Here’s a great story for Lincoln’s birthday. An essay by Kitty Eisele on National Public Radio this morning described photographs of Abraham Lincoln that were recently found in the Library of Congress. They had been misclassified in the past, but a researcher using the Library’s digital image collection noticed the error. The NPR essay, Uncovered Photos Offer View of Lincoln Ceremony, states that the library had received a large collection of Civil War photographs in the 1940s, with handwritten logs. Some of the writing was hard to read, and over time, the caption for these photos were misplaced. But recently, a researcher in Colorado spotted the mislabeled Lincoln photographs in the Library’s online collection.

The Library of Congress is also experimenting with putting some of its image collections on Flickr and asking the public to add descriptions to them. Try tagging some of the photographs yourself - who knows what you’ll find!

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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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EveryBlock is a new website that aims to collate localized information for major cities and urban areas. The site, which now includes information on New York, San Francisco, and Chicago brings together publicly available mapped information, such as Flickr photo feeds and restaurant inspections, with local news and other information from providers such as CraigsList entries.

Mapping is a larger trend on the Internet, with services such as GoogleMaps proving to be popular among users. EveryBlock, as it expands listings for other cities, could prove to be a useful resources for visualizing a wide range of information about cities for discussions and class activities.

http://www.everyblock.com/

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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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You may post your vacation snapshots on Flickr, the photo-sharing site, but the Library of Congress has bigger plans.

This week the library was overwhelmed by the public response after it put 3,100 of the most popular photos from its collection online at Flickr, getting them outside the Washington library walls and into the hands of people who want to use them. (The selected photos have no known copyright restrictions.)

See more at The Wired Campus

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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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BiomedExperts.com, a social-networking Web site for health-care and life-science experts, was unveiled on January 11, 2008 at the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting, in Philadelphia. The site includes profiles of more than 1.4 million biomedical experts in 120 countries. Researchers can gain access to the site for free and search for colleagues based on their areas of expertise, where they live, or other variables. The site also allows scientists to share data and analyses, and view summaries of their colleagues’ research papers.

Article at the Chronicle of Higher Education

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A recent new blog, From Toy to Tool Cell Phones in Schools, highlights new developments in web 2.0 applications focusing on mobile learning in k-12 and higher education. With the high proliferation of cell phone use among k-12 and college students across this country, more and more applications seek to structure niche social networks and experiences based solely on how users access information through cell phones. With the cost and use of cell phones significantly lower, than acquiring a computer with high broadband internet service, educators are designing course curricula around cell phone technology and the way their students communicate and access information.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) reports on a new study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project that documents Web surfing habits. Not surprisingly, video sharing sites like YouTube are seeing a strong increase in viewership, and a Pew survey found last spring that more of these folks are looking at educational content when they visit these sites. Many institutions are taking advantage of this to make content available that’s been created by and about their faculty, staff and students. Duke has done this as well - visit the Duke University News channel on YouTube to see a variety of videos about faculty research, library activities, and other information about our campus.

See also:
Thanks to YouTube, Professors are Finding New Audiences (CHE)

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Alan Levine of the New Media Consortium has posted a list of more than 50 different Web 2.0 tools that can be used to tell stories in digital form. He provides variations on a single story for each tool, along with some additional examples for many cases. This is a great list to explore to get ideas of how different tools might be useful, accompanied by some tips for generating story topics, using media and preparing your project.

List of 50 ways (plus a few extras) to tell a story using Web 2.0 tools
Slide show of Levine’s conference presentation that is the source of this list

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