Technology plays a major role in Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt’s new course titled Travel and Transformation in the Early 17th Century. The course “makes innovative use of all the tools and technical know-how a major university can deliver” including a course Web site with texts, images, artwork, music, geographic, cultural, and historical resources, even a virtual ship tour. According to Greenblatt, his use of new technologies - including GoogleEarth, digital images, and digital video - reflects his latest scholarly thinking, allows for true interdisciplinary approaches and stimulates deep engagement with the material and creativity in his students. Greenblatt is a world-renowned scholar of Renaissance literature and University Professor of the Humanities working on ways to “cross the conventional boundaries of the specialties.” For details of how the course is organized and how technology is used, see the Chronicle of Higher Education’s description.

The library guide for the course reflects the rich array of materials used.

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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.

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SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, invites faculty to help students showcase their views on the value of openly sharing information. Make a two-minute video, post it on the Internet with a Creative Commons license and enter the contest to win $1,000. The Internet gives us ways to discover, collaborate and create in unprecedented ways, the SPARC invitation states, and the free exchange of information is a tool for addressing world problems. Applications for the contest are due Dec. 2, 2007.

SPARC is an alliance supported and funded by hundreds of academic libraries and research institutions.

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Adobe has announced that they are adding support for high definition video to the Flash plug-in.  Flash is used to deliver video on many websites including YouTube.  The standard that Adobe is supporting, H.264, is also used in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players and with hi-def cable and satellite systems.  H.264 is an open standard that was developed as part of an industry consortium.  Apple is also adding support for H.264 in Quicktime and other products this year.

Over the next few months, you will start to see improved quality on many video sites on the web and new opportunities for sharing video with higher quality.

blog post at the New York Times

samples of H.264-encoded QuickTime movies (requires QuickTime 7)

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SciVee is a web site promoting the “free and widespread dissemination and comprehension of science.” To that end, it has features which allow scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation integrated with the content of their published article. The uploaded videos help readers understand the content of the articles. Other scientists can view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords, and a tag cloud on the home page shows the current hot topics.

SciVee is operated in partnership with the Public Library of Science (PLoS), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).

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