An interesting data visualization and analysis combination comes from the Dopplr travel service. "Raumzeitgeist" imitates the Google Zeitgeist summary project, looking over months of user activity to identify patterns.
(via BoingBoing)
Amazon.com is purchasing e-book publisher Audible.com for $300 million in stock.
Also in Amazon news this week, the company's data services now use more bandwidth than everything else the company puts through the internet.
A college professor writes about his positive experiences using a microblogging service in teaching. David Parry (Emerging Media and Communications program, University of Texas, Dallas) lists a series of uses, including building class community, speeding feedback, teaching writing, and more.
Parry also published a Twitter-based writing assignment.
Note: the Chronicle article about this story describes Twitter as being based in mobile phones. In fact Twitter is a Web service, which can be accessed from either Web browsers in laptops or cell phones.
Notes on a presentation about student podcasting from University of British Columbia (UBC), given at the ELI 2008 annual conference.
The Prototype of an Educational Podcasting Initiative (PEPI) project involved multiple UBC offices, including Land and Food Systems, journalism, the library, public relations, and instructional technology. The goal was to support podcasting in a different way than profcasting, which was seen as very often done. A second goal was to move somewhat away from dependence on Apple's iTunes. Pedagogical goals: improving communication skills, engaging academic content in a new way, adding digital fluency, and reaching a larger audience.
A snapshot of students: agroecology majors are often very passionate about their academic issues, and are also relatively small compared to the rest of the university, in addition to being spatially removed.
Course development: a fourth year seminar was the initial class, which worked closely with the UBC Farm. Assignments involved describing details of the farm. Journalism instructors taught storytelling techniques. Technology training came from Duncan McHugh (Multimedia Developer, Land and Food Systems Learning Centre), who taught Audacity, recording practices, and copyright. GarageBand and iMovie were available, but not taught or otherwise supported (reasons of time and relative complexity). Content was published to the Web via a group blog, a WordPress implementation. Podcasts can also be found at this directory.
Reflections after the class: learning curve was high, which was a challenge, not always met with student enthusiasm. Technology staff faced challenges in supporting students, rather than faculty and staff. Supporting Audacity had occasional issues, including crashes and finding the LAME.dll file. Permissions and privacy issues came up; those should be dealt with ahead of time. Some student feedback was very positive.
Coming up: rerunning the class, with journalism collaboration continuing.
Discussion surfaced various topics, including recommending a WordPress blog podcasting pluging (PodPress). iTunesU might house content. YouTube wouldn't work as well, because of political problems (Canadian concerns about locating content in the United States, re: PATRIOT Act).
Notes on a presentation on building a virtual world to teach Spanish, given at the ELI 2008 annual conference. Presentation materials blogged to the Web.
Pedagogical goals: improving collaboration skills, expanding student-instructor interaction, visualizing off-campus content-related spaces, emotional connection with the environment, and role-playing language and culture situations. Additionally the instructor wishes to teach pragmatics, practical social interactions in a second language.
The application selected was Open Croquet.
Faculty interaction: the word "game" was seen as detrimental, while "simulation" and "virtual world" win better attention.
The professor leading this project's development studied student use of the world, focusing on 60 undergraduates who worked on it for six weeks in fall 2007. The professor analyzed student learning through interviews, pre- and post-experience assessments. Interactions (chat, voice, movement) were recorded.
Initial results: students did not vary their avatar's appearance. Major difference in perception: world as content area versus world as (social) practice space. Students improved knowledge of certain "content chunks". Student motivation was high, perception positive.
Spatial organization: host family, university setting, market/plaza.
Discussion questions began with Second Life comparisons. Croquet is peer-to-peer, not server-based, enabling faster connections and less lag. Access to the world was sufficiently restricted by campus sign-on.
Notes on a presentation on redesigning a politics and media class to address Web 2.0, given at the ELI 2008 annual conference. Presentation materials blogged to the Web.
First version, 2006 - the plan: read and critique content in various Web 2.0 forms. Students were required to blog, one post/week; since the campus didn't support blogs, they "used publicware." Students also built content in a wiki. Moreover, students worked in audio, either contributing to a live radio show or co-creating a podcast (for example). Some podcasts were "enhanced podcasts," sound plus images, and published to YouTube (example). Additionally, students were required to find and add five (5) items to a group del.icio.us account, tagging from a precreated set (media bias, etc).
Various other organizations helped support students. A local community radio station helped with audio training. Campus film studies assisted with video. The library partnership included teaching about copyright issues.
One problem emerged: too much work, leading to student resistance. Public matters: students decided to make all audio content public. An unusual problem: students shocking other students with very violent content.
Some lessons learned: the blog form was the most comfortable for students (one example). A course feed page worked well. Free public online tools (Blogger, YouTube) worked well. YouTube was much easier to work with than iTunesU. One risk was that students could plunge too far into technology (medium over message). The cognitive shift involved in Web 2.0 was tricky to make, and complex to think about, "fundamentally changing how we think about information."
Next steps: creating and using a YouTube enhanced channel. Building an information commons in the library, which would support podcasting creation. Google Docs will be the next wiki platform.
One article from local media on this.
MIT professor Henry Jenkins is offering a keynote at the Educause ELI 2008 annual conference, titled "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies". Jenkins describes a Wikipedia study project conducted by MIT's Comparative Media Studies program.
He began by focusing on higher education's engagement with Wikipedia, starting with the Middlebury College controversy. After expanding on the controversy's complexity, Jenkins recommended that higher education conduct a dialogue on the topics Wikipedia evokes, a form of teaching the debate.
Jenkins then addressed the Macarthur Foundation project on digital media and learning, arguing that what's at stake now is how to add to knowledge, rather than losing from cultural heritage. Participatory culture is one way of approaching this. The "digital native"/"digital immigrant" metaphor limits cross-generational social connections.
Participatory culture skills are very social, bound into communities. Some skills are participatory, requiring involvement in online environments. Jenkins asked us to consider the difference between media effects (what media does to us) and media affects (ethical interaction).
Challenges facing the rise of participatory media:
Within that header, Jenkins identified several skills applicable to Wikipedia: collective knowledge, judgement, networking, and negotiation. Openness and transparency help foreground the process of knowledge. Jenkins cites Middlebury College professor Jason Mittell's argument that Wikipedia is teaching us to think about knowledge in new ways. He adds that Wikipedia challenges the expert paradigm, raising crowdsourcing and other collaborative forms as alternatives. Jenkins drew on other forms of digital social behavior to expand on this, including gaming, from alternate reality gaming to massively muliplayer online gaming.
Other blog posts covering this talk: Intellagirl.
Technorati tag: ELIAnnual08
NITLE's research director is conducting a preconference workshop on web 2.0 storytelling at the Educause ELI annual conference this morning.
Workshop materials can be found starting from this wiki page.
Today Davis and Elkins College is hosting a NITLE workshop on emerging technologies, where participants are drawn from across the Appalachian College Association (ACA).
Workshop materials are found in a series of wikis, starting here.
One author describes his ongoing practice of writing a book using Google Docs. Philipp Lenssen explains his workflow, then assesses the advantages and disadvantages of Google's wiki service. A followup blog discussion extends the commentary.
The leading blog search service is Technorati, according to a Comscore report. Google's Blogsearch is also in the running.
One of the most successful online games, World of Warcraft, reached a milestone this week, as the number of paying subscribed cracked ten million players.
Many previous Liberal Education Today posts on World of Warcraft here.
A new scholarly book to be published by an academic press will receive peer review online through a group blog site. Expressive Processing (MIT Press, forthcoming) is being written by Noah Wardip-Fruin, associate professor of communication, University of California San Diego. Grand Text Auto is the site. As the author explains:
Blogging has already changed how I work as a scholar and creator of digital media. Reading blogs started out as a way to keep up with the field between conferences — and I soon realized that blogs also contain raw research, early results, and other useful information that never gets presented at conferences.
ResearchBlogging uses blogs to aggregate new scientific research.
# Bloggers -- often experts in their field -- find exciting new peer-reviewed research they'd like to share. They write thoughtful posts about the research for their blogs.
# Bloggers register with us and use a simple one-line form to create a snippet of code to place in their posts. This snippet not only notifies our site about their post, it also creates a properly formatted research citation for their blog.
# Our software automatically scans registered blogs for posts containing our code snippet. When it finds them, it indexes them and displays them on our front page -- thousands of posts from hundreds of blogs, in one convenient place, organized by topic.
It's newly launched, so some disciplinary departments lack content. Those with content to examine include biology, clinical research, mathematics, philosophy of science and science ethics, and psychology.
(via Chronicle Wired Campus)
A major study of online copyright infringement, one which influenced several years of national and campus policies, turns out to have grossly overestimated one crucial statistic. The 2005 study commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) claimed that 44% of the film industry's losses to copyright infringement were caused by college students. But the MPAA now admits "human error" misstating the statistic, which should be... 15%.
Moreover, even that 15% may be too high:
Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause, says it doesn't account for the fact that more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren't necessarily using college networks. He says 3 percent is a more reasonable estimate for the percentage of revenue that might be at stake on campus networks.
"The 44 percent figure was used to show that if college campuses could somehow solve this problem on this campus, then it would make a tremendous difference in the business of the motion picture industry," Luker said. The new figures prove "any solution on campus will have only a small impact on the industry itself."
(via InsideHigherEd)
A working document for the latest HTML specifications had been released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
This specification defines the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web, HTML. In this version, new features are introduced to help Web application authors, new elements are introduced based on research into prevailing authoring practices, and special attention has been given to defining clear conformance criteria for user agents in an effort to improve interoperability.
(via Slashdot)
A British company has released an application connecting part of Web 2.0 with one virtual world. The Twitter Fountain takes Twitter (microblogging) content and republishes it within Second Life.
(via New World Notes)
The Atlantic Monthly has opened up its issue archives to the world, removing longstanding subscription access barriers.
(via MetaFilter)
Harpooned is a political game, where the user takes the role of a whaling vessel. The game's rhetoric labels the player as a scientific researcher, but gameplay focuses on killing whales to harvest their meat. The political argument is clear.
Political computer gaming is an established genre in this developing medium. It occurs all over various ideological spectra.
(via MetaFilter)
Nanw's Adventure is a Welsh computer game where you help a library retrieve missing books. The game plays in the browser, and offers increasing complexity with each retrieval.
Along the way the player learns facts about Welsh cultural history.
(via JayIsGames)
A collaborative video service is being explored by Kaltura and the Wikimedia Foundation. The goal is, apparently, a browser-based video co-authoring tool.
From the press release:
The overwhelming participation in Wikipedia has revealed users' inclination to collaborate using text. Simultaneously, the success of user-generated video sharing sites has demonstrated users' growing interest to produce and to share rich media. With this project, Wikimedia and Kaltura hope to leverage both these trends by allowing groups of online users to collaborate and create rich media content together, and contribute to human knowledge creation and dissemination globally.
(via BoingBoing)
A new ECAR study examines student experience with IT in higher education. a December 2007 presentation (slides) outlines findings concerning curriculum, student perception of instructors, use of course management systems, skill self-assessment, and more.
Duke University's magazine recently published a front-cover article about game studies, describing faculty who research and teach with computer games.
(thanks to Richard Liston)
The OpenID standard gained a powerful adherent this week, as Yahoo brought its broad social empire on board.
Yahoo and its roughly 250 million user IDs officially jump[ed] on the bandwagon. Today, there are only approximately 120 million valid OpenID accounts. In one move, Yahoo more than triples that number.
Google has started an OpenID pilot with December, as we noted in December.
(via TailRank)
The creators of a popular Facebook application is facing legal action from the creators of the old-fashioned game it was based on. Scrabulous is based on Scrabble, and Hasbro did not authorize the Facebook-based derivative work.
This visualization project arranges leading terms from Homer's Iliad into a tag cloud:
(thanks to Sean Connin!)
The Economist is hosting an online debate about the value of social networking technologies in higher education. Pro and con sides are available from their site. Additionally other voices are making themselves heard through the blogosphere, such as edublogger consultant Will Richardson, and social networking scholar Danah Boyd.
Traditional-age college students are not competent in searching Web information, according to a new report from the British group JISC. The "Google Generation" study argues that
although young people demonstrate an ease and familiarity with computers, they rely on the most basic search tools and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to asses the information that they find on the web.
A Penn State economics professor describes using YouTube to teach his subject area. Dirk Mateer's practice is to set up a channel (http://www.youtube.com/dmateer), wherein he stores saved movies on various topics. That channel contributes to class content.
there are many useful media available on You Tube: movies of in-class demonstrations, short movie scenes from theatrical releases that are of interest to economists, music and music videos that are rich in economic content, commercials, clips from TV shows, news clips and current events, comedic media from The Daily Show, sketches from Saturday Night Live, and much more.
He also makes these selections public, so that he can publicize economics, and also attract attention and feedback, blog-style.
Moreover, another benefit of this YouTube approach is avoiding copyright problems, since the YouTube platform already addresses that.
The Library of Congress has partnered with Flickr to publish two large image collections, Web 2.0-style. The idea is to take advantage of "crowdsourcing," using input from many people around the world. In this case the hoped-for benefit is improving textual descriptions of each image. One collection consists of news photos from the 1920s, the other of color images from the 1930s and 40s.
(example photo)
This is the pilot for a larger Flickr project, Flickr Commons, which has other crowdsourcing projects in mind.
(thanks to Andrew Connell!)
Ushahidi is a current events and political intervention mashup, combining reports about the Kenyan crisis with Google Maps.
One educational podcaster is interviewed this week about the state of the art. Rice University's Daniel Frey sees five forms of podcasting in academia:
Faculty want to share information… For staff, the reason is usually training...
Students, of course, are doing everything. They're doing podcasts themselves and putting them out there. With development alumni, it's raising money, connecting with alumni, making sure they know how they can get involved: that's a big portion of podcasting.
But the number one reason is really recruitment and enrollment.
Time-Warner entered the virtual world arena this week, purchasing a large stake in a teen-oriented 2d/3d space. Gaia Online was founded in 2003.
(via Stephen Downes)
The RTI Group mobile messaging company was purchased by course management system market leader Blackboard this week. In a press release Blackboard explained the acquisition in terms of emergency warnings and the importance of the mobile device ecosystem:
...it has become imperative that academic institutions have
the ability to quickly and effectively communicate with their entire
campus constituency in the wake of a range of school and campus
tragedies, severe weather and other safety concerns...
Institutions are focusing on mobile-centric strategies and looking to
tightly integrate their learning environments with cell phones and
PDAs.
Blackboard is paying $182 million for RTI, perhaps up to $199 if earnings rise. The company expects 2008 revenue of about "$278 million to $284 million."
Today Saint Lawrence University is hosting the NITLE Introduction to Teaching with Technology in Liberal Education workshop. Topics will include Web resources, publishing to the Web, discussion tools, and multimedia pedagogy.
A presentation which structures the day can be found here.
"Online Photo Sharing in Plain English" is a short video explaining how Web 2.0 photo publishing works. Very clear, brisk, and useful.
(via elearnspace)
This morning Rollins College is hosting a NITLE workshop on emerging technologies.
All materials, outlines, resources, and discussion for the workshop can be found starting here.
Today Rollins College is hosting a workshop on social software for education.
Resources for today's workshop can be found on this wiki.
A group of RSS readers, once available for purchase, have been republished as free downloads. They include FeedDemon (desktop application), NetNewsWire, and NewsGator (for Outlook).
(via Tailrank)
Two examples of using folksonomies in higher education come from the University of Colorado system. Two medical schools' faculty self-assigned tags to find each other through publication, grants, and techniques fields. UC School of Education & Human Development tag their interests and professional activities, resulting in individualized tag clouds. For example, one professor's publication cloud:
(thanks to Peter Gilbert)
A Wikipedia-affiliated Web search project appeared today in an early stage of development. Wikia Search is in alpha release, and accepts user contributions to search rankings and short descriptions, wiki-style. Users can also create profiles with search interest information, which may be the service's most important element, according to VentureBeat:
According to Wales, Search Wikia’s primary innovation will be to tie a user’s social network - that is, information about the user and their friends - into search results. The idea is that a user and their friends share a common set of preferences and that using that information makes search results more personalized as well as more relevant.
Although any Web search project appears to compete with Google, Wikipedia's co-founder demurred:
"We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer," Mr. Wales said. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a "Google-quality search engine," Mr. Wales said.
Other, competing social search services are active, notably Mahalo.
Some Web observers are very disappointed with Wikia Search as it stands.
The creation of Wikia Search was announced in 2006.
Educational uses for the do-it-yourself social networking tool Ning are growing rapidly, according to Ning's founder. Ning groups are being created by teachers and staff for curricular materials, courses, educational populations, with a K-16 range.
(thanks to Steve Burnett)
Bill Gates gave his last CES keynote\ this week. It included a glimpse of possible strategic moves for Microsoft in the near future, according to Forbes:
Much still needs to be improved or invented, Gates reminded his listeners, including better mapping services, data synchronization and directories of friends. High-definition images should be available everywhere--not just on displays but on every wall and desk. Virtual three-dimensional environments will let consumers "walk" into stores--digitally, of course--meet people at a distance and collaborate on projects.
The digital "cloud" will take care you: back up your data, make it possible to get photos or information anywhere you need it. Those digital assets will also create a "context" around you that will make it possible for your devices to know and recognize your preferences and needs, so that when you go to buy a new mobile phone or PC, everything you need to get up and running will be instantly on tap.
And, eventually, more natural modes of interacting with computers will finally prevail, including touch, natural language recognition, digital pens and other motion cues.
Also on the horizon: an iPhone-like interface for the next Windows Mobile.
Google's web-based slide presentation tool has received some upgrades this week. New features include embedding slideshows in HTML documents, and, perhaps most importantly, importing PowerPoint presentations. Presentations are part of the larger Google Docs service, alongside wikis and spreadsheets.
This represents a further move in Google's "Web Office" strategy, competing on some levels with Microsoft Office. Google Presentations now more effectively competes with SlideShare, the smaller, Web 2.0 service.
Google released this tool in June of last year. One liberal arts campus and one NITLE example noted here.
(thanks to Peter Naegele)
A prominent blogger was arrested by Saudi Arabian police this week, most likely because of criticism he published on his site. Fouad al-Farhan,
32, who used his blog to criticize corruption and call for political reform, was detained "for violating rules not related to state security," according to the spokesman, Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, responding to repeated requests for comment with a brief cellphone text message.
Farhan's Dec. 10 arrest was reported last week on the Internet and has been condemned by bloggers in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Bahrain. The Saudi news media have not yet reported the arrest, but more than 200 bloggers in the kingdom have criticized Farhan's detention, and a group of supporters have set up a Free Fouad Web site.
(via Instapundit)
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