Videos within Google Privacy Channel on YouTube cover different topics,
like how users can manage their search histories and adjust cookie preferences, enhancing users’ control over how their personal information is displayed.The series, appearing on YouTube’s Google Privacy Channel, is part of the corporation’s effort to raise awareness about how users can control their personal information when using Google’s products, according to the Official Google Blog.

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Google recently started an invitation-only beta test of a new service called “Knol”.

Pages at Knol are similar to Wikipedia entries, with expert authors writing articles on a variety of topics.  A columnist at ArsTechnica notes that despite being one of the top sites on the web, Wikipedia is the one space where Google can’t make money through ad placement - he speculates that Google’s motivation is to create a “Wikipedia-killer”.

Regardless of the motivation, Google’s approach is to highlight the authors of the articles.  They want to encourage individuals that are experts on a topic to write articles and let users examine information about the author to determine how trustworthy the information might be.  (Wikipedia, of course, works on a “crowdsourcing” model where multiple authors - sometimes anonymously - create and edit entries.)

Currently, Google doesn’t have Knol open to the public, but has posted a blog entry and sample screenshot.

blog entry at Google

sample screenshot at Google

A range of thoughts about Knols and the future of Wikipedia can be found on various blogs:

listing of posts at Buzzfeed

An article about Google’s Knol effort has also appeared at Wikipedia.

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Two recent articles have highlighted popular teaching content (and the professor- stars who have created it)

The New York Times proudly proclaims: At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star. Professor Lewin’s course materials, including videotaped lectures are available on OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at iTunesU.

Fans e-mail him from all over the world, discussing both his inspirational style as well as the concepts he has taught them from watching his videos. Even people who are not students have a new appreciation for physics after watching his presentations.

Two mathematics professors, Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness, at University of Minnesota have created a YouTube hit about Möbius transformations; in the 6 months since this was posted, it has received over one million hits. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes the animation.

We may be able to all have our 15 minutes of fame on the internet. Or, use someone else’s popular content in our teaching.

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The New York Times has an overview today of ways that social scientists are studying group behavior using Facebook.  With over 58 million users, the site provides scholars with a remarkable amount of raw data.  The site has no policy that prohibits researchers from pulling data about users for academic study.

Areas being looked at by researchers include the ways that individuals form relationships or form online identities and areas involving poltical activism, race, and self esteem.  One group of researchers is examining data from the student body of an entire class to see how the students change over time.  Some scholars do caution about the data that can be obtained with Facebook, since some minority groups tend to use competitor MySpace.

article at NY Times

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Tumblelogs are to weblogs (aka ‘blogs’) as Twittr is to social networks like Facebook. Bloggers decided to strip down their lengthy diatribes in favor of postmodern collages and/or collections of lean quotes, text, blurbs, photos, YouTube links, etc.

Exercises in brevity or the end of civilization as we know it (again)? Even if you decide the latter, it seems that the upside of the trend is an increasing development in web applications that allow users to quickly set up spaces to create rich media (ie: videos, sound, images, text) sites (most notably some lightweight content management systems, such as Gelato)

More info on tumblelogs:

Kottke.org has a nice write up with some sensible thoughts about the tumblelog phenomenon.

Of course, Wikipedia has an entry on it as well…although I haven’t seen anyone else using the term ‘tlog’…but that’s Wikipedia for you.

Here’s some examples for the curious:

http://www.tumblr.com/ (also provides a tool for creating tumbelogs)
humachine (http://nikography.tumblr.com/)
iridescent (http://iird.us/)
projectionist (http://project.ioni.st/)
marco.org (http://tumblelog.marco.org/)

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Today Yale launched its Open Yale Courses project with seven complete online courses in Astronomy, English, Philosophy, Physics, Political Science, Psychology and Religious Studies.

According to their FAQ, “each course includes a full set of class lectures” as downloadable videos or audio-only files with searchable transcripts and includes other materials such as “syllabi, suggested readings, and problem sets. ”

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog post about the project also noted that the project’s scope is intended to be international, with lectures broadcast over Chinese television and an Indian satellite network.

Under the project’s Terms of Use, “Most of the lectures and other course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.”

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Tired of YouTube? There are at least 3 sites for finding videos on scientific subjects: SciVee, LabAction, and JoVE.

SciVee offers “pubcasts“, which are videos of scientists speaking about a paper they have just published. This is a painless and time saving way of keeping up with some of the peer-reviewed literature.

SciVee also offers videos on scientific topics, from pushing a styrofoam cup through a box to an animation of exploring the moon, to organic chemistry lab videos, to mapping ear wax genes onto human migration patterns across the globe, and a comedy routine about infectious diseases.

“SciVee is about the free and widespread dissemination and comprehension of science. SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).”

Watch the inner life of a cell, or learn real time PCR, or see a simulation of childbirth on LabAction.

“… here at LabAction we make efforts to provide the biology community with the latest videos/movies/information on human genetics, science experiments, science projects, biotechnology, current biology news and much more. LabAction is a community driven free resource for the information on biotechnology, cloning, human genetics, genetic disorders, stem cell research and marine biology. “

JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments is an online video-publication for biological research.

“Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is an online research journal employing visualization to increase reproducibility and transparency in biological sciences. “

You can learn about motor neuron disease, using microarrays to analyze gene expression, and biofilms, as well as several techniques for maintaining human stem cells.

These sites may be useful not only for scientists, but also for people interested in current events and public policy to help visualize the human genome, stem cells, or simply see how scientists work. And some of them are entertaining.

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