Fall 2008 Announcements

Welcome to Fall semester! A few announcements as we start a new semester:

New Drake Webmail & Email Outage
As you know, unless this is your first semester, you can access your Drake email through the "Email" icon in BlueView. That email program will be changing to a more full featured email program. The email change is scheduled to take place over Labor Day weekend. This means two things for you:

• When you log on to your Drake email after Labor Day it will look different
  
• There will be no Drake email (student or faculty) from Friday, August 29 11:00pm through at least Aug 31, and probably until Sep 1.

(if you do not know how to access your Drake email and are NOT taking ALOP 242-Living, Learning & Leading in the 21st Century), let me know and I can tell you how to log in to BlueView and your Drake email).


Petition of Candidacy
Now that you all are officially accepted into the ALOP program, the next administrative step is to complete a petition of candidacy. The petition is plan of which classes you will be completing which semester. You need to complete this petition by the time you have 12 credits, but most students find the sooner they do it the better! If you have not yet completed a petition of candidacy, send me an email after classes get started and we can schedule a time to get it done!


Have a great fall semester!

Change in credits for fulltime student status

I've been getting a few questions about the impact of the change in the fulltime credits on financial aid (including student loans). Here's the situation:

Full time for grad students was 12 credits, but has been lowered to 9 credits starting fall 2008.

This really doesn't impact financial aid for those of you who have been getting financial aid as part time students. Financial aid has always had the guideline of half-time status eligibility. So now you must take a minimum of 5 credits (9 credits / 2 = 4.5 credits, rounded up is 5 credits) to be considered a half time student and to be eligible for financial aid.

If you have specific questions, you can call the Student Financial Planning office (aka "financial aid") at 515-271-2905.

BlueView & MYDUSIS maintenance

Once a month, BlueView and MYDUSIS are taken down for maintenance from 4:00pm until about 10:00-ish. You can still reach Blackboard and Drake email by using these direct web addresses:

Blackboard: http://bb.drake.edu/
Email: http://webmail.drake.edu/

For planning purposes here's the schedule for the maintenance dates for the rest of 2008:
July 11
August 8
September 12
Octover 17
November 14
December 12

Drake System Maintenance

BlueView and MYDUSIS will be unavailable at approximately 4:00 p.m. on Friday, June 13, 2008 due to routine maintenance. These applications will be available again at approximately 6:30 p.m.

You can still access Blackboard and webmail directly (without going through BlueView) at the following web addresses:

• Blackboard: http://bb.drake.edu
• Email: http://webmail.drake.edu

For planning purposes the next maintenance windows are scheduled for:

• Friday, August 1 - NOTE: This is expected to be an extended maintenance window possible lasting through August 3 in order to upgrade blueView to the current vendor release. (but you can still get through BB and email through the direct web addresses)
• Friday, September 12, 2008
• Friday, October 17, 2008

Drake Internet Outage--Friday, June 6

FYI:
The Office of Information Technology is planning an Internet maintenance outage scheduled for Friday, 6 June 2008 beginning at 4:30 PM, Central Time (U.S.).

The Internet maintenance will improve the quality of service to the internet offering at Drake. The maintenance outage scheduled will last 30 minutes.

Internet Services functions will be unavailable during the maintenance outage as connectivity will be taken down while migrating to a new service. All Inbound and Outbound functions will be unavailable during this time, including:

• Mail service, including sending and receiving mail
• Access to the blueView home page
• Blackboard
• Internet access Drake

APA Update

I received the following from a former student who is now a writing teacher and consultant (Cecelia Munzenmaier):

If any of your students have EBSCO create reference citations for them, they may find the database name replaced by a DOI identifier, as in this example Whitmeyer, J. M. (2000). Power through appointment. Social Science Research, 29(4), 535-555. doi:10.1006/ssre.2000.0680

This is correct, according to the update to electronic reference style at http://www.apastyle.org/elecmedia.html

Another change is that the retrieval date is no longer required for sources that are unlikely to change.

These changes are summarized at http://www.apastyle.org/elecmedia.html

New Policy: You can take *six* credits before you are admitted

Hi Everyone-

I just learned of a change of policy that will take effect Fall 2008.

Currently, students are allowed to take up to 12 credits before they are officially accepted into any graduate program in the School of Education. Beginning Fall 2008, students will be able to take 6 graduate credits before being accepted into the program.

What does this mean for you?
If you have not yet completed the admissions process and been accepted into ALOP...you'll want to do it by the end of the summer. Here is the admission process, but if you have questions feel free to give me a call or send me an email.