A recent newsletter from the MIT OpenCourseWare project includes this information.

As a permanent part of the MIT academic program, OCW continues to publish about 200 courses per year –– dozens of new courses that are introduced at MIT each semester, as well as updates to courses already on OCW. Here are some examples of what is happening in 2008:

• More than 50 new courses, including brand new courses from Health Sciences and Technology, Sloan School of Management, Literature, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

• About 150 redesigned and refreshed courses from departments like Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemistry, and Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences

• New video lectures for courses in Mathematics, Biological Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and the Engineering Systems Division –– Note: MIT is in the process of adding video subtitles and transcripts to improve access for hearing impaired users.

• OCW audio and video on distribution channels such as YouTube and iTunes U

• Expanded content in the new Highlights for High School section of OCW

• New pages that link OCW courses to key MIT initiatives in energy and the environment.

To see these items or learn more about OCW, visit their website (http://ocw.mit.edu).

I’d be interested in knowing whether faculty and students at Duke would be interested in having course content openly available in ways similar to the MIT project. What would be the pro’s and cons’ of distributing course material publicly?

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An interesting and very mainstream article about how humanitarian applications for Google Earth are blossoming.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/08/google.refugees.ap/index.html

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Description from the Voicethread website:

A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world.

You can share and comment on video as well as pictures and documents! What a powerful collaborative tool! Watching the samples on the website is a great way to generate ideas for using this tool. You can embed the “voice thread” on your blog or webpage (even your Blackboard course site), making any site a group collaboration site.

Thanks very much to Lucy Haagen and Donna Hall for telling me about this, and Shawn Miller for remembering what it is called! Please try it and tell me what you think.

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A new site currently in beta, VerveEarth, allows users to link their blogs on a GoogleMap.  You can browse blogs, newspapers and other local content in a particular state or region and view a pop-up that includes a feed of the latest posts.  Users registered at the site can also share favorites with friends and leave comments.

With the growing interest in the use of blogs in education, particularly for projects seeking to engage the local community, VerveEarth provides another outlet for viewing and promoting student work.

http://www.verveearth.com/ 

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To incorporate real-world, current issues in your course, consider using resources recently made available about the human impact on the oceans. There are engaging photos, interactive graphics and accessible articles, which could complement courses on public policy, the environment, biology, chemistry, writing and social sciences, as well as others.

The New York Times has a series of thought-provoking articles and resources about human impact on the seas:

* “Human Shadows on the Seas” reports on the first worldwide portrait of human impacts on the oceans, revealing a planet-spanning mix of depleted resources, degraded ecosystems and disruptive biological blending as species are moved around the globe by accident and intent.

* Pictures of reefs and the scientists working at them are in a slide show “Before they vanish“.

* An interactive map, “Mapping the Other 70 Percent”, allows you to display data on the human impact, shipping, invasive species, temperature, ultraviolet light and acidification.

* An article “Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them” describes recently published research results (listed below) . Comparing the popular press version with essays written by the authors and the scientific research report could be a useful educational opportunity.

PLOS Biology has an open access essay on “Shifting Baselines, Local Impacts, and Global Change on Coral Reefs” to accompany two research reports published in PLoS ONE. These research reports, “Baselines and Degradation of Coral Reefs in the Northern Line Islands” and “Microbial Ecology of Four Coral Atolls in the Northern Line Islands”, are open for online discussion and annotation. Currently, readers can access the Editor’s comments and comments by the Faculty of 1000. Discussing research papers online provides a window into the process of scientific research and showcases critical thinking.

For more information about Coral Reefs, engaging photos and other multimedia, see the Coral Reef Alliance. The resource library section has extensive links to visualizations about changing climate, videos, photographs and other educational organizations.

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Here’s a great story for Lincoln’s birthday. An essay by Kitty Eisele on National Public Radio this morning described photographs of Abraham Lincoln that were recently found in the Library of Congress. They had been misclassified in the past, but a researcher using the Library’s digital image collection noticed the error. The NPR essay, Uncovered Photos Offer View of Lincoln Ceremony, states that the library had received a large collection of Civil War photographs in the 1940s, with handwritten logs. Some of the writing was hard to read, and over time, the caption for these photos were misplaced. But recently, a researcher in Colorado spotted the mislabeled Lincoln photographs in the Library’s online collection.

The Library of Congress is also experimenting with putting some of its image collections on Flickr and asking the public to add descriptions to them. Try tagging some of the photographs yourself - who knows what you’ll find!

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An article at Campus Technology discusses a NEH funded project that allowed art history students to create 3d models of the ancient Greek site of Delph in a cooperative project between Arkansas State University and Coastal Carolina University.

Dubbed Ashes2Art, the project aims to encourage students to use 3d software to recreate and study ancient ruins, a type of work typically done by professional modeling firms.  A variety of software tools were used in the project, but many of the students gravitated towards Google SketchUp, a free software package that is easy to use.

The students are encouraged to do historically accurate renders, drawing on excavation reports and other published archeological evidence.  In some cases, for a project focused on Florence, students had to translate original materials from French as part of their research process.

article at Campus Technology

Ashes2Art website

DigitalDelphi website

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EveryBlock is a new website that aims to collate localized information for major cities and urban areas. The site, which now includes information on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago brings together publicly available mapped information, such as Flickr photo feeds and restaurant inspections, with local news and other information from providers such as CraigsList entries.

Mapping is a larger trend on the Internet, with services such as GoogleMaps proving to be popular among users. EveryBlock, as it expands listings for other cities, could prove to be a useful resources for visualizing a wide range of information about cities for discussions and class activities.

http://www.everyblock.com/

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BiomedExperts.com, a social-networking Web site for health-care and life-science experts, was unveiled on January 11, 2008 at the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting, in Philadelphia. The site includes profiles of more than 1.4 million biomedical experts in 120 countries. Researchers can gain access to the site for free and search for colleagues based on their areas of expertise, where they live, or other variables. The site also allows scientists to share data and analyses, and view summaries of their colleagues’ research papers.

Article at the Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) reports on a new study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that documents Web surfing habits. Not surprisingly, video sharing sites like YouTube are seeing a strong increase in viewership, and a Pew survey found last spring that more of these folks are looking at educational content when they visit these sites. Many institutions are taking advantage of this to make content available that’s been created by and about their faculty, staff and students. Duke has done this as well - visit the Duke University News channel on YouTube to see a variety of videos about faculty research, library activities, and other information about our campus.

See also:
Thanks to YouTube, Professors are Finding New Audiences (CHE)

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