Liberal Education Today

Twistori is a good example of attractive visualization, displaying selections from Twitter's public feeds, organized by several leading verbs.

Play the News is an interesting new simulation game. Users work through a capsule multimedia description of a current event, then offer their opinion about its outcome. Those opinions are then compared with other players'.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

New software to enable image searching is being described by Google. According to a paper (pdf) given this week at the World Wide Web conference in Beijing, VisualRank addresses the problem of searching images for content. Unlike text, "human recognizable objects are usually not automatically detectable in images."

Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jingy applied Google's Web search tool, PageRank, to create large matrixes of related images, not based on attached text tags but on their proximity in users' searches.

Instead of modelling the relationship between objects and image features, we model the expected user behavior given the visual similarities of the images to be ranked. By treating images as web documents and their similarities as probabilistic visual hyperlinks, we estimate the likelihood of images visited by a user traversing through these visual-hyperlinks. Those with more estimated “visits” will be ranked higher than others.

This project is not available to the public yet, but has apparently resulted in improved image search results.

Georgia State University is being sued for copyright infringement by a group of publishers.

The complaint, filed by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications and supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), charges that GSU administrators--including J. L. Albert, the school's associate provost for information systems and technology, and Charlene Hurt, dean of libraries--are violating the law by systematically enabling professors to provide students with digital copies of copyrighted course readings without publisher authorization...
According to the lawsuit... GSU distributes the materials through its electronic course reserves service, its Blackboard/WebCT Vista electronic course management system and its departmental web pages and hyperlinked online syllabi available on websites and computer servers controlled by GSU.

Gathering information about teaching with Voicethread is the purpose of a new site, Voicethread 4 Education.

(via Colette Cassinelli, by her comment on our previous post on VoiceThread)

American professors are increasingly assigning Wikipedia articles as course content, according to InsideHigherEd. Sometimes the purpose is teaching public writing by authoring or editing a Wikipedia article. Other times the pedagogical need is simply for good resources:

A quick glance at the syllabus for Breno de Medeiros’s Advanced Topics in Cryptography and Network Security course at Florida State University, to take one example, reveals reading assignments — in addition to the usual textbook chapters and published papers — that direct students to pages on Wikipedia. Introduction to complexity theory? See the page on P and NP classes. Brush up on probability theory? See Wikipedia’s entry on the Chernoff bound. Far from the amateurish, typo-ridden entries some have come to expect, the articles are straightforward and include definitions, illustrations and explanations that at least match similar content from comparable textbooks.

An additional pedagogical function, unmentioned by the article, is assigning students to read Wikipedia article discussion tabs, in order to better understand the social construction of knowledge.

Twitter played a vital offline role this week, when a journalism student used that web 2.0 service to help get out of an Egyptian jail. It's a rather dramatic example of the way people use Twitter to keep in touch with people they know:

Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10.

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. "Arrested."

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt -- the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier -- were alerted he was being held.

(emphasis added)

"7 Things You Should Know About Ning" introduces that do-it-yourself social networking platform.

An example of remix pedagogy comes from a Middlebury College class. Students followed professor Jason Mittell's assignment:

create a remix video that in some way offered a critical examination of media, posting it to YouTube to potentially generate some feedback from people who stumble across it.

You can view some resulting work, and read Mittell's reflections, on this blog post.

Yahoo! launched a new Web service, aimed . Yahoo BrowserPlus is a connecting platform, enabling programmers to link web code to content on devices.

At present, BrowserPlus is only available for Yahoo!-owned sites. This may change:

Today, Yahoo! BrowserPlus™ may not be used by non-Yahoo! sites. We have plans in the future to share this platform with the world. If "soon" isn't soon enough, drop us a note!

A showcase of student projects built with VoiceThead can be viewed through a blog post. They are the results of ESL classes taught in seven countries, Argentina, Brazil, Hungary, Kuwait, Romania, Sudan, and the United States.

Each VoiceThread file is embedded within those blog posts.

A variety of digital storytelling articles, examples, and resources appear within the latest Digital Storytelling Carnival.

Notes on project management for digital humanities projects have been blogged by a Center for History and New Media lead developer. Very useful stuff, coming from a lot of collaborative practice.

A kiosk-based project lets players conduct orchestras, according to USA Today. UBS Virtual Maestro combines the Wii game technology with the Guitar Hero approach to interactive music.

(thanks to Victoria Stawiarski!)

NITLE is pleased to invite its participating colleges to sign up for our new Multipoint Interactive Videoconference (MIV) Pilot Service. The service will officially open for campus use on Monday, May 21, 2007, for enrolled campuses who have completed the requisite training curriculum. Participation in the MIV Pilot Service is available at no additional cost to comprehensive and defined participating colleges. The pilot period for the MIV Pilot Service will extend to June 30, 2008, allowing NITLE to further explore, in collaboration with its participating colleges, the benefits and potential uses of this shared system for learning with technology, and how this technology can be delivered as a managed service.

For more information, including how to sign up, please see http://www.nitle.org/index.php/nitle/content/view/full/1612.

A wiki page for CMS conversion tools has been launched by a Canadian educational technology blogger.

[S]upport for interoperability formats is uneven at best and there is no such thing as a plug and play world for learning content across course management systems. While things like the IMS Content Packaging spec (and the newer IMS Common Cartridge spec) offer themselves as non-product-specific middle ground, they are unevenly supported, and we are often left finding and developing ad hoc methods to move from specific platform (even specific version of platform) to specific other platform.

This page is an attempt to collect known tools for getting content out of and into various CMS.

(via Stephen Downes)

Today is the first day of the NITLE "Learning to Write in the Digital Age: Writing with Technology across the Curriculum" event, hosted by Colorado College.

Agenda:

4:00-6:00 pm Arrivals, Registration and Check-in

6:00-7:00 pm Reception

7:00-9:00 pm Welcome Dinner and Keynote Address

Balancing Acts: Transformations and Tensions in the 21st-Century Writing Classroom, Barbara Ganley, Lecturer, Writing Program and English, CTLR (Middlebury College)

Participants and everyone else may follow the event's Twitter feed: NITLE_Writing.

PC World surveys the state of the browser world, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, along with Opera and Flock, all in their most recent releases. The review considers look and feel, memory usage, security, standards compliance, and innovation.

Firefox seems to come out on top.

KML, a digital cartographic standard best known by its use in Google Earthco, has now been recognized as an open standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC).

KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language. "Keyhole" refers to the company which owned the cartographic data, named in turn after the American spy satellites which took so many images.

(via Ars Technica)

An Illinois Wesleyan psychologist has begun an NIH-funded project using virtual worlds to study how people spread social diseases.

The grant will fund the purchase of two sets of virtual reality equipment and software, which Smoak will use to run scenarios for students, while Marsh will work with community members in Hartford, Connecticut. “Students will be placed at parties or in other situations where there is a potential for interaction,” said Smoak, who noted in virtual reality, the environment can be easily changed. “We can make the music louder, the lights lower, and even change the appearance of the people with whom they interact,” she said.

(thanks to Grace Pang!)

Saleforce.com decided to use Google's "Web Office" applications, including word processing and spreadsheets.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff made a typically bold yet familiar declaration in another prepared statement: "The combination of our leading CRM applications and Google's business productivity applications pushes forward the transformation of the industry to cloud computing. The end of software is here."

Commentators note that this represents one further step in cloud computing, or another shot in the Google-Microsoft war.

A good explanation of how to use Firefox plugin Trailfire to share and manage information comes from Scott Leslie, in a podcast interview with Nancy White.

We blogged about Trailfire in the context of other co-browsing and social browsing tools last month.

There are now one million computer viruses on the internet, according to Symantec.

Testimony about virtual worlds was given to a US House subcommittee last week. The Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, part of the Energy and Commerce Committee, heard New Media Consortium (NMC) CEO Larry Johnson and others describe how Second Life and other online environments work. Johnson's remarks were republished to the Web through a CommentPress interface.

Within several days the Daily Show satirized the event.

A University of Bath team is producing a 3d printer which can print copies of itself.

Previous Liberal Education Today posts on 3d printing.

Researchers are mapping the Iranian blogosphere, studying content and networking. This research shows the continuing complexity of this global Web 2.0 movement, as well as a useful visualization application.

>

(via Jesse Walker)

Prediction markets are increasingly in demand by institutions seeking to keep up with rapidly developing fields, according to the New York Times. This distributed, asynchronous approach can leverage a "wisdom of crowds" effect to glean better information about emergent trends.

Classic Web 2.0 photo-sharing service Flickr has added video to its offerings.

Flickr recent reached a two billion image milestone.

Some New York Times stories are now accessible through Google Earth. Selected placemarks within that geographic tool lead to Web page stories associated with those geographic locations.

One liberal arts campus is using a Web 2.0 service to share a new digital collection. Access Ceramics is created and curated by the Lewis and Clark College library, and uses Flickr to publish digitized images of a ceramics collection. Users can also upload images to the project's Flickr pool.

Access Ceramics is managed by an art history professor and a visual resources librarian. There is a project blog.

(thanks to Mark Dahl, who presented on this to the NITLE Summit)

A classroom use for a new computer game has already appeared, just weeks after the game was launched. A Berkeley sociology class is trying out a Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG) mission, a tour through a series of Web sites and articles concerning digital identity. Each stop is annotated with text, including a question. For example:

We blogged about PMOG two weeks ago, in the context of new tools for socially annotating Web exploration.

A Sheffield Hallam University scholar has started a research project using Twitter for information gathering.

For this phase of the project, we've recruited 15 students to send us regular (average 3 per day) updates via Twitter telling us a little bit about where they're learning - well, as much as they can fit into 140 characters! A few of us will be monitoring and facilitating the study - possibly asking additional questions, providing commentary along the way, or generally just lurking and being distracted from our day to day work. Of course, this being the first time we've tried collecting data via Twitter, it could all go horribly wrong - but if you'd like to watch, lurk, or participate anyway as it unfolds (or unravels...) you're more than welcome.

The 2008 NITLE Summit continues today, with afternoon sessions.

1. NITLE Research: "The Very Latest Emerging Technologies" (wiki page with agenda and resources)


2. Poster sessions

More notes can be found in the NITLE Summit Twitter stream.

Tags: NITLESummit

The 2008 NITLE Summit continues today, with morning sessions.

• Opening remarks from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, describing ongoing support for IT-mediated pedagogy and research, then applauds work through NITLE on the arts of teaching and structuring the academic enterprise with technology. Final note: looks forward to NITLE and client institutions' advances
• Three minutes of fame - a series of lightning presentations on innovative uses of technology in the liberal arts. The poster session later in the day will expand on these sketches, while adding still more presentations.
• Partners in Strategic Collaboration - Michael Nanfito thanks advisory councils, introduces NITLE Instructional Innovation Fund. Representatives from each regional council then described their process and supported projects.

More notes can be found in the NITLE Summit Twitter stream.

Tags: NITLESummit