Liberal Education Today

The Connecticut Literary Collective is a wiki-based community resource for writers in that state. Run by an academic advisory board, the site offers a series of resources, including reviews of literary journals as potential publication venues.

URL: http://ctliterarycollective.wetpaint.com/

(thanks to Sarah Hutton)

Mashups and teaching in higher education are the subject of this IT Conversations podcast interview with Raymond Yee.

TimeTube lets users revisualize YouTube-hosted videos, by combining search terms and a timeline. For example, from a search on "liberal arts":

The resulting timeline is clickable and its contents moveable. No registration, download, or fee is required for use.

(via Podcasting News)

A report on Web 2.0 service downtimes has been published by Pingdom.com. While most service are up the large majority of the time (example: Livejournal, 99.95%), microblogging innovator Twitter leads the losers at 98.72%.

(via Podcasting News)

New York City Department of Education employees are now prohibited from including their professional blog's URL in their email signatures, according to one educational technologist. It's another sign of the tensions between institutions and web 2.0.

(via Will Richardson)

Various examples of using Web 2.0 technologies in higher education were the subject of last week's Case Western Reserve conference. InsideHigherEd has one report.

An interoperability agreement has been announced between MySpace, Ebay, Twitter, and Yahoo.

Authentication of users will be via the OAuth protocol.

Although MySpace is a member of the Google-led OpenSocial alliance, but this action is independent of that.

A Gettysburg College literature professor is teaching medieval culture using computer games. Within his rich Medieval Atlantic Web site, professor Christopher Fee's students have written interactive fiction games to describe Icelandic tales, Norse myth, and archaeological site. This practice supports classes like English 401: Viking Studies
.

For example, this page contains and links to information about the Lindisfarne priory. A student can absorb that information, then play this student-authored game, which offers an adventure story tracing a path through sites and myth. A quiz that lets the learner assess their progress.

Professor Fee makes available links to several free, downloadable, and often open source resources, including the Inform 7 interactive fiction authoring tool,

Interactive fiction (sometimes "IF") is a form of text-based computer gaming dating back to the 1970s.

Professor Fee also showcased is work at the 2008 NITLE Summit.

A new academic computer game lets players compete in solving biological puzzles. Players organize into teams, trying to determine which patterns certain proteins will develop. Fold.It was launched by a University of Washington scientist.

It's a form of crowdsourcing, related to human computing, as the site explains:

We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!

Professor Baker also maintains a related project, Rosetta@home.

(thanks to George Brett)

The United States House of Representatives passed a bill which increases federal powers to enforce and punish copyright infringement. The House passed HR 4279, the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (PRO-IP) by a large majority, 410 in favor to 10 against.

PRO-IP has several features, including:

• Establishing an Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative, a Presidential appointment (nicknamed "copyright czar");
• Expanded powers to seize property involved in copyright infringement;

The bill was introduced last year. However the Senate has not yet taken action on a corresponding piece of legislation, so the emergence of actual, new law is uncertain.

Microsoft applications lead the tool usage of even early adopters, according to a time management company. RescueTime stats, based on data gathered from their applications' users, and reported by TechCrunch, suggest that even exploration-minded users' toolkits tend to be dominated by Microsoft products: Outlook, Word, Excel, and more.

The American FBI withdrew a gag order attached to the Internet Archive. The federal agency had issues a National Security Letter (NSL) for reasons as yet unpublished; such is the secretive nature of an NSL. Subsequently, under pressure from a series of groups, including the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),

the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle against the record demand.

The Internet Archive argued that it should be considered a library, rather than an electronic resource. This changes its status, and the government's obligations, under the PATRIOT Act.

(via Slashdot)

Two bills designed to help academics access "orphan works" entered the United States Congress this week. The Senate and the House each started considering bills aimed at, in the Chronicle's words,

exempt[ing] scholars and others from facing excessive copyright-infringement penalties for using orphan works. They would need to first diligently try to locate the works’ owners. Should the owners surface after a work has been reused they would receive some compensation, but could not stop the derivative creation from being distributed.

(thanks to Brenda Landis)

Rumors are abroad, now that Microsoft has ended its attempt to purchase Yahoo!. One is that the company will try to buy Facebook.

In contrast, other stories suggest that Redmond has decided to give up its longterm purchasing strategy, and will assign all development internally. One nickname for this is apparently "Granola", since all will be done organically.

In another sign of social networking intersecting with education, Yahoo has launched a social networking service for teachers. The audience seems to be American K-12.

(via Stephen Downes)

The New York Times is asking the world for media concerning the Myanmar disaster.

NYTimes.com is asking readers inside Myanmar to help us report on the disaster by sending in photographs, video or written accounts of the storm and its aftermath.

A short video sketches out an innovative class practice, led by Kansas anthropologist Michael Wesch. WorldSim let students create an alternate history of the modern world (since 1450 CE), with groups creating nations and gaming their interaction over time.

Several technologies were involved. A wiki site contains information about the world and class (http://worldsim.wetpaint.com/). The class used Twitter to update their world.

Inspiration came from Buckminster Fuller's World Game.

Professor Wesch keynoted the 2008 NITLE Summit.

26 Learning Games to Change the World are free and playable in a browser. We've covered some of these before.

(via Stephen Downes)

Email backscattering is increasing. This is a new spam effect:

The spammer finds your address, or sometimes even guesses it, and then puts it in the "from" line of his messages, sending them out to hundreds of thousands of recipients. When the spam gets sent to an address that is no longer active, it can sometimes be bounced back ... to you.

The Computerworld article offers three solutions on its second page.

(via Slashdot)

A growing number of American university presses are podcasting. This MetaFilter post links to a series of them, where the content often consists of interviews with authors: Harvard University Press, MIT Press, Rugers Press, University of California Press, University of Michigan Press, and
Yale Press.

Microsoft withdrew its offer to buy Yahoo!. In a published letter, CEP Steven Ballmer explained that Yahoo!'s price remained too high.

A hostile takeover bid could happen, but meets an objection for Microsoft. Namely, if Yahoo would partners with Google for self-preservation, such a Yahoo-Google partnership would render Yahoo "undesirable as an acquisition."

A guide to 250 virtual worlds has been published by the Association of Virtual Worlds. The "Blue Book" is a free download:

Each world is listed alphabetically and includes a web address and brief description. In addition each world is classified as to whether it is live or in development, whether it is appropriate for kids, tweens, teens, or adults; and type of virtual environment it is, for example, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), a social network, a mobile application or a custom world.

(via Terra Nova)

Today Skidmore College is hosting a NITLE workshop, Social Software for Education.

All materials for the day can be found starting from this wiki page.

Using wikis for project management on a liberal arts campus was the subject of a recent conference presentation. Occidental College's Lisa Spencer (Director, Support Services) and Gayle Burns (Manager, Academic Technologies) presented to an Educause regional conference. Their report (pdf) describes their process of working with and deciding between two different tools, the benefits and problems of using a wiki, user support issues, and lessons learned.

At a minimum, information is more easily captured, searchable, and shared then it was before Oxypedia.

Web 2.0 and social networking services reach undergraduate students more effectively than does email or mass media, according to a new study by an American computer scientist. Leysia Palen (University of Colorado) argues that more students were informed, and more quickly, via Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 tools.

New Scientist article, subscription-only.

Copyright take-down notices from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) are increasing, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Colleges and universities around the country are reporting similar increases in complaints from the industry group. Because most colleges investigate every incident and take action against the online pirates, the surge is putting a sudden strain on their resources as the semester winds down.

"We have not seen a nationwide spike like this," said Kevin L. McLaughlin, director of information security at the University of Cincinnati. "This is new."