Seb Schmoller's Fortnightly Report for August includes a report about a July "Spotlight on Moodle” event at Sheffield University with Martin Dougiamas (Moodle Lead Developer), and Jason Cole (Product Development Manager at the Open University). Nothing hugely suprising here, but it's a good update on the state of Moodle and includes presentation slides from Dougiamas and Cole. It appears that the Open University is using Moodle on a massive scale, and it would be interesting to track this implementation next to developments in the states. The same issue includes a perceptive piece about Blackboard's recent acquisition of WebCT and questions about patents. 

The Fall 2006 issue of AAC&U's Peer Review examines a range of current issues concerning the role and use of technology in student learning and also addresses how these technologies can advance liberal education learning outcomes. Much of the issue is online, but several key articles are not--so you still need the paper copy!

The online articles include David Shi's "Technology and Integrative Learning: Enabling Serendipitous Connectivity across Courses," "Harnessing Technology to Improve Liberal Learning"--an interview with Steven Sachs, and Charles Hannon's "Service Learning in Information Technology Leadership." Jack Meacham offers a "Reality Check": "Questioning the Best Learning Technology," in which he confesses, "Yes, I continue to use a variety of technologies in my teaching, but less so than a few years ago, for often the students can best be stimulated by sharing a good story with a twist or sketching a simple table or diagram with chalk. The criterion for bringing technology into my courses should always be: will this enable me to pose questions that better engage my students, spark their curiosity, and push them to think critically and, ultimately, to learn?"

The Internet Scout  at the University of Wisconsin has just unveiled the  AMSER project--the Applied Math and Science Education Repository. It is funded by the National Science Foundation and serves up information about applied math and science resources in an easy-to-use format. From the Scout release: "Though specifically created for teachers and students at community and technical colleges, AMSER is free for anyone to use and is part of NSF's larger National Science Digital Library initiative. Users can find a wide assortment of materials at AMSER, from large web sites focusing on an individual applied science or math topic to Flash animations that demonstrate specific science or math principles in action. AMSER also offers users a variety of features including rating and commenting on resources and having new resources recommended to them."

The Humanist List has had quite a bit of talk lately about the phenomenal growth of Wikipedia as a favorite source for citation in student papers. Alan Liu weighs in this week (Humanist 20.084) with a draft policy statement on student use of Wikipedia. He's looking for response and suggestions; at some point, he writes, he's hoping for a one-paragraph version that could easily drop into a course syllabus. With claims like "Students should be aware that Wikipedia is a dynamic, constantly mutating resource," Liu's statement opens up interesting room for discussion about  the nature of information in general. Predictably, there's already a healthy debate in response to Liu's proposed guidelines, including an interesting post from Bob Cummings, currently conducting dissertation research at Georgia on Wickipedia use in the college classroom.

Jeffrey R. Young has a brief piece in the Chronicle highlighting some efforts to keep track of academic blogs, noting Academicblogs.org, which grows out of the blogrolls at Crooked Timber and a few other lists. It uses Mediawiki for its platform and, since launching in September, has accumulated a substantial list. Young marvels at the growing number of blogs out there--he counts at least 470 listed for the humanities alone. He quotes Henry Farrell, assistant professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, who maintained the Crooked Timber list until it ported over to Academicblogs. Farrell acknowledges that there is no way to insure quality control: "The only policing is to make sure that anybody who's there is an academic," he said.

The Open Course intitiative started at MIT several years ago has prompted several similar programs, including an interesting one at Carnegie Mellon. Their program features intellectual grounding in "Cognitively-informed Education” and "Data-driven Iteration," and employs cognitive tutors, virtual laboratories, group experiments, and simulations. Assessment and evaluation tools are built into the courses, and it will be especially interesting to see how successful this OLI is in creating the "community of use" they want to build. The first courses developed through OLI are introductory courses intended to replace large lecture format courses in Economics, Statistics, Causal Reasoning, and Logic.

The Humanist List notes that the latest edition of the Swedish journal Human IT focuses on "Dynamic Maps." It's a fascinating issue (all in English this month), and, as guest editor Patrik Svensson points out, a soundly interdisciplinary enterprise. The issue includes the following articles:

 

• Editorial: Dynamic Maps
• Zachary Devereaux & Stan Ruecker
  Online Issue Mapping of International News and Information Design [Refereed Section]
• William E. Cartwright

Tomorrow's Professor, the excellent mailing list  sponsored by the Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning  considers this week a variety of learning activities that can be done with laptops in the classroom. The post excerpts Chapter 1: "Laptops in the Class: What Are They Good For? What Can You Do with Them?" from Barbara E. Weaver and Linda B. Nilson's New Directions for Teaching and Learning no. 101: Enhancing Learning with Laptops in the Classroom (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). The authors state "The real question requires more elaboration: What can we do with laptops in class that (1) has genuine learning value for students (is interactive, participatory, experiential, or hands-on) and (2) cannot be done as well or at all without a laptop, at least not in class? In fact, many of the laptop activities suggested here could be done as homework on any kind of Internet linked computer. So why not just assign computer activities to be done out of class and forget about laptops?" They answer their question with 8 solid suggestions for types of activities that effectively use laptops in the classroom.

Infobits, published by the Center for Instructional Technology at UNC Chapel Hill, has a number of interesting bits in the May issue. The issue points to a piece (in pdf format) by Walt Crawford, "Books, Blogs & Style" (Cites & Insights, vol. 6, no. 7, May 2006) that meditates on how medium affects message. Crawford, a senior analyst at the Research Libraries Group, publishes this free online journal of "libraries, policy, technology and media." 

Seb Schmoller's latest Fortnightly Mailing includes a piece by Mark van Harmelen about the state of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) in the UK, focusing especially on a recent meeting at Manchester University sponsored by CETIS (Center for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards). The post focuses not only on emerging Web 2.0 tools but on client tools being developed by groups like CETIS.

Van Harmelan writes, "Importantly, and picking up on threads that have been emerging in the Blogosphere over the last two and a half years, PLEs are increasingly seen as a vehicle for self-directed and group-based learning, where individual learners construct their own agendas and learning programmes to satisfy their own learning goals. As such, the PLE revolution harbours two important threads, a change in learning style in institutions, and a spilling over of learning technology from institutions to non-institutional life."

The Scout Report, always a good source for heads-ups about tools for learning with technology, points in its recent issue to a collection of science animations gathered at North Harris College. Scout bills this as a "clearinghouse for science animations created by a wide range of institutions from the University of Hawaii to Cambridge University." But it would be good if sites such as this, our own LOLA, and MERLOT managed to find more connections, cross-listing, and generally good use of indexing.

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute provides an ideal environment in which to discuss, to learn about, and to advance skills in new computing technologies influencing the work of those in the Arts, Humanities and Library communities. The institute provides a week of intensive coursework, seminar participation, and lectures. It brings together faculty, staff and graduate student theorists, experimentalists, technologists, and administrators from different areas of the Arts, Humanities, Library and Archives communities and beyond to share ideas and methods, and to develop expertise in applying advanced technologies to activities that affect teaching, research, dissemination and preservation.

Now in its sixth year, the institute takes place on the University of Victoria campus, and is generously hosted by the University of Victoria's Faculty of Humanities, its Humanities Computing and Media Centre and its Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. It is sponsored by the University of Victoria and its Library, University of British Columbia Library, Simon Fraser University Library, Malaspina University-College, Acadia University, the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Image, Text, Sound and Technology Program and others.

D-Lib Magazine, sponsored by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), just came out with their January issue. It includes a thoughtful commentary  by Marieke Guy and Emma Tonkin about Foksonomies: Tidying up Tags? Guy and Tonkin report about their brief analysis of tags in flickr and del.icio.us and conclude that "only ten to fifteen percent" of tags are single-use tags; they describe "a single, fairly stable, shared ontology" developing and analogize it to a creole language developing from a pidgin language. Their conclusion:

Jim Farmer, Coordinator of Georgetown University's new Interoperability Center, has gotten plenty of notice over the last week or so for his report "On the Cost of Selling an Enterprise Learning System." But almost as interesting as reading the report is watching the discussion of Farmer's analysis move through the blogosphere.

The report itself, dated 8 January 2006, exists, as far as I can tell, as a free-floating, unadorned pdf file with the footer "Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic, inc" the only identifier. Michael Feldstein's excellent January 12 e-Literate coverage of Farmer's document offers the most thorough analysis, and in a sense "publishes" Farmer. Stephen Downes (Stephen's Web), picks up Feldstein's story the following day. Several comments evoke response and clarification from Farmer on Stephen's Web. Then a Chronicle Wired Campus blog entry on January 17 summarizes the report, highlights the implications for open source, and, quoting Feldstein, makes it sound like his work. That produces a disclaimer on Feldstein's blog pointing Chronicle readers back to the original report. There's plenty more to report about the circulation, but you get the idea.

It's an important discussion about open-source solutions--and a fascinating glimpse at the evolving nature of academic discussions in the blogosphere.

The ACM online journal Ubiquity features an interview with futurist/genius/inventor Ray Kurzweil in the January 10-17, 2006, issue. The interview focuses on his new book The Singularity is Near, which includes statements like "We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010." Pulled out of context, such statements seem, well, hyperbolic, but the interview touches on some points crucial for teaching and learning. Consider, for example, this exchange about pattern recognition and think about how it might connect to the discussion about experts and novices in works such as Brandsford et al's How People Learn:

NCTE--The National Council of Teachers of English--has assembled an excellent set of resources to help educators think about literacy as going well beyond print texts, encompassing how texts are produced and how multimodal forms of representation convey meaning. According to the introduction to the site, "NCTE is taking the lead in defining how emergent technologies are used to teach language, literacies and critical thinking skills as well as how ethical considerations can guide the use of various technologies."

The site includes some "research-based policy statements" that some may find surprising:

From the Humanist List:
The special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews entitled "Digital scholarship, Digital Culture" (30.2, June 2005) is now available freely online.This issue contains the lectures from the series by that name, held at King's College London, during the 2003-4 academic year.

• Stanley N Katz, "Why scholarship matters: the humanities in the twenty-first century"
• Michael S Mahoney, "The histories of computing(s)"
• Gordon Graham, "Strange bedfellows? Information systems and the concept of a library"
• Yorick Wilks, "Artificial companions"
• Ian Hacking, "The Cartesian vision fulfilled: analogue bodies and digital minds"
• Timothy Murray, "Curatorial in-securities: new media art and rhizomatic instability"
• Jerome McGann, "Culture and technology: the way we live now, what is to be done?"

Toru Iiyoshi is a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where he works as director of the Knowledge Media Laboratory. Matt Pasiewicz has a good interview with Toru via an Educause podcast  that offers some good insights into KML projects and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

FibrecultureJournal is a peer reviewed journal from Australia that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations. The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of:

Inside Higher Education gives a good digest of "The State of Open Source Software," a report recently published by Rob Abel for the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC). Abel's report draws on a survey of more than 200 higher education officials  responsible for software selection at a range of  institutions. According to the report, two-thirds said they have "considered or are actively considering” using open source products; only about a quarter of institutions are implementing higher education-specific open source software. Inside Higher Education quotes Kenneth Green,  founding director of the Campus Computing Project, as calling the mindset toward open source "affirmative ambivalence.”

Seb Schmoller's Fortnightly Mailing continues to be good reading, casting a wide net over interesting conversations on both sides of the Atlantic. The October 17 issue includes an intriguing piece, "The Web is Not Just a Better Printing Press," which notes a recent presentation by Nature Magazine's Timo Hannay at Harvard's Berkman Centre. The blog entry says "if you are interested in publishing, Open Access, e-research, how research is done (not just scientific research), blogging, the future of the Internet, Second Life (where Nature has an island, and is trialling integration between Second Life and external research databases) etc., you should spend an hour or so" with the Hannay materials. What's especially interesting about this are the developments in how we circulate information: Hannay's slides, a video transcript of the talk, and contemporaneous notes from the convener are all available.  

An interesting open source development in the U.K. announced last week; from the press release:

The Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Hull, and the UHI Millennium Institute announce the formation of the Tetra Collaboration, the outcome of a series of meetings and a major summit held at the University of Oxford on the 25th-26th September 2006.

The goal of the Tetra Collaboration is to coordinate activities across the member organisations so as to more efficiently develop and deploy open source enterprise applications of use to UK and European universities and colleges. By working together we can share common solutions to better serve the needs of students and academics, and each of the institutions named is committed to making tangible contributions into the collaboration.

 Editor's note: URL has been updated to show proceedings from the conference. 9/3/07

 

International HASTAC Conference
 "Electronic Techtonics:  Thinking at the Interface”
April 19-21, 2007

HASTAC ( "haystack”—Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is now soliciting papers and panel proposals for "Electronic Techtonics: Thinking at the Interface,” its first international conference. The interdisciplinary conference will be held April 19-21, 2007, in Durham, North Carolina, co-sponsored by Duke University and RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute). Details concerning registration fees, hotel accommodations, and the full conference agenda will be posted to http://www.hastac.org as they become available.

Highlights include a keynote address by John Seely Brown (The Social Life of Information), a talk by legal theorist James Boyle (co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Science Commons), a conversation among leaders of innovative digital humanities projects led by John Unsworth (chair of the ACLS "Cyberinfrastructure and the Humanities and Social Sciences” commission), and a presentation by media artist and research pioneer Rebecca Allen. The conference will also include refereed scholarly and scientific papers, multimedia performances, an exhibit hall of innovative software and hardware, plus tours of art and scientific installations in virtual reality, learning-game, and interactive sensor space environments.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Six sessions will be devoted to panels with refereed papers on spects of "interface” spanning media arts, engineering, and the human, social, natural, and computational sciences.  Panels will be topical and cross-disciplinary; they will be comprised of papers that are themselves interdisciplinary as well as specialized disciplinary papers presented in juxtaposition with one another.
 
Deadline for Proposals:  December 1, 2006.

The NITLE News is published by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, which seeks to make effective use of technology to enhance teaching, learning, scholarship, and information management in liberal arts education. The newsletter highlights some of the work being done in the three regional technology centers sponsored by NITLE.

Transformations  is an online journal hosted by the Associated Colleges of the South Technology Center, serving as a forum for liberal arts faculty, students, library and information technology staff to "explore the concept of digital information fluency and its significance for the educated citizen of the 21st century." Vol. 2, Issue 2, published in February 2005, focuses on the "merging" of information services organizations.

Primary Source is a monthly mailing list published by the Institute of Museum and Library Services; the newsletter highlights grant deadlines and announcements, new publications, funded IMLS projects, and other issues in the world of libraries and museums.  

CIT Infobits is an electronic service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Center for Instructional Technology. The Center's staff offers monthly, nicely annotated citations for journal and magzine stories about information and instructional technology. The June 2005 issue index offers a good indication of their focus:

• Personal Digital Libraries
• eLearning and the Structure of Higher Education Institutions
• Principles for Supporting Cyber-Faculty
• Clickers in the Classroom
• Update on Videoconferencing Options
• Recommended Reading

The University Web Developers' Mailing List aims to provide a discussion forum for people responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining a higher education web site. The list sponsors talk about technical web development and site design, administrative policies at various institutions, training and conference information, useful support tools, etc.

First Monday is one of the first openly accessible, peer-reviewed journals on the Internet, solely devoted to the Internet. Since its start in May 1996, First Monday has published 613 papers in 109 issues; these papers were written by 725 different authors. Edward J. Valauskas is Chief Editor of First Monday. See especially the June 2005 issue, "Teaching and Learning with Digital Resources: Web-Wise 2005."  

Edupage a free e-mail briefing published three times each week by Educause. "Where other EDUCAUSE publications focus primarily on information technology in higher education, Edupage offers synopses of a more general nature, which are extracted from the mainstream media."

Humanist is an international electronic seminar on the application of computers to the humanities. Published since 1987, Humanist is allied with the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing. It is an affiliated publication of the American Council of Learned Societies and a publication of the Office for Humanities Communication (U.K.).

LiberalArtsOnline is the monthly publication of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts  at Wabash College, the sponsor of Academic Commons. LiberalArtsOnline  promotes inquiry and reflection on liberal arts education. Published essays advocate for, critique, debate, reimagine, and challenge the virtues and relevance of liberal arts education.  

The Internet Scout Project, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been offering good information about web resources since 1994. Their weekly Scout Report, their flagship publication, is thoughtful, informative, and well-written.

An article in the July 13  Chronicle, "Bloggers Need Not Apply," by "Ivan Tribble," a pseudonymous humanities professor at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest, cautions about the dangers of blogs for job seekers. "Tribble" reports about the damage that several candidates inflicted on themselves by suggesting that the search committee check out their blogs and websites.Those willing to read found the "dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag." If you want to track the follow-up to the Chronicle article, see Blogline's very cool service that shows all pointers to a given article--at last count, some 437 of them.

http://www.duke.edu/ipod/
The Chronicle has a brief article today (6/16) about Duke's program to hand out iPods to all 1650 of their first-year students. Writer Brock Read's lead isn't really surprising: "In a new report, administrators at Duke University have found that the institution's much-publicized iPod giveaway had educational merit, but not in every course." But it's worth reading the full report (a 16-page pdf document) from the Duke iPod site linked here. Only 15 fall courses (enrolling 628 students) used the iPod but 33 spring courses (enrolling 600 students) used it.  The report lists four "significant institutional impacts" from the program, including "significant and unanticipated publicity" that yielded contacts,  increased visibility for Duke's technology collaborations and commitments, and a means of revealing strengths and gaps in the Duke infrastructure. Most interesting, I think, is the claim that "the project catalyzed conversations among faculty, administrators, staff, and students about the best role for technology in teaching and clarified needs and interests of faculty in this regard."

The Humanist List calls attention to the new edition of a Scandinavian journal, Human IT, which includes some work in English, notably an essay by Daniel Paul O'Donnell. O'Donnell discusses his editing of the Old English poem Caedmon's Hymn  based on "SGML-encoded diplomatic transcriptions of all twenty-one known witnesses to the poem." O'Donnell attempted to create a filter that allowed readers to choose different features and versions of the text. But in this essay, O'Donnell rethinks the need for the human editor and discusses "a system in which the computer would generate, but a human edit, the final display texts presented to the reader."

O'Donnell moves toward  the somewhat obvious point that "technical advances of the last eight years have greatly improved our ability to extract and manipulate textual data--and our ability to build editions in ways simply impossible in print." But he finds particular significance in meeting his original two goals: "a method for avoiding reinputting primary source documents" and "a description of the locus of editorial activity." O'Donnell concludes with an intriguing note for producers and consumers of digital tets: "in an increasingly collaborative and interactive scholarly world, it appears that the ghost in the machine may reside in the stylesheet."

Derek Morrison recently started an interesting discussion in  Auricle responding to a  major deployment ("world's largest) of Moodle in New Zealand.  Morrison cautions "An open source monoculture is still a monoculture and monocultures tend to get monotonous and prone to disease." Richard Treves offers substantial rebuttal to Morrison, which prompted a second round of discussion about the "monoculture" issue.

Kairos Web continues to publish some of the best work about teaching, learning, and technology; Volume 9.2 (Spring 2005) focuses on "Writing in Globalization." I especially appreciated Virginia Kuhn's Visual Work: Visual Projects in the Writing Classroom, for it considers crucial issues of just what we want to mean by "writing" these days.

"I firmly believe that just as yesterday's writing classrooms helped to prepare students for their other college classes by both honing their critical thinking skills as well as their verbal literacy, today's writing instructors are in a position to teach students the type of multimodal literacy...