Technology and Learning at Macaulay

Last Friday I had the marvelous opportunity to spend the day on the island of Staten, at Snug Harbor, joining some great Macaulay student volunteers (and one ITF volunteer) at the 2009 Gadgetoff.  This was a real happening, with a walking mechanical spider, pulse-jet powered carousel, enormous trebuchet (launching pumpkins and flat-screen TVs) and much much more.  There were three separate theater sessions of presentations (each presentation only a few minutes long) demonstrating ideas and projects from the sublime (the hydraulophone) to the heroic (the most amazing prosthetic arms and hands I’ve ever seen) to the ridiculous (the no-pants subway ride).  Outside and inside there were loud explosions, intelligent robots, close-up magic, and remote-operated submarines.  I do have to say that out of the dozens of presentations, only two of the presenters were female.  That seemed unbalanced, and I wish that the organizers had made more of an effort to strive for balance.  Women innovators are out there–we can’t let it continue to appear that the “smartest tinkerers and thinkers” are only male.

The best thing was that Macaulay volunteers really made the day succeed.  Our students and our ITF played a critical role in making everything work, making the day exciting and educational and enjoyable for all.  Take a look at the photo gallery (and some videos!) from the day, and be sure to congratulate your classmates who took part.  And let’s see if we can get more volunteers, and some participants, in the future.  I’d love to see Macaulay students up there on the stage presenting, as the future of the future–inventing, creating, imagining.  That’s what you all do best!

Do you use a Mac “mighty mouse”? Maybe you plug one in to your MacBook, or you have a Mac desktop in addition to the MacBook? Almost everyone who has used one of these stylish white mice has encountered, after a while, the problem of the little scroll ball refusing to do its job. You roll and roll the little ball, and no scrolling happens. Just today I was told “I need a new mouse!” because of this problem. But it doesn’t take a new mouse to fix this–the remedy is quick and easy (and inexpensive). Just take an alcohol pad (available at any drugstore, or if you’re here in the Macaulay building, just ask me!) and rub it on the scroll ball. Up and down, back and forth, all around–and turn the mouse upside down and tap it on the desk a few times, too. Then some more rolling with the pad. You will be scrolling freely again before you know it.

What happens is that over time, there’s a buildup between the ball and the rollers (inside the mouse) of a substance technically known as “gunk.” Dirt, dust, dead skin cells, skin oils, lint…gunk. The alcohol gently dissolves and loosens that stuff, and your mouse is back to normal.

Do you have any other Mac tips? For the mouse or any other part of your machine? Leave a comment and let us know!

Is email an important method of communication for you?  I hear all the time (usually in a cranky old-person voice :-)) that “kids today don’t use email.  They only care about that texting facebook machine thing.”  I’m not sure if that’s entirely true or not, and I know that I heard the same kind of thing years ago about–“kids today don’t write letters.  They only want to pick up the telephone, even if it’s long-distance.”  But for us at Macaulay, email is a fairly important and fairly efficient way for us to push information out to our students (and others).

And we’ve recently made a switch in the way we provide email accounts to our students.  In the past, like many colleges (like all the CUNY campuses) we automatically created an honorscollege.cuny.edu email address for each new student.  Then (two years ago) we switched (to reflect our new name!) to macaulay.cuny.edu email addresses.  But we found that most students weren’t really using their Macaulay email accounts at all–or if they were, they were just forwarding to another email address (usually their campus address or a gmail or yahoo account).  So, starting last year, we did not create Macaulay email accounts automatically.  Any student who requested one, got one, but only if they specifically made the request.  We got maybe a dozen requests last year.

Then two things happened this past summer.  We switched to a new system (hosted by Google) for all the existing accounts (mostly alumni).  And Facebook finally, after two years of official requests and student petitions, created Macaulay Honors College as a “network” (like just about every other college in the country).  In order to join that Macaulay network, all you need is a Macaulay email address.  Once that happened, and we announced it, things changed.  A dozen or so students requested Macaulay email accounts in all of last year.  This year, in approximately one month, over 200 students have requested (and received) Macaulay email accounts.  So does this mean that the new email system is so fantastic that students love it and want to be a part of it? Or does it mean that Facebook is so important that students will accept an email account they don’t really need, just to be a part of that Facebook network?

You decide.  Let us know! You can leave a comment on this post, or as always, email me! joseph.ugoretz@mhc.cuny.edu (and of course if you don’t have a Macaulay email account yet, and you want one, or if you’re having any trouble with or questions about your Macaulay email account, you can email me for that, too).

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about the new Apple operating system, Snow Leopard. Especially from our new freshmen (welcome, class of 2013!), who got their new laptops just days before Snow Leopard arrived. Want the straight word on this new OS and how it applies to Macaulay laptops? You’ve come to the right place.

First, the official policy. We did not load Snow Leopard on any of the new laptops (and of course not on the older ones!). We can not support you if you decide to install Snow Leopard on your own. That means that if you purchase Snow Leopard and install it, and something goes wrong (it has happened to a few students already), we will only be able to restore the laptop to the state it was in when we gave it to you–when it was fresh out of the box. We won’t reinstall Snow Leopard for you, and we won’t fix whatever went wrong with the Snow Leopard install. Even beyond that, if you install Snow Leopard on your own, and then you have problems with using it or making software work with it, we can’t help you with those problems. The most we can do is wipe your computer clean and restore it back to the original Leopard operating system.

So those are the rules, that’s the official policy. But Snow Leopard is getting a lot of attention recently, and it’s not expensive at all (no, we are not eligible for the $10 price for computers purchased this summer, we won’t buy it for you, and no, you can’t use your Opportunities Fund to pay for it). At a price of $29 for the upgrade, or $49 for a family pack for five upgrades, it’s a hard deal to resist. I know that, and I know some of you are going to go ahead and try this out. I have now installed Snow Leopard myself on all my own Macs, and all my family’s Macs, and you should know what I’ve found–in case you’re thinking of giving this a try.

The basic advice–if you don’t care about details–is that this is not a required upgrade, and probably will not make a very noticeable difference in how you use or experience your Mac.  At this point, unless you’re a curious, bleeding edge, ahead of the curve, innovation-hungry, power user (like your Director of Technology and Learning 🙂 ), you should skip this and stick with Leopard.  You’ll be fine.

But if you’re planning to go for it, here’s what you should know.

1. Snow Leopard will save you some hard drive space.  Not a huge amount, but a noticeable amount.
2. Snow Leopard will let you have the date, not just the day of the week, in the menu bar at the top of your screen.
3. Stacks (the way that folders full of files or apps on the dock appear) work better in Snow Leopard.
4. Exposé works better in Snow Leopard.
5. You can set the clock to automatically update (like a cellphone does) when you travel to a new time zone (how often do you do that?).
6. If you need to sync calendars (iCal), contacts (Address Book), and email (Mail) to an Exchange server, Snow Leopard does that better. (At this point, this doesn’t apply to any Macaulay students–you’re not syncing to any Exchange servers, unless–maybe–you have a job outside of school where they use Exchange)
7. Some programs are a little quicker and zippier to open and run. A little.  Probably not even noticeable.
8. When you want to eject a removable disk in Leopard, you may have noticed that annoying message telling you that you can’t do that because the disk is in use.  In Snow Leopard, that message actually tells you which program is using the disk, so you can quit that and then carry out the eject.
9. The wifi indicator now tells you the strength of the various available networks, and has a nifty animation while a connection is being established.
10. You can tell other people that you are a curious, bleeding edge, ahead of the curve, innovation-hungry, power user like your Director of Technology and Learning 🙂

That’s about it.  That might look like a lot of new and exciting features (a list of 10!!), but if you really look at them, none of them are big or important.

There is also one fairly large negative.  I have seen reported, and experienced myself, serious crashes of Microsoft Word under Snow Leopard, when the program was working perfectly on the same machine under Leopard.  These are real hard crashes, with lost data (completely unrecoverable).  That will probably be fixed with a Microsoft patch or upgrade soon, but at this point I would say that if you do upgrade to Snow Leopard, do not use Word. Stick to Pages or Google Docs.  I have seen reports of other apps crashing or just not working well under Snow Leopard, but have not experienced that myself.  And Symantec antivirus (which is really only necessary if you’re excessively cautious) is not yet compatible with Snow Leopard.

So those are the differences.  All together, are they worth $29? And worth taking a risk that something may go wrong that we will not support?  That’s an individual decision.  Honestly I should say that the risk is pretty small–this is not a difficult upgrade and Apple handles these things very well.  But as I said, some students have had issues.  So choose wisely!

And of course if you have questions or comments, email me! (or comment on this post).

(And feel free to read some of the many other reviews out there on the web–I particularly liked MacWorld’s, Ars Technica’s (23 pages!), and David Pogue’s.)