If you are looking to study a foreign language on your own, or are a student enrolled in a language class looking for materials to supplement your coursework, here are some online resources you may find helpful:

• iTunes U and iTunes Podcasts – You can enhance your study of French or Spanish, or try learning a language that isn’t offered at Duke. A search of “learn language” in iTunes turns up hundreds of podcasts, including “One Minute Irish” and “Learn Tagolog Easy”. There are podcasts for Azeri, Kazakh, Uyghur, Tajiki, Yiddish – you name it and there is probably a podcast that will teach you how to speak it.
• Google Language Tools – At http://translate.google.com/, you can enter text from any one of 41 languages (as of this writing) and have it translated into any of the others. You can also have it translate an entire webpage. Want to read this in Lithuanian?
• News from Other Countries – An excellent starting point is http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/languages/, with 34 regional sites. Read and listen to news in Kirundi or Tamil.
• Video – Sites such as YouTube offer endless choices of foreign language clips. Watch Sesame Street in Dutch or Portuguese.

These are just a few of the many free, online resources for language self-study.

If you need a way to do quick and easy audio recording online, with a minimum of equipment and set-up, you need to try Wimba Voice. Wimba Voice provides a collection of tools which can be embedded in a web page or Blackboard page to allow voice recording and/or playback “on-the-fly” within that web page. Visitors to the page will see a toolbar allowing them to play back or record and save audio, without using a special application other than Wimba.

Use Wimba Voice to record and send voice emails, embed recorded messages in web pages, allow audio-based discussion boards, create presentations with audio accompanying visuals of webpages, hold simple audio-based chat sessions, and even create audio podcasts. These tools are available to Duke faculty using Blackboard, but are also available to faculty and staff outside of Blackboard – just contact CIT for an account on our Wimba Voice pilot server.

Sometimes you just want a way to collect a bunch of files all in one place – quickly and easily. A new tool called ‘drop.io‘ aims to be the “simplest way to share files online”.

For example, I named my drop “drop.io/cittest“. I added a bunch of random files (workshop handouts, video, etc…drop.io provides up to 1 Gig of space free of charge and accepts payments to increase space), and chose to allow others to ‘View and Add’. If I wanted to truly keep this dropbox more ‘private’, I would have also chose a ‘Guest password’, so that people going to my drop.io/cittest URL would have to know the password to access the files.

After completing the initial setup, I can either email my dropbox address to others I want to share it with, or I can go to my drop.io page, and look at some of the other options for sharing that drop.io has up its sleeve.

Things to notice: I can add ‘notes’ to better explain files or provide more details. I can also add links to websites, and move the windows around (up/down). If I click on the video or PDF file, drop.io will show me a preview of each BEFORE I choose to download it.

On the right, I have a set of options under ‘Share’. This is where I can set up drop.io to tip me off when a new file has been added. I can set up my Twitter account, my mobile phone (SMS), or even get an email when a new file is added. Other users can also ’subscribe’ to these alerts, letting everyone I’m working with know when a new file has been added, in various ways.

The last neat trick is one that can come in really handy if you have your own blog or website (or even access to adding some small HTML in Blackboard, for that matter). By clicking the ‘More’ button, I get more options – the best of which is the ‘Upload Widget’.

By copying the ‘Embed code’ and plopping it into the HTML of any webpage, blog or web document, I can add a quick dropbox like the one below. Feel free to give this a try. Just click ‘add files’ and upload a (please, relatively small!) file.

For more about setting up a drop.io account, check out the ‘How To’ movie on the drop.io site.

The big news today is that Apple’s 3G iPhone is finally available to purchase. What’s the big deal? If you need to know, here’s a handy ‘review matrix’ from Gizmodo that should help bring you up to speed.

While that’s just great, what about folks that have already bought an iPhone, or have an iPod Touch? What do we get? We get version 2.0 of the operating software, which gives us the Apple-sanctioned ability to install ‘apps’.

I’ve been waiting for opportunity to try out some 3rd party applications for a long, long time. At launch (available in the newest version of iTunes), there’s supposedly over 500 new applications available. I’ve downloaded or tried about thirty so far. Instead of provided a play by play on all the ‘apps’, I’m going to just hit on some of the overall themes or apps that I think might end up being useful for higher ed more specifically.

Voice Recording: This one is for the iPhone only (since the iPod Touch doesn’t have a microphone built into it). Given one of the iPhone’s functions (er…its a phone!), it makes sense to have a few applications that take advantage of the its built in microphone and provide us with voice recording capabilities (yes – shockingly missing from the original iPhone software).

Social Networking: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr and others are represented so far. Facebook’s app works pretty much just like their iPhone-specific web page application. The MySpace app is actually nicer than MySpace itself has ever been. There are also several Twitter apps, though none officially from Twitter itself. Ultimately, I still find using the Twitter iPhone web page easier than waiting for one of these apps to load up, but they’re definitely a step into a quickly emerging world that finds it less and less necessary to be tied to desktop and laptop computers to maintain connectivity and information.

Language Tools: Aside from standard translation dictionaries, there are already some neat language apps (some free, some costing $10 or more) that include access to libraries of short, spoken phrases in a given language. The iPhone finally gets some flashcard apps too.

E-Books: The iPhone can also now load eBooks in a variety of formats. Several ‘classic’ books and general eBook readers were available at launch. While I doubt it will kill sales of the Kindle, it certainly seems promising. Still, some folks might have reservations about paying $0.99 for Anna Karenina, when its been available for free on Project Gutenberg for years.

Location-aware Photos: I’m still exploring this feature, but the iPhone appears to be trying to geotag my photos now. There are already a few apps that try to take advantage of this, either by tagging your location and adding it to a social networking site, or by providing you with links to other photos from the same area. Ex: If I’m standing in front of the Duke chapel and take a picture with a specific app, I can also see pictures of the chapel (or the area around the chapel) on sites like Panaramio. It feels like this is just scratching the surface of what’s possible. Exciting, and worth mentioning.

Blogging and Productivity: A few apps try to provide sets of tools for blogging. Six Apart has already released one that helps the user quickly upload pictures and manage text on their TypePad blog. and it’ll be interesting to see if the other major blogs (Blogger and WordPress) follow suit. For those who don’t blog, but want to capture pictures, text and even audio notes, the productivity app from Evernote may prove to be very, very useful.

Science and Math: Believe it or not, there are already some science and math apps. For $10, users can try ‘Atom in a Box‘, which is supposedly an ‘aid for visualizing the Hydrogenic atomic orbitals’, or users can look at 3D Molecules for free. The math apps are still lacking a bit, but there are some nifty advanced calculators (though the new iPhone update gives us a scientific calculator built-in!) and some flash-card style math training games.

Other things of interest: There are so many of the apps, that its somewhat overwhelming to even think about getting around to trying most of them. Apple even built one – an app that turns your iPhone into a ‘remote control’ for iTunes and/or the Apple TV. Users can then use the iPhone to sort, search and play their iTunes libraries – the only tether is the area of your wireless connection. Still missing: video apps (we know they exist!) and more advanced, Skype-like conferencing apps for starters.

‘Apps’ and Oranges

Something I’ve noticed going through these apps and playing with each: there seems to be several different philosophies just what an ‘app’ should be. Some developers see the iPhone as ‘just another cell phone, but with a big touch screen’, and have basically developed applications that run like old Java-based cell phone applications. You have to wait for the app to ’start up’, and it sluggishly works. Other developers approached the development by just creating iPhone-ish ‘wrappers’ for their webpages. In other words, though it looks sort of like a built-in application, what you’re actually using is a webpage in a slightly glossier container. Somewhere between both of these worlds is the Apple-esque ‘widget’ philosophy – meaning small applications that do one or two very specific tasks well, and that’s that. Anyone who’s spent a few minutes playing with Apple’s built in, very simple, weather or ’stock market’ widgets knows the joys of quickly accessing web data with a snappy little application – yet never going to a ‘webpage’ or feeling like you’re waiting for the web to load up. It’ll be interesting to see how all of this pans out as more and more reviews of the apps become available.

For more summaries and short reviews of the new applications:

-Gizmodo live blog of app reviews
-LifeHacker app reviews: “What’s Good and Free…”

Apps photo from Flickr – user Photocology under a ’share-alike’ CC license.

An Ars Technica article titled “YouTube University gets failing grade from prof, students” provides an interesting account of Pitzer College professor Alex Juhasz’s media studies course she decided to hold entirely within YouTube. Juhasz’s experience is no doubt very ‘meta’, in the sense that she’s teaching media studies, and the course in question was called ‘Learning from YouTube’. She addresses this in her analysis of the course (note, I added the bold emphasis, not her):

“I did set forth the rule that all the learning for the course had to be on and about YouTube. While this constraint was clearly artificial, and perhaps misleading about how YouTube is used in connection with a host of other media platforms which complement its functionality, it did allow us to become critically aware of the constraints of its architecture for our atypical goals of higher education. Thus, all assignments had to be produced as YouTube comments or videos, all research had to be conducted within its pages, and all classes were taped and put on to YouTube. This gimmick, plus a press release, made the course sexy enough to catch the eye of the media, mainstream and otherwise, allowing for an exhausting, but self-reflexive lesson in the role and value of media attention within social networking.”

Juhasz then continues with some observations about the overall outcome of the course:

“…students quickly realized how well trained they actually are to do academic work with the word—their expertise—and how poor is their media-production literacy (there were no media production skills required for the course as there are not on YouTube). It is hard to get a paper into 500 characters, and translating it into 10 minutes of video demands real skills in creative translation, or artful summary, within word, image, sound, and their layering.“

Juhasz also writes about the imperative of YouTube videos to be quick and entertaining, and thus, force her as a teacher to uncomfortably try to be entertaining as well:

“While I have always been aware that I am a performer, entertaining my students while sneaking in critical theory, avant-garde forms, and radical politics, much of what I perform is the delight and beauty of the complex: the life of the mind, the work of the artist, the experience of the counter-culture. I am not interested teaching as a re-performing of the dumbing-down of our culture. “

Many of Juhasz’s reservations and criticisms certainly have merit, though looking at her course’s page also reveals that many of her students began to produce slightly more rich media presentations over time -some of them actually quite fascinating.

Link to the course/group space on YouTube

Link to Alex Juhasz’s YouTube space

CIT is no stranger toYouTube – we’ve posted pages about it and even used it (and Flickr) to document our annual Showcase. We’ll continue to be available to help faculty think about uses of digital video and yes, even YouTube, for teaching, as digital video continues to factor more heavily into higher education (see, for example the upcoming DDI programs for 2008-2009).

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?

This is a link to a 5 minute video on MathCasts http://ti-tfb.net/ti_web/profesori/lindas/trud/etpe2006_uom/mc_prez_short/mc_prez_short.html

MathCasts are ScreenCasts (videos) that focus on math from both an instructor and learner perspective. An instructor can produce a video that shows step-by-step the process for solving math problems. Even more interesting to me, is using MathCasts to capture the learner solving a math problem step-by-step. The equipment requirements can be as much as $300, but with headphones and mics becoming ubiquitous and cheaper, open source software for screen capture maturing; and other hardware going down in price, perhaps this can scale.

Courses, events and campus life activities at the University of California at Berkeley are now featured on YouTube. Much of the content is similar to U.C. Berkeley’s channel on iTunes U.

Podcast People is a new podcasting site not just for finding podcasts to listen to, but for recording, managing, and promoting your own podcasts. Not only can you upload video and audio to the site, but with a microphone or web cam, you can record directly into your Podcast People account. There’s also the ability to add widgets to your podcasting site, including Flickr streams (or your photos) and other information. They currently have free and pay accounts, with various options to choose from.

Speaking of podcasting, Mashable also has a very, very lengthy (but informative) post with links to an overwhelming amount of podcasting info currently online.

There are podcasts out there for just about everything – even geeks who take up farm living. Among the several discipline-based podcasts floating around the educational podosphere, there are also a few that focus more specifically on academic technology. A short list culled from a post on the POD (Professional and Organizational Development Network) listerv follows after the jump (click below for more).

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