EDUCAUSE | Tools

Web 2.0 and the perilous seas of content access

catherine — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:58:31 -0500

This post is not about "naming and shaming" innovative web content providers, who are making great strides in bringing interesting multimedia content to end-users.

It's just a small story to remind us that web 2.0 is not always as "accessible" as we think. For educators, perhaps it's a yet another reason to prefer open content. And it reminds us that commercial constraints and IP issues continue to prevent the web from being as "global" a resource as the educational community would like.

This is how I received the error message: browsing Jason Kottke's popular website kottke.org (now described as "a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0") , I noticed that, in a post about the film Koyaanisqatsi, Jason had linked to the popular video site hulu.com. But I couldn't actually see the video content - all I got was the above message.

Typing the hulu.com URL into my browser address field and hitting 'enter' brings up the following:

"Hulu is committed to making its content available worldwide. To do so, we must work through a number of legal and business issues, including obtaining international streaming rights. Know that we are working to make this happen and will continue to do so. Given the international background of the Hulu team, we have both a professional and personal interest in bringing Hulu to a global audience."

"We have both a professional and personal interest" -- I'm sure they do. Good luck to hulu.com.

In the meantime, I'll continue to recommend VideoLectures, Easy YouTube, and TeacherTube. For video search, beyond the Googleplex, BlinkX continues to expand its functionality and now offers an education content search option. Yovisto (formerly known as OSOTIS) continues to expand, and has an English-language-only video search option.

Leximancer - Data Mining Tools

rmcdonal — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:18:53 -0500

Is anyone using Leximancer as a knowledge management or data mining tool in their org? And if so how are you using it?

http://www.leximancer.com/

CNI Podcast: nanoHUB.org: Future Cyberinfrastructure - An Interview with George B. Adams III

gbayne — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:57:26 -0500

This podcast features an interview with George B. Adams III, Associate Director for Programs, Network for Computational Nanotechnology at Purdue University. Our interview was recorded at the CNI 2008 Spring Task Force Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

nanoHUB provides users with “fingertip access” to over 70 simulation tools for research and education. Users not only launch jobs that are executed on the state-of-the-art computational facilities of Open Science Grid and TeraGrid, but also interactively visualize and analyze the results--all via an ordinary Web browser. nanoHUB middleware hides the complexity of Grid computing, handling authentication, authorization, file transfer, and visualization, and letting the researcher focus on research. This approach also helps educators bring these tools to the classroom, letting them bypass the difficulties of Grid computing and focus instead on learning science and engineering.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2008 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

The 12/10 Conspiracy: Guiding Faculty and Staff Exploration of Web 2.0 as Learning Tools

happyharriet — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:38:02 -0600

Presentation given by FR Nordengren, Des Moine University. He is an education technology strategist and works in the college of health sciences. His job: Assess student engagement with technology, find out how we can maximize the current tools we use. Create a formal faculty mentoring program.

23 Things - Helene Blowers (Librarian) She set up a way for staff to study 23 contemporary tools on the web, they were incentivised and challenged to learn about these tools.

He decided that he needed the FedEx arrow (look between the e and the x) - if you have no budget and you need a person to think about your product, tell them that whenver they see the fedex arrow to think about the product.

So borrowing from these two sources, he came up with 12 resonable tools to represent what Web 2.0 is all about - that the faculty could review, research, study in 10 months. Things such as RSS feeds, google documents, blogger page, flakes, google alerts, tagging information, podcasting, facebook, wikipedia, flickr, ect.

A Terradiddle - story of nonsense. He gave an example of this by picking 12 random people and tied them all together by dates, and random data he found on each of them, thereby creating a "consipiracy theory!"

THIS WAS HILARIOUS. (wish this presentation was video taped)

However, the point was made. He created 12/10 lunch and learns (starting at 12:10 p.m, of course). For instance, he gives an overview of three tools which will help them organize their use of web 2.0 tools, such as Onebook. In a lunch and learn you can only give a brief overview of what these tools can do. He then waits to see if they want more in-depth training on the tool.

Technology boot camps was the strategic plan. Implement an instructional technology assessment, they also had a reorganization of their institutional computing department into information technology services. You must ask yourself does your organization agree on what educational technology is?? or do you have different definitions for it? They conducted a study to find out about the schools technology users. He showed a Pew/Internet study about the categories of typical information technology users and showed a breakdown germain to Des Moine university faculty and students. He then asked about the availability of contemporary hardware/software solutions. They found that the students found their own solutions for use of Web 2.0. Whereas, faculty depended upon IT for their hardware/software solutions.

Conclusions:

Faculty mentoring must be a personalized process. A one size boot camp won't work.
High yeild does not equal high competence with a tool ... even though they may use a tool, they don't know how to use it properly. For instance, linking instead of embedding, etc.
They are still defining what 'basic' skills are

IT Competencies, Information Literacy Skills, Online Interactions, Critical Thinking, Knowledge management; These are areas or skills that they encourage faculty to learn more. They ask faculty to learn or develop these skills and give them incentives for doing so (he did not say what the incentives were). Someone in the audience uses the tenure process as an incentive for participation in this type of learning.

Really great presentation! Good pace, good information, great speaker.

Using Google Apps and Video to Enhance Instruction

happyharriet — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:27:30 -0600

James Varn, Director of Faculty Development, Mississippi Valley State Univ., gave this presentation. Not quite sure there are still people out there who are not familiar with Google docs anymore. However, there are probably some people who may need to know what you can do with google documents. He suggests that chat within Gmail works really well. He gave an overview of Gmail and google docs. The advantage of google docs is that everyone can contribute, you can track the document revisions in real time. You can control who has access to the document. You can conduct peer reviews, work on group projects, review history of revisions, will convert to word or pdf formats, use it for brainstorming or project papers for comments. Google docs allows you to insert comments, compare revisions to determine work each student has contributed. Google docs also has spreadsheets and presentations. Google groups is nothing more than a discussion group. You can create a discussion topics, add people to the discussion, etc. Goggle talk is just a basic instant messaging app.

He says that Google blogger is easier to use than to create web pages (??? ... not sure about that statement, because there are so many free blogging sites already out there), use blogger to create discussion forums, use it like an e-portfolio (which we've already done at UTA - Art History 1301). He gave some statistics on the relationship between the net generation and media basically saying that this generation spends more time on video games than in reading books. Using these types of apps are good for this generation because these students are more visual. They like to multitask.

For using video in his course, he is using/has used video downloader, youtube downloader, orbit, google video search, unplug extension in Firefox to download video in his course. A GOM player plays most any video file... and it's free. He uses MS movie maker to create video clips.

He also discussed Zoho Applications which is seeking to compete with google. He covered wiki's, social bookmarking programs, e-portfolios, etc. He used all of these tools in teaching english. Very basic presentation for a beginner or someone very new to Web 2.0 tools.

What's not happening at home...

nebrshugyo — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:55:28 -0600

...is amateur software development. No sooner to I promise my family NOT to bring my laptop home from work than I do what I've done many times: set up an account on my wife's eMac. I've tricked out the machine with a tool chain, but I've discovered a few problems:

1) I installed the DarwinPorts and MacPorts port management tools, only to discover they work with Xcode 3.0. So...

2) I downloaded Xcode 3.0 (1.1 GB) only to find it doesn't run on OS X 10.4.11, only 10.5. Remedy?

3) Download Xcode 2.5 (997 MB), remove Xcode 3.0, install Xcode 2.5, and discover that a) DarwinPorts and MacPorts don't appear to run with an earlier version of Xcode. What's more installing the smallest piece of ported software wants a command-line version of Subversion installed. So...

4) I find and download a Universal binary for Subversion, only to find it won't install. I have to find an earlier version.

Hmmm...this is a heck of a lot of work just to work my way through Michael D. Cooper's "Design of library automation systems: file structures, data structures and tools." Cooper was on the faculty of the information school at Cal and is (or has been) emeritus for some time. His website is down, so I can't download the accompanying source code to his book.

I think the Universe is telling me the only thing I should be doing at home is housework, baby-sitting and the Honey-Do list. I'm going to remove DarwinPorts and MacPorts, keep Xcode 2.5 around for drill, clean off the dock at the bottom of the screen, and use my wife's eMac to check mail a couple times a week. Sheesh, I hate computers.

Exellent Blog

wallen — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 08:22:33 -0500

I happened onto a quite wonderful blog on tech and teaching. Learning Technology Teacher Development Blog for ELT.

The blogger, Nik Peachy, describes himself as "...a freelance learning technology consultant, trainer and content designer. At present I'm developing a Business English course for Second Life. I also work on a number of websites aimed at EL teachers for British Council and IATEFL."

The blog often points to new tools that are promising additions to a teacher's arsenal of digital tools. I established a test phone web site that is well designed for the cell screen. Another tool is a clever way of annotating photographs. Peachy adds video demonstrations on use of many of the tools.

Visit. Bookmark--better yet, socially bookmark.

Screencast-o-matic

lorbethm — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:51:49 -0500

This is a post I wrote for a Sloan-C workshop I'm currently participating in. I had to pick a Web 2.0 tool and evaluate it. I thought some of you might find it very useful! :)

********************

I'm finding creating a screencast using Screencast-o-matic is entirely too easy! It's simply a quick and dirty way to do a full screen capture with mouse motions. I used a Mac with OS X 10 to do my screen capture, as I've had trouble finding anything easy to use for screen captures that also capture mouse movements...or at least not as easy to use as Macromedia Captivate for the PC. My main complaint about S-o-matic is that you can't edit the screen lengths. I have quite a delay on a couple of the slides that in Captivate I can easily re-time. However, for a quick student hint or help, it can't be beat. It's cross-platform (thank you Web 2.0!!) and very simple to use. I found it very intuitive, actually, but I also have experience with Captivate, and the interface reminded me of Captivate a bit in the recording feature.

Here's the URL to my screen capture. I captured how to create a new page in this wiki, of all things! ;)

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/ci1TIDY6

I hope you enjoy playing with this tool as much as I did! I can definitely see how I will use it as an instructional designer!

To answer Burk's questions on the discussion board, you can't add audio to the screencasts just by using this tool. However, you can export your movie. It downloads as an MOV file, which you can edit in QuickTime Pro (you must have the PRO version, though.) You can add text notes at various points in the cast, though, and your students can add notes back to you.

I see this as a useful tool mainly in dealing with technology issues. As I support students using WebCT, if a student is having trouble using WebCT, I could ask them to screencast what they are doing, OR, I can screencast what they SHOULD be doing and send it to them quickly and easily. When I was teaching software classes, this would have been useful to show the students how to do a particularly difficult step. I don't like that it doesn't have audio, but you can work around that with the notes feature.

Now Check it Out ...

colecamplese — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:44:00 -0500

So of course I post about the blogs@pgsit project and Penn State gets hit with a massive power surge -- that knocks out the xServe they are sitting on, corrupts the database, and makes the service not work for two days ... well, thanks to the work of Chris Millet (who isn't a server admin at all) we are back and things are flowing again. I would expect some podcasts today or tomorrow ... the posts that are there are very good. Take a look. Thanks!

Blogs@PGSIT Come Alive

colecamplese — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 00:01:00 -0500

I've been writing about the Blogs@PGSIT project at my other sites (here & here) for a couple of weeks now ... the PGSIT, or PA Governor's School for Information Technology, is a program that I have administered here at PSU for the last six years ... it is a five week program on our campus that brings the state's best and brightest here to learn about technology. We do all sorts of things with the scholars, but this year we decided to give them a read/write space to use for a little bit of everything -- modeled after our beta, blogs@si project. They are posting thoughts, assignments, podcasts, vodcasts to the site. We built the space on Drupal and it has been an amazing success (so far). We are excited by what we've seen and really think that spaces like this are better at supporting the classroom than a standard LMS. At any rate, I thought this community would like to take a look at what is going on ... just remember, the only rules we gave them was to be responsible and take ownership of the space. So far, so good!