Friday, March 30, 2012

Save Your Data Week! - SanDisk Cruzer USB Drive

Readers,


Here is my favorite way to back up my data - SanDisk 64GB drive. I enjoy using this nifty drive to plug into my laptop computers.


I hang this drive on my Vera Bradley lanyard and my data is accessible on almost any computer.




I used this brand for the past 10 years and I LOVE it! SanDisk, if you ever want to host a giveaway on my blog, please let me know! ;)


Sincerely,


J. Edwards


Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Save Your Data Week! - Where Do You Keep Your Academic Portfolio?


Readers,

I know that this might sounds crazy, but one night I had a weird dream about something happening to my academic portfolio which I kept at my office. So, I decided to relocate my academic portfolio to my home in a Rubbermaid container (to protect it from water, etc.).

Do you scan the items in your academic portfolio?

Do you keep multiple copies of your CV?

Do you have the original copies of your diplomas (which you probably have hanging in your office)?

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Save Your Data Week! - iCloud by Apple

Readers,

Another way to back up your data is to use iCloud by Apple. Personally, I do not use iCloud for my e-mail, etc. because I do not want others to potentially have access to my e-mail. 

However, I really think that iCloud would be a great resource for some faculty and staff.


Do any of you use iCloud?

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Save Your Data Week! - Using Google Docs!


Readers,

Now, I save almost everything in the "CLOUD". In fact, I use Google Docs for a lot of my research endeavors and writing assignments with students. Here's a neat video about Google Docs!


Do you use Google Docs?

Sincerely,

J. Edwards
Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Monday, March 26, 2012

Save Your Data Week! - Backing Up Your Data by Using 5 Methods (Printing EVERYTHING)



Readers,

Some "old school" professors actually print everything they create on the internet. This method costs their colleges and universities a wealth of money in paper and ink. Sometimes it is great to have that high level of reassurance that your research article or your notes are in print, but the paper can encounter many negative outcomes before it reaches its final destination (i.e. - water, wind, etc.).

Do any of you save everything in print?

Sincerely,

J. Edwards


Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Friday, March 23, 2012

Grant Writing in Higher Education - Grant Writing Video (Vanderbilt University)



Readers,

I frequently watch videos focused on grant writing to gain more information on funding resources. Here's a good resource from Vanderbilt University.

Vanderbilt University - Instructional Improvement and Grant Writing


Sincerely,

J. Edwards


Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Thursday, March 22, 2012

Opportunity - (Last Reminder) TSMRI seeks fellows for its 2012-2013 fellowship program




TSMRI seeks fellows for its 2012-2013 fellowship program

The Texas Social Media Research Institute (TSMRI) announces its 2012-2013 fellowship program. An online application to become a TSMRI Fellow is available at http://www.tinyurl.com/TSMRIfellowapp. The deadline to apply is Friday, March 23 and fellows will be announced May 1.

TSMRI is a multidisciplinary collaboration based at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. The institute provides research and training focused on communication technology and social media for K-12 education, higher education, businesses, and non-profit organizations. 

The Texas Social Media Research Institute Fellowship Program aims to foster research on social media and provide researchers and practitioners resources for discovery, both applied and scholarly. Fellows will work with TSMRI to connect social media to their research agendas. Fellows will receive early access to the Journal of Social Media in Society, complimentary registration to the 2012 Social Media Conference and TSMRI workshops and a one-year membership to TSMRI. Fellowships are for one year (June 1 to May 31) and applicants may re-apply for one additional year.

We are excited about offering opportunities to scholars wishing to study issues in social media. We expect to have between 2 and 5 scholars for the inaugural year of the fellowship program and hope to have applicants from universities across the United States, various disciplines and research paradigms.

For more information about TSMRI, visit http://www.tarleton.edu/tsmri/ or contact texassocialmediaresearch@gmail.com.


Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Grant Writing in Higher Education - Serving on Federal Grant Boards/Serving as a Reviewer




Readers,

I have only served on a review board for a state grant, but I have never reserved on a federal board. The State University System of Florida has an incredible resource for people who are interested in serving on a federal review board!


Serve on the National Science Foundation Review Boards...

Why You Should Serve on an NSF Board - http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/meritreview/reviewer.jsp

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Grant Writing in Higher Education - Duke University's Funding Opportunities Database



Duke University
Readers,

Today's resource is from Duke University! This university has an online database with NOTHING but research grant opportunities!

You can search the database according to upcoming deadlines, discipline, eligibility, etc. Sometimes the result list is quite overwhelming, but it is definitely one of the BETTER funding resources available for the higher education community.


Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Grant Writing in Higher Education - The ProQuest Funding Database



Readers,

I am quite excited about the ProQuest Pivot funding database. I plan to use this database VERY frequently! It seems like a great resource. Does your institute have a subscription?





Enjoy!

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Monday, March 19, 2012

Grant Writing in Higher Education - Yay! We Met Another Deadline




Readers,

And...we're back! Spring break was great! Our family had a group weekend at Lake Tyler in Tyler, TX and now I am refreshed and ready for the rest of the week!

Today, a colleague and I had a grant deadline. We were super excited to submit the application and to sign the paperwork in the internal transmittal process. Thank goodness!

The grant is actually focused on the social media processes of a state agency in Texas. We would be VERY excited to receive the grant and we should hear about our status in a few months. :) Wish us luck!


This week, I will focused on a few grant resources that I frequently use to seek grants. :)

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Thursday, March 15, 2012

WINNING ENTRY! - "Great Ideas for Teaching With Adobe Products" Contest


Congratulations to "SUBMISSION C - Mobile Game Design Using Flash and Photoshop" for the prize-winning submission to the Adobe in Higher Education contest co-sponsored by Communication & Higher Education blog and A Millennial Professor's View of Higher Education blog. We hope you enjoy CS5.5!

Thank you to everyone who submitted their use of Adobe in higher education and thanks to everyone who took the time out to vote for your favorite submission.



Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Monday, March 12, 2012

Opportunity - (Reminder) TSMRI seeks fellows for its 2012-2013 fellowship program



TSMRI seeks fellows for its 2012-2013 fellowship program

The Texas Social Media Research Institute (TSMRI) announces its 2012-2013 fellowship program. An online application to become a TSMRI Fellow is available at http://www.tinyurl.com/TSMRIfellowapp. The deadline to apply is Friday, March 23 and fellows will be announced May 1.

TSMRI is a multidisciplinary collaboration based at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. The institute provides research and training focused on communication technology and social media for K-12 education, higher education, businesses, and non-profit organizations. 

The Texas Social Media Research Institute Fellowship Program aims to foster research on social media and provide researchers and practitioners resources for discovery, both applied and scholarly. Fellows will work with TSMRI to connect social media to their research agendas. Fellows will receive early access to the Journal of Social Media in Society, complimentary registration to the 2012 Social Media Conference and TSMRI workshops and a one-year membership to TSMRI. Fellowships are for one year (June 1 to May 31) and applicants may re-apply for one additional year.

We are excited about offering opportunities to scholars wishing to study issues in social media. We expect to have between 2 and 5 scholars for the inaugural year of the fellowship program and hope to have applicants from universities across the United States, various disciplines and research paradigms.

For more information about TSMRI, visit http://www.tarleton.edu/tsmri/ or contact texassocialmediaresearch@gmail.com.


Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.

Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Happy Spring Break! - Monday, March 12th to Friday, March 15th


Readers,

Happy Spring Break! The Millennial Professor blog will observe Spring Break during from  Monday, March 12th to Friday, March 15th.

Enjoy your break!

Sincerely,

J. Edwards


Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Friday, March 9, 2012

Open Education Week (March 5th to 10th) - Take the Plunge, Sign the Open Education Pledge!




Readers,

Open Education Week is coming to a close, but this is definitely not the end to this amazing celebration of open education! Take the pledge! Commit to open education! 

The Support Centre for Open Education and the Open Education group are sponsoring a pledge to enable others to support open education!


SCORE logo

Enjoy!

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Thursday, March 8, 2012

Open Education Week (March 5th to 10th) - Open Textbooks!





Readers,

I am becoming a huge fan of open textbooks! Here is "A Virtual Tour of the College Open Textbooks Adopter Communities" Prezi presentation! 



When traveling, I hate dragging textbooks along in my luggage. This virtual alternative for textbooks would enable me to remain current on my classwork AND prevent back pain at the same time!

Enjoy!

Sincerely,

J. Edwards


Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Open Education Week (March 5th to 10th) - Flexible Learning for Open Education (Floe) Animated






Readers,

Happy Open Education Week! I was pleased to find an amazing animation focused on Open Education Week. I enjoy creating and editing these great animations for class and also for fun!




Enjoy!

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Open Education Week (March 5th to 10th) - Open Michigan





Readers,

Happy Open Education Week! Michigan University utilizes the open education concept in a variety of ways! Check it out!


Enjoy!

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Monday, March 5, 2012

Open Education Week (March 5th to 10th) - African Open University




Readers,

Happy Open Education Week! This is an amazing event! This week, I will highlight a few of the NEAT "events" happening during this week:

African Virtual University at the Open Education Week!


Africa Virtual University is an innovative concept for its students and the local community! Enjoy!

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Sunday, March 4, 2012

LAST DAY TO VOTE - Vote for the BEST IDEA - "Great Ideas for Teaching With Adobe Products" Contest



Readers,



Greetings everyone!

Here are the entries for the "Great Ideas for Teaching With Adobe Products" Contest! Vote for the BEST IDEA via the Google Form listed at the end of this blog post.

Thanks for your support! :)

The contest ends on March 4, 2012! Please type any questions in the comment section below.

Drs. Edwards and Helvie-Mason

SUBMISSION A - Surreal Animation
Idea Category: Classroom Ideas (Face-to-Face or Hybrid)

Adobe Product: Photoshop

How the Adobe Product Was Used: Students create the animation in Photoshop and then export the video to be edited in either MovieMaker or Premiere Elements.

Idea Description: Students collaborate in pairs to create an animated dream-like surreal animated collage using Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft MovieMaker or Adobe Premiere Elements. Students will compare and contrast the concepts of dream-time or the subconscious in work created by Aboriginals and the 
Surrealist movement with an emphasis on Salvador Dali and Frida Khalo. 


View examples here: http://vimeo.com/17954450


SUBMISSION B - Smart Boards And Adobe Connect

Idea Category: Online Instruction/E-Training

Adobe Product: Adobe Connect

How the Adobe Product Was Used: We use adobe connect for education,  for IT remote help, and inter-departmental online meetings

Idea Description: Adobe Connect is a powerfull virtual classroom application which is very suitable for distance learning university programmes. But  in math involved lectures it should be improved that the whiteboard pod can  recognize the math writings turns them into regular math equations and formulas which is input via a smart board. Also the chatpod should be improved for written math conversation between students and the lecturer. For example when i write a latex code between a tag it should render the formula and shows the actual equation.  This should be improved because smart boards are not so smart to recognize the handwritten formulas.


SUBMISSION C - Mobile Game Design Using Flash and Photoshop

Idea Category: Classroom Ideas (Face-to-Face or Hybrid)

Adobe Product: Photoshop, Flash

How the Adobe Product Was Used: 
We use Photoshop to create the graphics that we use inside Flash.  We especially use it for creating seamlessly tiling textures for use in a blitting tile based game engine.  We create sprite graphics that we can use for our character and projectile animation needs.  We use the tools in Photoshop to understand how both additive and subtractive color theory works and pixel density affects the clarity  and sharpness of images and graphics used for projected display and print media.


We use Flash to understand animation, from keyframes to tweening, timing and secondary motion.  We come to grips with the advantages of vector graphics and the drawbacks in terms of performance.  We explore the use of Action Script 3 extensively for use in animation, interaction and game design.  We finish by publishing our files for use on the web, stand alone PC through AIR and for mobile devices through Android and iOS releases.


Idea Description: I currently teach a class in Game Design.  I use Photoshop and Flash almost exclusively to bring the concepts taught in the class to life.

We first take a crash course in Photoshop, learning how the program's tools and functionality work to understand color theory, image resolution and raster graphics.  We create projects that are directly applicable to our game development by learning how to make seemlessly tiling textures, using layers to seperate out parts of a character for use in animation and building graphical user interfaces and heads up displays from scratch.

Afterwards we delve into the world of Flash where we explore all the options and tools that it presents to understand how framerate can affect animation.  We discuss using keyframes to build animations and using tweens to move from keyframe to keyframe.  We explore the differences between vector and raster(bitmap) graphics, the advantages and disadvantages of each as it pertains to game development(especially for mobile devices).  We discover the display list and how we can use it for different effects. We import graphics from Photoshop and become aware how easily we can update our movie clips, character animations and textures while moving from one program to the other.

Once we have become familiar with the graphic and animation capabilities of Flash we then dive into Action Script 3.  We use this as a base to begin learning object oriented programming.  We begin by studying the fundamentals of variables and functions and continue on towards building custom classes and interfaces that allow us an amazing level of interaction and complexity between our existing graphics and user input, be it through keyboard, mouse or touchscreen.  Flash using Action Script enables us to consider new ways to bring ideas to life, where Adobe has opened every creative avenue and inroad is an opportunity for a budding game designer to express themselves in an ever expanding marketplace of potential.  

Our final project is to take the Flash projects we have worked on and publish them for use on both Android and iOS devices.  The ease with which we are able to do this through Flash has really motivated my students' desire to learn how to develop games using the Adobe products.  The time is ripe to take advantage of such a rich feature set to not just build our dreams into reality, but to carve out careers and a deeper appreciation for the world we live in.





Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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Friday, March 2, 2012

Higher Education Faculty/Staff and Stress - A Word from a Faculty Member in the Field

Readers,

Today, I am featuring several blog posts from one of my dearest friends in higher education, Dr. Lora Helvie-Mason. She contributes several posts a year on the topic of stress and higher education.



I enjoy reading her posts, because she writes about work-life balance and tenure, the story of my life for the past few years. :)

Sincerely,

J. Edwards

Millennial Professor - Jennifer T. Edwards, Ed.D.
Become a fan of Millennial Professor on Facebook - http://goo.gl/gnN41
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