The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning an open access, peer-reviewed, international academic journal focusing on improving college teaching & learning. It includes articles, essays and discussion about the scholarship of teaching and learning and its applications in higher education. The current issue of International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning (IJ-SoTL) is now available online.

To receive an email notification when new issues of IJ-SoTL are published, go to http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/ijsotl/email_notification.htm. Currently, 1,934 people from 63 countries have requested to be notified of new issues.

The submission deadline for the January 2008 issue of IJ-SoTL is November 15, 2007.

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Wendy Seltzer, a scholar who has been active in debates on copyright issues, will give two talks tomorrow. The University Computer Policy and Law program at Cornell University will stream both the 2:55 pm and 7:30 pm talks live. Seltzer is a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University School of Law, teaching Intellectual Property, Internet Law, and Antitrust, and a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Protecting the University from Copyright Bullies – 2:55 pm, 9/27/07
How can the university foster intellectual exploration and creativity, protect students’ privacy, and educate responsible citizens of the networked world? Is it possible to support balanced copyright law and enforcement, without responding to every entertainment company’s demands for internet filtering and “pre-litigation notices”?

Righting the Copyright Balance – 7:30 pm, 9/27/07
Can the music go on by offering fans better ways to get music, while guaranteeing payment for its creators? Where have copyright law and its enforcers gone wrong, and what can students, music fans, and co-creators do to put the law back on track?

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For the past few months, Sony has been marketing the PRS-500 Portable Reader, a new generation of ebook device using new eink screen technology.  (The CIT and Perkins Library did a small trial of the Sony Reader in Spring 2007.)  Now Amazon and Google are releasing products for the ebook market.

Amazon is coming to market with its own ebook reader called the “Kindle”.  Priced at around $400, the portable reader will use wireless networking to allow users to purchase books directly from the retailer’s online store.  Also, Google is planning to offer for-fee access to the full content of some books in its database in cooperation with book publishers.

article at the NY Times

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DabbleDB is a free online database tool that allows you to easily create a simple relational database and share it with others on the web.  If you wish to share the data publicly, an account is free; a subscription fee is required for sharing and collaborating on private databases in small groups.

The site also includes a seven minute video showing features of the software:
http://www.dabbledb.com/explore/7minutedemo/

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This article at MIT’s Technology Review suggests that there may be gender differences in the way technology is used. This has potential implications about the way we look at academic technology tools or the way we talk about them, train users, and write supplemental documentation.

In general, we don’t have control over how software is designed by others. We do have control over how we deliver training and the documentation that we offer on our CIT and Blackboard web sites.

Click http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/19424/ for Technology Review article.

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CommentPress is an open source software tool that allows readers to make notations in the margins of a digital text. The developers of CommentPress, at the Institute for the Future of the Book, designed the tool to make reading a more social process and to encourage close textual analysis. Individuals can view other readers’ comments next to individual paragraphs, or sorted by section or by commenter. CommentPress works with WordPress, a popular blogging tool.

You can read an article about the software and its use in the Chronicle of Higher Education or see examples of the software in action at the CommentPress website in the About CommentPress section.

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Though still in ‘beta’, Google’s Google Docs keeps coming up with compelling reasons to at least shift some of our time away from Microsoft Office tools. Case in point - AcademHack and the Google Blog both have brief articles on the newest addition to the Google Docs tools (along with documents and spreadsheets): presentations. Though maybe not a PowerPoint killer just yet, Google’s presentations tool does allow for some instant collaboration and interactive online chatting while the presentation is running, too. Of course, a Google account is required.

Here’s the new ‘Google Docs in Plain English’ video that’s circulating the web:

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Google has announced that its popular Reader product, which allows users to subscribe to feeds from news sites and blogs, will now support French, Italian, German, Spanish, English (UK), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, and Korean. Users of Google Reader can now use standard features to organize, tag and share information in these languages.

A brief announcement about the new language features is available on the Google Blog; for more information about the tool itself, you can take an online tour of Reader and its features.

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The The New York Times Knowledge Network has expanded into an online initiative that provides distance education, course content and social networking. Mount Holyoke College, Stanford University and the Society for College and University Planning are some of the institutions working with this initiative. Educators can select Times articles, archival content, graphics and multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts and make them available to students online, along with other course materials. The Times will be providing technology and marketing for non-credit courses taught by college and university professors. Funds from tuition revenue will be split between the colleges and the Times.

Read more in The New York Times press release or in a news article from Inside Higher Ed.

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The outreach showcase describes a wide variety of projects   that use Google Earth to bring geographic context to their stories. The resulting visualizations may complement course content or spur ideas for your own projects. Examples of projects:

• Visualization of South American trade - each country is mapped to show exports to all other countries with lines, and the dollar amount is mapped the size of the circles at the end of the line.

• 
• The life and work of Henri Rousseau, the French artist.

• A guide to global environmental issues, created by Popular Science.

• A Malaria Atlas Project with over 20 years of data.

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