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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One of the trends happening with software over the past couple of years has been a transition of applications that cover basic functions, like word processing, from the desktop to the web browser.

The latest entry in the online application sphere is a free online version of Photoshop, which went live as a beta today.  Currently, it’s a “stripped down” version of the application that handles basic image editing tasks with JPEG images and up to 2 GB of storage.  Adobe plans on adding more functionality and premium features for users who pay for a yearly subscription.

article at News.com

Photoshop Express online -  http://www.photoshop.com/express

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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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Besides email applications and web browsers, most of us use Microsoft Word on a daily basis. Certainly Word has its benefits - compatibility, comfortable familiarity, general availability, steep academic discounts, etc — nearly everyone knows what to do with a ‘.doc’ file. However, with a newer version of Word out there (Office 2007 featured a pretty extensive overhaul of all the Office products, and Mac Office 2008 now offers them for Apple users), it looks like as good a time as any to reflect on one’s use of Word…is it the best tool for what we’re trying to achieve when we write?

A recent New York Times article includes several suggestions for other applications that work just as well as Word, and perhaps better, depending on your individual goals. The article mainly focuses on Scrivener, a tool that takes the word processor a bit further and actually encourages outlining, storyboard, and managing of notes and sources. Similar tools, such as the Mac-based DevonThink, have also begun to catch on with academics.

Not ready to take the plunge into a completely different set of software? Free, web-based writing applications give you a chance to spend some time outside of Word, and perhaps even increase your ability to write collaboratively with others. Companies like Zoho have been getting some recognition for providing entire Office-like suites completely online. Of course, there’s always the ever-popular GoogleDocs, which some suggest may be a great tool for the collaborative writing of books.

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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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Some 200 science bloggers, scientists, journalists, educators and readers met on Saturday, January 19, 2008 for the second Science Blogging Conference organized by Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker and held at Sigma Xi in Research Triangle Park, NC. Others participated online via streaming video (many courtesy of Wayne Sutton) and chat rooms.

The format was an “unconference”, where discussion, dissent and debate is crucial for each session; some sessions achieved this. As most of the attendees were bloggers, the sessions have been recorded in blogs, photos, video and audio. Below are descriptions of sessions with links to selected summaries.

(more…)

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