Duke faculty  Jennifer Ahern-Dodson (Writing) and Kevin Caves (Biomedical Engineering) are featured in the article How Tiny Camcorders are Changing Education published in eLearn Magazine.

Ahern-Dodson and Caves participated in CIT’s  Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program, to share ideas about teaching with video with other faculty.  In the article, they describe how they used Flip cameras from the Duke Digital Initiative for student projects in their courses.

Apple has released their new operating system for the Mac, Snow Leopard.

The update isn’t for everyone - it only works on newer Intel-based Macs and, since this is a major rewrite to the operating system, it has had some glitches on some computers and isn’t compatible with some current Mac software.

However, it gives you a glimpse of some new features that will be common on the Mac that will provide some useful options for you and your students.

A new version of Quicktime has a redesigned interface and simplified options for saving videos.  One of the most intriguing new features in Quicktime X is a built-in screen recording utility, allowing you to make a video of your computer screen.  Here’s a YouTube video demonstrating screen recording in Quicktime X.

If you work with the Chinese language, a new feature of Snow Leopard might be useful – input of Chinese characters using the computer’s trackpad.  The YouTube video below shows a demo.

If you’re interested in investigating Snow Leopard, talk with your local technical support staff to see if the upgrade is for you.

Want to learn more about Photoshop, Excel, Duke’s wiki or how to use your Flip videocamera?  Duke’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) is ready for you.  See their full list of workshops.   Workshops are open to staff, students and faculty, register to save a space for yourself.

If you’d rather learn at lunch time, attend a presentation in the LearnIT@Lunch Seminar Series.  Everyone is welcome,  and you don’t have to register.

Guest post by Danette Pachtner, Lilly Library, Duke University

Easily and legally share documentary videos in Blackboard. Duke University Libraries has acquired over 80 video titles from Films Media Group that include permissions to stream clips or entire documentaries in Blackboard at Duke. The Films on Demand collection offers a great opportunity to provide easily accessible video content to students for course reserves and to create custom playlists for a broad range of classes and topics.

Duke’s streaming video database can be accessed on the library homepage from the Search Resources/Databases tab (see image).

You can browse titles or search across all titles by keyword. Once you have found a relevant video, copy the URL from the video page and add it to your Blackboard course as an external link.

If you have suggestions for titles to add to Duke’s Films on Demand database, contact Danette Pachtner, Librarian for Film, Video, and Digital Media.

Join Adobe at Duke University, where you will learn about Adobe’s tools to help you create, collaborate and connect with students and peers across  campus. Participate in person or virtually (via Adobe Connect) in a Summer Adobe Day @ Duke.

Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Location: Duke Law School or Online via Adobe Connect. (Sessions will be recorded).

Morning Sessions (Concurrent): 9:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Session A: Electronic Document Publishing
Session B: Video Production and Distribution

Afternoon Sessions (Concurrent):  1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Session A: Communication and Collaboration
Session B: Web and Application Development

Registration for this event is free; however, seating is limited to the room capacity. All participants must register. If you select that you will be participating via Adobe Connect, you will receive the connection information in an email from Adobe.

Lunch and snacks will not be provided.

Questions?
Contact Christine Vucinich

YouTube recently released a new section of their website that brings together all of the content that’s been posted to YouTube from various universities. The address is simple: http://www.youtube.com/edu

Duke has had several YouTube channels for some time. This recent development doesn’t change the official YouTube channels – it just brings them all together in a more readily available way. For more information on adding content to the Duke YouTube channel, see OIT’s information page.

Not unlike iTunesU and YouTubeEDU, Academic Earth is attempting to provide freely available educational resources via online video. So far, they only have a handful of universities involved (Harvard, Stanford, etc), but seem to be growing. (more…)

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.

Join us on Friday, April 24th 2009  to meet colleagues and share stories at the Center for Instructional Technology showcase.

Talk with Julie Reynolds about using video to teach writing, Julie Perco about teaching with Second Life, Len White or Lucy Haagen about mobile devices, Victoria Szabo or Alex Glass or Peter Haff about using mapping in your course and student Jennifer Kim about effective blog assignments.

Talk with people who have been teaching in the Link (Liliana Paredes, Laura Florand, Sandra Valnes Quammen, Hugh Crumley, Susan Wynn and Deb Reisinger) and find out how to use the flexible spaces.

Learn how your colleagues have used VoiceThread or iTunesU (or find out what these are).  And more!

Register now to reserve your space.

Andrea Novicki and I (Shawn Miller)  attended the Educause Learning Initiative’s 2009 Conference January 20-22 in Orlando.

Link to Educause conference archive (videos, ppts, etc): http://connect.educause.edu/term_view/eliannual09

The conference: the meta-experience

ANDREA: ELI is attended by people who are excited about using technology in teaching. The attendees (faculty, learning center folks, instructional technologists) may also be excited about technology in general, but the focus is on the possibilities that technology provides for education.  The organizers and attendees are the sort of people who are willing to try things to find out what works. Therefore, there are many experiments at this conference: types of sessions, varieties of activities, and how people learn at the conference (which is the most interesting to me). It’s like being able to see into the future, or, even better, getting to play in the future.   (more…)

Students in Marine Invertebrate Zoology have created short videos about published research articles. The videos can be seen in on the course YouTube Channel; catch some of the students’ enthusiasm for invertebrates while they explain published research in marine invertebrate zoology. This course is taught at the Duke University Marine Laboratory by Cindy Van Dover; Andrew Thaler is the teaching assistant.

Students share top billing with invertebrates like squid and dwarf worms, and provide a window into life at the marine station. Here’s the video about my favorite animal.