Liberal Education Today

The ten millionth Wikipedia article was created this week.

There are more then two million English-language articles in the Wikipedia.

(via WikiNews)

Yahoo has launched a women-centered Website, Shine.

In the latest twist in the Blackboard patent case, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ruled all 44 of Blackboard's course management system patents were "rejected," according to Desire2Learn. All 44 are now subject to reexamination.

In response, Blackboard emphasized that this ruling is one step in a continuing process.

This Office Action was expected and is the first step in a reexamination process that often takes years to complete. It has no effect on the validity of the patent, the lawsuit between Blackboard and Desire2Learn or the pending injunction against Desire2Learn.

Iving Wladawsky-Berger reflects on cloud computing, noting that the field is exciting to startups and small groups, but not yet ready for enterprise use. Wladawsky-Berger also sees two major features of emergent cloud computing, which could appeal to campuses: solid scalability and improved user experience. Combined, what could be seen?

Cloud applications should be able to provide a really high quality of experience to massive numbers of users without missing a beat. They should significantly improve the way people deal with the many tasks and devices that surround them in their everyday life – at work, at home, on-the-go, and wherever they happen to be.

"7 Things You Should Know About Google Apps" offers a two-page introduction.

This list of twenty recommended blog pages provides non-post content suggestions for bloggers. It is aimed at commercial bloggers, but some of the ideas should be useful for academics as well.

(via Digg)

A large archive of downloadable sound clips has been Webbed up by the One Laptop Per Child campaign. These could be used in many multimedia projects.

(via Brian Lamb's del.icio.us)

Yet another enterprise service has been released by Zoho. This time the Web 2.0 application is invoicing.

Consider this a datapoint in the steady growth of Web 2.0 services.

(via TechCrunch)

Adobe released Photoshop Express for the Web this week. Users can upload images, then edit them using many familiar Photoshop tools. The service also hosts up to two gigs of images on the site.

(thanks to Bret Olsen!)

A new Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) has been established by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The ODH builds on the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI).

One of its first acts was to support a joint grant with the British JISC for digitization, backing five projects.

A new game simulates living conditions in contemporary Haiti. Ayiti lets users follow the daily lives of a family, selecting how they spend their time, responding to crises, and attempting to attain goals.

Ayiti was designed by Playing4Keeps, a group of New York City teenagers working with Global Kids and UNICEF, with support from Microsoft.

(thanks to Jen Sader!)

Several new projects help users share records of their passage through the Web.

Trailfire is a combination Firefox plugin and server. Users register pages in a sequence, then publish them to the Web. Each page in a trail can be annotated.
(For example, this Gothic literature trail)

PMOG offers a game approach to cobrowsing. It's a "passively multiplayer online game", letting users publish annotated paths through the Web. Being a game, users receive points for pages browsed, can leave surprises (pleasant or dangerous) for other players, and make continuing along a path playfully mysterious.

(PMOG annotation example)

Microsoft Research plans to launch SearchTogether, a cobrowsing project:

SearchTogether's collaboration features include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat.

Steven Kaye points out that there are many cobrowsing tools and services.

Yahoo! joined OpenSocial, an initiative aimed at increasing interoperability between social networking platforms.

Google launched OpenSocial last fall.

The Open Content Alliance book-scanning project just hit another milestone. The Internet Archive, founding ACA member, now scans one thousand books per day.

(via Stephen Downes)

iPhone owners use Web services at a dramatically high rate, compared with owners of other mobile phones, according to a new M:Metrics report. Rich media services are popular, either via widget or browser:

[A] staggering 30.9 percent of iPhone owners watched mobile TV or video, versus a 4.6 market average, and more than double the rate for all smartphone users. Usage of social networking is also popular among iPhone users: 49.7 percent accessed a social networking site in January, nearly twelve times the market average.

(via Podcasting News)

A storytelling experiment has been launched by Penguin, using Google Maps as an integral part of a novel. The 21 Steps uses (so far) a London map to ground each paragraph.

Campuses battle campuses, with students organizing furious building-by-building struggles: the New York Times reports on a new gaming style from higher ed. GoCrossCampus uses campus maps to stage Risk-style battles, and can be considered "multiplayer locally social gaming".

(thanks to Todd Bryant!)

A series of papers about using Second Life in higher education, drawn from a 2007 New Media Consortium conference, are now available on the Web.

The Russian Wikipedia passed a milestone this week: 250,000 articles.

(via WikiNews)

Reed College is hosting a NITLE workshop today, Podcasting for the Liberal Arts Classroom.

Agenda for the Day
9-9:30 Introductions

9:30-10:30 Overview
1) podcasting 101
2) podcasting, pedagogy, and the liberal arts campus

10:30-10:45 break

10:45-12:00 Searching, aggregating, and composing podcasts, 1
• Listening to podcasts
• Web search
• Audacity

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-1:45 Searching, aggregating, and composing podcasts, 2
• Audacity
• iTunes

1:45-2:45 Intermediate podcasting, 1
• GCast

2:45-3:00 break

3:00-3:45 Intermediate podcasting, 2
• Other options: Garageband, videocasting
• Web 2.0: VoiceThread

3:45-4:30 Final discussion
• Reflections
• Plans and next steps

Podcasting 101

1. Samples: Berkeley Groks, CBC Radio podcasts, Engines of Our Ingenuity, In Our Time (BBC), IT Conversations, Librivox, The MacCast, Napoleon 101, NASA podcasts, National Public Radio podcast directory, One public radio podcast directory, Out of the Past, Radio Open Source, This Week in Tech, University Channel (Princeton)


2. Liberal arts campus podcast aggregations: Allegheny College, Bowdoin College, Layafette College IT , Language Lab Unleashed (Oberlin), War News Radio (Swarthmore), and still more


3. Pedagogical examples: "We Media" Carleton class, Barbara Ganley at Middlebury, John Donne podcasts; Artmobs, smARThistory, A marketing textbook


4. Searching and finding podcasts: Podcast Alley, iPodder, Podcast.net, Yahoo Podcasts, Podcast Ready; iTunes (download); Podfeed's Top 100

Recording podcasts

1. Podcast life cycle



2. That LAME plugin: Audacity

   for Windows and for Mac



3. Garageband (Apple iLife suite)

Publishing

Gcast

Younger workers are more technologically autonomous than their elders, with implications both good and bad, according to a presentation from Baseline.

(via Slashdot)

Google's Sky service, an astronomical tool for the Google Earth application, can now be accessed in a browser. It's very much like Google Maps in appearance:

Google Sky launched last summer.

(via Slashdot)

Second Life's CEO is stepping down from that position. Philip Rosedale will become chairman of the board, and remain with Linden Labs:

I will be 100% involved and fulltime at Linden Lab. Second Life is my life’s work, and I am not going anywhere!

Such a transition might signal a second phase for this virtual world, with major strategic decisions in the offing.

Rosedale's departure comes several months after Second Life's Chief Technology Office left the firm.

Mission Wadlandis is a hybrid game, combining Google Earth with browser-based point-and-click mystery.

(thanks to Todd Bryant!)

Captchas are explained and current developments outlined by their inventor, professor Luis von ahn, in a good, short IT Conversations podcast.

Poets.org launched a selection of poetry formatted for mobile devices.

Historian Dan Cohen describes how professors can start blogging. Cohen emphasizes the diversity of the blogosphere, the ways traditional aculty practices map right onto blogging, and the social benefits of profblogging. He also debunks some popular myths, and calms some fears.

(via )

YouTube announced the release of some APIs, which would allow programmers to build data mashups with that Web video service.

We do all of the hard work of transcoding and hosting and streaming and thumbnailing your videos, and we provide open access to our sizable global audience, enabling you to generate traffic for your site, visibility for your brand, or support for your cause. Meanwhile, we provide full access to our substantial video library, enabling you to attract users and enhance the experience on your site. It's all free, and it's available to everyone, starting now.

One American campus uses Facebook for lost and found purposes. The University of North Texas deployed Trace to connect the popular social networking site with security needs.

The hope is that someone will check Facebook before buying that used laptop or bicycle, see that it belonged to someone else, and call the police or the person who’s missing the goods.

"Measuring Success: Raid on Deerfield Revisited" describes a Website assessment approach, which tracked changes in audience perception after experiencing content.

Course management system provider Desire2Learn is prevented from any software sales in the United States, according to an injunction issued by a federal judge this week.

[L]ate Tuesday, Judge Clark issued an injunction that went beyond what Blackboard had requested. The ban applies not only to future sales of Desire2Learn's products but to its existing U.S. customers as well. It banned Desire2Learn from "encouraging, supporting, aiding, or abetting the use of" its already-installed software systems.

Blackboard issued a statement in support of the injunction, and expressing a desire to move forward.

Desire2Learn has stated that it is finishing up a new, significantly redesigned version of its Learning Environment software, which should avoid patent challenges. A subsequently issued 60-day stay in the injunction should, according to another D2L statement, help speed this development process.

This latest move in the Blackboard-Desire2Learn case has, as with previous iterations, drawn criticism.

Bryn Mawr College is hosting a NITLE workshop today, offered for the first time: Gaming and Teaching: Virtual Environments for Liberal Education.

AGENDA FOR THE DAY

9-9:30 Introductions

9:30-10:30 Overview of gaming and pedagogy

10:45-11:30 Platforms and examples: casual gaming

11:30-12:00 Platforms and examples: Interactive Fiction, 1

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-1:45 Platforms and examples: Interactive Fiction, 2

1:45-2:45 Platforms and examples: MMOGs and virtual worlds

3:00-3:45 Platforms and examples: off the shelf games, modding, alternate reality games

3:45-4:30 Final discussion: reflections, plans, and next steps

Most materials for the morning and afternoon sessions can be found starting from this wiki page.

Breathing Earth represents several features of human interaction with our environment: births, carbon emissions, deaths.

There's a temporal dimension to Breathing Earth, as it shows emissions in something like realtime. It also offers running stats (seen on right).

According to the project, statistics are drawn from 2005.

(via Internet Scout)

One instructor reflects on how and why to teach with Twitter. Melanie McBride shares practices, including topics such as contextualization, anonymity, opting in, and modeling.

(Previous Liberal Education Today posts on Twitter)

A Blackboard blog post reflects on how people use Scholar.com, that CMS' bookmarking service, and the difficulties users encounter. The post identifies two: bookmarklet underuse, and lack of tagging practice.

Previous Liberal Education Today posts on Scholar.com: launches, social upgrade.

A student is being expelled from Ryerson University for organizing chemistry class study group on Facebook, according to the Toronto Star.

First-year student Chris Avenir is fighting charges of academic misconduct... [having] been charged with one count of academic misconduct for helping run the group... and another 146 counts, one for each classmate who used the site.

Avenir sees the group as a digital analogue of offline study groups.

"What I participated in is the same thing basically as all the other study groups that are going on in the library," he claims.

Students would meet virtually, and discuss classroom assignments.

One side effect of this case is students fearing using Facebook for academic purposes:

"All these students are scared s---less now about using Facebook to talk about schoolwork, when actually it's no different than any study group working together on homework in a library," said...Kim Neale, 26, the student union's advocacy co-ordinator, who will represent Avenir at the hearing...

"That's the worst part; it's creating this culture of fear, where if I post a question about physics homework on my friend's wall (a Facebook bulletin board) and ask if anyone has any ideas how to approach this – and my prof sees this, am I cheating?" said Neale, who has used Facebook study groups herself.

A majority of Americans use mobile devices to access data services, according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Said devices include cell phones and PDAs. Most Americans have also used the internet wirelessly away from home.

Usage of mobile services breaks down interestingly:

American college students consider Firefox and Internet Explorer to be their favorite browsers, according to an Eduventures study.

(via KairosNews)

A Web 2.0 courseware platform is being piloted by a group of Kansas State University faculty and students. NetVibes (Ginger release) hosts content, which includes feeds from other tools:

Google Calendar: to stay on task

Diigo: to share links and notes on online resources

Zoho Creator: This allows us to create data entry forms. Any researcher (I prefer this term to “student” for this class) can access these forms from anywhere and enter data they have collected...

Screenshot from a class taught by Michael Wesch:

An assessment rubric for digital storytelling and multimedia narrative has been published by the University of Houston.

(via Jess)

An interesting visualization maps out the world of science by using ISI citations.

(via The Nets We Weave)