July 7, 2008
Upcoming events: Blackboard Advisory Group MeetingService or program spotlight: CIT's "off-line" resource collection
Teaching resource of the month: Librarians can bring course-specific resources into Blackboard sites
New and cool: Wordle - Making tag clouds into "beautiful word clouds"
Project profile: Using citizen scientists to monitor the spread of invasive plant species
Blackboard tip of the month: eReserves - efficient and legal use of copyright-protected works
Upcoming events
Blackboard Advisory Group meeting
http://cit.duke.edu/help/events/event.do?eventid=591&occurid=1631
Thursday 7/24/208, 3 - 4pm
Service or program spotlight
CIT's "off-line" resource collection
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/dukecit
CIT maintains a small collection of books and videos for faculty use and short-term check out in our Bostock Library location. You can see our book collection in LibraryThing, an online service to help people catalog their books easily (LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth - if you enjoy books, take a few minutes to explore LibraryThing).
If you are a faculty member and would like to borrow one of our books, please contact us (cit@duke.edu or 660-5806).
Teaching resource of the month
Librarians can bring course-specific resources into Blackboard sites
Many faculty at Duke already take advantage of library instruction services, to provide training to their students in using Duke's vast library resources for important class projects and papers.
Librarians are also willing to create custom sets of links and instructions for courses, and to include these right in the course Blackboard site. Faculty who have taken advantage of this service in the past year have found this helpful to them and their students.
Faculty who wish to have pages created for their courses should begin by contacting their subject specialist librarian (http://library.duke.edu/about/directory/subject_librarians.html).
New and cool
Wordle - Making tag clouds into "beautiful word clouds"
http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/07/03/wordle
Tag clouds (or 'word clouds') are visualizations made up of sets of words from a document, website or set of 'tags' (e.g., 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 (http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/).
Several great tools for visualizing text and tags exist on the web (see http://kevan.org/extispicious or http://tagcrowd.com/). Wordle includes several options for enhancing the visualization: multiple font choices, color palettes, and overall layout of the text (i.e., horizontal, random, vertical, etc). Wordle creations can be printed out or posted to a public gallery on the web. Here's a Wordle version of the CIT Strategic Plan, reduced to a frequency of 50 words, with a color palette applied: http://cit.duke.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/citstrat50colorrandom.jpg.
Project profile
Using citizen scientists to monitor the spread of invasive plant species
http://cit.duke.edu/ideas/projects/2008/06/04/citizen-scientists
Julie Reynolds, Mellon Instructor in Writing and Biology, has found that students with very little prior knowledge of science can participate in authentic scientific research, can be trained to collect meaningful scientific data, and can develop a better understanding of ecological processes and the interconnectedness of nature through these experiences. Building on this success, she is expanding a current project to engage members of the community in an authentic scientific study. She is developing educational activities around invasive species at the Eno River State Park (http://www.ncparks.gov/Visit/parks/enri/main.php), and training the public to be involved in monitoring these species. Visitors to the Eno River State Park will be trained to monitor invasive plants using GPS and gather data in Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/). This project at the Eno River could serve as a pilot to be adopted throughout North Carolina.
This project is funded by the Duke Center for Science Education (http://www.scied.duke.edu/).
Blackboard tip of the month
eReserves: Efficient and legal use of copyright-protected works
Whenever digital excerpts from copyright-protected works are used for teaching, it is necessary to either
- link to the material in a licensed database,
- determine that the specific excerpt being used is fair use under the provisions of the Copyright Act, or
- get permission from the copyright holder.
See the policy on electronic course content (http://library.duke.edu/about/depts/scholcomm/copyright-and-fair-use.pdf) adopted by the Duke faculty for more information and guidance.
The electronic reserves system (http://library.duke.edu/research/reserves/) (e-reserves) in the library is an efficient way to ensure that these decisions are made quickly and consistently. The e-reserves staff will check for copies of submitted material in licensed databases, evaluate whether other excerpts submitted for e-reserves are fair use and, within certain parameters, will obtain permission on your behalf for those requests where it is needed. Documents that are submitted using the Perkins Library e-reserve system are accessible through a Library web site and through Blackboard. Submit once, and your content shows up in two systems. To learn more see http://blackboard.duke.edu/help/ereserve.html.
For more information on rules about scanning and adding documents to your Blackboard course site see http://tinyurl.com/3sr9fg. For a general discussion of copyright in teaching see http://tinyurl.com/4mxmpp.
To explore and discover additional Blackboard features, see the Blackboard support website (http://blackboard.duke.edu/).
