http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090118-youtube-begins-experimenting-with-downloadable-videos.html

YouTube is apparently exploring allowing users to download some video content. For example, on this Change.gov video, the option appears on the bottom left:

As Ars Technica observes:

The option to easily download YouTube content is no small matter. More than just a site for goofing around on camera, YouTube has become an effective platform for public communication and furthering the careers of creatives and popularity-haulics alike. Some will undoubtedly consider allowing the public to download their videos because it furthers a purpose or message through yet another medium. Others who don't agree and don't enable the feature may feel a new pressure from users who quickly come to expect having that option available. Rippers and other tools for grabbing videos from sites like YouTube have existed for years, but it's the cultural implications of this feature that may have repercussions.

The Change.gov site has seen some interesting and significant experiments: previous Liberal Education Today posts.

http://karlynmorissette.karlyn.me/2009/01/master-higher-ed-twitter-list/

One education blogger has compiled a list of academics who use Twitter. It's around 240 people, as of this posting.

(via Jay Collier via Twitter)

http://www.nitle.org/www/events/908-emerging-technologies-and-the-liberal-arts-campus-19

Today Colby College is hosting a NITLE workshop on emerging technologies for liberal education.

Workshop agenda, outline, links, participant-contributed content can be found starting from this wiki page.

http://insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/13/graff

The walls between classes should be broken down, argues a well-known academic. Gerald Graff, best known for his argument for teaching the canon and culture wars, now sees the barriers between classes and courses as counterproductive to student learning and faculty support.

no matter how transparent each course is, as long as we know little about our colleagues’ courses our students figure to come away with confusingly mixed messages that will be hard to make sense of without more help than we are providing.

Several times Graff draws connections between technological changes and academic collaboration. For example,

I mentioned earlier that such courses are at odds with the new forms of connectivity enabled by our new electronic technology. They are also at odds with the most sophisticated and original work in the humanities during the last generation, which has taught us that what seem to be free-standing identities—whether they be texts or selves — are produced by collective structures of discourse and representation. It seems we have deconstructed the autonomous, self-authorizing subject and the autonomous, self-authorizing literary work. It’s time we got around to deconstructing the autonomous, self-authorizing course.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/0,39029432,49300555,00.htm

Apple recently launched a new service for its iTunes music store, which removed the digital rights management (DRM) coverage from already purchased songs. However, iTunes Plus songs apparently contain the user's email address, according to one British account.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/pubrelease/isttf/

A new study of children online has found that worries about internet predators to be vastly overblown. Instead, "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies" saw peer bullying as a more significant concern.

Some major findings:

• "Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline."
• Internet-mediated sexual encounters involving minors are usually not predicated on false identities: "cases typically involved post-pubescent youth who were aware that they were meeting an adult male for the purpose of engaging in sexual activity."
• Peer dangers, between minors, are important and underappreciated. "as they get older, minors themselves contribute to some of the problems."

The report is already receiving criticism from legal figures, who see it as understating dangers to children from predators.

“Children are solicited every day online,” [Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general] said. “Some fall prey, and the results are tragic. That harsh reality defies the statistical academic research underlying the report.”

Full title: "Final Report of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force to the Multi-State Working Group on Social Networking of State Attorneys General of the United States."

http://www.physorg.com/news151139956.html

Both houses of the United States Congress launched YouTube channels this week. senatehub and househub each contain multiple channels for individual Senators and Representatives.

(via Slashdot)

http://scienceblogs.com/bloggingtheorigin/

An online reading of a major scientific document has begun. Posts on Blogging the Origin are composed by a British science writer, and focus on working through Darwin's great work. Comments come from anywhere.

(via Seed)

http://insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/14/ebooks

One American campus is exploring electronic textbooks and mobile devices. Northwest Missouri State University is using digital documents viewed on Sony'e ebook reader, according to the Chronicle.

http://mashable.com/2009/01/14/youtube-mutes-videos/

YouTube is increasingly taking action against music videos with soundtracks drawn from copyrighted, unauthorized music. Unlike the format followed when YouTube takes down an entire video, some video clips are instead just silenced and labeled:

“This video contains an audio track that has not been authorised by all copyright holders. The audio has been disabled.”

(via Veronica Pejril via Twitter)

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAbout/47998

"7 Things You Should Know About Alternate Reality Games offers a good introduction to this form of computer gaming, describing educational uses.

Previous Liberal Education Today posts on ARGs.

http://www.nitle.org/www/events/905-web-20-storytelling-3

St. Lawrence University is hosting a NITLE workshop on Web 2.0 storytelling.

The workshop's agenda, along with selected resources and participant work during the day, can be found starting from this wiki page.

From the workshop's description:

[Web 2.0 storytelling has] many forms across media and platforms, including narrative by blog, wiki, podcast, web video, SlideShare, and microblogging. Other topics will include audience as coauthor, story microcontent, antecedents, multimodal forms, appropriate tools, and emergent trends. Grounded in a series of real-world examples, the workshop will mix presentation with discussion and focus on educational uses.

Previous Liberal Education Today blog posts on Web 2.0 storytelling.

(image from johndan)

http://www.europeana.eu/portal/index.html

Europeana relaunched this week. The European digital library is "testing newly configured hardware."

(sample search on "college")

The site now includes a lab for experimental approaches to the site, along with a timeline viewer letting users query years. For example, for "1789":

Europeana launched last November, but ran into server issues.

http://connect.educause.edu/wiki/TLChallenges09

The Educause ELI list of top 5 challenges for academia and technology is now complete:

1. Creating learning environments that promote active learning, critical thinking, collaborative learning, and knowledge creation.


2. Developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).


3. Reaching and engaging today's learner.


4. Encouraging faculty adoption and innovation in teaching and learning with IT.


5. Advancing innovation in teaching and learning (with technology) in an era of budget cuts.

Information about each point, along with the community process which created it, can be found on or linked from this page.

http://chronicle.com/free/2009/01/9311n.htm

One American campus tracks classes in its course management system to compare how many hits each professor generations. At the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, according to the Chronicle,

Mr. Canfield amassed 12,927 “hits” on Blackboard, the course-management system used by the university, during the fall semester. That’s 1,000 more than the nearest competitor, and double the average at the university.

http://mashable.com/2009/01/09/twitter-growth-2008/

Microblogging service Twitter grew its user base by more than 700% in 2008, according to Mashable. In terms of unique monthly visitors, Twitter's numbers rose from 500,000 to 4.43 million.

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/01/google-blog-converters-10-released.html

A set of blog conversion tools were released by Google this week. They support transporting user content from several blog platforms (WordPress, Livejournal, Moveable Type) into Google's own blog tool, Blogger.

There is a 1 meg cap on the amount of content which can be converted.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

http://freesouls.cc/essays/03-howard-rheingold-participative-pedagogy-for-a-literacy-of-literacies.html

An essay on new media pedagogies comes from Howard Rheingold. "Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies" builds on history, touching on the alphabet, print literacy, virtual communities, and recent Web 2.0 developments. Rheingold then argues for new pedagogies aimed at teaching students how to critically participate in social media.

Increasingly, access to that infrastructure−the ability to upload a Macaca video or uncover a threat to democracy−has become economically accessible. Literacy−access to the codes and communities of vernacular video, microblogging, social bookmarking, wiki collaboration−is what is required to use that infrastructure to create a participatory culture.

http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=191

What Web 2.0 tools work best for teaching and learning? Well-known anthropologist Michael Wesch is using Diigo for a specific classroom situation.

So far, Diigo seems best for the collaborative aspects of the project. It allows us to build up a massive database of links and notes that are collectively generated, tagged, and organized.

However, Wesch finds a couple of Diigo limitations, and offers a way around them.

But it is a total failure when it comes to the ability to create private notes and work offline.

Right now, the best solution I can imagine is a combination of Evernote and Diigo. Evernote for managing private notes and working offline. Diigo for sharing and collaborating. If Evernote could somehow be synced with Diigo we would have the perfect solution.

Wesch's observation appears in a blog post. A series of comments follow, offering suggestions and alternatives.

http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_index.html

Education played a role when Edge.com asked a group of scholars, thought leaders, and activists a question about 2009 and the future beyond, what single thing will change everything? Education appeared in two of the responses.

Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conference, argues that the Web will expand education to a far larger audience than it now engages. On a related note, one physicist sees a mix of increased accessibility and new tools also growing and changing the experience of education.