Taking second looks at Second Life

It seems the luster of Second Life's newness has worn off.

Now that the hype over Linden Labs's virtual world is fading into the sunset, business and journalists are starting to take a more serious and objective look at Second Life and what it means for the average user.

Wired has published an article that discusses the disappointing results from advertisers that have set up spaces in SL - the spaces are fairly deserted and Wired does an estimate of the actual number of regular SL users that indicates many people only have time to live their First Life. Wired's editor has also written a piece explaining why he gave up on Second Life. The LA Times has also published an article on how disappointing SL is to business.

Some faculty are finding interesting and appropriate uses of Second Life that have pertinent learning goals for students. (A blogger at New Scientist discusses one faculty member at Elon that has a virtual telescope in SL to prepare his students to use the real thing, for example.) However, the Chronicle of Higher Ed continues to be a rather uncritical cheerleader for Second Life and many leaders in IT still tout "virtual worlds" as the "next big thing" in education.

SL development is expensive and time consuming - I'm thinking that a more cautious and realistic approach might be more beneficial to faculty and students in the long term.

Your email is buggy

There's been a great deal of work lately on visualizing information in unusual ways, in part due to new tools for programmers that have made this work easier.

The latest is an MFA thesis that includes a Flash program; it allows the user to visualize their email as living organisms. The software checks your email folders and shows representations of new versus old messages, unread messages, and other information.

blog post at Wired.com

The buzz on Buzzword

We already have web-based word processors from Zoho, Google and others. One new entry in the race to replace Microsoft Word is discussed in a blog post at Wired.

Buzzword was built using Flex, a technology that is an offshoot of Flash, and is generating interest because of it's advanced, clean interface. It was created by a small start-up company and is in an "invite only" Beta right now, with an open Beta scheduled for the Fall.

blog post at Wired.com

Karaokee social networking

If MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Second Life aren't giving you enough social networking in your life, now you can share your budding vocal talents with web users everywhere through SingShot, a website devoted to creating, sharing, and commenting on other people's renditions of "Yesterday" by the Beatles or "Crazy" by Patsy Cline.

A site like this could be quite useful in education - vocal students, instrumentals or actors and performers could post their work and invite critiques and suggestions from other users. However, it would run into problems with student privacy laws if done in connection with an institution or course.

A commentator at Slate comments on using SingShot.

I started belting out songs—"Heartbreaker," "Independent Women"—that I would've never dared to perform in front of a live audience. I stayed up nights recording take after take, track after track. But to my chagrin, the bleats that came out of my throat sounded feeble. My voice cracked on high notes; I had trouble with rhythm. The main advantage of a karaoke Web site, I learned, is that I could humiliate myself 24 hours a day.

Edugames are no edufun

Slate has a little opinion piece that deflates the idea of using video games in teaching. The author compares trying to teach using video games to "putting Velveeta on broccoli" - the results aren't necessary fun and are more like a chore than anything else.

One of the bigger profile projects in higher ed the past few months, besides the sudden fetish among educators for "Second Life", has been UNCG's Econ 201, an entire course that's taught through the video game medium. I saw a demo of the thing and, quite honestly, thought it was rather silly - the whole world of cartoony aliens with silly names invented for the game look like something your "hip" dad would develop that he thinks the kids would find "cool".

The whole look of the game seemed outdated even before the ink was dry on the programming code - visually, it takes inspiration from SciFi channel movies of the week and second tier PlayStation video games.

article at Slate

MySpace and Facebook differences

Researcher danah boyd has produced a new study of Facebook and MySpace users, finding that the differences between the two have more to do with class than age or other factors. Facebook is attracting more affluent, middle class young people who have a focus on college and careers; MySpace seems to be attracting more minorities.

Faculty interested in looking at social networking as part of class activities might want to examine both sites closely; the different audiences for them could make for interesting class activities or student research.

Participation in Web 2.0 sites

A new study concludes that participatory Web 2.0 sites have less participation that initially believed. Less than 1% of users at Flickr and YouTube actually upload videos; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia had the most participation (about 4%) of the sites examined in the survey.

article at News.com

Virginia Tech tragedy - social networking and student privacy

Slate.com has an interesting piece that looks at how the Virginia Tech tragedy unfolded from the perspective of students, giving us a rare look at how students use social networking tools in their day to day communication and social life.

The article looks at some entries at LiveJournal and Fark.com as students blogged about the events as they happened and tried to connect with friends to make sure they were okay; the piece also links to some of the tributes that have cropped up on social networking sites.

Other media sites are reporting and linking to two plays that were done by the shooter in a class. Interestingly, these were given to AOL's news site by one of his classmates that apparently now works for the company; the man said in a blog post about the events at the school that he "didn't know" whether it was legal for him to turn over the plays to the press, but he did so for the benefit of individuals trying to understand what happened. The plays were exchanged by the students using Virginia Tech's Blackboard system as part of the course's peer review process, so that leaves some legal questions about student privacy for universities and instructors to consider in the future.

article at Slate.com

Museums and tagging

The New York Times looks at a movement among art museums that allows users to tag their image collections; the aim is to come up with a natural "common language" that can be used to describe and search works of art.

article via news.com

Revealing a hidden Picasso

The San Francisco Museum of Art has used some modern wizardry to reveal a previously unknown Picasso underneath one of the paintings in their collection. A reconstruction of the painting is currently on exhibit.

article at the SFgate.com

UNC TLT Conference, Day Three

And here are my notes from the third and last day of the conference.

Staying Ahead of the Curve: The Open Croquet Consortium
Presenters: Marilyn Lombardi

The presentation started an overview of the involvement by young people in "Web 3.0", which could basically be summed up as interactive virtual spaces. Croquet, which includes involvement by computer scientist Alan Kay, is a virtual spaces application, similar to Second Life, that is open source and built from the "ground up" as a tool for use in teaching. The presenter outlined the issues with using Second Life in a academic context. Since it's a commercial application, there are FERPA issues as student work is stored on servers outside the university; users are anonymous and SL includes inappropriate content, so you don't know who might drop in to a class or who students might interact with; questions about stability and viability as the application becomes more popular. Croquet uses peer to peer model - user's computers connect with each other to update the environment, rather than talking to "the mothership" like Second Life. It's designed to be platform neutral and there are plans to offer it through PDAs and mobile phones.

Croquet users can create virtual "worlds within worlds" and bring multimedia and other objects there; the software includes authentication issues to limit where users can go and the kinds of roles they have.

The presenter showed some movies of the environment. It's very much a beta and looks rather crude compared to Second Life and other applications. There was a demonstration of tagging objects in the world and creating an object "on the fly" by drawing a fish, then having the fish render in 3d and having behaviors attached to it. Users can create a "frame" to show/hide objects (ie, showing students some objects if they perform certain tasks or instructor can have objects they can only see.) Integrated with Jabber and VOIP in a basic way (ie, doesn't seem to allow for real time "talk" between characters, but you can have static pictures with VOIP.

Croquet is current a development environment, not a software package that can actually be used right now. It seems to be a framework for creating applications that operate in a virtual environment, rather than a virtual environment that users can drop in and use. They're releasing a SDK version 1.0 next week.

The speaker noted that Duke is creating an orientation environment in Croquet so that new students can get an idea of what attending Duke is like.

Development of the Course Training Design Development Package
Presenters: Forrest McFeeters, Antionette Moore, Irene Chief

Staff from Winston-Salem State University described a program they've put in place to help faculty put together online courses. The process takes about six months to one year and starts with the faculty member using course design principles to come up with goals and activities for their courses, similar to what the Duke CIT has used for our recent course design grants. There are specific deadlines that faculty meet for content for the course and they have put in place a system where a faculty peer does a quality control check on the course content and others do checks on the course design. They're looking at how to involve students in the quality control process.

They noted that they've tried the same process during an intensive summer workshop, with faculty putting the course together over a 20 day period. Faculty seem to like this better than the longer process, since they can concentrate on the process without being distracted by other duties, but assembling the components for the courses in such a compressed time period is difficult for the small staff. Overall, the process is quite similar to what is used in a corporate environment or by commercial design firms when putting together an online training course for an internal or external client. At any one time, they're working with 20-30 faculty on courses.

It was noted during the Q&A for the session that the new head of WSSU has set a policy that all faculty must create at least one online course in order to be eligible for promotion or tenure.


Facilitating Faculty Connections: The Technology Practices Directory
Track: Other
Presenters: Kevin Oliver, Geetanjali Soni

Staff of NCSU's LITRE office ("Learning in a Technology-Rich Environment") created a web-based mechanism for faculty to enter ways they use instructional technology in their courses. The effort emerged from NCSU's quality enhancement plan to gather information on a broad base of faculty on the campus.

http://litre.ncsu.edu/

A demonstration of the web database was part of the presentation; faculty enter information about themselves and, for each class they teach, entered technologies they used and then how those were used for instructional purposes. The form was designed in this way because faculty generally had difficulty reporting how they used technology in a pedagogical way, but could more easily describe technologies they used. The group formed a specific taxonomy that covered most types of tools and instructional uses on campus. The form is about five pages long and was quite lengthy - the group's board of advisors was made up of individuals from several campus units and each was wanting to gather specific information through this effort.

The software includes a search function so that faculty can connect with others who have similar interests. It also included the ability to export material about a department to an Excel spreadsheet so that Deans and department heads could get an overview of faculty in their area. The group also hoped to use the information to target calls for proposals for grants, training and other program offerings.

The database was advertised in a letter from the Provost and Deans, through a postcard and a newsletter over a period four months. Only 89 faculty out of 2,000 entered some form of information in the database. The main problem they found was in the length of the form and the fact that many tended to report only innovative or high-end technologies they were using.

The group thinks that the effort might make more sense taking a form that's similar to MySpace that faculty can use as a social networking tool over the entire UNC system. They're also looking at ways to give access to the database to administrative assistants or others that could contribute information about faculty activities, but they're concerned that these individuals might not know enough about the specifics of what the faculty are using to teach and how the faculty use the tools in classes.

UNC TLT Conference, Day Two

And here are my notes from Day Two of the UNC-TLT conference.

One note about the hotel, the Raleigh Hilton, and a surreal moment today. I was in the washroom during lunch and heard the Rolling Stones's "Paint It Black" on the Muzak system - a version played by a Mariachi band.

Developing Online Primary Source Specialists
Presenters: Elizabeth Coulter, Pamela Johnson

This session presented an overview of Adventures of the American Mind, a pilot project, just completing its seventh year, that was funded by the Library of Congress and was designed to introduce the use of primary resources in K-12 classrooms. The program went through different iterations. Initially, they gave laptops to K-12 teachers in exchange for taking a graduate level course and they had about 120 teachers that went through the program. More recently, to broaden the impact, they produced a series of professional development workshops, dubbed PROPEL, for media specialists at schools and worked with them to come up with activities the media specialists could do in cooperation with teachers in their local schools. They're also producing a Flash-based SCORM compliant module on using primary resources. More information is at http://www.aamonline.org/.

e-Texts
Presenters: Darwin Dennison, Michael Worthington, Catherine Fountain, Elizabeth Deifell

This panel concerned the experiences of some faculty in producing electronic textbooks. Darwin Dennison at UNC-Wilmington developed a "Dine Healthy" textbook with nine chapters and a 72 page curriculum guide that could be used for a short Continuing Education class or as a supplement to a health or PE course; the etext also included an application to analyze student diet and physical activity and presentation slides from the etext can be used with the Video iPod. Worthington's ebook was tied to the ECU's freshman seminar and the freshman reading at the university; it's in HTML format so it could be used in Blackboard. (They also saw it as a way to acclimate students to using Blackboard.) Fountain at Appalachian State is using a web-based e-textbook that's under development for a fourth-semester Spanish course; it uses authentic language material from and information about the local Spanish-speaking community as a basis. The textbooks is free and includes multimedia.

http://www.appstate.edu/~fountainca/1050/

The panel discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of the ebooks. They liked the fact they could include links and multimedia information in the texts, that the etexts can be ADA compliant, and that they are inexpensive to distribute. Some of the issues highlighted included the dependence on an electronic device to work with the material, difficulty for students to annotate or highlight materials; lack of standards for ebook formats; and difficulty in reading lengthy material on a computer or device. There were still several students in all the classes that wanted to print out the pages primarily for highlighting or taking notes, but they were surprised at how many read all of the material online (over 50% in the case of ECU). They noted that they thought the larger trend was to move towards PDF format since it allowed for highlighting and taking notes, in addition to links and multimedia, and could be formatted for viewing on-screen or printed, if needed.

I also had a brief conversation with one of the presenters after the session about the difficulties in formatting etexts for different output devices - the ways that students use computers, the Web, iPods and cellphones and the different displays used on the devices require that the material not only has to be reformatted for the devices, but that the writing style has to change as well.

Effective, Efficient, Easy: Managing the Teaching with Technology Workload
Presenters: Linda Lisowski, Joseph Lisowski

In this session, two faculty members from different discipline areas - English Literature and Special Education - presented about methods they use to minimize the time required to manage their course. Many of the methods they're using - planning the course schedule ahead of time in detail, preloading content into the course before it starts, using the automated grading features of Bb, and getting students to do peer review of their work on papers or in discussion boards - are one's we commonly advocate at Duke when working with faculty.

Social and Emotional Presence in Online Learning
Presenters: Ginny Sconiers, Robert Hambrick, Martha Cleveland-Innes

This presentation looked at a study on social presence in distance courses conducted at East Carolina University. Using a defintion of social presence as a "sense of being and belonging in the course", they recruited faculty teaching distance courses to carry out the study. The faculty members received training about some of the research in online social presence and ideas for implementing activities for their course. The faculty and students were surveyed as the course progressed to see the impact of these activities.

Basically, the researchers concentrated on practices in four areas. In self presentation, faculty members sent out initial contact letters and created an instructor bio on their course site; they were also encouraged to use "ice breakers" when starting the course and to have the students create profiles about themselves and their interests. For creating a safe environment, the instructors were encouraged to set expectations for the course, publish rules about interactions and behaviors in the course, and a "pre-lesson" to get the students familiar with how the course worked. The instructors also made the students aware of contingency plans if some part of the technology didn't work for an activity or assignment. The instructors were also encouraged to do activities that would get the students interacting with each other - having an informal "coffee shop" for discussions, using group activities and having students act as moderators and do peer review.

Part of the presentation dealt with efforts by North Carolina State University's Delta program as they put some of the ideas into practice with distance courses they designed with faculty. One of the items they developed with a kind of "course preview" that included information about the course, the expectations for the work and a five minute video introduction from the faculty member.

One of the presenters (who is in Canada) was supposed to be brought in through Elluminate video conferencing software, but there were problems with the network connection.

Generally, the principles being used in the study would probably work well in a face to face or blended course to increase student participation and engagement in the class.

Plagiarism Police or Teaching Tool?: Building Research-Based Writing Connections with Turnitin.com
Presenters: Amy Martin

This session looked at how Western Carolina University instructors use Turnitin.com as a teaching tool with student writing. The presenter acts in an instructional technology support role, teaching workshops on how to use the software. She found that many instructors don't know many of the capabilities of the software and were just using it to turn in final drafts of papers. She encourages them to get the students to set up turnitin.com accounts and use the originality reports on drafts of a paper with students to discuss how they're using sources. She also noted some of the legal issues in using the software since turnitin keeps all of the papers in their database. (They offer a template letter at the site that can be used by instructors to get permission to upload student papers.) She encountered some faculty who use it without telling students, which would be a FERPA issue. During the main part of the presentation, she demonstrated what different drafts of a sample paper might look like at the site.

Around the World of Learning Objects in 30 Minutes: A Tour of Discipline-Based Collections
Presenters: Hilarie Nickerson
Handout from session (Word format)

The presenter in this session put together a list of discipline based repositories of learning objects; she demonstrated Merlot and other sites and discussed some ways to more effectively search for materials at the sites. She noted that she didn't find any specifically for the Humanities; many of those in the Sciences have had major grant funding to get started and there haven't been similar efforts in the Humanities.

Poster Session
Interactive Models of Tonal Pitch Space
Presenters: J. Williams
A faculty member at UNC-G has developed a set of web-based learning tools that let students explore tonal music; it uses theories presented in the text "Tonal Pitch Space" to represent sounds visually.
website for the project

Essential Collaborations for Large Enrollment Course Redesign
Presenters: Dorothy Muller, Dorothy Clayton, David White, Joyce Newman, Jennifer Raby, Larry Bolen, Kathryn Weegar
PowerPoint presentation from session

This panel discussion looked at a redesign of two large enrollment courses at East Carolina University in Psychology (230 students) and Health Sciences (1200 students). The Psychology course was taught by one instructor and student assistants; the Health course used four instructors and included online assessments and multimedia. The Health course used a blended approach using lectures delivered via Blackboard and class meetings once per week for each section. The redesign was a team effort and included faculty who had previously taught online; they surveyed the students and observed increased satisfaction with the course after the redesign. The Psychology course included more "break out" sessions with smaller groups of students.

Finding video art on the Web

Slate has an article that explores why video art is so hard to find on sites like YouTube, explaining a bit about video as an art form and comparing it to sculpture and installations. The second page of the piece has links to several sites that do have some video art pieces online for viewing.

article at Slate.com

UNC TLT Conference, Day One

Over the next three days, I'm attending the UNC-TLT (Teaching and Learning with Technology) Conference in Raleigh, NC, as part of my work at Duke. Here are some of my notes from the sessions.

Accelerating Educational Innovation and Transformation Through Learning Communities and Knowledge Networks
Presenters: Toru Iiyoshi

The opening plenary was a kind of overview of where we are in IT, with trends towards use of new tools like Second Life and movements towards open access to educational materials. The speaker, who works with the Carnegie Foundation, encouraged the audience to take a close look at what's working and not working about what we're doing, finding out why, for example, faculty aren't really using open courseware materials and what could be done to make them really useful for a broad audience. The overall message seemed to be to look beyond whether something is sustainable in a financial sense or seems like a good idea to use evaluation to really investigate what the best approaches would be in the future. At least, that's what I got out of it ....


Designing and Evaluating Online Critical Thinking Discussion
Presenters: Scott Chattin, Marvin Croy

Chattin is at Southeastern Community College and teaches two courses on Philosophy; the mehods he developed were also used in different courses at UNC-Charlotte by Croy. The courses are taught online through Blackboard and consist primarily of discussion board postings and papers. The students in his classes come from rural North Carolina and often have difficulty with critical thinking skills; they can be rather dogmatic in their views and have problems having empathy with other points of view. (Some students are initially offended by the material - one, after being assigned an early reading in the course on the existence of God, wrote him that the reading made her throw up and possessed by "demons", so she was dropping the course.)

He uses an evaluation rubric for the class activities based on two authors (McPeck and Richard Paul) that have written extensively about building critical thinking skills. He shares the rubric with the students and they use it for self evaluation of their work; he's found it is usually pretty close to how he would evaluate their work (if he doesn't agree, he sends them a rebuttal and his own evaluation). As part of the process, students have to include short extracts of their writing to demonstrate particular aspects of critical thinking skills in the rubric.

The rubric itself is quite detailed and includes items drawn from Richard Paul's textbook on critical thinking; the items, on intellectual standards and elements of reasoning, look at areas such as clarity, accuracy, precision, depth, relevance, logic, significance, breadth and fairness or point of view, assumptions, inferences, and implications. Students are given an understanding that he's not grading on their ideas, but on their adherence to critical thinking standards he sets ouf the for the course. He's found that many of the students, which are given controversial subjects like abortion or gay marriage to debate and write about, are initially unable to engage in critical writing about the topic and fall back on emotion or personal beliefs; after a few weeks, they're able to show more empathy to other points of view and draw upon readings and research to support their views in a more organized and detailed way. He showed some sample writing from the semester mid-point that was pretty impressive.

Connecting a Community of Educators: Building a New Online Journal with Open Source Software
Presenters: Katherine O’Connor, Terry Atkinson, Sue Steinweg, Sharon Collins, Dionna Manning, Courtney Maness

This presentation was a demonstration of the Open Journal System, an automated software tool that manages workflow for journal publication. I attended this session thinking that it might be useful in the context of a writing class for certain types of assignments or for managing special writing projects like a senior thesis. OJS is being used by the Journal of Curriculum and Instruction published at East Carolina University. The software is very full-featured and allows for a great deal of customization; it can manage users in different roles and manages the workflow in an automated manner. The software is free and is part of an effort funded by the Canadian government; the software authors also have published an automated system for managing virtual conferences. About 120 journals use the software and there will be a conference on OJS in Vancouver in July. Since the software is open source, the users at ECU had difficulty getting training and information to get started; they used an online manual and "self taught" themselves on the system; they also arranged a three hour teleconference training session with the publishers of a journal at Emory that were using the system, which might be a useful model for other institutions using open source systems on their campus.

Open Journal System
http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ojs


Poster Session

One of the more interesting posters was from UNC-Greensboro's Library. They've developed an online board game on information literacy, based on the UNCG Objectives for Library Instruction for First-Year Undergraduates.

http://library.uncg.edu/game

The game, developed with AJAX, is ADA compliant and incorporates Web evaluation exercises. You can download your own copy of the game and modify it:

http://library.uncg.edu/game/game.zip

They also have a blog on library games at:

http://librarygames.blogspot.com/


Image Quiz: Using Principles of Cognitive Psychology to Teach Visual Expertise
Presenters: Bruce Kirchoff

Unfortunately, I missed this session - I got into a really good conversation with a colleague from Winston-Salem State University about their development of online courses. However, I did some research on the Web on the software.

Kirchoff has developed a prototype software package, Image Quiz, which uses principles of cognitive psychology to help students learn to identify plants. He feels the principles used in the software could be applied in other subject areas where students learn to identify works of art or other types of materials. Basically, the software uses a set of quizzes that take the student through stages of learning visual material. One stage concentrates on distinct features of the object in question and identifying it with a "family" of similar objects; in another stage, the students examine the overall configuration or "gestalt" of the objects.

The prototype is available from his website, http://www.uncg.edu/~kirchoff/. (Note that it says his site hasn't been updated since 2004; the .zip file containing the software and an article about the principles behind it is dated 2006.)

Zoho office suite

Slate has an article on a web-based office suite, Zoho, that is more fully developed that a similar offering from Google. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications in addition to a calendar and a wiki creation tool. The company is also introducing a "notebook" application to the suite that's similar to Microsoft's OneNote and the suite includes collaboration features.

article at Slate

Online and screenwriting software

Recently, I've been looking at some new alternatives to commercial screenwriting software (Final Draft being the one I use right now).

Celtx (http://www.celtx.com/ is still not at version 1, but offers a host of features. It can be used to write screenplays and stage plays and as a management tool for the writing or production process. It also allows users to create an online account and work collaboratively; the software can be downloaded for Mac, Windows and Linux.

ScriptBuddy (http://www.scriptbuddy.com/ is web-based screenwriting software - just go to the website, log on and start writing. The "pro" version, available for about $5 per month, adds other features such as PDF output and access to an online forum to upload your script and trade reviews with other writers.

History dept bans citing wikipedia

The History Department at Middlebury College in Vermont has banned the citing of Wikipedia articles in student papers. The NY Times has an article about the academic "love/hate" relationship with the online collaborative encyclopedia.

article at NY Times

Instant sculptures

At the International Toy Fair, a manufacturer showed off a new system that they hope to take mainstream. It uses 3d laser scanning and a rapid prototyping machine to make 3d sculptures at low cost. The initial uses would be for kiosks in public spaces that allow you to have a sculpture of yourself, similar to photo booths. Most analysts expect home 3d prototyping machines to become available in the next few years that would allow users to create 3d models or download them to their computer then "print" them at home.

article and gallery at Wired.com

Commercial lp recorded on an iPod

Singer/songwriter Jimmy Camp has become the first artist to record an entire album on an iPod. He took the output of a simple little stage amp and mixer and input it into a Belkin TuneTalk and just recorded the tracks in his home studio. He has some samples of the songs on his site and a video about making the album; it's worth a look for some insight into how different techniques can be used to get high quality sound from the iPod and TuneTalk.

sample songs and 'making of' movie at jimmycamp.com

Pipes at Yahoo

Pipes is an intriguing new service that recently went online from Yahoo as a
Beta. It allows you to create RSS feeds by taking two or more and combining
them together in creative ways. For example, you might take the daily
headlines from the New York Times and use that as a filter for keywords of RSS
feeds of Flickr photos. Another example I saw at the site was constructed from feeds of real estate listings from Craigslist filtered through Google Maps and other services to show houses and apartments that are available near landmarks or particular types of commercial businesses.

This type of application could have many uses in classes for student research where students engage in activities to construct their own "pipes" to analyze current data on the Internet.

Pipes beta at Yahoo

Podcasting PDF's

I was reminded of a new/old technology today when attending the Podcasting Academy V at Duke University.

Many people don't realize that different types of files can be used for "podcasting" - audio and video files are the most common, but there are a growing number of sites that offer subscriptions to PDF files. The PDF's can take the form of a traditional newsletter or magazine or might include multimedia elements. Apple's iTunes can subscribe to PDF RSS feeds and Adobe Acrobat 8 can be used to subscribe as well.

This blog post at Make magazine includes sample subscription PDF's that are used for museum tours, language instruction and many other types of serial publication.

blog post at Make magazine

Musicians playing together online

A new software package at eJamming, which will be released in March, promises to offer real time audio collaboration for musicians. It allows musicians to play together at a distance either using MIDI or more traditional instruments. The software uses P2P (peer to peer) technology to overcome the issue of latency and synchronization of the audio from different players.

The software could prove promising for doing music lessons online or performing pieces with performers in multiple locations. Some work has been done in this area on Internet2, the super-fast new Internet backbone at major research institutions, but this is the first application for real-time musical collaboration for the desktop.

article at Wired.com

Interview with Internet Archives founder

News.com has an interesting interview with the founder of the Internet Archives. Recently, the organization had a setback in court when they attempted to clarify that they could, under Fair Use, add so-called "orphan works" to the Archives.

"Orphan works" present a challenge in the transition to online digital research materials. They are still under copyright, but essentially out of print and abandoned by the copyright owners, making them difficult or impossible to find and access.

Honestly, I'm surprised that school teachers and faculty members in academia aren't up in arms and organizing campaigns to educate the public about the erosion of Fair Use and how it impacts their own research and teaching. With Congress passing extended copyright periods to owners and making it impossible to use any digital material protected by DRM useable for classroom or research purposes because of the DMCA, it's getting tough to find something you can do with copyrighted material in education.

article at news.com

Snipshot online photo editing

A new entry in the many web-based applications that are becoming available is Snipshot. The application allows you to do Photoshop-style editing on your images without buying a copy of Photoshop.

Snipshot website

Adobe Lightroom released

Adobe has finally taken their photo management tool, Lightroom, out of Beta. It will be available as a commercial product for $300, mirroring the pricing of it's competitor, Apple's Aperture. Lightroom will be released for both the Windows and Macintosh platforms in mid-February.

webpage at Adobe

Queer silents website

A website devoted to LGBT silent cinema could be useful in classes dealing with LGBT history or film studies. The information can be a little sparse at this point, but it may develop further in the future.

Queer silents website

Social hygiene exhibit

The University of Minnesota Library has an interesting and useful online exhibit of social hygiene advertisements. The collection ranges from 1910 to 1970 and users can search by keywords or browse topics.

link to exhibit

Second Life - class and race

An editorial at The Register looks at race and class in Second Life, the author noting why there's a dearth of Black characters in the virtual world and how it impacts its community.

commentary at the UK Register

DaVinci notebooks online for six months

The British Library, in cooperation with Microsoft, has put two of Leonardo DaVinci's notebooks online that can be accessed for the next six months. One of the notebooks is owned by the Library, the other by Bill Gates and the effort was produced in conjunction with the launch of the new Windows operating syste, Vista.

The site is tailored for Windows viewers; excerpts are available using the Shockwave plug-in for non-Windows users.

artcle at the UK Register

Update on Google's book project

The New Yorker looks in on Google's book project, which is attempting to scan every book ever published in the next ten years. A major challenge to the project is a lawsuite by publishers who contend that Google's wholesale scanning of books in participating libraries is a violation of copyright law.

The outcome of the case, and the results of Google's project, could have a significant impact on academics and libraries and how researchers will find material in public domain, out of print, or in-print books in the future.

article at The New Yorker

Palm sized photo printer

A start up company, working with Polaroid, has developed a photo printer that's about the size of an iPod.

The printer uses special paper and heats different layers of the paper to produce an image - perhaps a variation on dye-sublimation technology that has been around for several years on photo printers.

article at news.com

Immortal computing ... from Microsoft

Microsoft Research has applied for a patent for what it calls "immortal computing".

The effort seeks to find ways to store information for users in more permanent forms that can be retreived in future generations; the system would also allow for actions to be taken with the data (sending an email at certain intervals to your descendents, for example) and could be "virtual representations of our personalities" (whatever that means).

"Maybe we should start thinking as a civilization about creating our Rosetta stones now, along with lots of information, even going beyond personal memories into civilization memories," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft principal researcher who also is working on the project.

article at Seattle PI

Hum into the search engine

A new search engine, midomi, is taking an interesting approach to music.

You simply hum or sing a few bars of a song into the search engine and it can retreive recordings of other users who have hummed the same tune. The site also allows for more traditional text-based searching as well.

link to midomi

iPod sustainability

The university where I work, Duke, gained considerable press for it's adoption of the iPod for class activities. One issue that plagues the device, along with many other current technology gadgets, is how well they hold up over time.

The magazine Stay Free has started a campaign to raise awareness about the issue, urging companies to build more robust electronics equipment that isn't so breakable and disposible.

iDud at Stay Free

It's something to think about both for faculty members and administrators seeking to integrate technology into teaching. Many analogue devices, such as rugged Tascam portable cassette recorders designed for fieldwork or even early portable GPS devices, are still useable today. The trend towards less rugged electronics could be chalked up to the drive for cost savings among corporations or planned obsolecence, but the end result of less reliability is becoming a major factor in deciding on whether to use a tool in class or how to pay for a comprehensive program that puts technology in the hands of a large number of students.

Visualization table

Visualizing data for better comprehension has been greatly enhanced in recent years through the use of computer graphics, giving new life to the idea of "concept mapping" among teachers.

If you are interested in trying concept mapping for the first time, there are several great overviews and tutorials to get started. But, if you're "stuck", thinking about the best approach to use for visualizing some information, the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is a good idea generator. Moving your mouse over each type of visualization will pop-up an example

Cell phones and novels in Japan

The LA Times uses the announcement of the iPhone as an opportunity to talk about how cell phones are integrated into everyday life in Japan.

Keitai form a cyber social network in a highly mobile society. To wait for a light on a Tokyo street corner or to ride a train is to see crowds of people with their heads down, thumbs pumping as they send photos, write text messages or play online games on their phones. Increasingly, they are reading books and manga, or comic books, on their phones too.

article at LA Times

The piece is a good reminder to anyone about how different forms of communication and types of text are emerging as technology changes the way people interact with media and each other. A course on writing fiction might benefit from a short activity where a short novella written for a non-traditional publishing medium, such as a cell phone, is written by the students and compared with a short story written for the web or print publication.

Wired.com also recently featured an article specifically on cell-phone novels as an emerging text form in Japan; the novels are sometimes written on cell phones. Most are around 200 to 500 pages (or screens), each containing 500 Japanese characters.

Last month, the site held the world's first mobile phone novel award -- with the cooperation of heavyweights like NTT DoCoMo, D2 Communications and video-rental giant Tsutaya.

While most of the 2,400 entries were romance novels written by women in their teens and early 20s, other popular genres included horror, sci-fi and fantasy. The Outstanding Achievement Award went to a man pushing 40 who told an apocalyptic tale of the last 24 hours on Earth.

"A mobile phone novel boom is definitely in place," said Magic iLand spokesman Toshiaki Itou. "And these are people who hardly ever read novels before, never mind written one."

Next summer, the company will debut software that allows mobile phone novelists to integrate sounds and images into their story lines.

article at Wired

Undergraduate research online

The Institute for Undergraduate Research at Dartmouth has an online database to house Senior theses: http://www.ugresearch.org/ . The site, which currently houses about 1,000 papers, was created in 2005 by two former Dartmouth students.

As undergraduate research becomes a larger focus in many institutions, sites such as this one could prove valuable for students to feel a larger stake in their work. Some libraries and individual institutions are creating online portfolios of local student work, but placement in a larger database open to other universities create opportunities for student theses to be viewed by a much larger audience. Sites centering around undergraduate research that integrate some social networking tools could open dialogue between students at different institutions with similar interests.

Windows Vista and DRM restrictions

This is an interesting analysis, put together from various email lists and discussions, about aspects of the Windows Vista operating system that are designed to protect commercial content. One point worth noting is that Vista will "downgrade" output (sound or video) if material is protected by Digital Rights Management and you are attempting to display or hear it using certain types of hardware. It notes a scenario where uncompressed medical images would be downgraded for display at a lower quality, without any warning, if the user is playing DRM protected music or other material at the same time they are attempting to look at the image. There are also other notes about Vista potentially closing certain types of hardware, making it incompatible with Linux, Mac or even certain types of Windows software.

The article is worth a quick read for potential issues it raises for possible Fair Use scenarios in content use or other problems that might crop up in an academic environment using Vista.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

iTunes, DRM and regional content

Faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences who increasingly deal with global culture in their courses constantly face challenges in using material from other countries in their courses - from region codes and different TV standards with video to streaming content at commercial or non-commercial sites that might be restricted to IP addresses in a particular country or region.

Slate has an article on the licensing restrictions that prevent US iTunes users from purchasing content from iTunes stores in other countries. A good explanation of why the restrictions are in place and how users work around the restrictions through purchase of gift cards from other countries.

article at Slate

IBM's future world of virtual offices

At a recent conference, IBM discussed their interest in Second Life and virtual worlds. They've purchased several Second Life islands, experimenting with virtual storefronts and areas where IBM employees can connect with each other and share ideas. The company sees virtual worlds as a way to hire and keep talented young employees.

A generation of kids reared in virtual worlds like Second Life or MTV's Laguna Beach are eventually bound for a work force that will need to cater to their experiences by creating virtual worlds for the corporate intranet.

Personally, I'm not entirely convinced that the hype for Second Life is warranted, at least at this stage. There seems to be a great deal of curiosity about "virtual spaces" and the possibilities for collaboration and interaction they create. However, we had one really big "virtual space" for about a decade - the Internet - and I don't see American workers staying home in droves, reporting to work through their broadband connection. The Internet, for individuals in close proximity in "real" space, acts as a more efficient way to exchange information or organize life; it really only acts as a primary means of interacting for colleagues or friends who are dispersed geographically. Perhaps Second Life and similar tools will settle into similar patterns.

article at news.com