Invitation to present your special use of technology in academia

Every year, OIRT's Technology Showcase brings together faculty and staff from around the university to share novel uses of technology in academia.

Do you use technology to organize your research in a novel way? Do your students grasp your material better because of the way you present it using a specific technology? We'd love to hear about it and have you share your experiences with other faculty and staff at the university.

In past years, we've had faculty talk about their use of a variety of technologies including, but certainly not limited to:

- Google Earth for showing GIS data
- Second Life for language acquisition
- Sakai for coursework, student organization, and research projects
- Podcasting for complex course content that bears repeating
- Voicethread as a rich feedback mechanism for student assignment submissions

This year's Technology Showcase is on December 18th from 11am-5pm. OIRT is looking for faculty and staff to present their own special uses of technology in academia. Note that if you are selected, we'd ask you to be available at the event for at least half of the day.

Send us an e-mail at oirt@rutgers.edu if you have something to contribute to our ongoing conversation about how we can all better use technology in academia! Please include your name, department, a brief description of the technology you'd like to present, and your availability on the day of the event.

Faculty researchers: be a YouTube star!

Back in early 2008, OIRT started a web video series called The OIRT Faculty Research Spotlight. Its goal is to highlight the contributions our faculty make to the academic community through their research. If you'd like to get interviewed about your research, please read on to see how you can get involved!

Since the inception of the series, we've interviewed 50 faculty members in 36 departments across the university. We've published about 30 of these interviews so far, with more to come every few weeks.

You can see the videos on the Rutgers YouTube channel. I've embedded an example below for your convenience: Dr. Lee Clarke (Sociology) discussing disaster and the human response.



We do have a sizable log of footage left to edit, but we'd like more! If you're a faculty researcher here at the university and you'd like to showcase your work, send an e-mail to podcasting@rutgers.edu and we'll schedule a meeting with you to discuss your involvement in the project.

Your involvement in this project consists of about 20 minutes during the initial meeting (we'll come to your office for this) and about 40 minutes for the actual interview (which will also take place at your office, if you so desire).

OCTOBER is: National Cyber Security Awareness Month

Click here to learn more, see a fabulous commercial parody starring an engineering student and an ITI student, and play Safepardy, a game developed by a communications alum.

Adobe Connect for desktop videoconferencing

The Division of Continuous Education and Outreach and OIRT are pleased to offer faculty the opportunity to integrate Adobe Connect into Sakai and eCollege or to use it in a standalone mode.

Adobe Connect provides desktop videoconferencing, shared whiteboards, shared websites, and chat capabilities for use in courses and projects. It is particularly useful for fully online courses and in instances where faculty need to conduct classes from off-site locations.

To add Adobe Connect to your eCollege course shell or Sakai site, or for standalone access, visit http://connect.rutgers.edu/

RU undergrad researchers: be a YouTube star!

Last year, OIRT and The Aresty Research Center started a video series called The Undergraduate Research Spotlight. The goal of the series is to recognize the contributions of the undergraduate students who are at the heart of this university's strong research tradition.

So far, we've interviewed over 50 undergraduate students and we want to interview more! Read ahead to learn how students can participate and how faculty can get their students involved.

We've uploaded about 35 of the interviews onto the Rutgers YouTube channel. To date, this series has over 7,000 views from YouTube viewers from all around the world!

I've embedded an example of our work below, starring Amy Torres from the Anthropology department.



We'll take self-nominations or nominations from faculty members. Nominees should be current or former Rutgers University undergraduate researchers. Nominees should also be comfortable (and excited to be) talking about their research in front of a camera!

If you'd like to nominate someone, please send an e-mail to podcasting@rutgers.edu with the nominee's name, e-mail address, and a bit about the nature of the nominee's research.

Word clouds with Wordle

Wordle is a free tool that turns a block of text, or simply a list of words, into a cloud pattern. Words that are used most frequently are displayed most prominently. You can play with layout, font, and colors to change the appearance or highlight certain vocabulary. Wordle is useful for analyzing text, comparing newspaper coverage of a specific issue, and summarizing the content of student papers or presentations.

Here's a Wordle of President McCormick's Annual Address. I've limited the number of words to 50, to make it easier to read.

It's really easy to create a Wordle. You simply copy some text into a box on the Wordle website and click "Create."

Google Docs now has equation editor

On September 28, Google announced the addition to Google Docs of some useful new features for academic use. Google Docs has added a new equation editor for mathematics teachers and students. There is a new subscript and superscript tool that can be used in writing chemical compounds and mathematics equations.

Cell phones for brainstorming in the classroom

I’ve started using the free versions of Poll Everywhere and Wiffiti in class and my students really seem to like both applications. They’re both easy to use – students text message answers to a question and the answers get posted live, stimulating more participation and, I think, understanding.

I had the students work in pairs or small groups so that students who do not have unlimited text messaging plans with their cell phones could participate.

During one class, I asked the students to comment on the relationship between technology and the doctor-patient relationship. I created the Wiffiti screen in about 30 seconds (I already had an account). You can see the responses here. I then gave the students an impromptu assignment based on the brainstorming. Since one of the course’s goals is for the students to learn how to conduct scholarly research, I asked them to find a scholarly article related to the doctor-patient relationship and technology and write a summary and an APA-formatted reference.

If you want me to show you more about how I'm using Wiffiti or Poll Everywhere, please don't hesitate to contact me.

And I’ll write more about Poll Everywhere shortly—it’s time for my class.

Extended Sakai Help Hours

I am pleased to announce that we are expanding the amount of Sakai support we are able to offer, beginning this fall semester. During these hours, we will provide first and second level support via email and phone.

Sakai support contact info:

sakai@rutgers.edu
732.445.8721

Sakai support hours:

Normal Fall Schedule (Aug 31 - Dec 11, excluding Labor Day weekend)

• Mon-Thurs 8:30AM-10:00PM
• Fri 8:30AM-6:00PM
• Sun 4:00PM-8:00PM

The week before the semester (Aug 24-28) we will have partially extended hours:

• Mon-Thurs 9:00AM-8:30PM
• Fri 9:00AM-5:00PM

And we will also have extra weekend hours for the two weekends surrounding the start of the semester with 11-3 phone coverage and email coverage throughout the day:

• Sat, 8/29
• Sun, 8/30
• Sat, 9/5
• Sun, 9/6
• Mon, 9/7 (Labor Day)

The weeks of Thanksgiving and Finals will also have adjusted hours, which will be announced in November and December.

With these new hours and added phone support, we hope to better provide the assistance you need, when you need it. And, as always, we welcome your feedback and comments.

Sakai Downtimes

You may have noticed that Sakai has been unavailable about once a week for two hours early in the morning during the last month. These maintainance “downtimes,” which will continue until classes begin, are giving us a chance to upgrade Sakai in anticipation of an increase in activity during the upcoming school year.

For those interested in more details, we're in the middle of three general projects which are requiring downtimes:

Sakai Updates - At the beginning of the summer, we upgraded to Sakai 2.6. This upgrade included significant changes across many different Sakai tools. In addition, we have also added a few extra features, at the request of faculty and staff at Rutgers. Every time we want to implement some updates, we need to take Sakai down for an hour or so. We do this early in the morning so as to inconvenience the fewest number of people.

Hardware Updates - Sakai is run on many different machines. These machines require upgrades and regular maintenance. This summer, we are upgrading our databases and installing some new hardware that will improve Sakai's performance.

ePortfolio Development - We've been working with a few groups at Rutgers to develop ePortfolios for student reflection and assessment. These systems need to be tested by the organizations that will be using them, and changes implemented immediately to allow further testing.

Right now, our anticipated downtimes until Sept 1 are as follows:

Tues, Aug 11
Sat, Aug 15
Sat, Aug 22
Tues, Aug 25 (this may be moved up to Tues, Aug 18 if possible)

Once the semester begins, we anticipate monthly downtimes that will last about an hour. We will take Sakai down as few times during the semester as possible, and will work hard to minimize the impact on the faculty, students, and staff who rely upon the system.

Our end goal is to make Sakai as reliable and useful as possible. We anticipate having almost 20,000 unique users log into Sakai every day come Fall semester, and so this is important to us now more than ever.

If you have any questions or comments on any of this, please either comment here or send us an email at sakai@rutgers.edu. As always, we thank you for your understanding.

ISTE part 2

More on my desktop videoconferenced class. During the class, I showed them You Tube videos and a Microsoft Word document, just as I would have done in a face-to-face class. They responded to a question by typing on the online whiteboard, providing me with a way to summarize their ideas in one place. I didn’t use powerpoint slides, but I’m not using powerpoint in this class. If I was, I could have shown the slides and talked through them just as I would during a face-to-face class.

Most of the students agreed that the discussions were richer and that they felt more comfortable participating without feeling that they were being judged in some way. They also felt that it was ok to provide shorter answers than they would have felt comfortable providing in a face-to-face class section. In general, they felt that there was a lot of benefit to synchronous, online learning. They were less certain about asynchronous learning—although these students have a technology bent, most felt that having live interaction was important for their learning.

As the instructor, I found that I needed to “call on” the students more often than I would have during class, since I didn’t have the visual confirmation of when they looked like they wanted to say something (the students didn’t use audio or video, except for the student who presented using audio.) I often felt like I was babbling, since I couldn’t see head nodding. When the students typed things like, “ok” or “I agree” or “uh huh” while I was talking, I felt like I was getting feedback--I need to remember to suggest this when I teach again this way.

I didn’t do one thing that I wish now that I had done—I didn’t record the session. However, I’m not certain if the students would have participated in the same way had I done so.

I’d be happy to speak in more depth with anyone who would like to try doing this with their class. I think that this technology will work with any sized class—I’ll know more in the fall when I try it with my large intro course.

ISTE annual conference: an overwhelming experience

I’m currently at the International Society of Technology in Education’s (ISTE) annual conference in Washington, DC. There are about 18,000 K12 teachers, tech staff, and administrators, university faculty, and vendors attending this conference. We’re all here for a similar purpose: to find ways to improve learning through the use of contemporary technology. It’s an overwhelming experience that I’ll be writing about in many blog posts.

I’ll start with two of the three keynote speakers (the third hasn't spoken yet). Sunday night we heard from Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. He spoke about the importance of failure in education—and how we need to stop viewing failure as, by definition, a bad thing. He used Fleetwood Mac and sports as examples of successful entities that failed before they succeeded. You can listen to his talk beginning at 54:30, NECC 2009 keynote.

Today’s keynote is a panel debate: “Resolved: that bricks and mortar schools are detrimental to learning.” A pre-talk “clicker” survey indicated that the attendees were against the resolution 2 to 1. After listening to the arguments, the survey indicated that nearly 75% were against the resolution. A video of the debate, moderated by Robert Siegel from NPR, should be available shortly here.

I’m finding this debate fascinating, in part, because I conducted my undergraduate course, “Contemporary ideas in information technology,” via desktop videoconferencing last evening. There are 9 students in the class; most are working at least part time; and about half are non-traditional students. One of the students orally summarized a chapter in one of the books that we are reading for the class after which I led the remainder of the discussion. The rest of the class used the chat space as a back channel to discuss what he was talking about while listening. They also used the chat space to participate in the class. I asked them to discuss their experience at the end of class. More on this in my next blog post.

Homeless in The Sims 3

Can a video game show us what it would be like to live on the streets? Can it show how growing up in a dysfunctional family could influence a person later in life? Can it inspire others to donate to charity to help the homeless?

These questions are starting to be asked, ever since a social "experiment" began in The Sims 3, the new "real-life simulation" game by EA Games. Robin Burkinshaw, a game development student in the UK, decided to act out a homeless family in The Sims 3 and publish the family's development on a blog.



Enter Alice and Kev, a father and daughter who live in a park of a neighborhood in The Sims 3. Kev is a pretty bad father: neglectful, often angry, and accusing. Alice is a clumsy girl, very much alone but still kind-hearted. She takes solace in going to school every day, and puts off going home as long as she can.

They sleep on benches, or the occasional bed that they can find when they go over others' houses (much to the owner's displeasure). Alice eats at school, but is otherwise left to eat whatever she can find on the street...or in other people's refrigerators.

There are many interesting dynamics at play here. First is the relationship between Alice and Kev. The story starts with Alice as a child, and she later grows into a teenager, which brings a whole new dimension to her relationship with her father as well. Then there is the relationship Alice and Kev have with the rest of the neighborhood -- particularly the reactions that others have when Alice smells because she hasn't showered, or when they find her curling up for a nap on their couch. We also see how tough it is for Alice and Kev. When you have no money to buy food, what do you do? When you don't have a bed, and are miserable because you are tired and have not had a comfortable place to sleep in weeks, how does that affect the rest of your life and interactions?

Some of the interactions and events in this story are dictated by the creator, but Robin states on her site that "a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over."

The story is quite moving. Robin documents the family's exploits, complete with some rather realistic looking screen shots. At times amusing and at other times saddening, this story has gotten quite a following, as readers are anxious to see what might happen next and how Alice will grow up.

The comments on the blog posts are really interesting to read as well. There are some pretty varied reactions, but overall people seem to be saddened by the story and yet drawn to it, rooting for Alice and hoping for a happy ending. A couple of user comments in particular caught my attention:

Good god, I feel so sorry for Alice. I know she’s a fictional Sim and everything but everything that’s happening to her is truly miserable. It makes one think of the similarly difficult lives that many among us live out here in the real world.

(posted by "Sol Invictus" in Just trying to be alone)

This makes me wonder. What is Kev’s backstory? Was he an Alice at one point? On the streets with a horrible parent, struggling like Alice? Or was he placed here by his own actions and circumstances? Where is Alice’s Mother? Will Alice become a Kev? And have an Alice of her own?

(posted by "Eric" in Better than Teddy)

As part of the blog, Robin has also linked to various charities that give to support for homeless. I wonder if anyone has gotten involved in any of these because of this story. It seems to be generating awareness, at least.

Read the full blog here.

Google Labs Similar Images

I saw a tweet yesterday from Lisa Thumann at the Center for Mathematics, Science and Computer Education. She's got her finger on the pulse of the educational technology world and she mentioned a new technology from Google Labs called Similar Images.

In my short play-test, I found it to be extremely successful. Here is quick walkthrough of how it works:

1. Visit the site and search for an image of something, I chose fencing and got this screen full of images:



2. Click 'Similar Images' beneath an image for which you'd like to see others like it, I clicked the fifth image and got this:



While they're all sketches, they're not all fencing images.

I went back and clicked the first image in the list (a shot of American Jon Tiomkin versus Renal Ganeev of Russia in the Athens Olympics in 2004) and got this:



Which are all images of two Olympic or world cup fencers on a very dark background. Pretty nice work for a computer!

Honoring Our Fallen Soldiers Using a Google Earth Layer

During Memorial Day weekend, it is easy to get caught up in barbecues and summer rituals and forget the original purpose of the observance of this holiday. I happened across this blog post that I felt would be appropriate to share during this time of remembering those who lost their lives defending our country.

Sean Askay, an engineer for Google, unveiled on his blog a Google Earth layer he created to acknowledge those who died fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using information found from a number of sources, Askay mapped out the locations of the soldiers' hometowns and approximations of where they were killed, as well as other detailed information about each individual.



If you have Google Earth you can download the layer file here.

Not knowing anyone personally who has died in the recent wars abroad, it's easy to become numb to the news stories of continuous casualties. Using this tool put everything into a new perspective for me. Just the opening image of the U.S. map covered with seemingly endless symbols representing these men and women who died is shocking and humbling in itself. Taking a closer look at my neighborhood revealed an even more moving experience as I saw the faces and learned the names, ages, and hometowns of my own neighbors who gave their lives protecting mine. While I had never met these individuals, I am grateful to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

data.gov is live!

For those of you interested in government datasets and an invitation to play and shape the future of publicly available government data, your day has arrived!

From the main page of data.gov:

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

This is huge! The fact that the data is machine readable is even better! I'm really excited to see the kinds of data visualizations that come out of this, as well as the new data sets that citizens request.

Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 3)

Tomorrow's the big day! Here are the last of the changes we will be making:

Site Info

There have been some improvements to the "Import from Site" action in the Site Info tool. You can now choose whether the material you are importing should replace your current site material or be added to what is already there. You can also now import participants from another site, adding them to the participants already in your site (this only works with participants added individually, not with participants attached via roster).

Polls

You can now sort the poll results by their headers. This lets you display the poll options in order of most to least popular, for instance.

Discussion & Private Messages

You can now grade posts, either topic by topic or for an entire forum. With this enabled, an extra grading button will appear on your message board where you can enter numerical grades and textual comments for each student. You can also link these grades to the Gradebook tool.



Email Archive

In addition to general performance improvements for sites with many archived messages, you can now specify what appears in the "Reply to" field of messages. Previously, replies would be sent to the original sender only. Now, you can instead choose to have replies go to the email archive itself, allowing everyone in the site to see replies.

Schedule

You can now manually select which sites you would like to be included in your My Workspace Schedule tool, instead of always seeing scheduled activities for all sites to which you belong. You can also now subscribe to iCal calendars within the Schedule tool.

Dropbox

Similar to Assignments, there is a new option in Dropbox to download all content of the tool. This will give you a .zip containing a folder for each student along with any files that have been uploaded.

Assignments

This is another tool with a lot of changes...

Improved Grading Navigation

When you are grading assignments, there is now a previous, next, and return button to make it easier to grade lots of assignments in one sitting.

Improved Drafts Sharing

You can share drafts of assignments between instructors and TAs, instead of them being private only to their creator.

Custom Fields

When setting up an assignment, you can create some custom fields for various purposes:

• model answer/solution - This will be displayed to students when they view the assignment. You can specify when you want students to see this (as they work on the assignment or after it is graded, for instance).
• private note - This will be displayed on the instructor side during grading. You can decide whether you want to share it with other instructors or keep it private to yourself.
• all purpose item - This is additional information that doesn't fit into the other two categories. You can choose who you want to see it (students, instructors, etc), and when you want them to see it.
  

Improved Integration with other tools

Assignments that are posted in the Schedule and Announcements tools now have links from the post in the tools back to the assignment.

Find Missing Submissions Feature

This was actually available before, but was not linked anywhere. Sometimes students attach a file to an assignment, but don't realize they have to complete the second step of actually submitting the assignment and so the instructor does not receive a submission. In Sakai, when students attach files to assignments, they are saved even if the assignment is not submitted. There is now a "Find Missing Submissions" button when you are grading assignments, allowing you to see all attached files, whether or not the student actually submitted it.


_____

That's everything! All of these changes will be available after we complete the upgrade, which should be sometime late tomorrow (Wed) night.

Top 10 Disappointing Technologies

Sometimes, technology isn't all it's cracked up to be. More often than we'd like, some new technology that is expected to change the face of IT simply....doesn't. PC Authority gives a review of some such technologies in the recent article, Top 10 Disappointing Technologies. Their ranking:

Honorable Mentions:

• Biometrics
• Ubuntu

Top 10:

10. Virtual Reality
9. Alternative Search Engines
8. Voice Recognition
7. Apple Lisa
6. 10GB Ethernet
5. FireWire
4. Bluetooth
3. Itanium
2. Zune
1. Windows Vista

Some of this surprises me a bit. As much as I hate to admit it, VR is ranked lower than I expected. I want VR to work, I really do, but sadly, it's simply not there yet. There's a lot of hype, but for the most part, it doesn't really follow through. On the other side, I was not expecting Bluetooth on that list, especially at number 4. Sure, my Bluetooth headset for my phone doesn't work as well as I'd like, but I've never had a problem with file transfers and, overall, I find it a handy tool to have.

What are your thoughts? Does any of this surprise you? Is there anything that you think should have made the list, but didn't?

(A draft of) the next step in search engines is here!

Wolfram|Alpha opened its doors to users this weekend. It is being touted as a step beyond conventional search engines. Its creator is Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame), who calls it a computational knowledge engine. Briefly, this means that this engine can take specially prepared data sets and attempt to help you compute and create knowledge. The idea is that you can ask it questions like you would ask questions of a person, and it would be able to help you understand the answers. See this post from Gina at Lifehacker for a pretty good testing of Wolfram|Alpha, and to get some insight on how to use it.

For those who just want to play with a computational knowledge engine, click here to play with Wolfram|Alpha. Click the 'Examples by topic' link on the right menu to get situated. For those who want to better understand what they're about to play with, read on:

Google is a great way to find information and data on the web, there is no doubt about that. But how good is Google at helping us discover and analyze knowledge? First, some definitions to get things moving:

Information: facts provided or learned about something or someone

Knowledge: information or skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject

...so a very rudimentary definition of knowledge is information having been applied or analyzed.

So why are we still just searching on information instead of knowledge? The short answer is that computers can't very easily parse much of the information on the web and make meaning out of it. This is because most of the information is written in a way that is easy for humans to understand.

Could you imagine a world where we slept through the night as our computers chugged hard to create knowledge out of all of our data? This is part of the idea of a semantic web!

As much as Web 2.0 gave rise to a sharper focus on the use of semantic markup on the web, it never quite reached the goal of a fully semantic web. The rise of the semantic web is one piece of Web 3.0.

In my short (several hour) play-test of the engine, I found it to be helpful when I asked questions about the things that the engine was prepared to answer. I found comprehensive answers when using its suggested queries, but I was often left unhappy with the answers it gave to questions that were shot from the hip. For example, the suggested query of 'microsoft vs. apple' yielded considerable results, but the query 'mac vs. pc' yielded no results. This is acceptable to me because I understand that this is an emerging draft, and it can only call upon pre-selected silos of properly scrubbed data.

My thought is that projects like Wolfram|Alpha (and Google Squared, which is dropping later this month) are showcases as to how the semantic web may someday behave. I look forward to the evolution of this kind of software, and to the emergence of a semantic web.

Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 2)

Here is the promised Part 2. I'm going to start listing 2.6 changes based on tools from this point on.

Announcements
You can provide an RSS feed for people to subscribe to your announcements in a site. Only the announcements set to "public" will appear in this feed. All other announcements will only be viewable by members of the site.

Chat Room
Multiple chat rooms were available in 2.5, but now you can link directly to the different chat rooms in the left tool menu. This saves people from having to manually move from the default chat room to the one they want. Simply add a second Chat Room tool (Site Info --> Edit Tools) and then set the second Chat Room tool to default to another specific room.

Gradebook
Similar to how you can upload multiple Resources in one shot, you can now add multiple Gradebook items at the same time. While you're adding Gradebook items, you can click "Add Another Gradebook Item" to bring up the option. How many can you add at once? I'm not actually sure. I got bored and quit when I reached adding 30 items at once.

Tests & Quizzes

This tool has received the most attention in the 2.6 upgrade. It is very complex, which gives it a lot of room to grow. There are a lot of new features here, so I'm giving it its own category.

Assessments can now be released to specific groups within a site
If you use the "Manage Groups" option in the Site Info tool to split your Sakai site up into smaller groups of students, you can release assessments in the Tests & Quizzes tool to only students within certain groups. If you have used this in the past with the Assignments tool (for example), this new feature works the same way.

Changes to question with multiple answers
Multiple choice questions can have more than one answer. There are now two ways to do this:

1. Single selection - A or B is correct, students choose one answer and receive full points if they choose either
2. Multiple selection - A and B are correct, students choose many answers and receive partial points for each correct selection while losing points for incorrect selections

Before, only option 2 was available.

Questions can be set to negative point values on an incorrect answer
If you want to dissuade guessing on a quiz, you can make students lose points if they answer a question incorrectly.

Question pools can be shared with other site members
In the past, question pools were user-specific. Now, you can share your question pools with someone else, allowing instructors to collaborate on quiz questions within a Sakai site.

Assessments display a "last modified by" date
From the instructor's side, if an assessment is modified, the date, time, and modifier will appear next the assessment name. For students, if an assessment is modified after they have already submitted it, a warning note will appear: "This assessment has been modified since you submitted it. Please consult your instructor if you find any discrepancies."

"Quick create" feature for creating assessments
When creating a new assessment, you have the option to use "quick create". This will allow you to do a mass input of questions in a specific format, instead of entering questions individually using the normal Sakai interface. The format is pretty standard to what quizzes look like if they are formatted in, say, Word (questions listed, then answers, with an asterisk in front of the correct answer).

Once you add the questions, you can continue on to create the assessment. Sakai will take what you entered, create questions out of it, and give you the option to make any changes necessary. Then all that is left is to go through your settings (delivery dates, feedback options, etc), and you're ready to publish.

Assessments will be submitted at deadline
As of last semester, timed assessments would auto-submit when the time limit was reached. Now, regular assessments will also auto-submit when the deadline for the assessment is reached. If students begin an assessment, save for later, and don't come back to submit it (or simply forget to hit the final "Submit" button), the assessment will automatically go through at the due date.


There are also a few smaller improvements/changes to Tests & Quizzes which may not be noticed by the casual observer. Those are all the major ones, though!

_____

I still have some more updates to go over. Part 3 will come out early next week with the rest of the changes in Sakai 2.6.

Looking ahead to the new Sakai... (Part 1)

As you probably know, Sakai will be down on commencement day, May 20. This is to perform some major upgrades to Sakai as we update from Sakai 2.5 (the current version) to Sakai 2.6.

We at OIRT have been hard at work the last few weeks, doing final testing on our test servers. We are catching bugs, getting acquainted with the new system and any quirks it has, and customizing the "generic" Sakai system to look and feel like the Rutgers Sakai you have all grown accustomed to. The result, we hope, will be a smooth transition to Sakai 2.6, with few glitches, informed Sakai support staff ready to answer questions, and as little noticeable change in basic functions from the user perspective as possible.

So, what's happening? In my next few blog posts, I'll be writing about some of the changes and new features you can expect to see once Sakai 2.6 goes live. If you have any questions about any changes, feel free to leave them in the comments of the posts and I'll check back to answer.

General Changes

There are a number of changes happening behind the scenes, which users should not really notice (or in many cases even care about). I will instead focus my posts on interface changes, new features, etc. One thing I would like to mention though is that we are upgrading to the latest version of java. This should result in a faster Sakai. Some of the issues we encountered lately with Sakai being slow or unresponsive should be fixed with this upgrade.

Overall, the look of Sakai should not change too much. One difference is the button you press to get back to the home page of a tool.


Right now, this appears as a house icon:



In Sakai 2.6, we've changed this image to look more like the "refresh" button in your browser:



A big feature that has been added is the ability to view a site as a student/access user. This lets instructors see things exactly how a student in the class would see the site. No more worrying about whether or not the Announcement actually got posted, or what parts of the Gradebook and site participant list students can see! Also, for those of you who used to add yourselves to your sites as students, this should take away some of the need for that.

Another excellent feature is the ability to specify how many tabs you see across the top of your screen. If you're anything like me, over half of your screen may be wasted white space instead of convenient tabs. No longer! You can add and remove tabs just as easily as you can change the order in which they appear.

A handy feature (though rather a nuisance to test...) is a timeout warning before Sakai logs you off due to inactivity. Users will normally be logged off after 2 hours, but now Sakai will pop up a warning 5 minutes prior to logging you off, giving you the ability to remain active.

These features alone make me excited to see Sakai 2.6 go live. But that's far from all we're implementing. Improvements have been made to many tools, including Assignments, Chat, and Tests & Quizzes, to name a few.

But I'll save those for future posts.

Exam questions that address cheating: primer or ethics reminder

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and visiting professor at MIT's Media Laboratory. I found an interesting and timely post that he wrote on his blog the other day, which is short enough to share in full:

Here are the first two question of the exam I just gave:

1) My parents and grandparents would be most proud of me if:
a. I did not cheat on this exam and got the score I deserve
b. I cheated on this exam and got a score higher than the score I deserve

2) While taking this exam, I intend to:
a. cheat (e.g., by looking at other people’s answers, or showing my answers to others)
b. not cheat


I think it was effective...

Do you think this is a primer for students to cheat, or a gentle reminder to do the ethical thing? I'm inclined to believe that for most students, it is the latter (at least I hope so).

What are your thoughts?

Online Communities the Death of Qualitative Research?

Virtual worlds and online communities can be great tools for conducting experiments. It's not uncommon for an experiment that would be costly, unethical, or simply hard to manage in "real life" to find an easy transition into the digital world. In fact, sometimes even virtual mistakes and oversights can unintentionally cause situations of interest to the research world (I'm thinking particularly of the World of Warcraft epidemic of 2005, though there are other examples).

So what does this mean for the research community? A recent post to Terra Nova, a community blog about virtual worlds, recaps a discussion that took place in Second Life about the future of qualitative research. In short, the availability of virtual worlds and online communities for experimentation (with their increased ability to provide statistical and quantitative data), paired with the misconception that quantitative research will always trump qualitative research, could create a decrease in funding and interest in qualitative research. If a question can be answered both qualitatively and quantitatively, should the quantitative answer hold more merit? If a question can only be answered qualitatively, is it even worth asking?

The full transcript of the panel discussion is available in the article.

ACTA Fool

A proposed treaty, The Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement, between various nations of the world raises several concerns in consumer privacy, the free flow of information on the Internet, and legitimate e-commerce, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

EFF argues that despite the agreement's obvious cracking-down on counterfeited physical goods, its scope has been broadened to include Internet distribution and information technologies. A few measures include the requirement of Internet Service Providers to monitor their customers' communications online and divulge- to local and federal government- the identities of alleged copyright infringers without warrant, disruption of fair use, and holding pharmaceutical manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients liable if those ingredients are used to make counterfeits.

I can see the benefit in a system that punishes illegal copyright infringement and rampant counterfeiting for profit, but is that fine line between protection of intellectual property and the warrant-less searching of the government being blurred?

What are your thoughts? Do you see an agreement like this stifling creativity under fear or would it bolster it with enhanced regulatory measures?

Google's Distributed Artificial Intelligence System Now Online

According to Google, the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on at midnight and is now preforming initial functions. While Google cautions that there is a long and difficult road ahead, they were pleased to see CADIE deduce design principles, after a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web, from which CADIE produced its own home page

The Rutgers research community is planning for this next generation of computing resources, however it thought than until the price of such systems drop below the cost of maintaining an average graduate student that these systems will not be common place. Even so, OIRT is organizing a bake sale for Rutgers' Day on April 25th as well as possibility of using work-study students' donation of plasma, blood or little used organs to help meet this funding gap.

Shift Happens

I stumbled upon the latest version of the provocative Did You Know? video this weekend. This presentation was first created a few years ago, but went through a nice revamp in late 2008. Watch the most recent version below and leave your thoughts in the comments section.

My main question for you:
What skills does the university need to provide to our students so that they will be able to thrive in this new era?



...and here are some of the more interesting figures they withheld from the current version:

2006 College Graduates:

• United States: 1.3 million


• India: 3.1 million


• China: 3.3 million

Other figures:

• 100% of 2006 college grads in India speak English


• More than 50% of 21-year-olds in the United States have created content on the web.


• More that 70% of 4-year-olds in the United States have used a computer

Tricky puzzle or learning tool?

Fantastic Contraption is part puzzle part learning experience. You are given a limited set of materials (Tinkertoy wheels and connectors) and the simple goal of move one block across the screen. By the end of the series of puzzles, the solver has developed an intuitive feel for torque and elasticity as well as invented many of the common structures known to engineering.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/inXile_Ent/fantastic-contraption

Even if you decide not to play, you may want to scan youtube to see the wide range of machines and solutions that other players used.

The History of the Internet

I came across this video which gives a brief (7 minute) history of the Internet. Visually appealing and entertaining, it's quite simple and straight forward. It's not comprehensive of course, but the video does a good job of getting at some of the big ideas. The complete accuracy is questionable in places, but even so I think it's a good overview, especially for those who know little on the topic.

Enjoy!



History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

NJ High Performance Computing Event

NJEdge is having its cyberinfrastructure and high performance computing conference today, Friday. The goal of this conference is to promote and facilitate an understanding of advanced computing technologies to share high performance computing successes from NJ institutions. Whether your interest lies in the physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences or the arts as an educator, researcher or simply have a professional development goal, HPC is likely to play an increasingly prominent role in academic life. Join us to learn more.


Cost: Free
When: Friday 3/20/2009

Agenda:
8:30 AM To 9:00 AM Registration
9:00 AM To 9:05 AM Introduction - Kevin Rego, Sun Microsystems
9:05 AM To 9:45 AM Keynote: HPC Cloud Computing - Glenn Brunette, Sun
9:45 AM To 10:05 AM Research Computing at NJIT - Kevin Walsh
10:05 AM To 10:25 AM Sun's HPC Success - Dave Teszler
10:25 AM To 10:35 AM Break
10:35 AM To 12:10 PM Sun's HPC Solutions and Future Direction - John Fragalla
12:10 PM To 12:30 PM Lunch
12:30 PM To 12:50 PM Demanding computational problems in life sciences - UMDNJ - Angelo R. Rossi
12:50 PM To 1:10 PM HPC at Rutgers University - Eric Marshall
1:10 PM To 1:30 PM The Value of HPC within Healthcare Delivery - Vincent Grasso
1:30 PM To 1:40 PM Q & A and Closing remarks - Matt McGrath

Where:
Sun Microsystems Somerset, NJ office, Sun Conference Room
400 Atrium Drive
Somerset, NJ 08873
Google Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=400+Atrium+Drive+Somerset,+NJ&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=us&ei=hAHDSbDAMcT8nQfNhemdCQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&resnum=1&ct=title

Register Online: https://www.suneventreg.com/cgi-bin/register.pl?EventID=2672

Order in the Court: Hand Over Your Wireless Device

There is an increasing amount of attention being drawn to cases where jurors have used wireless devices in the courtroom. In recent events, court proceedings have suffered due to accessing information that otherwise would not be permitted (or have been thought of as permissible) by the judge into the case.

As the linked article explains, just last week a juror assigned to a Florida drug trial admitted to the judge that he had been researching the case on the Internet from his handheld device. This went against the presiding judge's instructions and against what we know to be appropriate conduct in the courtroom, careful to avoid introducing bias toward either direction. If it had stopped there, the judge could have just thrown him off the case. Eventually, it was found that eight others had done the same thing and so the judge was forced to declare a mistrial.

In a similar scenario in Arkansas, a defense lawyer is asking the judge to rule a mistrial due to a juror's tweets in the courtroom. The twitter(er?) says that the verdict was already spoken before he relayed any information through Twitter.

Has our technological landscape changed so much that we need need to accommodate other realms that are affected by it? Or should it be 'business as usual' regardless of what kind of advances take place? On one side it seems appropriate to bar the uses of these kinds of devices, but the opposing argument would be that they introduce information that could turnout as key evidence in the case. Where is the line drawn?

Laptops in the classroom: useful or a distraction?

On March 16, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article entitled, "Students stop surfing after being shown how in-class laptop use lowers test scores." In the article, an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder found that the students surfing the Net during class scored 11% worse, on average, than their peers.

A June 13, 2008 article, found quite the opposite. A survey of 29,000 students at 85 law schools found that Web access can enrich classroom discussion.

I've found that when I set boundaries for laptop use, and channel the use toward topics relevant for a given class session, both the students with laptops and the students without laptops benefit from a richer class discussion.

What do you think? What have your experiences been?

The art of explanation and the credit crisis

"Explainers" are important these days. That statement alone needs a solid explanation (hence the hyperlink).

Unfortunately in our information age, people are left behind when it comes to understanding complex ideas. This is why it is important (as the article to which I've linked above explains) to sometimes shift your focus from information to explanation. This is part of my job everyday: to translate "geekinese" to English, and explain the complexities that inherently come packaged with most technologies.

Our current credit crisis is very difficult to understand if you're not big into financial lingo. I've seen many different videos that attempted to explain our current credit crisis, but often came away more confused as to how home owners, lenders, bankers, brokers, and investors all fit together into this complex puzzle.

I stumbled upon a video (below) that does an outstanding job of explaining it in plain English. The creator, Jonathan Jarvis, completed this visualization as part of his thesis work in the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.



The video is a little over ten minutes long, but does an outstanding job of keeping the viewer engaged by scaffolding their understanding throughout.

OIRT is looking for a few outstanding undgergraduate researchers

Late last semester, OIRT and the Aresty Research Center started a video series called The Undergraduate Research Spotlight. The goal of the series is to recognize the contributions of those students who are at the heart of this university's strong research tradition. We asked faculty to nominate their outstanding undergraduate researchers, and we got an amazing response: 34 faculty nominated 87 students from 50 departments!

Check out some of the videos by clicking the links below (Quicktime required to view):
Aradia Herbst-Gervasoni - Pituitary cancer and its relationship to ethanol and estrogen
Preeti Khanolkar - Video gaming through the eyes of its practitioners

We're still buried in the editing process for all of these interviews, but we're looking for more undergraduate researchers to come in and talk to us about their research.

Nominees should be current or former undergraduate researchers here at the university. Nominees should also be comfortable (and excited to be) talking about their research in front of a camera!

If you'd like to nominate someone, please send an e-mail to podcasting@rutgers.edu with the student's name, e-mail address, and a bit about the nature of their research. You can even self-nominate, if you like!

The videos are being uploaded into the Rutgers iTunes U media repository as they are being completed. Check out the rest of the videos, and other great Rutgers content, by going to http://itunes.rutgers.edu and clicking the big red button (download iTunes).

Diagram in a gliffy

Don't have five hundred extra dollars to spare for diagramming software? I don't blame you. Gliffy is an online application that provides the tools necessary to create various types of diagrams, share and collaborate with others, and publish the finished product quickly and easily. It's like Google Docs meets Microsoft Visio.

The service boasts a comprehensive shape library with the ability to import your own images, revision control feature so all users are working on the same version, and enhanced multi-user management (for premium accounts).

Whether you are working on a SWOT analysis for your management class or drawing up technical layouts for engineering, this tool goes the distance. Watch the Demo here.

Mobile technologies-or How to get students to use their cell phones for learning

Mobile learning is one of the new buzzwords circulating among teachers these days. It involves using cell phones, iPods, and portable gaming platforms, devices that most students already have, to encourage anywhere, anytime learning.

The Sesame Workshop recently published a report about using mobile technologies in learning. I think that it contains some really interesting examples of what can be done with these technologies.

I hope to try using some cell phone apps later this semester and during the fall. One tool, gFlash, will let me create flash cards that my students can use on their cell phones. I hope that it works . . .

Schools considered harmful to creativity? Sir Ken Robinson weighs in

In a very engaging (and, dare I say, funny) presentation, Sir Ken Robinson takes a swipe at the education system of today. His case is focused on the idea of a wider vision of intelligence and the supporting idea that passion is critical to success. If nothing else, his 'stand-up' comedic bit about being Shakespeare's elementary school teacher made me laugh out loud.

Ken Robinson was knighted in 2003 for his work in the UK regarding education, creativity and the economy.

Using a Creative Commons license for dissertations

This is a really interesting summary of how a Berkeley grad student, Danah Boyd, was able to license her dissertation under Creative Commons. One of her reasons for doing this is to encourage more grad students to make their dissertations publicly available, to encourage free use and expand scholarship.

Cell Phones Serve a New Purpose for Writers

A new trend is emerging in Japan as writers are finding a new use for their cell phones. Keitai shosetsu, or cell novels, are written entirely on handset and posted online. The novels are written in an autobiographical style and are generally published under pen names.

What makes this style of writing increasingly popular is that writers are able to discretely write their personal accounts from anywhere via their cell phones and publish their writing anonymously. Readers enjoy these novels because they are able to connect with the writers at a personal level and learn things about them that the writer might otherwise be uncomfortable sharing. Sites such as Maho no i-rando (Magic Island) boast billions of readers, and some of the more popular novels have been published as paperback novels.

The emergence of this style of writing is just another example of the shift in the use of technology as a tool to create community and personal connections (such as Facebook and Twitter). Even though these writers are not exchanging dialogue with their users, they are able to share personal information that connects them with their readers.

Here is CNN's article

Podcasts Make You Smarter

Well, sort of. In a recent study conducted by Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York, university students who downloaded digital lecture material fared better than students who went the traditional route- sitting in a classroom.

In a class of 64 students, half were chosen to attend lecture in person. The other half were sent home to download its podcast episode. After administering a test on the introductory psychology material, to examine how effective learning was via each method, results showed that those who attained the podcast received a 'C' average while those who attended the in-person lecture scored a 'D' average.

While it is still too early to take these results and start reformatting every college curriculum in the country, they do show some promise. We have increasingly become aware of the current shifts in styles of educational delivery and reception. In order to keep up with these shifts, it is important for those involved to adapt and apply these new methodologies to the traditional educational setting.

You can find the article here.

Learn more about what Rutgers is doing with Podcasting here.

I'm teaching a course with HOW many students?

I teach part time at Rutgers, in addition to my full time position in OIRT. I'm expanding my teaching repertoire this fall to include a large, 100 level lecture class. To date, I've taught primarily 400 level courses with between 8 and 40 students. Fall 2009 will be my first foray into the world of the LECTURE HALL (notice the big, scary letters), where 200 students will be staring at me expecting to hear my "pearls of wisdom" on the course topics, hoping that the multiple choice exams I give are easy, and wondering if they really need to be in the room to pass the course.

So, here's my problem. I don't lecture when I teach. I ask questions, assign in- and out-of-class group work, have students create final projects, and give essay exams. I'm not sure how I can use this teaching style with 200 students. I'm looking at some cell phone applications that increase interaction (more on these in a future blog post), possibly conducting some of the classes using web videoconferencing (group work would work well with this, I think), and, of course, walking around the room, creating panel discussions, etc etc etc.

I've read a few old but good articles on this and found some good material at Princeton but I would really like to hear how people are addressing the issues inherent in large lecture classes here at Rutgers. Anyone have some thoughts to share?

A Virtual Human?

People have talked for years about human-computer interaction becoming more natural. Justine Cassell, Director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior, is conducting research about it.

She will present "Making (Virtual) Friends and Influencing People: Computational Systems that Establish Rapport," as part of Douglass College's L'Hommedieu Lecturer Series on Wednesday, March 11, beginning at 7pm in the Douglass College Center.

This sounds fascinating to me, so I thought I'd share the information with many of our blog readers, especially those interested in human-computer interaction.

No, we haven't discovered Atlantis....

There's been some hype about Google Earth's new Ocean app, allowing users to dive under water and explore the ocean floor, learning about marine animals, research, and more. The hype hasn't all been about the app itself, though. Many users have been asking questions about strange patterns on the ocean floor picked up by the satellite images. Could this be the lost city of Atlantis?

It turns out that no, these strange patterns aren't the mark of an ancient city. The geometric shapes etched into the ocean floor are not streets, but rather marks made by ships using echosounding to map the ocean floor. (Read the full story on Google's official blog here.)

Even though no great discoveries were made, I find this story interesting. (And not just because I'm a fan of Google Earth and related products.) It reminds me a bit of the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlisted thousands of volunteers online to help classify galaxies. It turns out that with minimal training in what to look for, humans can identify galaxy types faster than the world's supercomputers. People got to help further research while having fun and looking at some pretty incredible images.

Google didn't create the Oceans app to get people to further marine research, but this "Atlantis discovery" still shows that it's pretty natural for people to want to explore the world and see what kinds of neat things are out there. Google put some new information and images out there, and people took to it, searching for new things and asking questions. Instead of research and discovery being limited to a lab, the information is made available online for the world to explore as well. This is a trend we seem to have been following for a while now. And it makes me wonder: What other sorts of things could the general public find that a small team of researchers - or computers - could miss?

Should you be wary of the new Facebook Terms of Service?

UPDATE 2: In addition to scaling back the terms of service, Facebook is letting their users help them write the next version of the terms of service. How's that for treating your users right?

UPDATE: It seems that enough people got angry and voiced their concerns. Facebook has scaled back the Terms of Service to the previous version as they revisit the privacy needs of their users.

A few weeks ago, the folks over at Facebook edited their Terms of Service (ToS) to reflect the current thinking in the online social networking space. It's making a lot of folks a bit nervous, however, as it states that they have full rights to everything that you add to Facebook forever, no matter what you do. Should we worry about this?

The recent ToS change wasn't a major change from the previous language. Facebook used to have rights to everything that you put on their network until you removed said content. At that point, they no longer maintained rights to your stuff, though they would keep copies of it on their servers.

As an aside, for a great comparison of different social network ToS agreements, check out Dr. Amanda French's post here.

This recent language change stripped that crucial part from the ToS. Now, if you delete your content, they will retain that content and their right to use that content. The language shows that they have a perpetual worldwide license to your content, with the right to sublicense it (i.e., redistribute it). Also, if you don't like it, you automatically agree to arbitration!

Why are they doing this?

Facebook promises that they're not out to get you. They claim that they made this change because the emerging social network landscape demands it. The folks at Facebook believe that even if you close your account, the content that you shared with other users should persist, not disappear. Think about what would happen if I left the university and every e-mail that I ever sent disappeared from each recipient's archived mail. It seems weird, right? By that logic, they want your stuff to stay and exist in perpetuity even if you decide to go.

I can't say that I disagree with their point, but it does raise some interesting issues:

Privacy - What happens if you run for public office and all of the embarrassing pictures of you that you thought were removed from Facebook are easily mined from the system by your opponent? You lose the election!

Benevolent dictator argument - They don't claim actual ownership of your material now...but what happens when they do? You lose actual ownership of your content!

The landscape itself - I agree that the system needs to function properly. Content should show up where it is meant to show up for as long as it is meant to show. If it doesn't show properly, you get what you see out on the web when stuff disappears: links to ghost content, 404 (site not found) errors, etc. While I know that it is extremely difficult to code the logic that gives users elegant control over content, I still believe that it will prove necessary to do so as the social networking landscape develops.

I hope that users will demand control over their content, and that they demand that that control be as effective as the control that they have over the content on their own desktop machines. I think that this blanket statement of ownership is a lazy response to the very valid problem that Facebook face.

RU faculty member empowers female inmates

I had the opportunity last week to film an event at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Clinton, NJ. The event, titled "Share the Wealth Expo Day", was the culmination of Community 101, a 14-week education/enrichment program being run at the facility. Dr. Nancy Wolff, director of the university's Center for Behavioral Health Services & Criminal Justice Research, runs the course and invited me to the Expo Day to see what it was all about.

Dr. Wolff is an economist by training, and she spent some time explaining the economics of all of this: 97% of all inmates are going to leave the penal system at some point in their lives, so it makes sense for us to help them become functioning members of society, contributing wealth back into the system, instead of spending taxpayer money only on retribution by simply punishing people for their crimes.

The goal of the program is to help inmates succeed once they leave the prison system. Among other things, inmates learn about anger management, money management, stress management, and how to get identification and other documentation once they leave the prison. They also learn interpersonal skills which will help them while they're incarcerated and once they've left the system.

The bottom line is that Dr. Wolff is trying to build empowerment for these women so that once they're released, they can show society that they are confident and pro-social individuals. She wants them to be able to step away from their labels and become what their potential will allow them to be.

We'll be publishing a Faculty Research Spotlight episode about her research once we've completed the video work that we were hired to do for this program. I look forward to sharing her work with the community.

Sakai Updates - 2/17/09

The following updates were made to Sakai on the Feb 17th restart. Questions about changes can be sent to sakai@rutgers.edu.

Interface

• The "more" dropdown box is now another tab titled "My Active Sites". This tab brings up a menu with your additional sites categorized by semester. Hidden sites will still not appear on this list. You can still change the sites you see in this list and which you always see as tabs through My Workspace -> Preferences -> Customize Tabs.

Resources

• Improved performance for sites with large file repositories

Tests & Quizzes

• Auto-save feature to save student work every 2 minutes
• Ability to import publisher content in more formats

Post'Em

• If a student appears on the spreadsheet to be uploaded but not in the worksite, the error message will now give the student NetID or RU ID# - whichever was listed on the spreadsheet. Previously, only the NetID was returned.

Adding Users to Sites

• Users can now be added to sites via NetID or RU ID#
• When creating a guest account for someone via email address, the site owner has the option to include a first and last name for the user immediately (note: this option is only available if the guest user has not already specified a name)
• Changed wording of notification email sent to users when added to sites
  

Other

• Documentation updates
• Changed wording on some buttons to clarify functionality

Siftables: Computerized Toy Blocks

Information overload

I joined Facebook yesterday, and subscribed to a few RSS feeds using Newswire. I also downloaded a couple of podcasts to listen to on the way to the Mobile Learning 2009 conference next week. And I'm blogging.

But I need help. I am completely overwhelmed with all of the information moving in my direction and don't really know how to filter it. I used to know how to filter information--when it was on paper and microfilm. There were a limited number of books or journal articles to look at--and it was relatively easy to figure out who the experts were in specific areas (citation indexes are a wonderful thing). But now, there's just too much. I scan blogs and want to read everything that a person has posted and everything that they link to. There seems to be an endless number of podcasts that look interesting. And I don't know at all how to get started with Facebook--I "friended" some people I know and looked at their Facebook pages--but I'm not sure what comes next.

I spoke with a "digital native" about this yesterday--and he told me to start with one or two people's blogs--which I did. But they link to SO much interesting stuff--and there are only so many hours in the day.

How do people keep from going insane with information overload?

The Net Generation

I've been reading a lot of books lately about the Net Generation in preparation for a new course I'm teaching at Rutgers. Two of the books are "must-reads" for anyone involved in planning for the future of higher education:

The first book is Mark Prensky's Digital Game Based Learning. Don't let the title fool you--it's about much more than video games. The first five chapters examine the natural ways that the Net Generation learns and how educators are causing students to "power down" in school. Prensky coined the terms, "digital native" and "digital immigrant" and talks about making education learner-centered instead of content-centered.

The second book was released last month. "Grown Up Digital," written by Don Tapscott, identifies eight norms of the Net Generation. In brief, they want freedom, the ability to customize and personalize, entertainment and play in work and education, opportunities to collaborate, speed, opportunities to innovate, corporate integrity and openness, and transparency.

New Undergraduate Research Spotlight episodes posted

I just posted a bunch of new episodes in the Undergraduate Research Spotlight section of our iTunes U site. The students are:

• Niti Mehta - Spanish & Portuguese
• Samantha Farris - Center of Alcohol Studies and Psychology
  
• Preeti Khanolkar - Sociology
• Kristin Howell - Center of Alcohol Studies
  

You can see the videos by going to our iTunes U repository, http://itunes.rutgers.edu. You will need iTunes in order to access the videos. Click here to download iTunes (Mac or PC).

Look for more episodes coming soon!

Lumifi - Organize Your Research

Lumifi is a web-based workspace for faculty, students, and other researchers to search for and organize their research information. It looks to be pretty helpful as an application. The short introductory video below can explain it much better than I can. Check it out:

Coccinella - Instant Messaging w/ Whiteboarding and VOIP

I just tripped across an instant messaging application called Coccinella that allows you to do whiteboarding as well as voice chat with your conversations partners. It supports AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk.

As long as the person on the other end is using Coccinella, you can take advantage of it's advanced whiteboarding and voice chat features.

Coccinella works for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Dipity - A Timeline Tool

I stumbled upon a new web tool called Dipity the other day. It's an easy to use timeline creator. The nice thing about it is that you can share editing rights to any timeline with anyone you want (e.g., a class full of students). I can see this as a great way for students to collaboratively cobble together an understanding of a particular time period.

Here is a Dipity timeline that someone created about the Iraq War:



The last event on this timeline occurred four months ago. The creator of this timeline could add more events if she wanted to, or invite collaborators instead to have them do the work for her.

This timeline makes reasonably good use of Dipity's functionality. For each timeline item, you can add a video, an image, web links, and as much text as you see fit.

Another cool piece of functionality: you can have other web services like Flickr or YouTube feed a timeline. Pictures or videos will automatically filter onto the timeline in the order that they were uploaded to those services. RSS feeds work here too!

Google Earth & More

If you haven't seen Google Earth yet, now is a good time to take a look. Google Earth lets you zoom in on any place in the world, viewing satellite images, maps, terrains, and 3D buildings. That's just the standard package. Individuals can now also create their own maps and make them available for others to use in Google Earth. Here are a few examples:

• Real-time Earthquake Data shows recent earthquakes on the map with links to data about the earthquakes. View by time line, severity, etc.
• Natural Hazards shows significant earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. The real neat part about this is that you can view known events all the way to 2000 BC.
• Drilling in Alaska gives a visual story on the current political/environmental struggle in Alaska oil drilling. The map shows where current oil wells are, the protected territory, and the habitats of various herds of animals.

Google Earth also now includes a Sky view which lets you view the night sky from the Hubble Space Telescope. This lets you see star locations and information, planetary orbits, constellations, etc. Just click the "sky" icon in the top menu to switch views.

Online Scientific Calculator

It's been a few years since I've had a math class, so I cannot attest to just how comprehensive this "eCalc" calculator is. But to the casual observer who knows at least that sin, log, and e^x buttons are handy, this looks pretty cool. It might serve at least for those days when you forgot your own scientific calculator at home. The unit conversion part on the right is something I could definitely use.

ScreenFlow

I've been playing with an application for screencasting called ScreenFlow. It is a Mac OS 10.5 only application, but the things you can do with it are really slick. There is a lot of potential here. Click the link above and watch the quick demo video to see what I mean.

Five Best Instant Messengers

Check out this Lifehacker post about the Five Best Instant Messengers. I often find myself forwarding this link to my friends when they tell me that they're still using AOL's Instant Messenger application (complete with advertising).

You can find upgrades to your current IM situation regardless of your operating system. I like Adium for OS X, and Digsby for Windows. When I'm not on a personal computer, it's the web application Meebo for me. All of the apps mentioned can do multiple protocols at once, meaning that I can be connected to my friends on Facebook, GMail, Yahoo! IM, and AIM all at once.

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner

I just stumbled upon this magnum list of web-based tools to supplement your learning on the College@Home blog. The list is broken down into three types of learners (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic). You can find links to mind mapping, note taking, and chart/graph creation tools, as well as various podcast and presentation creation tools.

8 Useful Tips to Manage and Avoid RSS Overload

I found a really nice article on Dumb Little Man that talks about how to avoid being a slave to your RSS reader with 8 simple tips. It can be very easy to let yourself get carried away with interesting feeds. I currently have 57 feeds in my reader, and so far I've been able to get my news through RSS without losing control.

The article recommends a few rules that you should set for yourself. A few of them were new to me, but the others were just common sense ideas that I figured out as I went.

Text 2 Mind Map

I found a really clean, lightweight mind-mapping tool on a Lifehacker post this morning. It's called Text 2 Mind Map. You simply type out your ideas as a tabbed list. Your start with by writing out your main concepts, then tab in once for each level of sub-idea you have (see the screenshot below).



You can use the web application to visualize your concept map on the fly, and export it to a JPEG image once you're done working.

Jaw-dropping Photosynth Demo

Blaise Aguera y Arcas from Microsoft Live Labs demonstrated Seadragon and Photosynth at TED last year. I just came across the demo which is truly amazing. Check out the video:


You can actually play with the technology now at Microsoft Live Labs.

Directory of Learning Tools

Dave at academhack just posted a link to a really helpful resource. It is a directory of over 2,300 learning tools. You can find it here. This index covers everything from blogs, wikis, and RSS readers to content management systems and learning management systems.

Phun: Physics simulator

From Kevin Purdy at Lifehacker:

Phun, a free open-source, cross-platform 2D physics simulator, makes you want to pick up blocks, or maybe crayons, and learn more about the way things fall and move under pressure. Written by a Swedish graduate student, the program teaches concepts of restitution and friction, so it's great to load up with the kids, but you'll probably find yourself sneaking a few turns by yourself at creating, and knocking over, shapes and lines. Phun is a free download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems; hit the link for instructions on using and having, well, fun in Phun.

I've been playing with Phun for a few days and have enjoyed it. If you're into physics here at the university, try it out and let me know if it's at all useful to you.

Academhack

Academhack is a really decent instructional technology blog. It is biased towards the humanities and many of the applications highlighted are Mac only, however, there are plenty of resources for non-humanities disciplines and non-Mac users. I often find great new technologies here, but the blog also lays out some best practices for the less high-tech stuff (e.g., Handling E-mail for Professors).

10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop

If you can't afford the hefty price tag for Adobe's Photoshop software, and aren't interested in using GIMP (open-source imaging software), check out these free, web-based alternatives at Life Clever ;).

Omnisio: Online video editing

Omnisio is an easy way to edit videos online. For example, you can take a few Youtube videos and splice them together. Academhack found another interesting use for Omnisio:

Omnisio solves one of the problems with making your presentation available online. Before you had to either sink your audio to the slides, and not show yourself talking, or show the video of your presentation at the expense of not always being able to see the slides. No longer. Omnisio allows you to synchronize the video with the slides and show both.

Quia.com

At quia.com, you can create simple games in disciplines as far ranging as chemistry and music. I just played hangman showing my knowledge of technology terms, matched chemistry equipment to uses, and researched the eruption of Mount Vesuvius as part of a scavenger hunt. Although targeted primarily at high school students, Quia lets you create your own games at any level--I'm thinking about using it in my undergraduate course next semester to help my students learn about IT laws, something that they've had difficulty with in the past.

TED

Like Pop!Tech below, TED is a conference of visionary thinkers, whose presentations have been filmed and posted to the web. Do you wish to see artwork that walks on the beach by it self or Peter Gabriel speak about concrete ways to stop torture; see Jan Han demo his amazing touch screen or Jan Chipchase on mobile phones. Poke around and find something delightful.

Make Magazine

Make is a magazine and blog that channels and expresses the desire to make things. Newsweek called Make "geek DIY (do it yourself) porn". There is a store where you can buy things from derby racing kits to DIY motherboards for video games. I recommend the rentable library of instructional videos (from machine lathe operation to painting water colors). There is an annual event called the Maker Faire (which included silliness like a lifesize version of the Mousetrap game using bowling balls instead of marbles and massive fire-breathing robots)

Cool Tools, Street Use, Out of Control

Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired and Whole Earth Review has a collection of web pages called Cool tools full of gear, gadgets and approaches that ate more of my time than I care to admit. A related site is Street Use which includes backyard pulse jets and match box cameras. He also wrote the acclaimed Out of Control, a book about technology, biology, decentralization and self-sustaining systems. (It was also required reading for some of the cast of the Matrix movies.)

Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb

Black Swan by Nassim N. Taleb
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world.

Blink by Malcom Gladwell

Blink by Malcolm Gadwell / Gladwell maintains that we "blink" when we think without thinking. We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than we do with volumes of analysis.

Pop!Tech

Pop!Tech is a yearly conference in Camden, Maine where several hundred visionary thinkers come together in an ongoing conversation about science and technology and their implications for the future. All Pop!Tech sessions are available to watch free of charge as Pop!Casts. Pop!Casts are Creative Commons licensed high-definition videos and MP3 audio files.

Digg

Digg is a social network that relies on its users to collectively determine what has value on the Web. There are no editors at digg; all stories are submitted and voted on by its users. Categories include: World & Business, Technology, and Science. As a user, I can follow others in order to find like-minded individuals, increasing the likelihood that I will find content that is interesting to me.