February 6, 2008 Google has announced the ability to use spreadsheets combined with a form to collect data. Let’s try it out. Here’s a link to my form.
Posted in announce, google, technology, web 2.0 
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February 6, 2008 I’ve been back from the Educause Learning Initiative Annual Conference for a few days now, finally catching up on everything. There were lots of great sessions from ELI that I want to recommend to those who did not attend. All the recorded sessions are available here.
First, I’d recommend George Siemens’ talk on Connectivism, which provides a new way to think about learning. I’ve been following his work for quite a while and find it quite compelling. This talk was a good introduction.
Second, I’d recommend Michael Wesch’s talk on Human Futures for Technology and Education: A Crisis of Significance. I didn’t get to see this talk myself as it conflicted with my own panel, the video for which you can find here and the audio here. You may know Wesch’s work from YouTube. He’s had a few videos go viral.
Third, Intellagirl’s talk on using Second Life to teach rhetoric was quite inspiring and had me looking at Second Life in a new way.
Each talk is about an hour, includes video and slides and is well worth the time spent viewing them. It’s a great way to see some of the ideas from a conference without having to go. But it’s also well worth going for the discussions in between. Hopefully, in watching these videos, you’ll have things to discuss as well.
Posted in education, eliannual2008, technology No Comments »
January 12, 2008 For the last two days, I’ve been at NITLE’s Scholarly Collaboration and Small Colleges in the Digital Age conference. It’s been a great conference so far. Both Tim and Kathleen have been liveblogging the panels and have really good notes and commentary on each of those sessions. Here are what I think are some key points so far:
I’m looking forward to a few more good sessions today.
Posted in academe, nitle, publishing, social software, technology No Comments »
January 6, 2008 I’ve been working on getting Wordpress Mu up and running for Bryn Mawr. It’s been up since the summer, running mostly on an experimental basis. One thing that I wanted to get working was creating a dynamic front page that pulled posts from all the blogs. Between not having the time and not being too good at coding, I just couldn’t make it happen. I’ve had Jim Groom’s (of UMW fame) post on how he created his front page bookmarked forever. I bucked some of his advice and still managed to get the front page working. I still have some work to do, sprucing up the sidebar and whatnot, but at least I’m now pulling all the posts to the front page.
Here’s how I did it. First, I took Jim’s advice and installed Userthemes, a plugin that I think will be useful all the way around. Instead of creating a separate front page and following his instructions there, I simply added the BDP RSS code to the main page template of my userthemes template. It’s very important that you first copy the them to your userthemes folder using the admin panel for that. Otherwise you’ll write over the main template page that everyone uses. There are a couple of downsides to this method. One, if you post to the main blog, it will appear after the feed posts. Since I’m not planning to post, this isn’t a huge deal for me. But I may move to Jim’s page method later. Right now, I don’t think anyone’s going to pay much attention to the lone post at the bottom of the page. The other downside is that you have to edit the main index page, which makes some people nervous. But it is a quick way of doing things.
The next bit of advice I ignored was not to use the sitewide feed plugin with BDP RSS Aggregator. Jim said it would choke. It didn’t on mine, but I suppose it could at some point, so I’ll keep an eye out for that.
I’m very happy with the results for now and am looking forward to seeing more posts appear on the front page.
Posted in blogging, wordpress mu 9 Comments »
January 3, 2008 As it turns out, those who are computer literate are more likely to use the library than most others. Young people between the ages of 18 & 30 who are internet savvy, those that some in older generations complain are less interested in such things, are twice as likely to use a library as those who are not. Interesting finding that bodes well for information literacy, if we seize the opportunity.
Posted in libraries, technology, technology literacy 1 Comment »
November 9, 2007 Via the Wired Campus Blog, I found Pronetos, a facebook-like app for sharing research and connecting with scholars. I like the look and feel of it. It’s missing some of the more fun elements of social networking, but it’s definitely got potential. Of course, I set up an account. Like I needed another social networking account . . .
Posted in academe, announce, social software, web 2.0 No Comments »
November 8, 2007 Via eHub, I found this great source for documentaries online. Many documentaries don’t make it to local theaters, only playing at film festivals or in large metropolitan markets. This gets those films out there.
Posted in announce, film, resource No Comments »
October 30, 2007 First, there’s this video on the Information R/evolution:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/-4CV05HyAbM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
I’m in the middle of reading Everything is Miscellaneous, which I highly recommend to anyone who regularly creates, stores, uses, or interacts with information of any kind–which is almost all of us. This video in combination with the book are really hitting home. There are challenges, of course, with information being less neatly organized. But the biggest challenge is to the idea of information organization itself. We are the organizers, not some group of gatekeepers.
Then, there’s this video about Today’s Student.
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Some very interesting information here. One thing that I thought about was the way that small liberal arts colleges really are positioned well to take advantage of information technology tools. Larger colleges and universities seem to be focused on using technology for more efficient information delivery, not for finding ways to engage students and create collaborative learning opportunities.
Posted in announce, education, libraries, web 2.0 2 Comments »
October 19, 2007 Everyone should read this article in The Chronicle. It’s some food for thought for many of us whose work often blends between home and work and vice versa. How hard a line should one draw between work use and home use?
Posted in ethics, technology 1 Comment »
October 16, 2007 These are my notes for our Video Workshop held on October 17, 2007.
Some questions we need to think about to start off with.
Answering these questions for each instance can help you decide on such practical issues as file format and size and distribution method.
File formats.
The basic process
Links to documentation for video editing:
Other kinds of video to work with:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/dPLzKur06Vo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /] Posted in announce 1 Comment »
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