Have you wondered how you or your support staff can keep informed about changes to Blackboard including scheduled outages, updates, bugs, news and training opportunities? You are in luck! Sign up for the bb-alerts email group.

Q: How can I subscribe to the bb-alerts email group?

A: Method 1: go to https://lists.duke.edu/sympa/info/bb-alerts and log in with your NetID and password, and then click on  “subscribe” option within the List Operations on the left menu.

Method 2: send an email to sympa@duke.edu and in the subject line write SUBSCRIBE bb-alerts.
Should you have any questions or concerns, contact Neal Caidin (neal.caidin@duke.edu) or Lenore Ramm (lenore.ramm@duke.edu) as the list owners.

To explore and discover Blackboard features, see the Blackboard support website. If you need a tutorial for Blackboard, request an office visit and we will come to you.

According to the 2009 Horizon Report, “Geo-Everything” will significantly impact teaching, learning, research and creative expression within the next two to three years.  (The report covers 5 other technologies, but geo-everything is my favorite.)

What is it?

Geolocation (geocoding or geotagging) means using data about location, whether it’s where you are or where a photo or other data was taken.  Every place on earth has a unique set of coordinates (longitude, latitude and altitude) that can be detected by GPS receivers.  These receivers are now being included in many devices.

Geolocation is not new; people have been tracking their movements (and the movements of animals) for years. I’ve used a GPS device to record and create tracks of where I’ve been and to tag photos to map on Google Earth for several years. What is new are small, multifunctional devices like the iPhone that have GPS built in,  so it is easier to record or use location information. For example, students could be investigating the distribution of a plant species, or investigating medical care in an underdeveloped country.  Students can take pictures, video and record notes, while the device automatically records the location and displays it on a map. The new devices eliminate the need for a separate GPS unit while simplifying the steps to create annotated, precise maps.  The devices also allow communication based on location.  For example, imagine a student waiting for the C2 bus, worried about her German class.  The device in her pocket may let her know that someone within a few feet of her is also taking German and would like to practice German as they wait for the bus.

What are these devices?  Some are pictured here.  Wired has a comparison of 5 currently available devices, including the iPhone; it’s likely more will be available soon.

People are already using geolocation here at Duke.  For example,

• Victoria Szabo, and Richard Lucic (ISIS) are exploring devices for creating multimedia maps creating multimedia maps with their research capstone course and Duke Engage
• Julie Reynolds‘ (Biology) citizen scientist project maps the location of invasive plants
• Trudy Abel (History) has collected historical information, including maps for Digital Durham
• Peter Haff’s students (NSOE) mapped their field trip to the southwest desert using Google Earth
• Pat Halpin’s Marine Geospatial Ecology lab uses mapping to look at marine ecology, resource management and ocean conservation issues
• Alex Glass’s (NSOE) course mapped the location of virtual oil field
• Gary Gereffi (Sociology) has created maps demonstrating North Carolina’s role in the Global Economy
• Ken Glander (Evolutionary Anthropology) is working on tracking the daily activity of lemurs

For a more frivolous, but more concrete view of current possibilities, see Wired’s description of 10 applications that make the most of location.

For a short description of how geolocation works and how it can be used in teaching, see the pdf “7 things you should know about geolocation”, or read more in the Horizon Report (pdf).

Dr. Bruce Alberts, current Editor-in-Chief of Science will lecture on “Making a Science Out of Science Education: Strategies for Success in this Critical Enterprise for the World’s Future” on Friday, January 30, 2009 at 1:30 p.m. in the LOVE Auditorium in LSRC at Duke.

This lecture is sponsored by the Duke Center for Science Education.

You may recognize Dr. Alberts’ name because of his long involvement in science education, as an author of the textbook, Molecular Biology of the Cell, his involvement in creating the National Science Education Standards and his editorials on the importance of science education (pdf).  See you there.

Some ideas for using blogs and wikis in teaching college science, from a session I moderated with Brian Switek (a science blogger and ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University) on Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond at ScienceOnline09.  These ideas were generated and discussed by the session participants:

• Use a blog to post notes from guest speakers, librarians, or add resources from your lecture
• Require students to post to a course blog and comment on each others posts
• Post supplemental material for the course (links to multimedia and more information)
• Use a wiki to organize course material
• Use a wiki for student to student communication (for collaborative projects)
• Connect class material to the world by connecting to relevant headlines and news stories
• Construct an assignment where students are required to find relevant headlines and post, connect to the course material and create a concept map within a course wiki
• Students can blog course notes, after they have edited and reviewed the material (example and discussion by Lou FCD, who participated in this discussion)
• Students can use their term papers as blog posts
• Students blog during a field trip, perhaps with video; this increases student focus on the trip as they know they must blog, and can see posts made by other students (example from Duke’s Marine Conservation Biology field trip).  The blog may be mined in the future for data on changes over time.
• Build up a resource for field trips that revisit sites by adding notes to a wiki
• Use blogs with relevant content as a resource for exploring a subject
• Use a blog to run course discussions as a supplement for in class discussions, to encourage all students to participate
• Use a blog for group project to keep track of what worked during the project
• Use a blog or wiki to share links, possibly making it competitive (who can find the best links)
• Create a space on the web to discuss controversial course topics
• Connect students from different universities
• Have students read and summarize papers in a blog, perhaps contribute to ResearchBlogging.org
• Keep a research notebook or field journal online
• Have students use a blog to create a website, like an online science fair project

One student who was homeschooled and found blogs useful for exploring topics of interest to him pointed out that it can be difficult to stay focused on the web.  He shared some tips:  monitor yourself to make sure you are on task, and take frequent breaks to refocus (take a walk, eat some fruit).

One of the participants who uses a blog to post his course notes, wrote about his own ideas from the session, in his blog, Crowded head, cozy bed.

If you are at Duke, call us at the Center for Instructional Technology for ideas and help incorporating any of these ideas in your course.

Update:

Kevin Zelnio participated in this session and wrote about it in his blog, Deep Sea News .

Mason Posner teaches anatomy and physiology and marine biology, and is experimenting with blogs in his senior capstone biology course.  You can follow his experiment at their central course blog.

How will new technologies impact teaching and research in the Humanities?

The Mellon Seminars in Digital Humanities have been exploring issues around changes in the Humanities brought about by these new opportunities.  As part of the series, the two faculty leading the seminars, Todd Presner, UCLA, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Stanford, are leading the drafting of a “Digital Humanities Manifesto” in an online blog.

The blog is set up to allow users to comment on each sentence in the Manifesto and discuss its contents.   To join the blog, click on one of the links in the “comments overview” window in the middle of the screen, and then click on “Create an Account.”

More information on the Mellon Seminars in Digital Humanities, which will be held at UCLA and broadcast via a live feed in Second Life each month through June 2009 can be found in a previous CIT blog post.

Digital Humanities Manifesto blog

As part of conference for scientists, bloggers, science educators, and journalists; (ScienceOnline09), Stacey Baker and her students (mostly 9th grade) answered questions about how they use technology to learn biology in high school, and what the students thought about it in a session: Science online – middle/high school perspective or: “How the Facebook generation does it”. Their photo is from their class blog.

Here are some of the tools and thoughts they shared:

The students write a class blog about biology, Extreme Biology,  which won the 2008 Edublog Award for Best Class Blog! Caitlin shared her enthusiasm for the blog before the session, saying how motivating it was when people outside the class commented on their blog, especially scientists.

Students in AP biology use Twitter to pose questions while doing homework, students say “it’s fun and easy and you get instant access”. The teacher sets expectations for the students, by telling them that she will not always be online, and that their help should come from their peers. One student really liked twitter, and created a separate account that could be public. He talked enthusiastically about getting “tweets” from NASA.  Picture shows tweets from Mars Phoenix.  

The students were asked why they would communicate through text if they could talk by phone. They answered that when you write text, you can think through what you want to say first, so it saves time. It’s also easy to multitask while using text to communicate and you can talk to more than one person at a time. They generally check to see if someone is online before calling, and will text someone to ask them to get online (to communicate online rather than texting, which may cost).

The class also uses Ning, a social networking tool. Accounts on Ning are free to educators, others have ad content. Participants must belong to the group to post things and comment. There is a ning network called Synapse for connecting biology educators world wide.  Another example of the use of Ning is Sean Nash’s principles of biology course. This site is a collaborative network linking Benton High School and MWSU via the dual-credit course: “Principles of Biology.”

What about using Facebook for your course? Students described the Creepy Treehouse phenomenon, where they are uncomfortable with teachers using spaces they consider theirs. Students said that they’d make a separate account in facebook if a teacher wanted to use facebook. Just as it’s awkward for students to see a teacher outside of school, it is similarly awkward to have a teacher in a social online environment. Although ning is also a social network, it’s not weird to use it for school because it was introduced in school. Students are introduced to facebook as social website and don’t mix the two. Participants seemed to agree that teachers can “friend” the students on Facebook after they have left the school; teachers find this is a good way to keep up with their former students. One teacher pointed out that you can join a common group without friending people to be able to keep up with them, and can then select what you share.

January 25th through 30th, Linden Labs will be holding a Second Life Education Support Faire.

Bringing together faculty and students using Second Life in education with professionals from Linden Labs, this online gathering or conference will include booths with support information on using Second Life in education, exhibits of educational uses of SL by faculty and scheduled events.

Educators using Second Life in courses are invited to present.  More information is avialable in the Linden Labs blog.

blog entry at Linden Labs

The site smARThistory is a unique, growing resource that aims to be an enhancement, or even a replacement, for the traditional art history textbook.  It allows users to browse styles, artists, and themes in an easy to use interactive timeline.  Clicking on a work will bring up short podcasts lectures, flickr feeds and links to other resources related to the work.

http://www.smarthistory.org/

The site was founded by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker of the Fashion Institute of Technology at the State University of New York.  The work is an outgrowth of multimedia materials and blogs they were already creating for their courses.

“For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging. In addition, we had found the web resources developed by publishers to be woefully uncreative. We had developed quite a bit of content for our online Western art history courses and we had also created many podcasts, and a few screencasts for our smARThistory blog. So, it finally occurred to us, why not use the personal voice that we use when we teach online, along with the multimedia we had already created for our blog and for our courses, to create a more engaging “web-book” that could be used in conjunction with art history survey courses. We are also committed to joining the growing number of teachers who make their content freely available on the web.”

The New Media Consortium’s 2009 Horizon Report, which looks at trends in uses of technology in teaching in higher education, cited smARThistory as an example of the “Personal Web”, a set of technologies that allow faculty, students and experts to easily build rich multimedia websites, e-books, and other resources.

This semester, Duke opened a new flexible teaching and learning space in Perkins Library, called the Link. The Link supports student and faculty learning, teaching, and collaboration by offering several flexible, multimedia capable classrooms in addition to many informal meeting rooms and break-out spaces that encourage group and student engagement.

As part of what will hopefully become a continuing trend, CIT will begin posting faculty-written reflections of their experiences teaching in the Link. Following, is the third and final post in a series from Caroline Bruzelius, Anne M. Cogan Professor of Art and Art History. Read the first post by clicking here or the second by clicking here.

During the week of December 1, the students had ten minutes to present their projects. They were free to do this in any way they liked: as a “performance” or a straightforward presentation. In evaluating each presentation, we consider the quality of the overall conception, the coherence of the three parts (fictional history, architecture and decorative program), and certain ineffable qualities in the project: brilliance of concept, and inventiveness, as well as charm and humor.

At the end of the semester, each time I teach this course, I am amazed that students who have had no previous background in the Middle Ages or in Art History are able to come up with compelling historical narratives, wonderful decorative programs, and terrific architectural designs. This year was particularly striking in its wide-ranging and inventive approaches, because there were projects set all over Europe and the Near East: Turkey, Cyprus, Northern Germany, and Spain, as well as England, Italy, and France. Although the Gothic style was born in France, the students took it “on the road” in their projects and designed it in relation to local conditions, such as the need for earthquake-proof design (Turkey), the use of locally-available materials ( brick, instead of stone in N. Germany), or the insertion of the cathedral into a former mosque (Spain).

(Note: This is a slideshow of images of the completed cathedral designs. It will cycle through images automatically, or you can click on an image to see the next image).

So now – out of a class of majors in topics such as Chemistry, Political Science, History, Engineering, etc. – we have crafted a group of wonderfully resourceful and inventive medieval architects, iconographers, and historians. In the fictional narratives, the “rediscoveries” of long-lost local saints, the recreation of ancient trade routes bringing income and ideas, the writing of “budgets” that would define income as well as the expenses of materials and labor, are stimulating exercises that on some level recreate the experience of building a major architectural project in a distant historical period.

I am so very proud of my students, and love what they do.

(Note: This is a slideshow of images of the class. It will cycle through images automatically, or you can click on an image to see the next image).

What is that little black device in your hand? An iPod? An iPhone? Some new kind of cellphone? Nope, its the ‘world’s smallest’ HD video camera – the Flip Mino HD.

Last semester, the Duke Digital Initiative (DDI) made several Flip Mino video cameras available to Duke faculty and students through both its grant program and a large ‘loaner’ pool of cameras available for checkout in the Link (which students and faculty can check out for up to 3 weeks at a time). This semester, DDI is once again offering a grant program to faculty and students interested in exploring the uses of the Flip camera for academic purposes.

Here’s a link to more information about the grant and other DDI programs.

Here at the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT), we’ve worked with many faculty to help them plan on the uses of Flip video cameras for their courses. Want your students to create mini video ethnographies? Try having them record interviews with a Flip. Want to see your students working on a project? Ask them to use a Flip camera to capture key moments of their work. Once you see how light, quick and portable the Flip is, you’ll start coming up with several uses for it – many you never anticipated.

While the Flip is great – the documentation isn’t. Using the Flip to record is as simple as clicking its big red button. Moving those files to your computer is another story. One of the nice things about the Flip is that it includes built-in software (called ‘FlipShare’) that allows users to quickly edit video and upload it to sites like YouTube, or download it to their computer for later use. We often get asked for help either a) working with this software, or b) figuring out ways to use the Flip video with Blackboard. To fill this need, we’ve provided a few videos on our YouTube channel to explain the process.

Basic editing/trimming function of the FlipShare software

Click here to see the video in a larger size and/or on YouTube.

Making a ‘movie’ using the FlipShare software

Click here to see the video in a larger size on YouTube.

Uploading a Flip video to YouTube

Click here to see the video in a larger size on YouTube.

How to embed a YouTube clip in a Blackboard wiki

Finally, we get several questions about how to get Flip video into Blackboard. There are several ways to do this, but one method that results in a nice looking presentation is to use the Blackboard wiki tool and ‘embed’ the video there via YouTube. An ‘embedded’ video is a video that can be watched and played in the context of the page it’s in (as I’ve done with the videos here).

Click here to watch the video in a larger size on YouTube.

If you have any comments on any of these videos and/or have a specific need to see something demonstrated, please let us know.

Image of Flip cameras used via Creative Commons license. Photo by http://flickr.com/photos/momentimedia/