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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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).

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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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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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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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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.

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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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A classified advertisement in last Sunday’s New York Times (2/3/08) states that New York University is “establishing a multi-school center for the research, design and development of electronic interactive games” and is seeking a Faculty Director for that center. The ad goes on to say that “…games are in the process of becoming a major art form, a site for new convergences of art and technology, vehicles for new approaches to learning, and opportunities for cultural studies.” Housed in the Tisch School of Arts, the Faculty Director will be expected to work across multiple schools, develop curricula and hire additional faculty for the center.

I’ve heard of courses and programs on gaming at various schools, but the NYU gaming center sounds like an ambitious and broad-based initiative.

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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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