Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch got the ball rolling, by showing the value of a multi-touch screen as a user interface. Now Microsoft is getting into the act with a new operating system, Windows 7, slated for release in 2009, that natively supports touch screens and with a new system that can turn existing hardware into a touch screen for relatively little money, a couple of hundred dollars.

What does this all mean for education? Do touch screens represent the potential for new ways to collaborate in the future, with groups huddled around a screen manipulating images, workflows, designs and ideas? Any other ideas for how multi-touch interfaces could impact teaching and learning?

The University of Georgia has produced the Civil Rights Digital Library, with primary sources and educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives along with educator resources and contextual materials. CRDL is a partnership among librarians, technologists, archivists, educators, scholars, academic publishers, and public broadcasters. The initiative receives support through a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Another resources on the civil rights era is The Amistad Digital Resource Web site. Although it was developed to be a multimedia resource for secondary school teachers, the Amistad site contains primary resources, audio and video clips, maps, timelines and other materials which could be useful in any level course studying this time period. The Amistad Digital Resource Web site was developed by the Columbia Center for Digital Research and Scholarship with funding from the Ford Foundation.

The website 50 Tips and Tricks to Create a Learning Space in Second Life describes the educational possibilities of Second Life for reaching out beyond traditional classrooms and school districts, connecting with people around the world, having interactive discussions, practicing real-world skills and keeping students engaged in a technologically-driven society. The list offers examples of educational uses of Second Life in a variety of subject areas such as CyberOne: a Harvard Law School course on Law in the Court of Public Opinion or Money and Design, an economics class using Second Life as a virtual platform for future entrepreneurs and business designers to practice their skills. You also can find tips and tools for getting started and then making the most of using Second life. For those who do not want to have to do development work, there are examples of already-created spaces, such as The Wall SL, which is a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial or the PacificRim Exchange, which hosts a private island that serves as a platform for students from schools in the Pacific Rim to connect and learn about new customs and countries.

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education includes an article that continues the debate on the potential merits and drawbacks of lecture recording.

The Lectures Are Recorded, So Why Go To Class? (Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2008)

The article points out that faculty reluctance about providing recorded lectures sometimes stems from anxiety about lower course attendance, even when they believe that student learning might benefit. At some institutions, lecture recording has become standard practice for many courses. This article describes a variety of strategies used to ensure that making recorded lectures available does not adversely impact attendance, including some which would be considered good education practice in any case, such as increasing the level of interactivity and offering in-class quizzes to assess student learning.

Ready to try lecture capture? If you’re a Duke faculty member interested in offering your students lecture recordings, there are a variety of options. You can contact a CIT Consultant in your area if you aren’t sure which option would best meet your needs.

- the DukeCapture service using Lectopia is available in many locations across campus
- the Duke Digital Initiative currently offers grants for some types of event recording and plans to offer more options in Fall 2008

Not sure whether lecture capture is a good idea for your course? Here are two other recent articles describing the lecture capture experience at Temple and Dartmouth.

Classroom Capture: Lecture Recording System Draws Devotees at Temple (Classroom Technology, Feb 2007)

Evaluation of the use of lecture recording at Temple found high satisfaction among both students and faculty and no evidence of a decrease in classroom attendance. Nearly all faculty who tried lecture recording decided to continue using it.

Capturing Course Lectures (The CREATE Project, Dartmouth Academic Technologies)
In addition to a brief summary article, you might want to view their three video profiles of faculty in humanities and sciences who describe benefits of lecture capture for their courses and their teaching.

Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube are a few examples of social networking sites that are popular these days. If you are involved in more than one of these communities, is there a way to make the sum of social networking sites greater than the parts (the individual sites themselves)?

Flock is a web browser, based on Mozilla Firefox, that attempts to unify social networks. Read a Technology Review article about Flock.

WRAL has an article on one of Google’s latest initiatives, called “Friend Connect“. “Friend Connect” provides a framework, no programming required, that will enable people to interact with their friends and use favorite applications they have accumulated on social networks even when they aren’t visiting those sites.

And to consider future possibilities with social networking read the Technology Review article about MIT students who are exploring the power of an open source cell phone operating system, provided by Google. One idea is a social-networking program that helps people make new friends in their area using geolocation. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine how a service like this could be integrated with social networking sites. For example, the cell phone software could help create spontaneous in-person connections leveraging connections made online through social networking sites.

Educause 2008 Southeast Regional Conference, June 2-4, 2008

The Educause 2008 Southeast Regional Conference, The Right Stuff, will take place June 2–4 in Jacksonville, Florida. The program covers a range of topics, including emerging technologies for research as well as for teaching and learning. Preconference seminars offer a close look at the important current issues of blogs as an instructional tool in the classroom, using communication as an effective leadership strategy, and emergency communications management. Register by May 5 to save money with early-bird rates:
http://www.educause.edu/serc08

MERLOT International Conference, August 8-10, 2008

The 2008 MERLOT International Conference (MIC08) will be held August 8-10, 2008 in Minneapolis. The eighth MERLOT International Conference is devoted to faculty development in the design, creation, utilization and evaluation of online teaching and learning materials. Conference attendees span all disciplines and the continuum from novice to expert in the development and use of online resources. This year the featured discipline is Education – Teacher Education, Faculty Development, and Library and Information Services. Sessions and workshops offer opportunities to learn about new technologies such as Web 2.0, Social Networking, etc. Conference information is at:
http://conference.merlot.org/2008/

Elon University Innovation in Instruction Conference, August 21, 2008

Elon University invites Duke faculty and staff to attend their 5th annual Innovation in Instruction Conference on August 21, 2008. The conference’s plenary speaker will be Dr. Mike Wesch, a cultural anthropologist from Kansas State University. Wesch will address the crisis of significance in higher education, exploring how interactive media are changing the nature of learning and teaching.

Wesch and the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of undergraduates at Kansas State, have garnered much attention in both the academic press and the popular media for innovative projects posted on YouTube. “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” has been viewed more than 5.1 million times over the past year (winning a Wired Magazine “rave” award in 2007, among other accolades), and “A Vision of Students Today” has been viewed almost 2 million times in the last six months. Wesch also has developed the “World Simulation”, an interactive exercise (designed for cultural anthropology courses of 200-400 students) that “allow(s) students to actually experience how the world system works and explore some of the most important questions now facing humanity such as those of global inequality, globalization, culture loss, environmental degradation, and in the worst case scenario, genocide.” More information about Dr. Wesch is here: http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro/wesch.htm

More information on the conference is at: http://idd.elon.edu/catl/conference/index.html