We’ve posted in the past about Google’s Wikipedia-like tool ‘Knol’ (http://knol.google.com), but until this week, its been in closed beta. Now open for everyone, Knol is both interesting and frustrating to look at. Many of the (early) entries feel like draft versions of university term papers- and that’s not really too far off from the goal of the Knol project in the first place. Pages feel very linear (with hyperlinked subsections) and may include references, graphics, etc. Users can comment on articles in a blog-like fashion, with comments showing up at the end of the page. Users can also choose to revise a section, but those revisions have to be approved by the original author of the piece.

A few first impressions:

-Due to the ‘author-centric’ approach to the Knols, most of the articles I perused really did read more like they came from one individual author (even those with lengthier revisions). Unlike a Wikipedia entry, that attempts to be ‘unbiased’ due to its encyclopedia-like format, the author’s opinion has a bit more weight here.

-Many of the early Knol pages have been written by academics. You’ll find lots of MDs and PhDs as original authors here.

-There are a significantly larger amount of medical articles so far, though there are a few odd/unique ones as well. So while you can read basic articles on asthma and knee surgery, you can also read an article praising homemade buttermilk pancakes or find out what things (you can) do in Singapore.

-To some degree, the Knol pages feel less cluttered than Wikipedia’s, but they also feel like they lack connections to other areas of the site thus far. I’m guessing this is mostly due to the lack of content posted more than anything.

-Knol doesn’t feel like its trying to directly compete with Wikipedia. They’re each really coming from a different direction anyway. There’s much less of the socially collaborated feel within the Knol, and much more a feeling of social cooperation (vs. actual collaboration).

-Faculty have used Wikipedia in the past as a springboard for real-world publishing of student work. For example, its not uncommon for students to be asked to find Wikipedia entries related to their topic of study, and to make significant improvements on them (or start new entries altogether). A similar approach could be taken with the Knol, though it also provides the opportunity to target a much more focused audience. For example, instead of writing another overview piece on something like say, the Bayeux tapestry, a history student might write a Knol about the ‘political ramifications of color choices found in the Bayeux tapestry’.

For more info on getting started, Google has provided a Knol on writing a Knol.

A few other recent blog posts about Google’s Knol:

Ars Technica

CNET

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The big news today is that Apple’s 3G iPhone is finally available to purchase. What’s the big deal? If you need to know, here’s a handy ‘review matrix’ from Gizmodo that should help bring you up to speed.

While that’s just great, what about folks that have already bought an iPhone, or have an iPod Touch? What do we get? We get version 2.0 of the operating software, which gives us the Apple-sanctioned ability to install ‘apps’.

I’ve been waiting for opportunity to try out some 3rd party applications for a long, long time. At launch (available in the newest version of iTunes), there’s supposedly over 500 new applications available. I’ve downloaded or tried about thirty so far. Instead of provided a play by play on all the ‘apps’, I’m going to just hit on some of the overall themes or apps that I think might end up being useful for higher ed more specifically.

Voice Recording: This one is for the iPhone only (since the iPod Touch doesn’t have a microphone built into it). Given one of the iPhone’s functions (er…its a phone!), it makes sense to have a few applications that take advantage of the its built in microphone and provide us with voice recording capabilities (yes - shockingly missing from the original iPhone software).

Social Networking: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr and others are represented so far. Facebook’s app works pretty much just like their iPhone-specific webpage application. The MySpace app is actually nicer than MySpace itself has ever been. There are also several Twitter apps, though none officially from Twitter itself. Ultimately, I still find using the Twitter iPhone webpage easier than waiting for one of these apps to load up, but they’re definitely a step into a quickly emerging world that finds it less and less necessary to be tied to desktop and laptop computers to maintain connectivity and information.

Language Tools: Aside from standard translation dictionaries, there are already some neat language apps (some free, some costing $10 or more) that include access to libraries of short, spoken phrases in a given langauge. The iPhone finally gets some flashcard apps too.

E-Books: The iPhone can also now load eBooks in a variety of formats. Several ‘classic’ books and general eBook readers were available at launch. While I doubt it will kill sales of the Kindle, it certainly seems promising. Still, some folks might have reservations about paying $0.99 for Anna Karenina, when its been available for free on Project Gutenberg for years.

Location-aware Photos: I’m still exploring this feature, but the iPhone appears to be trying to geotag my photos now. There are already a few apps that try to take advantage of this, either by tagging your location and adding it to a social networking site, or by providing you with links to other photos from the same area. Ex: If I’m standing in front of the Duke chapel and take a picture with a specific app, I can also see pictures of the chapel (or the area around the chapel) on sites like Panaramio. It feels like this is just scratching the surface of what’s possible. Exciting, and worth mentioning.

Blogging and Productivity: A few apps try to provide sets of tools for blogging. Six Apart has already released one that helps the user quickly upload pictures and manage text on their TypePad blog. and it’ll be interesting to see if the other major blogs (Blogger and WordPress) follow suit. For those who don’t blog, but want to capture pictures, text and even audio notes, the productivity app from Evernote may prove to be very, very useful.

Science and Math: Believe it or not, there are already some science and math apps. For $10, users can try ‘Atom in a Box‘, which is supposedly an ‘aid for visualizing the Hydrogenic atomic orbitals’, or users can look at 3D Molecules for free. The math apps are still lacking a bit, but there are some nifty advanced calculators (though the new iPhone update gives us a scientific calculator built-in!) and some flash-card style math training games.

Other things of interest: There are so many of the apps, that its somewhat overwhelming to even think about getting around to trying most of them. Apple even built one - an app that turns your iPhone into a ‘remote control’ for iTunes and/or the Apple TV. Users can then use the iPhone to sort, search and play their iTunes libraries - the only tether is the area of your wireless connection. Still missing: video apps (we know they exist!) and more advanced, Skype-like conferencing apps for starters.

‘Apps’ and Oranges

Something I’ve noticed going through these apps and playing with each: there seems to be several different philosophies just what an ‘app’ should be. Some developers see the iPhone as ‘just another cell phone, but with a big touch screen’, and have basically developed applications that run like old Java-based cell phone applications. You have to wait for the app to ’start up’, and it sluggishly works. Other developers approached the development by just creating iPhone-ish ‘wrappers’ for their webpages. In other words, though it looks sort of like a built-in application, what you’re actually using is a webpage in a slightly glossier container. Somewhere between both of these worlds is the Apple-esque ‘widget’ philosophy - meaning small applications that do one or two very specific tasks well, and that’s that. Anyone who’s spent a few minutes playing with Apple’s built in, very simple, weather or ’stock market’ widgets knows the joys of quickly accessing web data with a snappy little application - yet never going to a ‘webpage’ or feeling like you’re waiting for the web to load up. It’ll be interesting to see how all of this pans out as more and more reviews of the apps become available.

For more summaries and short reviews of the new applications:

-Gizmodo live blog of app reviews
-LifeHacker app reviews: “What’s Good and Free…”

Apps photo from Flickr - user Photocology under a ’share-alike’ CC license.

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Tag clouds (or ‘word clouds’) are visualizations made up of sets of words from a document, website or set of ‘tags’ (ex: bookmarks from your del.icio.us account). These word collections may use color, word size or even position to better illustrate the frequency of word use. A popular example of word clouds in action would be the recent use of word clouds to analyze presidential speeches. Here’s a screenshot of Chirag Mehta’s tool that creates a word cloud for several presidential speeches:

This cloud reveals the most 50 most frequently used words in Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address. The standout terms are obvious. The thing that makes Mehta’s tool really interesting, is that he’s included a ’slider’ (look above the word cloud box) that can be moved to cycle through word clouds from other speeches from the past. Here’s one of Harry Truman’s State of the Union Address speeches:

How Can You Use or Create Tag/Word Clouds?

Several great tools for visualizing text and tags exist on the web. For analysing del.icio.us tags, extisp.icio.us or the tag tool at Hub Log work just fine. Another popular tool, Tag Crowd, takes things a step further than just sorting del.ico.us tags, and allows users to copy/paste text from documents or even analyse a webpage. Here’s the CIT Strategic Plan for 2008-2011 copy/pasted into Tag Crowd, then filtered down to the 50 most frequently used terms:

Not surprisingly, ‘teaching’, ‘technology’, and ‘faculty’ come up quite a bit. This works well enough, but what if I want to make this look, er…pretty? That’s where Wordle comes in. Here’s the same text from the Strategic Plan pushed through Wordle:

Now, that’s a ‘pretty’ word cloud. Wordle includes several options for enhancing the visualization: multiple font choices, color palettes, and overall layout of the text (ie: horizontal, random, vertical, etc). Wordle creations can be printed out or posted to a public gallery on the web. Here’s another version of the word cloud above, reduced to a frequency of 50 words, with a color palette applied:

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So just what are the advantages to using these tools? Here’s an example. To the left, I’ve included a picture I took in Princeton. This is actually a very large photo that I wanted to do a small bit of color correction to and shrink the overall size of the image down so that it wouldn’t bloat this blog post. Using the application Picnik (a free application mentioned in the LifeClever post, as well as recently integrated into Flickr), I not only managed to quickly pull the photo up from my desktop computer, but I quickly adjusted the color, tint and size of the picture, and, just for fun, added a stylish border to the whole thing. This took <5 minutes and then provided me options for saving the picture back to my computer, sending it to someone via email, or posting it to a variety of sources, such as Flickr, Picasa - even Facebook.

What’s not to love? Some of these applications are awash in advertisements and gimicky clutter for one thing. You’ll not only find standard photo editing options, but sometimes you’ll also find downright silly icons and ‘eye-candy’ that really only get in the way of the stronger features. You’ll also be hard-pressed to find any of these applications that work well with really high resolution imagery (not even the recently mentioned online version of Photoshop)…a task still really reserved for Photoshop itself.

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blog entry at Google Operating System

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Mihm addresses the common criticisms of “amateur” contributions, stating that the vast increase in the volume of materials available and the tendency for individuals to correct the errors of others make the sites valuable. Long-standing historical research sites are legitimizing such contributions. For example, the September 11 Digital Archive, set up by history professor Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University for people to post photographs, videos, documents, e-mails, and recollections of that day, was so successful that the Library of Congress made it their first digital acquisition.

Minh concludes: “So far, only a handful of professional historians have begun to exploit crowdsourcing, which remains a relatively crude tool for gathering and organizing knowledge. But as the power of crowds meets the practice of history, these online repositories represent a remarkable change not only in how historical materials are gathered and organized, but, perhaps most important, in how deeply and broadly the past can be understood.”

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Flock is a web browser, based on Mozilla Firefox, that attempts to unify social networks. Read a Technology Review article about Flock.

WRAL has an article on one of Google’s latest initiatives, called “Friend Connect“. “Friend Connect” provides a framework, no programming required, that will enable people to interact with their friends and use favorite applications they have accumulated on social networks even when they aren’t visiting those sites.

And to consider future possibilities with social networking read the Technology Review article about MIT students who are exploring the power of an open source cell phone operating system, provided by Google. One idea is a social-networking program that helps people make new friends in their area using geolocation. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to imagine how a service like this could be integrated with social networking sites. For example, the cell phone software could help create spontaneous in-person connections leveraging connections made online through social networking sites.

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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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“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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Flickr, the popular service for sharing photos, has now added video capabilities to the site. The video uploads aren’t intended to replace or duplicate YouTube - the length is limited to 90 seconds - but as a way to augment user image collections with short videos taken with their digital camera. For example, users might have a photo set devoted to an event and the video would give a short interview or footage that gives a flavor of what the event was like. Videos can also be embedded in web pages or blog posts, similar to YouTube content.

Sample videos from the Flickr beta group

Article at techcrunch on differences between FlickrVideo and YouTube

Blog post with thoughts about the service

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