Wetpaint released a new technology called "Injected" earlier this summer.  For those unfamiliar with Wetpaint, they're a free hosting service for wikis.  We use them for several class websites because they remove ads for educational sites and the version comparison is very good for collaborative writing.

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. 

Ithaka promotes innovation in higher education by helping pioneering initiatives to thrive. Leaders of new not-for-profit projects, and their funders, must navigate a challenging path from early-stage funding to long-term viability. At the same time, long-established institutions are finding that they must fundamentally rethink the way they serve their constituents in a changing world. Ithaka supports entrepreneurial leaders in higher education with a range of services.

Research Services
Our research group works to understand how new technologies are changing higher education and how colleges and universities can best manage these changes. Its work is guided by an advisory committee of community leaders, and it is presently emphasizing three areas of interest:

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.

• 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.  

While focusing on financial aspects of implementing new technology  in higher education, this CNNMoney article contains some interesting statistics regarding the relevance of podcasting and "web 2.0" in higher education. In particular, it illustrates the increasing demand for access to "a next-generation learning environment" from incoming students (something I have personally predicted over the past several years).

It's rare as an educational technologist that you find a cutting edge technology whose use is immediately obvious to faculty.  Google Sky is the exception. Astronomers will need little convincing after seeing the latest version of Google Earth in action.

 http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html
 

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.

Red vs Blue is getting ready to release their final episode.  You can read more about it at Wired.

For those not familiar with Red vs Blue, it's a comical video series created with the video game Halo and released via the internet. The series was the first popular example of what is now known as machinima, the use of video games to create films. 

If you're interested in the possibility of using games to have students create content, you can find an infinite number of examples at www.machinima.com. They also have tips and tutorials for the most popular games. Sims may be the easiest. If you're focused on foreign languages, Felix Kronenberg at Pomona has some good examples.

Rome Reborn 1.0 resides at the crossroads of history, archeology, technology and imagination. You can visit the project's website or read a short report on its unveiling from CNET News.com where you will learn that the simulation "shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls in 320 A.D., when Rome was the multicultural capital of the Western world." One of the more provocative tidbits from the project site is the fact that the creators are hoping to incorporate the work of other scholars who would "contribute their work as bricks in the larger edifice." If that dream of collaboration is realized, the virtual city would double as a spatialization of particular scholarly projects and as a metaphor for the scholarly endeavor at large. At the same time, as you view the video clips on the project site, you may be reminded of Second Life and find yourself wishing to move about in Rome Reborn as a toga-clad avatar. The pedagogical (and other) possibilities are staggering.

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?


 

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."

Ben Vershbow from the Institute for the Future of the Book has posted a nifty review/preview of the World Without Oil, the social consciousness-raising ARG (alternate reality game) that recently launched. His posting is interesting both for what it has to say about ARGs and their power as a narrative form, but also for its critique of Second Life. He writes:

"This couldn't be more unlike the whole Second Life phenomenon (which, as you may have noticed, we've barely covered here). Instead of building a one-to-one simulacrum of the actual world (yeah yeah, you can fly, big whoop), this takes the actual world and tilts it — reinterprets it. There's imagination happening here. "

OPML Workstation provides OPML creation, editing, hosting and distribution services, free of charge. OPML, for those not in the know, is a free-form, highly versatile markup language aimed at creating hierarchical outlines including multiple kinds of resources (nodes may include text, links, HTML, RSS feeds, rich media, or other XML). Here's my working example. 

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 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.

 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.

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."

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." 

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.

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."

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.

This website offers an overview of using digitized audio commentary to respond to student writing.  Features include

·benefits for students and faculty  

·articles on audio commentary

·samples of MP3 audio commentaries

·research on student attitudes including student interviews

·recording options (how-to instructions)

From the Educause web site: 

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.

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.

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

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...