Friday, July 4. 2008Wave The Flag For Our FreedomsIn commemoration of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, we bring you this tech news note: The copyright litigation between Google and Viacom over video uploaded by users continues. Now, a judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has ordered Google to hand over data on every YouTube user, including username, the associated IP address, and a list of all the the videos that user ever watched. How ridiculous is that? One blogger has suggested that they deliver the data printed out and drown them with paper. Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages for alleged copyrighted material on YouTube. The Electronic Frontier Foundation believes this ruling violates the Video Privacy Protection Act which forbids the disclosure of personally identifiable rental data without a consumer's consent. Serendipity35: The Blog That Never SleepsIt's Friday. It's the 4th of July and schools and offices are closed. Actually, most of summer in educationland is slow anyway. Many campuses, mine included, are closed on Fridays anyway, so I have wondered who might be reading the blog then. Should I even post for Fridays? But when I look at our numbers, the visitors on a Friday or even on a weekend don't drop significantly because search engines are driving traffic to older posts 24/7. Take a look at this graph of hits on Serendipity35 last month. Rock solid. I wish my investments looked this boringly consistent.
I had told the reclusive Brother Tim Kellers that I would leave weekends open for him to post since he doesn't seem to get time during the week. On the few times that he has done a Saturday or Sunday, the site visits were robust. His "Et Tu, Moodle" post about the Latin course he put into Moodle for a New Jersey high school is closing in on 10,000 reads. The Internet really is the city that never sleeps. It's the library that never closes. Look at this chart of usgae by the hours and you'd get the impression that our readers never sleep either. You forget for a minute that our readers are
the world. No ego when I say that. Don't believe me? Take a look at last month's stats on countries. Hallo deutsche Besucher! I suppose I don't need to worry about what I post on a Friday or the weekend. We know you are out there. I can hear you reading. Thursday, July 3. 2008Are Your Online Students Really the Ones Registered for the Course?That's the title of a briefing paper from WCET - "Are Your Online Students Really the Ones Registered for the Course?" It looks at the requirements your institution may have in place (or needs to consider?) for online courses. I used to call them "distance learning" courses, but so many online courses are filled with students who aren't very distant - like those located in a dorm across campus - that eLearning or digital learning probably fits better. My own online course this fall has 15 students registered so far and only 3 are from outside New Jersey. Six are students living on campus. So how do you know that the person who took the online test or posted the comments in the discussion is actually the registered student? The WCET paper references the Higher Education Reauthorization Bill which calls on institutions to ensure that the student who registers for a distance education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit. Of course - but how do we do that? A pdf of the paper is available Wednesday, July 2. 2008Fair AbuseFAIR AbUSE Back in April, three publishers (Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publications) sued Georgia State University claiming that course readings that professors and librarians have made available online infringed their copyrights.The publishers' maintain that the institution encourages students to illegally download and print readings from thousands of works. Last week, Georgia State University went public in papers filed with the U.S. District Court in Atlanta with some of its defense asserting that that its online distribution of course material is permitted under the Fair Use exemption of copyright law. GSU was offering materials online to students as electronic reserves in the library, behind the login/password protection of the Blackboard course-management system, and on departmental & other university websites.Personally, I would love to see a case that adds come clarity to the vague language of Fair Use of materials being used for scholarship, teaching, or review. (Of course, I'm glad it's not MY institution that is the test case!) The big issue here might be the consideration of the amount of material being made available to students since the suit argues (see article) that GSU's use was "systematic" and "widespread," and involved "vast amounts of copyrighted work." It somewhat muddies the water for other schools looking for a precedent here that GSU is also arguing that it is protected from federal lawsuits under the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a doctrine known as state sovereign immunity. It's important for teachers and students to understand the legal issues involved in copying and redistributing the work of others. After all,the creator of an original work can be a student, teachers or professional writer or artist does automatically own all the rights to its use. Well, there are certain exceptions - one of them is Fair Use.Fair use allows us to use copyrighted materials without payment or special permission if it is being used for the purpose of education, review, satire, or journalism. That's the part a lot of educators know and quote. But there are also some further considerations to take into account:
It's very doubtful that a court would support an educator or student putting materials for an educational purpose on the public Internet for others to access and/or download or redistribute. Tuesday, July 1. 2008The ResearchChannelDuring our June PCCC Faculty Institute we spent one session showing faculty how to use video clips from the commercial vendor FMG in their writing-intensive courses. Still, in that unpredictable way that workshops sometimes go, there was much more excitement about being able to embed YouTube videos in their web pages. I realized that there was a sizable group of faculty that just hadn't believed that there was good, fre, educational material in YouTube. Since then I have been compiling a list for a fall workshop of other online video sources that allow easy access for students at no cost. One of those is a site I first encountered in 2005 when I helped organize NJIT's first Internet2 Day. The ResearchChannel was founded by a consortium of leading research and academic institutions so that researchers could share the work with a public audience. It's available to about 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers, but can also be viewed on their website. That includes 70 university and school-based cable systems in the United States and in other countries. Of course, avenues of distribution for video have been changing since 2005. Two methods that didn't exist then are now part of the ResearchChannel's ways of getting the research out there. Apple’s iTunesU now offers their video in its "Beyond the Campus" downloads area. Some of the titles available in their iTunes area are: Dark Energy, or Worse: Was Einstein Wrong?; Bioenergy and Biofuels: An Overview; The Psychology of Blink: Understanding How the Mind Works Unconsciously; The Teen Brain; and Mesopotamia to Iraq: Perspectives on the Middle East. And, like some other educational institutions, they have their own channel in YouTube which is certainly a way to get to the general public. In fact, this video part of Open Everything also includes efforts like Princeton University's UChannel which also has a YouTube presence, and FORA.TV which offers a wide selection of good video content on its its website, in iTunes or via YouTube. June ResearchChannel video
preview Monday, June 30. 2008Forget Blogging - It's Social Media That Will Change YouBack in April 2006, Tim & I helped organize a a day-long seminar on podcasts, wikis and blogs at NJIT. It was designed for non-technical business professionals to learn about these new tools and how they might be used in a corporate setting . Though I had been blogging for a while elsewhere, Serendipity35 was a new thing. I had been doing podcasting in preparation for NJIT to enter iTunes U. Still, we ended up doing the session on wikis. Though the term "Web 2.0" had been around since 2004 when Tim O'Reilly defined it as business embracing the web as a platform and using its strengths, you didn't hear the term being used that much. My post has had 25,000+ reads since then, probably just because of it containing the keywords podcast, wiki, blog and business. Three years ago, Business Week did a cover story on blogging called "Blogs Will Change Your Business." It was one of their first big pieces on "bottom-up media" and "news as conversation." Many people, especially in the business world, associated blogs with "trivia, banality, venom, and baseless attacks." "Beyond Blogs: What Business Needs to Know" was one of their June 2008
cover stories. Like my old post, that 2005 article continues to draw many online readers. Type in "blogs
business" at Google today and the story comes up at the top of the results. 2005 was before YouTube, Facebook was a
college baby and no one could Twitter, but the magazine warned that "Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs
out. Catch up...or catch you later." Business Week set up a blog at Blogspotting.net that
is still going.So, let's update that seminar a bit here. They started their new article by crowdsourcing the research. They posted questions on Blogspotting and asked what needed to be updated in the 2005 article and readers makes lots of suggestions. So they annotated the original article and added lots of notes and clarifications and created an updated version. But, being that they are still (this year) a print magazine, they had to publish a new print version too. In that version, they admit to having missed a part of the blogs story - the 2.0 part. Sure, blogs would become the new printing press making lots of folks publishers, journalists and editors. But they also would be just part of the revolution. The other DIY tools (podcasts, wikis...) and social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn...) would actually grab more people than blogging. (They cite a recent study from Forrester Research saying that only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month.) Not all of what they see going on is good for business: rivals become "friends," share company information, post pictures of products and employees, spend hours on Twitter, YouTube. IBM set up its own social network for employees called Beehive and it has 30,000 employees on it. Good for business? What changed in that updated version of their old cover story? The first thing to change was the title - delete "blogs" and go to "Social Media Will Change Your Business." How many are there out there? Technorati was indexing 112 million blogs early in 2008 and reported that 120,000 new ones appear each day - BUT only 11% of blogs have posted within the past two months, so the real number is probably more like 13 million blogs. (Other sources say it's more like 4 million, but that's still a lot of blogging going on.) Do you count the microblogging hit Twitter in there? Personally, I don't see the appeal of these 140 characters maximum posts, but more than a million people do.What about wikis? The British telecom giant, BT, has more than 16,000 employees collaborating on wikis. They use the same open-source software that Wikipedia and Tim & I use for our wiki. Their employees use them to write software, map cell-phone base stations, launch branding campaigns and allow engineers in Asia to pick up a project as Europeans go to bed. Business Week found that "An intern can amend the work of a senior engineer. Meanwhile, some 10,500 employees at BT are already on Facebook. BT is also offering an internal social network. But just like Facebook and Twitter, it won't work unless it attracts a crowd. [They] can't force anyone to use it. It would be fruitless to try... [all they] can do is provide tools and watch." That leaves podcasting. Podcasting hasn't caught on as dramatically. According to some sources, "podcast awareness" has increased from 22% of the public in 2006 to 37% in 2007 and may reach 50% this year. More than 70% of all podcasts are still heard/viewed on computers and not on a portable media player like an iPod. (Remember that the POD originally meant "portable on demand.") The listener market is currently estimated at over 6 million. A number of traditional media sources offer podcasts (The New York Times, Forbes, The Scientific American, Time etc.) Podcast advertising is perhaps the best indicator of where this medium is headed in business. The predictions are for a compound annual growth rate of 154% from 2006 to 2010. ($3.1 million revenue in 2005. The iTunes software still dominates podcasting and is the big (but not the only) podcast distribution point for content with 38 million iTunes users. We'll check back in a few years and see what else we all missed. Saturday, June 28. 2008Do Some Good While You Are OnlineDo something good for the world while you are online today. If you click on the links below, you can do just that. There's no obligation, no login, no cost to you, other than a few moments of your online time. Suspicious? Each of these sites is sponsored by companies who donate a small amount of money for each person that visits, sees their advertisement and clicks on the icon button. If one of the sponsoring companies appeals to you for shopping, you can go further and click their link too - if you make a purchase after following their link, then an EVEN GREATER donation will be made to that charity by the sponsor. If a cause is of particular interest to you, bookmark the site as a favorite and visit it often. YOU MAY ONLY CLICK ON ANY PARTICULAR LINK ONCE PER DAY - additional clicks will be ignored.
The Child Health Site The Rainforest Site There really is no good reason for you not to make several free donations right now. via Escaped Thoughts Friday, June 27. 2008The Myth of the Google GenerationFrom Jane in the UK comes an email about my comment about students not being as tech-literate as people sometimes assume with a link to The British Library which is reacting to a study that looks at the myth of the "Google Generation." Based on this particular research, the British Library argues that libraries will have to deal with the reality that these digital young people simply lack information skills. I thought libraries always had to deal with that lack of skills, but I realize that what the study addresses is that the expectation of tech literacy is a false one. The widely-held notion that kids born or brought up in the Internet age are not only web-literate, but able to do all technology is probably more accepted by the media and the general public than by educators. The virtual longitudinal study cited was done by the CIBER research team at University College London. It shows that although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web. The report is called Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF). It also shows that research traits that are commonly associated with younger users like impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, right up to undergraduates and their professors. One thing that really caught me in the report is the idea that students are becoming "viewers" rather than "readers" of online information. Anyone want to argue that American students are any better at information literacy? The British Library and JISC commissioned this report which was conducted by the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) at UCL. Listen to a podcast about the
report from the launch event at the British Library from the JISC website
Thursday, June 26. 2008Is This Course Useable?
Staring at that in a recursive cycle on the screen, it hit me. It's instructional design. Okay, no great revelation there, but do most educators or curriculum designers ever take into account some of the concerns of a usability specialist when they design lessons or a course? Accessibility is a part of usability that some designers address and I actually heard this week at a virtual worlds workshop some concern for Section 508 compliance in using Second Life. (Hurrah for schools paying attention prior to a lawsuit!) The Usability First website has a good glossary of usability terms, and is good example of usability itself. Usability really addresses the relationship between tools and their users
and the effectiveness of a tool (LMS, course site, software, assignment, rubric...) means it must allow users to
accomplish their tasks in the best way possible. What makes a website or piece of software usable? Let me take some
basic topics and questions of usability and apply them to course (re)design.
The Web Communications Division (for the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs) works with many federal
agencies, and offers a really good online guide for developing usable sites. Wednesday, June 25. 2008Literacy? Which One?I sat down with some of the PCCC library folks yesterday to talk about them supporting the fall 08 faculty teaching writing-intensive courses for the first time. One of the aspects of our redesign model is incorporating information literacy. In our discussion, other literacies kept coming up, and I started to think about how we might blur the lines between the literacies. According to the American Library Association, "Information Literacy is being able to recognize when information is needed and to have the ability to locate, evaluate, and to use effectively the needed information." I went to Google and did a search using the operator "define" (i.e.
define:literacy) and found many definitions.
Digital Literacy can be defined as "using digital technology, communication tools, and networks appropriately to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, and create information in order to function in a knowledge economy. There's even Network Literacy defined for online writers as "linking to what other people have written and inviting comments from others" or "understanding writing as a social, collaborative process." On Monday, I spent the day at Montclair State University with K-20 educators discussing finding educational uses for Second Life and virtual worlds. Is that a new literacy, or is it a combination of several literacies like visual literacy, media literacy and computer literacy? One thing we generally agreed upon in both of these discussions was that our students are very comfortable using computers and the Net, but really are not any more naturally adept (tech literacy?) at things like search strategies than students were 20 years ago. Several instructors using Second Life said that none of the students entering their classroom had ever used SL and most had never heard of it. Teachers more tech-conscious than NetGen students? Shocking! I'm hoping our writing instructors aren't really as interested in defining assignments as exercises in information literacy as they are in just employing info lit in their assignments. Yes, they need to be conscious that they are using it, and need to make students aware (probably well into the exercise or as a conclusion) that they are using that skill. The student who is going out to buy a new laptop will do "research" whether it be online, newspaper ads, asking other users, eyeballing models in the store, asking "experts" for opinions, testing out models (constructivism?) or a combination of strategies. I doubt they will call that process "research" and I'm afraid most of them will see no connection to that five-page paper they were assigned in Intro to Computer Applications class either. That's a shame. Gotta change both that perception and the way they do research in class. So, which one do you pick? If I was firced to choose, I'd have to go with Information Literacy as long as I could define in a way like this: A set of learning skills which allows you to effectively cope with large amounts of information, from a variety of media formats and construct new information.
More exploration of information literacy and schools at this Information Literacy blog, JakesOnline.org, Landmarks for Schools, and the Media Awareness Network. Tuesday, June 24. 2008Throw Away That Presentation SoftwareWell, don't throw it away if you already bought it, but you might want to reconsider purchasing the next version of presentation software like PowerPoint or Keynote as yet another web application (call it cloud computing, thick client...) makes its debut. This one is at 280slides.com. You can create very nice presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with anyone. No software to download and nothing to buy. You can even store your presentations on their server if you create a free account. You can also download them as a PowerPoint 2007 file without an account. I heard about this service when the developers were interviewed on the podcast Net@Nite, episode 57. The app has a built-In media search and you can add photos and movies to your presentation directly from popular web services like Flickr and YouTube. You can put your presentation on SlideShare, e-mail it to someone, or embed it directly on your own website very easily. The service just launched, so there are only a few slide themes, but you can also upload your own presentations and work on them too. 280 Slides runs right in the browser, and it feels more like a desktop application than a web service because of the way it was built. The developers are ex-Apple employees (their company is 280North, a reference to the highway out of Cupertino, CA) and wrote this in Apple's environment Cocoa and then built a cocoa-compatible/Objective-C like platform that runs in pure Javascript. (As the podcast mentioned, it's interesting that Apple has also recently announced a more conventional javascript library called SproutCore.That's as tech as I get. All further questions can go to Tim.) And they plan to go open source with this when it's running smoothly. Their blog blog.280north.com should keep you updated on things. This is a good tool for students who don't have access to software like PowerPoint or Keynote or for working on the road when you don't have access to your usual computer and software. It may be underpowered for folks creating fancier presentations at this early point. As with apps like Google Documents, you may find you don't need the bigger commercial products. The PowerPoint 2007 viewer is a free download so that you can view and present what you create online. Monday, June 23. 2008Well, Is Google Making Us Stupid?![]() Nicholas Carr wrote a piece in the new issue of The Atlantic called "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" I had read a blog that mentioned it and so I walked right outside my office to the library periodicals. No issue available. Of course, a quick Google search brought up the online version of the article. That sets the tone for this post. Carr admits that he is haunted by the scene at the end of Kubrick's film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey when the supercomputer HAL talks with astronaut Dave who is disconnecting the memory that is HAL's brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, “I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm afraid” Carr says he can feel it too. Like the astronauts who move robotically through their tasks on that ship "as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm," he believes that Kubrick's theme (Let's give Clarke some credit too - they share screenplay credit and Arthur C. Clarke's book version explained a lot of the questions left after the film ended) is coming true: "As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence." Why blame Google? Nicholas Carr is the author most recently of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, and blogs at Roughtype.com. He starts by explaining the symptoms. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. And what is his explanation for this problem?
I definitely don't agree with him that the "human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive." Still, I'm Googling for information on Carr and finding lots of others talking about this, and I do agree with parts of the argument. (I think I need to read his book to get the bigger take on this.) One opinion that I enjoyed reading was on the BBC News site. There, Bill Thompson jumps off from Carr's premise and takes a nice turn towards learning theory.
To get even more meta about all this, I then found (this is one advantage to being a slow blogger - I let ideas stew and by the time I get to them, there are so many other ideas to use) that Carr had also read the Thompson post and then commented:
But is the Net, represented in Nicholas Carr's argument by Google, actually changing the way our brain works? Is the process of getting information - that exploration - making it more likely that we will only assimilate that information into our existing frameworks? If it is - and the jury hasn't even been selected on this decision - then what can educators do to help students exploit, evaluate and accommodate information for new purposes? Back to Carr's article:
I think his idea is actually one that has been around for quite some time. In earlier forms, it wasn't the Internet. It might have been television, or comic books, or movies. McLuhan was looking at all that and even he wasn't the first. Ultimately, what might be most important is that we ARE looking at these things and thinking about them. I can still recall how cool I thought it was when I discovered that HAL the computer was called that because Clarke used the letters that came before I-B-M in the alphabet. IBM was the big brain in computing back then. How things change. We shouldn't be afraid of becoming like HAL. We need to worry about becoming automatons that can't disconnect the computer chips when necessary. In fact, I think I'll stop typing and get some sleep. Tomorrow, I'll look for the print copy of that book.
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