UNHCE Information Technology & Distance Education Blog

UPDATE (6/24, 6:30 PM): The email server is reconfigured and back online. It is likely that a small number of messages were irretrievably lost while the server was having problems. If you have issues with your account, please call the Hot Seat or, if able to, email Steve Judd.

Thanks for bearing with us during the worst outage we've experienced in the last ten years!

ORIGINAL: We continue to have issues with the email server, and anticipate it being up and down all day, while we attempt further repair.

This post will be updated as we have more concrete information to share.

Kevin Siegel, who offers training for Adobe in Captivate, has a wealth of resources at his website, Icon Logic.com. Included in it is a sign up for a weekly eNewsletter, called Skills & Drills.

UPDATE (6/23, 11AM): Thanks to Judi Strauss (who came in from vacation) and the technical assistance of David Bird of UNH CIS, the email server is coming back on line. It may be a while before all of the queued messages get processed, but things are in progress.

Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE (6/22, 6PM): The email server had a catastrophic failure of it's multiple, redundant hard drives. We are working on assessment and repair and may need to get some parts rushed in. Hoping to be back online by Wednesday afternoon at the latest. Will post updates here. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!

ORIGINAL: As of 8:00 AM Monday, 6/22/2009, the UNH Cooperative Extension email server is down due to a hardware failure. Users are not able to send or receive messages, whether using Eudora or the webmail interface.

We are working to repair the server and restore email service, but have no estimated time for having services back in order.

I will update this post when we have new information.

• Home Broadband Adoption 2009
• The Future of Personal Health Records
• Social Networking
• Online Classifieds
• Do you suffer from Internet fatigue?

Social marketing is the thing right now. What is social marketing? According to Wikipedia:

Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing along with other concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good. Social marketing can be applied to promote, for example, merit goods, make the society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote that considers society's well being as a whole. This may include asking people not to smoke in public areas, for example, ask them to use seat belts, prompting to make them follow speed limits.

I thought it might be helpful to explain the most popular forms of social marketing such as Twitter and Blogging.

Twitter:
By now, most of you have at least heard of Twitter. Twitter is a free social networking tool and/or microblog. Current estimates of the number of daily users range between 4 and 6 million. Recently, Complete.com ranked Twitter as the third most popular social network, right behind Facebook and MySpace. Twitter has grown 1382% and retains more members than either Facebook or MySpace. Why the increased popularity? Twitter allows only short comments (140 characters) and makes it simple to add and retrieve information. You go to your Twitter account and all new updates are there for you to view. Since they are small, often with links to more information, they are easy to look over and allow you to pick and choose which information you want to look at further and which you want to ignore. Also, it doesn't require as much input of personal information as Facebook and MySpace.

Twitter is becoming the place to go for the latest information rather than a place to catch up to friends and family. For example, a friend of mine who lives in San Jose, CA first heard about an earthquake in her area via Twitter before the local news station had time to report it. Once someone tweets, it goes out to the world for everyone to see. You can limit those who follow you, but that is less likely with Twitter since the information is generally for public consumption. There are still those who just post inconsequential bits and pieces (i.e. just got out of bed and brushed my teeth...) and there are those who will follow anyone and want to be followed by everyone just for the numbers. However, there is a definite trend towards more specific information which has attracted more mainstream viewers, President Obama, NASA, CNN, The Times use Twitter. When Oprah Winfrey sent her first tweet, so many viewers decided to follow her, it brought the system down. The LA Fire Department used Twitter to warn residents about wildfires in the area.

However you feel about it, it is a great way to get information out there, so take a look and think of the possibilities. Pick a subject matter you want information on, type it into the search and see what you find. You can access Twitter via web browser, desktop application, Blackberry and iPhone. If you are intrigued, you should take a look at Twittervision 3D.

Blogs:

What is a blog? According to Wikipedia

"A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog."

MySpace and Facebook are blogs. You can create an account for free. However, they require personal information you may not want to supply (age, DOB, etc.) If you want to create a blog, but do not want to share personal information, you can create one for free at Blogger.com, Createblog.com and many others. I use Blogger.com for the NH Adobe User Group blog.

A blog is a website that is easy to create and update. It allows you to accept comments from others as well. Our Extension Update is a blog. The information is less static than a regular website as it archives itself after a period of time. So, it is important to create entries on a regular basis if you wish to retain followers. With a blog, you can limit viewers by utilizing password protection and followers may want to subscribe to your blog so they get the latest information as it appears on your blog. If you want to create a blog Extension has it's own blogging software, Movable Type. Contact Stephen Judd for more information.

Social marketing may help you get your message across to your clientele in an easy, timely manner. Give it a try and see what you think.

A Free White Paper titled, "How to Present Effectively Online" is available online.

This report demonstrates how you can:

• Prepare more dynamic online presentations


• Boost interest in your message through engaging your online audience


• Retain your audience using interactive online tools


• Use a call-to-action to encourage audience follow-up

  
  

  Posted by Barbara Wright at 8:36 AM

• Getting Started with Premiere Elements - Customizing Themes
• Getting Started with Premiere Elements - Exporting to Video Files
• Getting Started with Premiere Elements - Using Multiple Effects
• Getting Started with Premiere Elements - Mixing Audio
• Getting Started with Premiere Elements - Customizing Themes

• Inserting a Flash Video (FLV file)
• Installing a Data Collection (Microsoft spreadsheet)
• Sharing Your Document
• Automating Tasks in Acrobat
• Removing Sensitive Information
• Optimizing Your PDF Document
• Adding Multimedia to Your PDF Document
• Exporting Documents to Office Formats
• Adding Headers/Footers to Your PDF Document
• Adding a Watermark to Your PDF Document

• InDesign CS3 Numbering
• Getting Cooler Color with InDesigns CS4 Kuler Panel
• InDesign CS4 - For People Who Think CMYK is a Four Letter Word
• InDesign CS4 - Beyond the Basics with Terry White - He is amazing. I saw him in Boston at a seminar.

eLearning DevCon 2009 is sponsoring a 1-hour, live training event titled "Upgrading from Adobe Captivate 3 to Adobe Captivate 4." On Wednesday May 20, 2009, at 1:00 PM.

Features covered will include:

• The enhanced Captivate 4 recording process


• Panning (Automatic and Manual)


• Drawing Objects


• TOCs


• Text to Speech


• PowerPoint Linking


• Adding Widgets


• Creating Variables

You can register at their registration page. The first 50 attendees are free. After that it's $29.95 to attend.