Since early March, I have been buried up to my nose with course work, materials development, and a distance-learning research project that I am working on with several other CalState faculty members. I am just now getting a chance to relax a little. So, I thought I would share a few things that I have been doing.
Experimenting with SharePoint Team Services
I switched web hosting services to a new one called "WebHost4Life" http://www.webhost4life.com. The new service supports Microsoft's SharePoint Team Services. If you are looking for an excellent web hosting service, these guys are great and very reasonably priced.
SharePoint Team Services provides a template format that can be modified using FrontPage 2002. The webpage format includes interactive features like announcements, discussion board, surveys, lists, and the ability to setup hyperlinks.
My objective was to create an interactive course webpage for each of my university courses. This is important since starting with the Fall Quarter 2003 many of my classes will be blended (i.e., will include both traditional class attendance, as well as, distance-learning students). I had hoped that SharePoint could be a platform that would enable both groups (i.e., live class + distance-learning students) to work together.
So far, I have been able to setup a SharePoint webpage, modify its appearance (but not easily), and make a number of the interactive features work. However, I ran into a major stumbling block with respect to inviting students into the SharePoint workspace.
SharePoint uses an email invitation approach to invite participants into the workspace. This is very similar to Groove's email invitation approach. For whatever reason, I have not been able to get the email invitation to work.
The bottomline to this experiment with SharePoint is that I have given up on it for the moment. I need more time to figure out the quirks in SharePoint before I can try to use it with students again.
I suspect that SharePoint works well within a company's network or LAN system. I think there may be problems when trying to use it across the Internet.
If anyone has experience with SharePoint Team Services, I would appreciate hearing from you.
Course Development Projects
During the upcoming Summer Quarter 2003, I will be teaching Intermediate Accounting for UCLA Extension in an online format. The course is the first course in the three-course Intermediate Accounting sequence. We will be using the new Intermediate Accounting, 11th Edition, by Kieso, Weygandt, and Warfield (Wiley & Sons, Inc.).
What's new here is that we will be a test class for the new online version of the textbook. I'm working with Wiley's instructional design people to see how we can link the online text to my website course materials, Groove, Blackboard (and possibly to SharePoint).
As a professor, for me this is exciting stuff. For, it will enable me to inject the power of the Internet into a textbook.
Continuing to Work with Ashok on GXl (Excel for the Groove Workspace)
For the past several weeks, I have been helping Ashok with his development and refinement of his GXl tool (Excel for the Groove workspace). Wow! What a powerful tool.
Several of my students have been using GXl to prepare solutions to accounting problems. So far, comments about the learning/collaboration experience have been quite favorable.
Life in General
As always, it seems like there is far more to do than there is time to get things done. This work is very exciting and challenging for me.
The more that I learn about using technology to develop course materials, the more I keep tinkering with things that I have already developed. I'm never quite satisfied with finished products. Somedays, this is good. Other days, I fall behind my self-imposed schedule.
No complaints. I'm a happy person doing enjoyable things.
Best wishes,
Rick Lillie
Email: rlillie@csusb.edu
1:56:07 PM 
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