CIT Training Program Gears Up for Spring Courses

The CIT Computer Training Program's Spring Semester 2005 is officially underway with more than 140 topics and 30 new classes. We have developed a wide range of courses to help NIH employees, staff, and other users of NIH computing facilities work as efficiently and effectively as possible. Classes will continue to be added throughout the term, and popular courses may have extra sessions added. Our classes are free of charge to NIH staff.

A full description of the course schedule is available at the CIT Computer Training Program web site. All courses are now open for registration on-line.

New Courses in CIT Services

• "NIH IT Enterprise Architecture 101" is a new course this semester, taught by Helen Schmitz, to support the NIH mission by creating a structured and dynamic NIH-wide information technology (IT) design in order to guide the implementation of applications and infrastructure. This interactive session is designed to introduce the concepts and terminology of Enterprise Architecture and detail its importance to you, to your IC, and to the NIH. Also covered in this session will be the purpose behind and what is needed in order to fully comply with requirements.


• A new course has been added in our Listserv category. The NIH Listserv currently hosts over 2,900 lists and was upgraded to the latest version in October 2004. Walter Lamar has specifically designed "What's New in Listserv 1.8e for List Owners" to explore the differences between the old and current versions, as well as additional features in the newest version.


• The problems of control and space for servers are addressed in another new offering. With the new course entitled "Need Better Space for your Servers? Consider Co-location," Kathy Scalzi details the co-location services that CIT offers - both in the NIH main campus facilities in building 12 and in a commercial off-campus site in suburban Virginia.


• CIT addresses the increasingly critical issues regarding computer security by offering "Meeting the Challenges in Desktop Security Patch Management at NIH." Chuck Benjamin will share procedures and lessons from his experience with using automated patching tools in the NIH environment and will solicit suggestions and ideas from seminar participants. This timely class joins returning favorites in computer security courses, such as "SARA Basics," "Network Security and Firewalls," "Basic Security for Unix Workstations," and "Security Penetration Testing, A Practical Overview."

New Courses for IT Professionals

• "Introduction to Novell Linux Desktop" and "Introduction to Novell SUSE Enterprise Server" introduce open source standards and the common knowledge and skills needed in all Linux distributions. The Desktop course will assist the student in effectively operating within the new Novell Linux Desktop 9. Among other items, students in the SUSE Enterprise course will gain the essential skills required to log in to a multi-user Linux environment and to navigate the SUSE Linux file system.


• HHS Usability Seminars give web developers and those creating web requirements a better understanding of usability concepts and testing. Seminars include "Usability of Handheld Devices," "Universal Design: The Case of Lower Literacy Populations," "Developing Statements of Work for Engineering Usability Services," and "Designing Usability Surveys." These seminars are given free-of-charge as a partnership between HHS and GSA.


• Aaron Gee-Clough, DNST, will bring "The Open Source Movement – A Review of Available Tools." This class will give an overview of some of the more well-known Open Source tools and applications. It will specifically discuss the maturity of these items and what makes them ready to use.


• "Beginning Perl" is offered this semester with a new instructor, Dr. Rick Troxel. This course provides a basic understanding to Perl, a flexible programming language that excels at reformatting data and manipulating long strings of test. Perl is a great first programming language for those who find spreadsheets too limiting.


• With the introduction of "Fundamentals of Filemaker 7," "Filemaker Pro 7 Level 1 (Windows)" and "Migrating to Filemaker 7" three new and cutting edge classes will allow student to take advantage of the features of this new and substantially changed version of the software. Filemaker 5 and 6 courses have been offered at CIT for several years and the new generation of Filemaker courses will continue to serve NIH users. Users of Filemaker 6 may be interested to know that this semester will be the final offering in 6 classes.

New Courses for Scientists

• Neuroscientists have four new entries in "Presentation" courses from Neurobehavioral Systems, Inc. Presentation is a precision and powerful "stimulus delivery" and "experimental control" program for neuroscience; the program delivers auditory, visual and multimodal stimuli with sub-millisecond temporal precision. The courses include a general introduction to the Presentation software, information in programming experiments using Presentation Control Language, and a demonstration of the implementation of a complete visual fMRI experiment in Presentation from scratch to completion.


• For the first time, there will be a full week of training courses by Dr. Matthew McAuliffe on Medical Image Processing Analysis and Visualization (MIPAV). In addition, a new class, "Writing MIPAV Plug-ins" will help users automate the processing and analysis of biomedical imaging data. Other courses offered during the MIPAV week are "Getting Started in MIPAV," "Visualization in MIPAV," "Writing Scripts and Plug-ins," and "Mapping to the Talairach Coordinate System."

Registering for Classes

All courses are available free of charge to NIH employees and other users of NIH computing facilities. For more information or to register for classes, please visit the training web site.

We also welcome your phone calls regarding courses, schedules, training issues, future needs, or teaching offers. Most of our instructors volunteer their time and talent to bring these timely and informative sessions to NIH staff. If you have a topic you would be interested in presenting to the NIH community, please contact us at 301-594-6248.