not support :hover CSS 3 pseudo-class
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