Neat Tools

Educause's Matt Pasiewicz has created a great visualisation of text from university home pages, using the popular webapp Wordle. What can we learn from it about the nature of the modern university? For me, one thing stands out: the single word 'Campus'. It's huge! (In descending size, the most visually prominent words in the visualisation appear to be: Students, University, College, Campus). At a time when virtual worlds are widely promoted and discussed within the educational technology community and more widely, I think the persistence of the physical and tangible within social experience is worth acknowledging. Even if we interpret university websites as propagating a particular type of 'marketing-speak' -- as telling a particular (and partial) story about the nature of the university experience, aimed at potential educational 'consumers' -- is it worth asking, what do we understand by the term 'campus', whether physical or virtual, and how does that understanding sit in relation to our concepts of 'community' and 'culture'?

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.

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.

Becta, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, has released a practical guide of issues to consider when planning to purchase (and use!) interactive whiteboards.

The guide simplifies procurement of whiteboards for educational institutions, featuring the OJEU (Official Journal of the European Union) -compliant Whiteboards Catalogue. Becta itself has moved to set standards in this area, ensuring that all suppliers featured in the catalogue meet the Becta functional specification and service requirements. This should really help teaching staff and tech support people navigate the piles of PR guff from commercial providers.

But, having got your hands on one, how are you going to use it in the classroom?

Becta admits that "There is no specific funding for training and support for interactive whiteboards." Hmmm. Support is available, but (like most of Becta's programmes) it is heavily targeted towards primary and secondary schools. This includes training already provided by suppliers, plus dedicated training from city learning centres, not forgetting the National Whiteboard Network (designed to support primary schools).

Pedagogical training? More, please. Becta offers a tantalising extra snippet of news on that front. In addition to the programme managed by city learning centres, a new element - Hands on Support (HOS), Teachernet FAQ available here - has "been included in next year's (2004-05) ICT in Schools Standards Fund Grant 31a". That's a promising start. Now, how about some training for HE?

Great to see that Auricle, the University of Bath's e-learning weblog, has a new piece on "Skype Recordings as Learning Resources." It provides a neat compendium of different ways to record Skype calls: Skype's own voicemail service, sound recording/editing software (including the nifty open source Audacity), Skypecasting... and all have been tested by the author, Derek Morrison.

The really interesting bit is Derek's own solution, which uses Alex Rosenbaum's SAM (Skype Answering Machine). It works like this: A SAM-linked Skype account is included as a participant in a Skype conference call. As a new conference is started, the SAM account "intercepts" and records the call. Neat! The only trick is that you need two computers: one to create the Skype account, and the other to initiate the conference call.

Derek goes on, quite rightly, to ask how this technology could actually be used for teaching and learning (he offers some nice suggestions, too). Then he asks the big one: how might schools and institutions use the potential of VoIP?

For example, how many HEIs have yet bothered to install VoIP gateways in their exchanges? Such gateways don't appear to be particularly expensive and would enable calls to be routed to non-telephone devices, e.g. computers, thus opening up the possibility of some interesting work.

I've thought about this, too. VoIP services could be a boon to online collaboration, as more teachers and students start to use CMS/VLEs (I suspect Skype et al. are already well-established among science researchers). If introduced more broadly, VoIP telephony has the further, non-negligible, potential to deliver significant cost savings for university managers.

There are significant issues to be addressed, though, before this could happen in practice. Political and technical issues, like whether (and how) commercial VoIP deals with quality of service, the availability of specialist hardware, and the demands of regulatory bodies like Ofcom, should get settled fairly quickly. But cultural and managerial issues will take longer. For example, in my own institution (and, I suspect, in others), Internet/Web/IT provision falls under the administrative category of "academic resources", whereas telephony is managed as "critical infrastructure." IT departments may not have the power to introduce VoIP telephony at anything beyond the local, small-scale level. A bit of grass-roots campaigning and awareness-raising by academics and learning technologists might start the ball rolling, but it's all going to take time.

The growth in number and type of web search tools supports my belief that the Internet is increasingly conceptualised, and used, as a kind of giant database.

Now that Google, Yahoo! and meta-search tools like Soople have web-based text searching pretty much sewn up, it's natural that audio and video indexing will be the next target for developers and users. Given the boom in podcasting and audio blogging, "non-spike" content gets buried pretty fast without a way to find it. Lists and indexes of content sites or creators can only go so far before they, too, become unnavigable. Q.v. "blogroll fatigue": any list without an obvious limit, or community focus, tends to register as meaningless.

(See Stephen Downes for a good definition of the content spike and its implications for online communities).

Podscope aims to plug this gap. Podscope is a podcast search engine that indexes the spoken words in a podcast, and then gives you 10 second snippets to play back as results, plus links to the full thing. A quick sample search for "architecture" produces an initial page of ten results, including a stream about Grand Central Terminal by Podcast NYC's New York Minute. The page links neatly to further search results. It works!

But hang on: isn't Blinkx already there? The difference being that Blinkx, like Google Desktop Search, resides on your desktop (crunching CPU power like crazy...). Blinkx is a "full-service" search engine that happens to index audio and video; Podscope is web-based. Small and light have intrinsic appeal. The Podscope blog claims the developers will be adding all types of multimedia "in the coming months", so I guess it's possible it might get more chunky. At the moment, though, it's great.

Google's My Search History is a new beta toy for registered Google users. It works via a calendar system, that automatically keeps track of all Web searches. As the company has it:

"This feature of Google web search enables you to find information you thought you lost."

Thanks to Google's page rank technology, user-based searches supposedly become more "accurate" over time. Of course, this does raise the question of whether one would necessarily want to retrieve such a detailed record of lost moments. Am I the only person who finds this a slightly melancholy prospect?

I've been thinking for some time that web-based bookmarking tools such as My Search History and Furl contribute to a new conception of memory in the information age, what I refer to as memory in a hyperlinked environment.

For example, here's a quip from the Furl website:

"Furl is a search engine for your mind.
Put simply, Furl it and forget it. Furl is your Internet memory in a search engine. Anything you save can be found again in a split second. No filing system to maintain. No pages to flip through. Enter a query and find what you need."

Or, this comment from a participant in Bloggercon3's "Academia" session (Nov. 6 2004, Stanford University):

"Google is like the reference system, it's sort of like the library."

These (perhaps unanticipated) social and cognitive attributes of web service tools tend to support John S. Rhodes' related claim that search engines such as Google have been successful because they shift a memory burden away from users. As Rhodes writes, search engines "shift recall to recognition." The educational implications of this phenomenon, for teaching and learning, are still being played out.