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

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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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The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) offers its annual Institute June 4-7, 2008 at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. From the Institute’s website:

“In its sixth year, the CASTL Summer Institute is pleased to continue to offer a variety of developmental opportunities to faculty, scholars, and administrators who share the desire to develop and promote the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). If you are open to changing or re-focusing yourself as a professional educator or graduate student OR you are curious about how the principles of SoTL might strengthen your teaching and deepen your students’ learning, consider attending the Institute.”

To learn more about SoTL and CASTL, visit the Carnegie Foundation’s CASTL website.

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It is becoming common for users of Twitter to associate images with their “tweets”. The two services used most frequently are TwitPic and Twitxr. Images can be uploaded from a desktop machine, but the intended purpose is for people to send images from their cell phones or other mobile devices. From a phone, one can e-mail the image to the service and that generates a Twitter message, which includes a link to the image. It is also possible to look at the service’s website directly and see all of a user’s images with their associated messages.

Twitpic requires a Twitter account and the functionality is currently limited to posting through Twitter. Twitxr is a social networking site in itself, in that you can have “friends” and “follow” other users. You can also specify locations for each image and then view maps that display where all of the recent images were posted. Twitxr also allows users to send images to Facebook and Flickr, in addition to Twitter.

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More and more people are starting to use “hashtags” or “twemes” on Twitter. On Twitter, using a phone or an IM client, you can track a specific keyword and people are using these hashtags to track particular topics or facilitate communication within a group. This also allows for communication at a gathering, such as a conference, without having all the Tweeters follow one another. For example, people at SXSW will be adding #sxsw to their tweets. The hash convention was derived from IRC channels.

http://twemes.com is a convenient way to see tweets on popular topics.

http://hashtags.org tracks the use of hashtags of those that follow hashtags on Twitter.

See http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags and http://twemes.com/p/about for more information.

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The prestigious journal Nature has commissioned a series of articles in which experts speculate on important developments in the next few years in their fields. One of the first is “Chemistry for Everyone“, which describes an ‘open’ approach to chemistry. In this approach, chemists format data to help computers access the scientific literature in order to make scientific information freely available and accessible. This will facilitate better sharing of ideas between professional chemists as well as teachers, students, and anyone interested. For example, CrystalEye is a free web application that gathers open-access crystallographic data and allows it to be searched and manipulated. This article is an exciting look at the future:

“As new ideas and technologies arise, the blogosphere spreads them almost instantaneously. And the message from the blogosphere is clear: the next generation of chemists needs open, integrated, semantic systems.”

Read some of the Chemistry blogs on Chemistry Blogspace.

And if you are looking for service learning ideas in Chemistry, check out the blog Chemists without borders.

A post about open source Chemistry requires mentioning my favorite open source Chemistry project by Jean Claude Bradley. Read about his open notebook laboratory, and get more information about this project here. He makes the process of science totally transparent, shares all lab results (positive and negative), and finds great new collaborators.

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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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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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Have you twitted? Twitter can be used to track friends and send short messages either to a select group of people or the world, online and by mobile phone. My colleagues use it as an in/out board. Can it be used to facilitate learning? Apparently, yes. AcademHack: tech tools for Academics describes a Twitter assignment in which students virtually followed classmates over a weekend to explore new media. The success of this assignment inspired 13 (thirteen!) ideas for using Twitter in the classroom.

For more, see the Educause Learning Initiative 2 page document “7 things you should know about Twitter“.

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Two recent articles have highlighted popular teaching content (and the professor- stars who have created it)

The New York Times proudly proclaims: At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star. Professor Lewin’s course materials, including videotaped lectures are available on OpenCourseWare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and at iTunesU.

Fans e-mail him from all over the world, discussing both his inspirational style as well as the concepts he has taught them from watching his videos. Even people who are not students have a new appreciation for physics after watching his presentations.

Two mathematics professors, Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness, at University of Minnesota have created a YouTube hit about Möbius transformations; in the 6 months since this was posted, it has received over one million hits. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes the animation.

We may be able to all have our 15 minutes of fame on the internet. Or, use someone else’s popular content in our teaching.

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