• Research and Demonstration Projects
• Building Digital Resources
• Library and Museum Collaborations
• Collaborative Planning Grants

Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program

ARTstor is a non-profit organization created with several aims:  

1) To aid in the transformation of education in the arts and humanities through the innovative use of digital technology;

2) To achieve economies of scale and reduce costs for the community by providing digital images for teaching and scholarship;

3) To facilitate efficient dissemination of content from a broad range of time periods, cultures and disciplines, making accessible large portions of our cultural record scattered across libraries, museums, archives, galleries and private collections around the world; and

4) To work with the community to find answers to commonly shared problems, including the development of standards and best practices for the creation of useful visual materials.  

As of July 2007, 750 colleges, universities, schools and museums have access to ARTstor's evolving library of close to 600,000 images and its accompanying software tools.

ARTstor seeks to play a role in the international network connecting educational institutions with content contributors, ranging from artists (such as the Roy Lichtenstein Estate) and photographers to museums (such as the Getty) and libraries (such as the Harvard College Libraries). In doing so, we work with the community to develop policies around sharing image collections, as well as to develop and enhance harvesting software and schema that promote interoperability (such as the Open Archives Initiative and CDWA-Lite), leading to the aggregation for users of images from disparate sources. We believe the coming years will bring continued expansion of an ever more decentralized environment. ARTstor's role in such an environment will not be that of the single source of image content, but rather that of a value-adding node in this increasingly networked environment. Toward this aim, much of our time has been spent creating or improving upon existing inter-relationships and networks, building bridges across the community and demonstrating both the potential and the challenges of facilitating the use of digital images. 

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), an independent nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., supports higher education and advanced research primarily through programs in academic libraries and allied institutions. CLIR convenes meetings to articulate concerns shared across multiple communities; commissions and publishes reports on topics of interest to the library and information research communities; provides support for graduate students and recent graduates of doctoral programs in the humanities; and runs the annual Frye Institute in cooperation with Emory University to train future leaders of college and university libraries.  

CLIR's agenda for the next five years reflects past and ongoing transformations resulting from advances in information and communication technologies. It has six interdependent components: cyberinfrastructure, preservation, scholarly methodologies, future library, leadership and new models of research. Cyberinfrastructure establishes a foundation that enables modes of technology-mediated research and models of scholarship. Computationally-intensive research methods and associated models of scholarship occasion needs for new leadership as well as new institutional roles for libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutions. These organizations will be key to managing the enormous quantities of data, which has resulted from technology-intensive investigations together with related forms of scholarly expression. CLIR's long-standing commitment to curation and preservation of analog and digital data positions the organization to take a leadership role in ongoing national discussions. CLIR is deeply committed to identifying strategic approaches and partnerships that leverage social, intellectual and organizational resources across institutional and disciplinary boundaries on behalf of the public good. 

HASTAC is a virtual university. It is a voluntary international network that spans disciplines, institutions, the boundary of higher education and K-12, libraries, museums and other civic and community institutions. It includes top research universities, underfunded community colleges, HBCU's and other minority-serving institutions, as well as supercomputing centers, grid computing centers and major scientific research labs in the U.S. and abroad. HASTAC is pronounced "haystack" and is an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Since 2003, HASTAC has been developing tools for multimedia archiving and social interaction, gaming environments for teaching, innovative educational programs in information science and information studies, virtual museums and other digital projects. HASTAC leaders have served as consultants to U.S. and international organizations and governments on grid computing and cyberinfrastructure.

In 2006-07, over eighty HASTAC centers worked together to produce courses, seminars, workshops and public events on the theme of "In|Formation." Topics in that theme were: InCommon, Interplay, InCommunity, Interaction, Injustice, Integration, Interface and Innovation. The project for 2007-08 is a series of ad hoc podcast Town Halls on any topic of social and political importance to new technologies. All podcasts will be advertised and archived on the HASTAC website. In addition, in 2007-08, HASTAC will host the Digital Media and Learning Competition, a $2 million competition sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of its initiative on Digital Media and Learning. To become part of HASTAC, simply register to the http://www.hastac.org/ website and contribute.

Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg are cofounders of HASTAC.

centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers in which individuals contribute time and energy to help each other find opportunities and collaborators, and share tools and resources. The network serves to strengthen the position of centers in their own institutions as well as to advance digital humanities generally. centerNet developed from a meeting hosted by the NEH and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., and is a response to the ACLS report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

Since its inception in April, centerNet has added over a hundred members worldwide. A start-up committee elected at the NEH meeting, consisting of Julia Flanders, Neil Fraistat, Mark Kornbluh, Matt Kirschenbaum and John Unsworth, is currently adding international members to its ranks.

The centerNet website can be used to find information about jobs, grants, conferences and software. The centerNet email list can be asked for advice about everything from problems related to starting a center to problems in programming. The centerNet wiki provides a taxonomic listing of digital humanities centers through which international partners can be located--for a staff exchange or for a grant application, for example. Members of the network can post to the list or include an entry for their center on the wiki.

We invite all those who believe that their center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, to join the network. We intend the definition of "digital humanities" to be inclusive, with cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts and other related areas. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of "center" is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence. Those interested in finding out more about the network or in becoming a member should visit: http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/.

NITLE is a non-profit initiative focused on advancing learning through the use of digital technology. NITLE's participating institutions represent more than 100 primarily smaller independent colleges and universities in the U.S. and world-wide.

NITLE provides professional development programs and managed information services that strengthen higher education by enabling the collaborative sharing of resources, expertise and effective practices. In addition, using collaborative technologies such as multipoint, interactive videoconferencing and open-source systems for learning and collaboration, participants in NITLE programs and services are able to engage in on-going, peer-to-peer exchange across disciplines, professions, and institutions and to build communities of practice that create and share solutions for learning that are useful and relevant to smaller, teaching-centered colleges and universities.

NITLE's programs--both face-to-face and virtual--engage faculty, instructional technologists and librarians in reflective discussion and hands-on practice focused on good teaching and the appropriate use of technology as well as effective, mission-centered strategies for adopting instructional technologies and enterprise tools on campus. NITLE's services lower institutions' risk in testing and adopting technology systems by aggregating community needs and providing managed services that meet those needs. NITLE services currently provide its participating colleges with access to multipoint, interactive videoconferencing (MIV); open-source learning management systems (Moodle and Sakai); and institutional repository services (DSpace).

In all its activities, NITLE leverages the expertise inherent in its participant community and provides a forum and resources to enable the strategic understanding and effective adoption of digital technologies.

For more information, visit www.nitle.org or subscribe to NITLE's blog, Liberal Education Today.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA), created in 2005 to bring books and other material online, currently comprises more than 80 members--universities, public libraries, and commercial companies working together and embracing the values of openness central to the tradition of the creation of the Internet. Our goal is to build a digital archive of global content for universal access.

For thousands of years, humans have been putting their knowledge in books to pass on for future generations. Today, we have to have these materials in digital form, and we have to have them in a form where we can access and use them in new and different ways, as an engine for research, learning, and discovery, even if in ways not originally intended. I think that so far, as a culture, we have been negligent in our responsibility to perform this task: not because we don't have the materials, but because we haven't put them into the formats that new generations expect.

• enhances humanities researchers' ability to use digital humanities applications for knowledge discovery, and
• provides digital humanities developers with an improved environment for advancing and innovating applications.  

Different communities of bibliographic practice have grown up around different resource types: library collections of books and journals, archives, journal articles, and museum objects and images. As these resources and others become increasingly accessible through the Web, separation of the communities of practice that manage them is no longer desirable, sustainable, or functional. Bibliographic control is increasingly a matter of managing relationships—among works, names, concepts, and object descriptions—across communities. Consistency of description within any single environment, such as the library catalog, is becoming less significant than the ability to make connections between environments: Amazon to WorldCat to Google to PubMed to Wikipedia, with library holdings serving as but one node in this web of connectivity. In today's environment, bibliographic control cannot continue to be seen as limited to library catalogs. [Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control PDF]

After a long build-up, Google has finally released OpenSocial. Unfortunately, it seems that the name is a bit misleading. Many people, myself included, had assumed OpenSocial would provide a way of communicating between the various social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

These social networking sites have always been exceptions to the general rule of openness in web 2.0 sites. You cannot, for example, create an rss feed that shows all of your friends in Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace along with their recent updates. However, it would be quite easy to compile this same feed using accounts of your friends on LiveJournal and Blogger.

Kristen Nicole (on Mashable) calls our attention to the relaunch of carmun, an academic, social networking, bibliographic, research space geared primarily at students, but also open to graduate students and faculty. Nicole describes it as "kind of like what Facebook meant to be until kids at frat parties learned the ease with which photos can be posted and shared." Carmun offers social bookmarking, study groups, social networking according to subject of interest, bibliographic reference management, and a research engine that will try look up any resources you identify at your own library. The list of university libraries at which it works is fairly long, and the way that carmun provides and promotes this functionality is a nice antidote to Facebook's apparent reluctance to let librarians build search applications for the Facebook platform.

Transcosmos is releasing a virtual world called "Meet Me" specifically designed for the Japanese market.  They hope to create a more conservative environment as an alternative to SecondLife.  Clearly the hope is that Meet Me will find a large niche market as a virtual environment, similar to the success Mixi has had in the social networking space.  I'm always happy to see these environments that are somehow language specific so that we can use them in our language courses.  I found this link via Bryan Alexander's Infocult blog:

Meet Me

Croquet has also developed significantly from when I last saw it, as seen in their demo on YouTube.  The ability to create windows that can contain content or link to other parts of the world is fascinating.

There have been several recent attempts to use more advanced statistical analysis to judge the reliability of articles within Wikipedia.

The first is a color-coding scheme that gives the reader an idea of the reliability of parts of the article based on the number of times it has been revised. The basic idea is that if a certain section is constantly being revised, it's less reliable than a piece that has been virtually unchanged for a long period of time.

http://mashable.com/2007/08/08/wikipedia-color-coding/

Earlier this month yet another major provider of web-based productivity tools, ThinkFree, announced the launch of a Facebook version. Given that Facebook variants are typically less supple than their open-web counterparts, it has not always been plain to me what the fuss was about. An excerpt cited in a Zoho blog is illuminating:

Imagine, students can find their classmates on Facebook using the courses feature ... and then work collaboratively with them using Zoho.

Most literary scholars know about the fabulous online editions of Blake, Rossetti, and Whitman, but in my experience many people who use these editions regularly don't yet know about Collex, "an open-source collections- and exhibits-builder designed to aid humanities scholars working in digital collections or within federated research environments like NINES." NINES is an acronym for Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship; it links together many important 19thC digital editions.

Valleywag has a very nice map of social networking sites and their popularity by country.

I notice they don't have Mixi in Japan, which is odd, but they have the international examples I already knew about, along with a few others. If you're looking to extend your classroom and bring students in contact with people from a certain country, this is a great place to start. 

This article from The Register is more evidence of the necessity for serious HUMAN control over at Wikipedia. After I checked out all the links from the article to wikipedia, I was dumbfounded.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a collectivist repository of knowledge, but the moderators have become so overwhelmed with duties and power that they are regulating their daily activities to the machines themselves...thereby alleviating themselves from a primary function, to think. In fact, the bot that Betacommand created on Wikipedia utilized the files created by humans to restrict human thought and behavior, the total antithesis of Wikipedia and academia.The sysop bot was editing Wikipedia and deleting members at breakneck rates. Their monitoring system did work to catch and eliminate the bot, but what is being done to correct any errors in judgment it may have had? Can they even determine what errors were made?

In the midst of all this, we are being repeatedly told by Jimmy Wales that academia NEEDS wikipedia, much like the military was told they NEEDED Skynet in the Terminator trilogy. I'm sorry, but I believe that people should think and computers should simply be tools.

I have one question for Tango.....if I write a bot, and that  bot creates a script to create another bot, can the bot implement the new bot? And can you have Essjay [or the resident Essjay bot] get back to me on that?

As a companion piece to a hands-on campus technology expo, a group of us at Wesleyan recently put together a round-up of various Web 2.0 technologies including overviews, practical academic applications, references to live examples, and a few tips on how to get started. You will find our "Web 2.Xpo" blog at http://web20.blogs.wesleyan.edu/. Even if you are already acquainted with most of the content, and even if some of it is tailored to the Wesleyan environment, it might prove useful as a place to direct the uninitiated. And you can leave comments.

The results from this somewhat biased study are promising in that it appears that students who utilize educational podcasts feel that they are helpful.

 But are recordings of lectures really podcasts?


 

BibMe is a new web-based bibliography tool created as a software development project at Carnegie-Mellon. Unlike CiteULike and Zotero, two other powerful web-based bibliography tools that seem aimed at scholarly researchers, this tool seems geared primarily toward students. It strips down the bibliography process to simply typing in search terms. All one needs to do is type in a search term under the appropriate category, and a list of possible sources appears. Clicking on an option automatically generates a bibliography entry. Entries may also be manually entered if the source is not contained in the database. The tool lacks the social aspects of CiteULike, where one can peruse other users' libraries or browse through tags, but it does have a suggested reading feature where similar sources appear under the bibliography entries. Sadly, the bibliography can only be exported to Rich Text Format, and I didn't see an import option so that existing citations could be uploaded. It does seem like an interesting tool and probably useful for students.

Joost has allowed its beta testers an unlimited number of invites. If you'd like one, send me an email mentioning this post to bryanttATdickinson.edu.

For those unfamiliar with Joost, it's basically an online TV service with some fairly big name channels, including Comedy Central, MTV, and the NHL. They are clearly trying to add a social element to TV viewing with Channel chatting and other features on the way. There are also some foreign language channels including ShortsTV, SiVoo and JumpTV in Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic. You'll find them under Entertainment in the channel directory. This could be another way for us to connect our students with native speakers while giving them a context for discussion.

LINK: http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@424.c9CMbu8k7E9.5@.775e9244/48

Tessa Jowell, the UK secretary of state for culture, media and sport, has weighed in on the blogging code of conduct debate from a few weeks back, stating that she welcomes and supports the initiative. From her article "Civility in 'Ourspace' " on The Guardian's website: "The wonderful, anarchic, creative world of the blogosphere shouldn't be a licence for abuse, bullying and threats as it has been in some disturbing cases...There is a need for serious discussion about maintaining civilised parameters for debate, so that more people - and women and older people in particular - feel comfortable to participate."

I ran across this parody of Wikipedia from somethingawful.com today. It pretty much encapsulates many of the problems faced by "the wikipedia problem" with SA's typical humorous bent.

A few examples include the lack of an entry for the term "girlfriend," "citation needed" for common knowledge (i.e. Cat babies are also known as kittens), edit wars, personal attacks, blatant inaccuracies and irrelevant commentary. Of course, the sources are none other than the SA forum goons.

Middlebury College's Department of History made headlines at the end of January when they announced a ban on the use of Wikipedia as a reference. Later in February, a Classics course at Oberlin College was required to use Wikipedia for a research assignment. These stories are but two of many that have prompted educators across the country to debate the value of Wikipedia as an educational tool. What are it strengths, its limits? When, if ever, is it appropriate to use Wikipedia for research? Should we be using it in the classroom at all?

This coming Thursday (29 March 2007), the first Language Lab Unleashed! of the spring will feature Don Wyatt (chair of the Department of History at Middlebury College), Elizabeth Colantoni (Professor of Classics at Oberlin College), Laura Blankenship (Senior Instructional Technologist at Bryn Mawr), and Bryan Alexander (Director of Research at NITLE) for a discussion on the potential uses and abuses  of Wikipedia in the educational arena.

The show will begin promptly at 8pm ... for details on how to join the  live conversation, please visit:
http://www.languagelabunleashed.com

--via Language Lab Unleashed

Middlebury College's Department of History made headlines at the end of January when they announced a ban on the use of Wikipedia as a reference. Later in February, a Classics course at Oberlin College was required to use Wikipedia for a research assignment. These stories are but two of many that have prompted educators across the country to debate the value of Wikipedia as an educational tool. What are it strengths, its limits? When, if ever, is it appropriate to use Wikipedia for research? Should we be using it in the classroom at all?

This coming Thursday (29 March 2007), the first Language Lab Unleashed! of the spring will feature Don Wyatt (chair of the Department of History at Middlebury College), Elizabeth Colantoni (Professor of Classics at Oberlin College), Laura Blankenship (Senior Instructional Technologist at Bryn Mawr), and Bryan Alexander (Director of Research at NITLE) for a discussion on the potential uses and abuses  of Wikipedia in the educational arena.

The show will begin promptly at 8pm ... for details on how to join the  live conversation, please visit:
http://www.languagelabunleashed.com

--via Language Lab Unleashed

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:

 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.

OCLC recently published a report with the admittedly less-than-thrilling title "College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources" which examines the information-seeking habits and preferences of 400 international college students. They surveyed college students from Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States about what they think about libraries and search engines. The results are somewhat suprising, in that the library turns out to not be as irrelevant to students' intellectual lives as much of the NetGen literature suggests. The authors of the report do suggest, however, that the library has a marketing problem, in that its 'brand' is the book. They write: 

Gabriel Jacobs recants or at least converts his guarded optimism in 1992 for the prospect of technology to "allow learning truly to mesh with the free association characteristics of the human mind" to a harsh critique of the often naive acceptance by many that educational technology must be good because it encourages active or discovery-based learning.

His criticism is not so much leveled against technology per se but against constructivist learning theory. As he puts it, "constructivist epistemology calls for a multiplicity of perspectives such that learners have a range of options from which to construct their own knowledge. But many basic techniques and skills, and much knowledge, whether or not deeply understood by students, can be effectively taught only by explanation, not by promoting free exploration; otherwise one is building on sand."

His solution does not necessarily call for the outright abandonment of educational technology, but rather new ways of thinking about how one teaches, with or without technology. He writes,"Within the problematical interplay of technological change and educational values, a predicament which is qualitatively different from previous areas of disquiet in the history of education, and with which all educators are now obliged to grapple, any application of the time-honoured method of remembering before discovering will for my part be welcomed."

The essay is interesting both as a critique of constructivism and a particular way of deploying technology, but also as a potential critique of liberal education. To what extent do our students need a foundation of facts and skills before they can become critical thinkers? 

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:

GIS use in the classroom is extending beyond geology, geography, and archaeology into other less-science based disciplines.

The Bowdoin News archives from March of this year contains an interesting article describing professor Patrick Rael's "The Civil War Era" class. Students used GIS to process US Census Bureau information from the 1790s, mapping out the election that gave Abraham Lincoln the presidency. From the article:

"Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology - a software system that allows users to convert data into detailed maps - his students mapped out voting and demographic information from the period to visualize the impact of social forces, such as early industrialization and slavery, on voting behavior....Rael's project demonstrates the possibilities of GIS-based scholarship and teaching in the humanities, a growing trend among colleges and universities....GIS is crossing disciplines and is being used in areas such as healthcare, law enforcement, environmental research, sociology, and land planning."

From the "We make our buildings, then our building make us" Department...

Retro-tech as solution to Information Overload
The time-management maniacs over at 43 Folders pointed to Paul Ford's recent piece on NPR entitled Distracted No More: Going Back to Basics . Ford provides an all-too-familiar criticism of the web: it is a time-sink and a major distraction. He isn't against distraction altogether, and muses eloquently on the importance of random associations that appear as one writes and thinks. His issue with the web is its superficiality, a sense that it is broad but not deep. His solution: retrotech. He hasn't given up on the web, but when he wants to do some serious thinking and writing, he takes out a low-tech laptop with a black and white screen and no internet connection, and boots up wordperfect for DOS. What's interesting about this is that he doesn't advocate a return to really old technology (the pen and the notepad), but older technology that doesn't afford the same level of immediacy and access. What does this mean for us on campus who are bathing every last inch of our social spaces with wireless internet? Who push laptops like drug-dealers push their wares? How does the web handle the human need for reflection?


For those of us who sometimes work the Information Literacy side of the street, Ford's piece and its link from 43 Folders is suggestive of new ways of thinking about information literacy and liberal arts education. What if part of information literacy has to do with the selection of the appropriate technology (both hardware and software) for a given task? In a world awash in too much unmediated information, should we be paying more attention to the time management gurus (Stephen Covey, David Allen), whose work increasingly has to do with managing the flow of information in your life? Allen's latest title "Ready for Anything " could almost be an advertisement for what we want to say about our graduates, suggesting that there may be a strange confluence between some of the claims we make about liberal arts education and the goals of content-neutral time management systems. 

The Campus Technology Newsletter sent around an interesting article on Wikis in academia. Subtitled "All Users are Not Necessarily Created Equal," it describes the steps that a team at the The Center for Scholarly Technology at the University of Southern California went through to identify and and implement a series of approaches to use of Wikis for teaching and learning.

After this summer's Chronicle article "Bloggers Need Not Apply," which discussed the dangers of such a "public display of a [job] applicant's personal eccentricities,"  Slate's "Attack of the Killer Blogs" points out yet another pitfall -- "Many [academics] perceive blogs as evidence of a scholar's lack of seriousness. Shouldn't he be putting more time into scholarship, they wonder, and less into his blog? And if a blogger does have something serious to say, why is he presenting it in a superficial medium, rather than a peer-reviewed journal?"

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

From the association's brochure

Arising from a strategic initiative of the American Statistical Association, CAUSE is a national organization whose mission is to support and advance undergraduate statistics education, in four target areas: resources, professional development, outreach, and research. The overarching goals in each area are:

• Resources: Collect, review, develop, and disseminate resources for members of the undergraduate statistics education community.

• Professional Development: Coordinate, develop, and disseminate opportunities, programs, and workshops for teachers and others involved in statistics education projects and initiatives, present and future.

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."

"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...