Kansas State University

State Surplus Property disposes of hard drives at no cost

In light of security risks posed by improper disposal of electronic media like computer hard drives, the state of Kansas' State Surplus Property program offers an immensely useful service by physcially destroying computer hard drives at no charge. Since federal guidelines (PDF) and an upcoming state policy require disk drives with confidential data to be "disintegrated, shredded, pulverized, or incinerated" when they are not going to be re-used or they leave the institution, few have the resources to properly destroy the drives. Fortunately, State Surplus Property contracted a company to degauss, shred, and then smelt the drives and is absorbing the cost.

Unfortunately for K-State, the hard drives have to be taken to the state Surplus Center in Topeka at 2904 SW Kanza Drive between 7:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The center only provides pick-up service for state agencies in Topeka. Two requirements:

1. Before taking hard drives to the state Surplus Center, you must contact Bill Lorson (785-368-7474, Bill.Lorson@da.ks.gov) to let him know how many drives you're bringing and when you'll bring them.
2. The drives must be wiped clean of any data with a tool like Darik's Boot And Nuke before Bill will accept them.

Future IT Tuesday articles will explore local options for disk-drive disposal.

For more information about recycling in Kansas, see:

• Recycling electronic waste — www.ksewaste.org
• www.getcaughtrecycling.org
• Kansas Recycles — kansasrecycles.org
• Kansas Green Teams — www.kansasgreenteams.org

Reuse your course for fall semester

When you teach the same class each semester, you don’t have to create a new course. Instead, you can "version" your course and assignments for the new semester. When you do this, you will want to clean up or update areas of your K-State Online course. The Announcements, Calendar, Assignments, and Files you’ve put online are not automatically updated with each new version of your course. You will have to go into each of these tools and decide what you want to update, what you want to delete, and what you want to archive.

For reference, use the Reusing Your Course checklist (PDF) created by the iTAC trainers. You can also review the online help — after signing in to K-State Online, click the Help link in the upper-right corner and search for the Reuse Your Course topics.

Where is my K-State Online File Dropbox?

With the release of the K-State Online upgrade last weekend, the File Dropbox is no longer a component and will not appear in the homepage menu for students. (Components are features that are turned on or off per course.) Instead, you can now create multiple File Dropboxes without naming restrictions, and can organize them with Manage Files to best fit your course.

Your course File Dropbox that you used prior to last weekend has not been deleted. It has been renamed "CourseFileDropbox" (no spaces in the dropbox name) and has been moved under Content in Manage Files. It is currently unpublished. If you wish to continue using this dropbox, you'll need to publish it so it is accessible to students.

• To publish, click the red X next to the File Dropbox. It will change to a green plus (+) sign indicating the File Dropbox is now published and students can again submit files.
• You can change the "CourseFileDropbox" name by clicking the black arrow next to the dropbox, and typing a new name in the "File Name" box.
• To create new dropboxes, from Manage Files, click the "New Item" button on the toolbar and select "File Dropbox".

For assistance, contact the IT Help Desk, helpdesk@k-state.edu, 785-532-7722.

Latest YouTube videos by Wesch on technology, education

Michael Wesch, assistant professor in Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, continues to publish YouTube videos about the technology of media and how it's changing lives. (His debut video "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" that went live in January 2007 became a worldwide hit and currently has 6,224,476 views.)

"I don't think of (media) as content, and I don't even think of it as tools of communication," Wesch said in his June 23 presentation about YouTube at the Library of Congress (see "An anthropological introduction to YouTube" below).

"I think of media as mediating human relationships," he said. "And that's important, because when media changed, then human relationships changed. ...And that's why I wanted to suggest that we're gonna have to rethink all of these things, including ourselves."

See Wesch's space on YouTube for these and more:

• An anthropological introduction to YouTube is Wesch's June 23 presentation at the Library of Congress. It includes more than 40 minutes of entertaining and insightful YouTube videos compiled by Wesch and his students to exemplify what YouTube is and how it is changing our world and views. (To jump to specific portions of the presentation, use the "More info" link in the right column to see an index of section topics and their timepoints.)
  (added to YouTube July 26, 2008. Current viewings: 186,603)
• A Portal to Media Literacy includes a PowerPoint presentation with Wesch's signature mix of interesting facts and viewpoints. It targets the assumptions that govern standard education and knowledge acquisition — and how those assumptions have been negated by the ways that students and the public are using technology to acquire, create, and use information.
  (added to YouTube July 10, 2008. Current viewings: 13,254)
• A Vision of Students Today is a 5-minute video created by Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at K-State. According to Wesch's overview, it covers "some of the most important characteristics of students today — how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime." His students researched, compiled data, and are silent signholders in the video, which document facts and numbers from the viewpoint of today's college students.
  (added to YouTube Oct. 12, 2007. Current viewings: 2,579,128)