Step One: Preparing an iPad

It is best to begin with an iPad right out of the box. Through Configurator, you can skip certain steps and provide some basic information about your institution by preparing your iPad as brand new. Here is where you have the option to supervise your device—if you choose not to supervise, some options may not be available. So, let’s explore the Profile option.

Prepare iOS Devices

If you have an MDM server, you can actually create a profile that configures to the wifi network and the server and load this profile directly onto the iPad. I do not have one of these, so we’ll be using the Manual enrollment for now and continuing on past the ‘Enroll in MDM server’ page.

Supervise Devices

These options will determine whether or not your users will be able to sync and pair with their own computer (at work or at home). There are pros and cons to both, and it really depends on how you intend the iPads to be used.

Assign to Organization

This information will show up in your settings and is a way to claim ownership over the iPads. It’s good. Do it. If you’re setting these up from a central library branch, you can fill out the information for wherever you want them to belong or be returned to, etc. The options are endless!

Configure iOS Setup Assistant

Ahhhh, my favorite window. When you open an iPad and go through the setup process, it forces you to go through a bunch of steps that can be a pain to undo later on. If you’re setting up a bunch of iPads, ain’t nobody wanna do that for every device. So just set them all up here and safe yourself the trouble. Again, what options you choose all determine how much ownership your users have. Once you’ve selected the options you want, you’re done with this process!

Once the iPad is prepared, we can dig into the Blueprint.

I LIVE!

Yes, I’m still around.

In the last year and some change I have completed my MSLIS and landed a pretty awesome big girl job for the local community college as a technical specialist in a subject library. There are some pretty great parts of the job, and one of my favorites (and most frustrating tasks) is setting up and deploying technology. We received ten iPad Mini 4s around holiday break, and since then we’ve been going through the process to get them into our students’ hands.

There have been a few bumps in the road, but nothing that some creative thinking can’t get around. When technology fails, the librarian rises to the challenge… in this case, with a fine-tip sharpie and a smile. However, there has been one difficulty that keeps getting under my skin and refuses to reconcile.

Apple Configurator.

It’s a friendly enough program, if you know what you’re doing. Which I sort of do. I guess. In short, it’s a program that allows you to create profiles and blueprints and apply them across your iOS devices. You can also create specific profiles for people and create those, so you don’t have to have Tom enter his same information every time he wants to borrow an institutional iPad. We can restrict access to certain apps and the iTunes Store, set the wallpapers, apply a passcode, subscribe to calendars, all this great stuff! It’s a pretty snazzy idea. In theory.

In practice, I know Apple products and I know the configuration I want, but Configurator doesn’t necessarily work like I want it to. The simple problem with this is my expectations. Again, I know Apple products. On some level I expected to be able to pick up and use it with minimal difficulty, but that has turned out to be a huuuuuuuge false assumption.

About two weeks ago I went to Computers in Libraries here in DC. It was great just as it was last year, and I learned a lot and had a blast networking and meeting long-time Internet acquaintances. On the Thursday I attended (the last day, sadface), I grabbed my coffee and yogurt and found an empty table where I could stand and not have to do the awkward “chair table” routine that I usually do. The first person to approach me and start chatting was Andrea Puglisi (@asterismsky), who IT TURNS OUT BY TOTAL RANDOM HAPPENSTANCE is also working on a similar level with iPads at her library. I love library conferences. The best stuff happens. We had a lot to talk about and share with each other, and it’s been nice to be able to tweet back and forth about our obstacles since.

Yesterday (two days ago?) a post crossed my tumblr dashboard asking about managing iPads, and specifically restricting access to Game Center. Google only told us so much, and even signal boosting the issue to the rest of the tumblarian community didn’t give us an answer. So today when I got to work, I checked on the laptop and LO AND BEHOLD—guess what Configurator does with a single little check box.

In all my hair-pulling, swearing, and furious gritting of my teeth at Configurator, I’d forgotten how much I’d learned by messing around in it. I’d forgotten how much I love problem solving and processing through my learning by sharing obstacles and victories on a blogging platform.

And so, it begins again. Coming soon—a series of posts about Apple Configurator and iPads in an educational setting. They will be basic. They will help me learn and distill what I’ve learned and go back to the beginning so I can reset my own knowledge to a more solid foundation.

If you have any insight or if you see a place I’m going wrong, please feel free to comment and discuss—I came into this mostly blind and am still correcting the assumptions I adopted with my expectations.

If you have questions, you are happily invited to ask them. I’m more than thrilled to do what I can and help others as much as possible.

Customize Your iOS Device to Fit Your Needs

Source: Customize Your iOS Device to Fit Your Needs

Responding to “On Trigger Warnings and the Halberstam Affair: a Panel Discussion”

LSC874—One Last Thing…

If anyone wanted to see what the spreadsheet looked like for the TimelineJS project, I have made it accessible on my Google Drive.

With that, I end blogging with the LSC874 tag and begin my vacation from schoolwork.

Using Diigo To Prepare for Comps

Useful!

LSC874—Bamboo DiRT: Useful Google Earth/Maps Skillz

I’ve already written about Google Earth and Maps to some extent during this class, but as I did use it for the last assignment I should write about it, and it’s come to my attention in the last week or so that I am not the only person who has experienced this difficulty.

Importing a map from Google Earth into Google Maps.

How do?

Here’s how do.

1. First off! Get your kmz file which you created in Google Earth. Got it? Awesome.
2. Next, let’s dig through Google’s options to take us back to Classic Google Maps.
   1. Go to maps.google.com and click on the question mark in the bottom right corner.
   2. Select “Return to classic Google Maps” and confirm when prompted 
3. Now, let’s import that KMZ file:
   1. Select ‘My Places’
   2. Click on “Or create with classic My Maps” [note: if you click on “CREATE MAP” it takes you back to current Google Maps -_- ]
   3. Select “Import”
   4. Click on ‘Choose file’ and navigate to the file on your computer. Confirm your selection and select ‘Upload from file’
   5. Wait forever for your file to upload
   6. Enjoy your feeling of accomplishment
4. Convert the old map into new Google Maps
   1. Go back to maps.google.com
   2. Click on the search bar and select “My custom maps”
   3. Select “see all my custom maps”
   4. Select the one you created a few minutes ago
   5. When prompted, select ‘Import’
   6. Voila!

[note: while Google Earth does, Google Maps does not support image overlays and so will present you with an error, as seen below.]

 

 

Special thanks to Kim Hoffman for permission to use her Google map as an example in this tutorial.

LSC874—Bamboo DiRT: StoryMapJS

So, Northwestern’s KnightLab has a lot of awesome tools, and I might as well get their logo tattooed over my heart, ’cause I sort of love them. StoryMapJS is a way to show a story in text and image while also displaying the relevant location on a map. As the story progresses, the map moves around and allows you to interact with the story differently. For this project, I used largely the same data as for TimeLineJS, using strategic copy/pasting. The result, as you’ll see, is somewhat different.

Unlike TimelineJS, this tool does not require use of a spreadsheet but rather is built in a manner resembling a presentation. Each event is a slide, and for every slide you have the option to manually place the geomarker or to search for a location and have it automatically placed accordingly. As I was mistakenly under the hopeful belief that I could import from Google Maps, I had already created a KML file of all the required locations. Entering them again (I’m beginning to see a theme with this project) was tedious, but pretty simple as the search field had a handy autocomplete feature and was spot on most of the time. It also helps that Rome is a pretty small city.

One of the main features I enjoyed using was the media selection feature, which is able to pull Flickr images from their page link without requiring a specific image URL. As Flickr makes finding such a URL very difficult, this feature saved me a lot of time and grief. No digging through the embed code for 50 jpgs to get the URL, no strategic screenshotting (which is dubious anyway), no hoping you have the right resolution… it does it for you.

When you create a StoryMapJS, it links to your Google account and saves the file on your Drive in a similar manner to TimelineJS, so you can stop and start back up again when you need to. I found this very useful as I had to switch browsers a few times to figure out which one was the best (Firefox, shocker).

StoryMapJS was created for Journalists to tell stories in a format other than the usual print/text+image format to which we are accustomed. Its purpose is not scholarly by nature, but it lends itself well to scholarly content and storytelling. It is easy to pick up and learn and requires no data formatting or coding, so while the bar is low the returns are high.

LSC874—Bamboo DiRT: TimelineJS

One of the three tools I used from Bamboo DiRT was Northwestern University’s TimelineJS, made in their fantastic KnightLab. I made a short sample to explain my creative process.

As you can see, it took me a while to figure out how to work with the spreadsheet and fix my data so that it would smoothly integrate with their specifications. However, while it was time consuming it wasn’t overly complicated, and it was in large part a lesson in planning and reading the directions ahead of time *cough* we well as setting my own expectations appropriately.

Timeline JS is a tool that allows you to enter time-measured data into a Google spreadsheet, publish it to the web, and with a clever use of the Google Docs API, it is parsed and presented as an embedded timeline which can be placed in WordPress or a straight-up HTML document. For those who really care, you can go into the code and do some customization, but the options supplied on the project page were more than enough for this project.

all ze options!

Getting my data around was by far the hardest part of this tool, as it meant that I had to identify what information was required and appropriate. Hawthorne doesn’t really care for trivial details such as the date or time, or really anything that I needed for a timeline. Largely I extrapolated periods of time using my mad logic skillz and my browser’s ‘find’ function to dig through the source material on Gutenberg. Yay, public domain!

before

after

The tool itself is scholarly in creation but can (as exhibited in the link above) be used for silliness. It’s very useful to lay out linear stories or to show a progression of events, either on a small scale (one day) or a large scale (ten years). Timeline is open source, so you can indeed download it and tweak it to your heart’s desire as well as create your own plugins using JS/JSON to make it do flips and tricks. If you’re interested in doing so, you can find it on GitHub. As my JSON skills are at their most basic and I felt no need to change the tool, I did not mess around in the code, but would be lying if I did not admit to being curious.

In the end, I was very happy with my results and quite content to spend time readjusting the media and the text to get it closer to my goal. The timeline is clear and the transitions smooth, and the data is able to be tweaked without republishing the tool. Overall, the result is that the story, which relies so strongly on the feelings of the intertwined friends, is made more understandable by the passage of time and comprehending how long or short the distance was between events. Hawthorne tends to skip around without much context, and the timeline certainly put the story into perspective for me. It also taught me the importance of removing all commas from the timestamp field and that I should check this first before falling apart over a cup of tea at 1am.

LSC874—DC|THATCamp|2014

WHEEE! THATcamp is always my favorite event of the year. Next time I’ll get enough rest ahead of time so I don’t feel like I just worked a double shift while fighting off zombies during the holidays in retail. I slept for thirteen hours on Saturday night, so… yeah.

This THATcamp was put on by a GWU history class as part of their final project! The group was largely beginner to intermediate, by our own admission, and most of the sessions throughout the day focused on group discussion and shared experiences rather than workshops or panel discussions.

After a brief discussion and some Dork Shorts, the following schedule was decided:

THATcamp DC2014 Schedule

I attended Sunlight Data Visualization, mostly because I was really curious about using government data for educational reasons and how data visualizations use design to portray a message. The session was intense and enjoyable. I have stickers. They have some fantastic tools available on their website, including a Shazam-like app called Ad Hawk which will tell you more about the funding partners for ad campaigns. They also have a collection of deleted tweets from political figures, which is less educational and far more entertaining.

The second session I sat in on was “You have built it, they have come—NOW what?” which was hosted by Meghan Ferriter (@meghaninmotion) and the rest of the Smithsonian Transcription Center (STC) team. Everyone in the room discussed projects  with transcription or active ways to involve a community and build trust with users. The STC team shared their experience with launching their transcription center and things which surprised them—which was mostly how amazing the volunteer community was. They found that once people started transcribing, others actively reviewed the transcriptions and would often have contributions or revisions. The volunteers built on each others’ work and the regulars collaborated together, resulting in high quality transcriptions and an active community.

The third session was one that I imagine our class would have had a ball with: DH in the Classroom/Digital Pedagogy. The discussion centered around what kind of involvement in the online sphere was best suited for what kinds of assignments and students, from K-12 to Ph.Ds. My favorite bit that came out of the discussion was from the visual notetaker:

 

The main takeaway I got was that our class is pretty fantastic, and that by using our WordPress blogs we are in fact practicing for having our work under public scrutiny by our peers, employers, and other scholars. In fact we’ve gone beyond practicing and are already doing it. So, go us!

Also, I met the fantastic Kathy Larsen, who teaches a class involving fanworks in media ranging from fanfic to Twitter accounts which impersonate West Wing characters. I have a lot of enthusiasm for this discussion because everyone was so interested and passionate and willing to share their experiences as well as learn from others. The woman who lead this discussion was at last year’s RailsGirlsDC event, and it really felt great to see her again and hear her speak about her experiences in digital pedagogy.

Finally, I decided to go to a low-key session about born-digital collections lead by Trevor Owens. I always enjoy his lead discussions because I always walk away with at least ten interesting links to look at in depth and a renewed interest in digital archives. It felt great to put my feet up and discuss video games, selfies, Yelp! reviews, and Geocities & fanfic archives, and hypertext literature with others. It really made me wonder if CUA could start gathering tweets & pics from campus events as part of a preservation effort. The Tower already includes some top tweets every week, it shouldn’t be too hard to begin gathering material. It might even be a good partnership project between the student newspaper and the library to find and share interest tweets.

Overall it was a fantastic day and I miss it already. Kelly joined me for the first half, and I’m so glad she did—the only other grad students who were there were in the humanities, and it was great to have another LIS peep there.