A recent blog post on LifeClever briefly sums up several new online photo editors. These are web-based applications that generally handle most average photo editing tasks that larger software packages like Adobe Photoshop would normally be used to do.

So just what are the advantages to using these tools? Here’s an example. To the left, I’ve included a picture I took in Princeton. This is actually a very large photo that I wanted to do a small bit of color correction to and shrink the overall size of the image down so that it wouldn’t bloat this blog post. Using the application Picnik (a free application mentioned in the LifeClever post, as well as recently integrated into Flickr), I not only managed to quickly pull the photo up from my desktop computer, but I quickly adjusted the color, tint and size of the picture, and, just for fun, added a stylish border to the whole thing. This took <5 minutes and then provided me options for saving the picture back to my computer, sending it to someone via email, or posting it to a variety of sources, such as Flickr, Picasa - even Facebook.

What’s not to love? Some of these applications are awash in advertisements and gimicky clutter for one thing. You’ll not only find standard photo editing options, but sometimes you’ll also find downright silly icons and ‘eye-candy’ that really only get in the way of the stronger features. You’ll also be hard-pressed to find any of these applications that work well with really high resolution imagery (not even the recently mentioned online version of Photoshop)…a task still really reserved for Photoshop itself.

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“Desktop faculty development, 100 times a year.” This is the description of Tomorrow’s Professor mailing list, which posts short articles every three days or so that address concerns of future and new faculty. These postings occassionally focus on instructional technology– two recently posted articles are about the use of personal response systems (”clickers”) in university classrooms. The posts, #883 & #884 at http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/postings.php, are summaries of two very interesting articles that can be found here:

1. Teaching with Clickers
2. An Instructors Guide to the Effective Use of Personal Response Systems (Clickers) in Teaching

Recommended reading if you are interested in using (or improving your use of) clickers. For more info about clickers at Duke, see the CIT classroom tools page on the PRS.

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The second generation iPhone was announced earlier this week, though it won’t be available till July 11. The main new features include 3G, GPS, and much cheaper price! The 3G provides for faster web page downloads over 3G cellular networks, as compared with the EDGE technology used by the original iPhone. Not all locations have 3G wireless but we appear to be covered pretty well in the RTP area (to see this for yourself, go to http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/ and in the Legend, click on “Show 3G coverage in select areas”). The GPS is “real” GPS, rather than just using triangulation from cell tower signals or wireless networks, which means that it is accurate. The cheaper feature is maybe the most amazing thing. The entry level iPhone second gen cost $199 for the 8 gig model, down from $399.

Apple had already opened up software development on the iPhone with the announcement of a free SDK (software development kit), which has been downloaded about 250,000 times since the announcement in March. In conjunction with this, Apple is launching an App Store for distributing 3rd party applications. The SDK has potential for the education market. Apple will have a special ad hoc distribution available so that a developer can register 100 iPhones. Steve Jobs gave an example of a professor teaching how to develop iPhone apps in class and then having the class distribute their applications over email (which they can do because their devices are registered). It also means that educational institutions potentially have a way to develop applications that meet their administrative or teaching and learning needs and distributing those applications for instructors and students to access.

There is also a potential Blackboard connection here. Blackboard has rolled out a free service called Bb Sync which provides Facebook integration as a Facebook app. The student has the option to install the application, or not, and it provides notifications of new materials posted in Blackboard course sites, and easy links to the materials, delivered straight to Facebook. In the process of creating this service, Blackboard created a central service to handle most of the actual security and functionality, with the Facebook application itself being used mostly as a means to provide the front end interface. As a result, this new infrastructure provides the potential for Blackboard to roll out services on many different devices, including the iPhone. Blackboard, Inc. mentioned the iPhone themselves in an April webinar this year. With the opening up of the iPhone SDK, Blackboard apparently has all the tools it needs to create such an application.

For more information about the new iPhone see:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

http://gizmodo.com/5015052/iphone-3g-complete-coverage

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I recently attended a conference presentation where Bemidji State discussed the results of their transition to a dual-boot campus. There are definitely pros and cons to such a move, but this is the most enthusiastic endorsement of the idea that I’ve yet seen.

Duke has one OIT-managed dual-boot lab. CIT will soon be implementing dual-boot to some extent.

The idea is hardly bleeding edge anymore, but it seems that the technology has just recently evolved to the point where implementing dual-boot is almost “easy”.

No one solution can fit in every environment, but if it’s true that total costs can actually go down with dual-boot computers, I expect to see this really start to propagate in the very near future.

Being an environmentalist, I am intrigued by the idea that dual-booting might cut down toxic electronic waste and electricity usage.

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YouTube, the popular and ubiquotous video sharing website, has added a new annotations feature.  After uploading a video to the site, you can now add “pop ups” with text that point to or highlight parts of the video frame to add commentary or additional information for viewers.  The annotations can be turned on or off by the viewer; the feature only works with videos at YouTube, not those embedded at external websites.

blog entry at Google Operating System

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Edupunk, a term coined by Jim Groom of University of Mary Washington, appears to be about having a do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude towards the use of technology in teaching and learning.  Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard, make creating a course web site incredibly easy, but is easy necessarily good?

Here is the short article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed

We especially invite comments from members of the Duke community.

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The Boston Globe’s May 25, 2008 article, Everyone’s a Historian Now, describes how individuals’ contributions of photographs, descriptions and interpretations of historical events, including recent events, are changing the way historical research and writing are done. The article describes how non-historians are creating new types of digital archives - such as photographs and recollections of the September 11 attacks on New York, or Hurricane Katrina - and also adding information to established research sites such as the Library of Congress and National Archives. “By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people, ‘crowdsourcing,’ as it’s increasingly called, may transform a discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a single historian toiling in the dusty archives,” says author Stephen Mihm, a history professor at the University of Georgia.

Mihm addresses the common criticisms of “amateur” contributions, stating that the vast increase in the volume of materials available and the tendency for individuals to correct the errors of others make the sites valuable. Long-standing historical research sites are legitimizing such contributions. For example, the September 11 Digital Archive, set up by history professor Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University for people to post photographs, videos, documents, e-mails, and recollections of that day, was so successful that the Library of Congress made it their first digital acquisition.

Minh concludes: “So far, only a handful of professional historians have begun to exploit crowdsourcing, which remains a relatively crude tool for gathering and organizing knowledge. But as the power of crowds meets the practice of history, these online repositories represent a remarkable change not only in how historical materials are gathered and organized, but, perhaps most important, in how deeply and broadly the past can be understood.”

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