Laura Blankenship January 12th, 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:
- Scholarship needs to change
- Promotion and tenure requirements often get in the way of pursuing new forms of scholarship
- Many issues about publishing digitally have yet to be worked out
- There are lots of interesting projects being pursued, often out of sheer devotion to a topic
- It’s difficult to get faculty to participate in projects, and to weigh in on the issues
I’m looking forward to a few more good sessions today.
aharding January 6th, 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.
Laura Blankenship January 3rd, 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.
Laura Blankenship November 9th, 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 . . .
Laura Blankenship November 8th, 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.
Laura Blankenship October 30th, 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.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/dGCJ46vyR9o" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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.
Laura Blankenship October 19th, 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?
Laura Blankenship October 16th, 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.
- Why use video or multimedia in your course?
- How do you use it? How do you want to use it?
- What about student-created media?
Answering these questions for each instance can help you decide on such practical issues as file format and size and distribution method.
File formats.
- .avi - uncompressed format; somewhat outdated; larger file size.
- .dv - also an uncompressed format, generally associated with digital video recording and mini-dv tapes
- .mov - Quicktime format, an Apple native format, can be wrapped around several different codecs
- .mp4 - similar to Quicktime format, but is a broad standard
- .mp2- Format for DVDs
- .wmv -Windows Media format, compressed format, created by Microsoft
- .swf, .flv - Flash and Flash video, compressed formats, .flv is used by YouTube
The basic process
- Source video–from DVD, VHS, miniDV, or file is imported into video editing software
- Using iMovie, FinalCut or other video editing software, video can be manipulated–cut, audio added, special effects, etc.
- Completed video is exported into a format for distribution–burned to DVD or exported into one of the above formats
- Video is distributed on hard format such as CD/DVD or posted for download or streaming on the web
Links to documentation for video editing:
Other kinds of video to work with:
- Machinima
- An Explanation and example:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/dPLzKur06Vo" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
- Screen Recording–can be done with Camtasia or other available software
- How to embed YouTube videos
Laura Blankenship October 6th, 2007
bFree is an application that allows you to browse your Blackboard archives offline so you can see what’s in there before you upload it into Bb. I just discovered this app a couple of months ago and now they have a new version out. It’s free and it’s pretty easy to use. Check it out.
Laura Blankenship October 5th, 2007
A couple of people sent this to me and I’ve already printed it out and put it on my door (come see it and more!). It’s also blog worthy.
