ETC @ BMC

Wikipedia 2.0?

2007-07-23T15:18:00.000-05:00

Leslie Madsen-Brooks has a great post about the new online encyclopedia project, Citizendium. The idea behind Citizendium is to basically add some editorial oversight to a wikipedia-like project. In order to do so, Sanger recruited editors from the academic community. Bryan Alexander wrote about the launch of the site, which included a manifesto from Sanger.

Bryan's post discusses some of the issues he has with Sanger's evocation of a more traditional model of knowledge creation that a project like Wikipedia has attempted to disrupt. Leslie's post does much the same, focusing on how Citizendium's collection of editors seems to have very few women in it. She suggests a history of knowledge creation in which women are often left out:

Across time and cultures, women have been deemed, sometimes subtly and frequently explicitly, to be less reliable sources of information. Today in the U.S., women are more populous than men in undergraduate education, but they are yet to be as well represented in graduate programs in the sciences as are men.

In a system where people with Ph.D.s may be favored over those without, and where the accuracy of scientific information is a priority (Sanger cites several scientific examples in his essay, and the major scientific journal Nature published an oft-cited report on the accuracy of scientific information on Wikipedia), it's likely that women's participation in the project may not be as valued or welcomed.

She cites others who are concerned about squeezing out women's voices as well as other groups on the margins.

One of her commenters made the point that we academics often discredit Web 2.0 projects without ever participating ourselves and notices a tendency for those who decry the projects most loudly to be those with the most to lose:

I don't see why experts shouldn't just involve themselves in wikipedia. Encourage their students to involve themselves in wikipedia. A wiki is only as good as the people who contribute. So contribute. For once. Instead of taking our collective academic ball home in a huff, let's play the game.

I think it's an especially promising opportunity to challenge the structures of the academy. I find the fact that men who are academically established are the ones trying to start an expert alternative that will be authoritative rather telling.

While Wikipedia and Citizendium are not appropriate academic sources, they do serve as authoritative sources for a great many people and they certainly are "The World Book" of the 21st century. Back when I was a kid, family debates were resolved with a check in our encyclopedia set. Now, we turn to Wikipedia. These new Web 2.0 sources represent to many people the way knowledge and information is created. Do we really want to recreate the hierarchal structures that prevented the exploration and discussion of topics outside the mainstream? Whether Citizendium is on that path or not is hard to tell at this early date, but we certainly shouldn't necessarily take it as a completely "better" Wikipedia.

Click and Double-Click 18: Is Web 2.0 the end of Academe?

2007-07-17T12:49:00.000-05:00

Mark flies solo and breaks down the latest salvo from Michael Gorman, noted library curmudgeon, with guest Jon Mark Bolthouse of the University of Wisconsin Colleges.

References include Scott McLemee's article summarizing the Gorman post on Inside Higher Ed, Steven Bell, and of course Michael Gorman

Enjoy!

Episode 18 (approx. 33 min., 35 Mb)

Click and Double-Click 17: Web 2.0 and Academic Publishing

2007-06-20T09:40:00.000-05:00

This week, Mark and I talked to Tim Burke from Swarthmore College and Collin Brooke from Syracuse University about various issues related to Academic Publishing in the web 2.0 world. They've both written in their blogs about these issues. Here are some of the posts that inspired the show:

Fun with Intellectual Property Issues
If Tuesday Began with the letters CSH
Is it really so complicated?

We covered a lot of ground, from the economics of publishing to tenure and promotion to tagging. I think the words of the day were "distribution" and "circulation."

Enjoy!

Episode 17 (mp3; approx. 40 mb)

Click and Double-Click: Episode 16, Gaming

2007-06-15T15:15:00.001-05:00

This week, while Mark was basking at the beach, I talked to Lindsay Gold and Liz Newbury, two former Bryn Mawr students who are also gamers. We talked extensively about issues we see surrounding women getting involved in gaming. They did a presentation for our department on the Wii, WoW, and Second Life. I recorded that presentation and will post it later. In the meantime, take a listen to my interview with them.

Episode 16 (mp3, approx. 24 mb)

Click and Double-Click: Episode 15: Online bibliography tools

2007-06-08T09:14:00.000-05:00

In this episode, we cover several bibliography tools and issues surrounding their use.

Episode 15 (mp3, about 16mb)

Links we covered:

My EndNote
Zotero
CiteULike
BibMe

Want us to cover something in a podcast? Email us at lblanken [at] brynmawr [dot] edu or mcolvson [at] brynmawr [dot] edu or tag it in del.icio.us with bmcpodcast. Or leave us a comment here. We'll take feedback and suggestions in any form!

Students not as tech-savvy as we think

2007-06-05T21:55:00.000-05:00

At the beginning of a workshop today, I explained that it's a common misconception that today's students live and breathe technology and therefore, we, as educators should pile on the technology to appeal to them. Many college students have Facebook accounts, use IM, frequent YouTube and can manage multiple email accounts, but not all, and those that do are not usually accustomed to using those tools as a way to learn or to engage in critical inquiry.

An article in Innovate, Questioning Assumptions about Students Expectations of Technology Use in College Classrooms, is an ethnographic study of students and their use of technology both in and out of the classroom. It found that students prefer more traditional methods of teaching in the classroom and resist using computers in a classroom setting. The study focused, it seemed, on laptop use specifically and did not discuss other technology that faculty might have used to enhance the classroom experience, such as social software, course management systems, or 3D modeling.

The researchers claimed at the beginning that they "sought to understand the ways in which liberal arts college students use technology to make meaning of their college experience in both academic and non-academic spaces on campus." However, it seems they mainly discovered how students used laptops, which seems a very limited view of student technology use. They conclude that "we may not be at the point of changing the classroom practices of either professors or students, contrary to common assumptions." But they never really question why. All they really showed was that neither group was ready for laptops in the classroom. I'd like to see a further exploration of students' resistance to other forms of technology in the classroom, a resistance I think is real in many cases and one I think it's worth investigating further. My own assumptions are that technology isn't even introduced in the learning experience in the first place and when it is, it may not be well planned, so that students don't understand why it's being used and therefore resist it.

Some of the references in the paper may answer my questions, so that's my next immediate exploration.

Click and Double-Click: Episode 14

2007-06-01T16:07:00.000-05:00

This week I talked to our new Summer Multimedia Interns. They talk about what they're looking forward to this summer, how they use technology, social networking and more.

Episode 14 (about 14 mins.)

My Panel on Blogging at FA 2007

2007-05-31T17:23:00.000-05:00

The podcast of my panel with Angela Gossetti-Murrayjohn and Sue Fernsebner on blogging in the classroom is up. While you're there explore the other podcasts and pictures and resources.

Click and Double-Click Episode 13: Faculty Academy at UMW

2007-05-24T06:25:00.000-05:00

I had the great pleasure of talking to some of the organizers and participants of this year's Faculty Academy. Because of a software crash, I lost the conversation with two of the guest speakers, Barbara Ganley and Alan Levine. I left Alan's hello in just to prove he really was there. I'm hoping he'll come back again as a guest to talk about the NMC and Second Life. The show is broken into roughly two parts. In the first part, Mark Colvson and I talk to Jeff McClurken, professor of History and American Studies at UMW about his presentation and his general involvement in Faculty Academy. We also discuss Karen Stephenson's amazing keynote presentation on networks within organizations. Stephenson was a Hepburn Center fellow and presented some of the work she did with Bryn Mawr students. In the second part, I got together with Martha Burtis, Acting Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, Gardner Campbell, professor of English, Jerry Slezak, Acting Assistant Direct of DTLT, and Jeff McClurken to talk more. Interesting conversations all the way around. Enjoy.

FA-07 (m4a file with chapter markers)
FA-07 (mp3 file)

Slow Blogging

2007-05-24T05:50:00.000-05:00

Barbara Ganley has posted a version of her talk from Faculty Academy. It's well worth a look. Video and audio coming soon.

Tablet PCs gaining in popularity

2007-05-21T06:25:00.000-05:00

According to Ars Technica, Tablet PCs are finally gaining traction. Dell has announced it will come out with a tablet later this year, and there's an aftermarket Mac tablet coming out this summer (supposedly).

Post Faculty Academy Skype Extravaganza

2007-05-20T20:09:00.000-05:00

I just couldn't let FA go, so I invited some of the people who made the whole thing possible to join me in a conference call to talk about the event, its history and future, and some of the issues that were raised by many of the presenters. We'll be hearing from Martha Burtis, Gardner Campbell, Steve Greenlaw, Jim Groom, Alan Levine, and Jeff McClurken (and maybe more). Assuming all the technology comes together, we'll be broadcasting live at 11 a.m. Tuesday, May 23rd. Regardless, we'll definitely have a podcast of the session up soon.

Rumor has it that there will be podcasts or screencasts or something of the presentations themselves, so I will point to those when they're available as well as make my own M*A*S*H*U*P^tm of them.

Faculty Academy at University of Mary Washington

2007-05-14T13:42:00.000-05:00

This week, I'm delighted to be included in the program at the Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington. Along with two other humanities faculty from UMW, I will be talking about using blogs in my recent CSEM courses. I'm looking forward to hearing what my two co-presenters have to say about their experiences and to hear discussion from the audience about blogging and teaching.

Generally, the sessions are podcast or screencast afterwards, so all of you not attending will be able to reap some of the benefits nonetheless. Many of the sessions look really interesting and I hope to gain some useful knowledge as well as inspiration.

Copyright and Fair Use on NPR

2007-05-08T05:55:00.000-05:00

An interesting report on fair use, including a guy who says fair use should be restricted.

A small clarification

2007-05-04T10:40:00.000-05:00

A small clarification about my last post. In talking to a certain computer scientist I know, I learned that I misspoke just a bit in terms of what the key released via the Internet actually does. As I understand it (and a more technical person than myself should feel free to correct me), the key circulating around the Internet over the last week or so is a key that allows hardware, coupled with appropriate software to play on machines not officially "authorized" to play hd-dvd's. When one plays a dvd or hd-dvd, the machine one plays it one actually decrypts it as it plays. It's a complex system, explained fairly well in this wikipedia article. The way we usually make clips is to play a dvd in a dvd player that is connected via firewire to a computer. In theory, a player could be made so that the signal gets scrambled and therefore wouldn't be copyable on the computer. Or, the software used to make the copies could be made to refuse to play dvds that are encrypted.

At a lower level, dvds can be copied whole hog, that is simply duplicated and the bit level (the 1s and 0s). There are some measures in place to prevent even this from happening, but those are more difficult to make unhackable. Generally speaking, pirates are making duplicates of dvds and reselling them. The protections that the powers that be have been trying to put in place are an attempt to prevent this kind of copying and the kind of copying described above (playing and recording), but it's at two different layers. Most of the protections so far have not made it harder for pirates to do what they do and may possibly make it harder for us to do what we do.

Copy protection, web 2.0, and education

2007-05-03T06:09:00.000-05:00

The story I'm about to discuss may not seem like it's relevant to education, but it is, extraordinarily so. But it wouldn't seem like it to the average person. For the last few days, I've been watching the Internet buzz with excitement as a 32 digit number was published on a wide variety of blogs and forums. The excitement was fueled by the purpose of this number. It's a code that coupled with the ride software can decrypt the new hd dvd format. I first saw mention of the number on Monday. On Tuesday morning, when I opened my news reader, which automatically collects news related to copyright and the dmca among other topics, the number was everywhere! The number had been revealed months ago in various forums, but the increased interest was spawned by the AACS-LA's own takedown notice to Google that had posted the number which contained the number itself in the url. People thought that was funny and so started posting about it and posting the number more widely. The site that was serving as a conduit for many of these postings, Digg.com, received as many 15,000 "diggs" for sites containing the number until they themselves received a request to prevent the sites from showing up on their site. (Digg is simply a site that recommends other sites through a user recommendation system; it's very popular.) At first, the Digg administrators tried to take down all references to sites containing the number, but they couldn't keep up with the posts. Eventually, an angry internet mob basically shut the site down, and digg eventually capitulated and allowed the sites to stand, not just giving up, but actually siding with their users and opening themselves up for a lawsuit. The whole story made it to the mainstream news this morning.

There are two reasons I find this story interesting for educators. First, it's a story about Web 2.0 on a couple of levels. For me, following the story and trying to find out historical information about the code, I had to rely on Web 2.0 sources--blogs, forums, and the like. This is not a story that usually shows up in the mainstream media. By digging around--using Google and Technorati, I was able to find ample information on all sides of the issue. The only semi-mainstream source I could find was a Wired magazine blog. One of the most informative sites I found in my search was Ed Felten's blog. Ed Felten is no random blogger, but a computer science professor at Princeton who specialized in security issues. His was a name I'd heard and so I knew the information on his blog would be credible. Finding the information was a lesson in the power of Web 2.0 sources, but also in vetting those sources. A good deal of what I found was just regular people ranting about the movie industry and such, a useful indicator of the general cultural moment, but not informative.

The other Web 2.0 story had to do with the users of Digg getting their way. Not everyone saw this as a democratic success story. And it's not the first time users on the web have had a tangible effect on an issue.

The second reason the story is interesting is because of the decryption issue itself. Posting the code is illegal as it violates the part of the DMCA that prohibits making public circumvention tools. The EFF explains the legal issues clearly in this statement. Unlike CDs, which can be easily ripped and imported into music players, DVDs have long been encoded and encrypted in a way that makes it impossible for people to simply pop the DVD into their computers and make a copy of it. The current DVD format's code was cracked back in 2000 with similar results to the current hacking incident (we have the t-shirt as proof). From a very strict interpretation of the DMCA, the way that most professors were obtaining film clips was technically illegal since it involved circumventing the copy protection on the DVDs (and VHS tapes) from which the clips were taken. Earlier this year, however, the copyright office made an exception for film studies professors, making it legal for them to circumvent protections in order to make clips as long as they followed fair use guidelines. Still, strictly speaking, anyone outside of the film studies discipline is still breaking the law if they circumvent these protections.

Why should we care about this code and this incident? Well, if you're a professor and you need a film clip for teaching or research purposes that comes from an hd-dvd, you might need that code just to get the clip, just to do your job. As formats change, the copy protection changes, which increases the chance that the current equipment we have may not have the ability to make the clips we need. There's a lot of pressure on computer manufacturers, software manufacturers, and video equipment makers to make sure their products will protect the content being played on them or through them from being copied. If we, as educators, don't remind lawmakers that we're legally allowed to work with this material for educational purposes, the market may eventually evolve in a way where it's actually impossible for us to do so. And then, we may be cruising around on the darknet to find these codes and the technical means to break copyright, behaving like criminals in order to uphold our rights.

Research: Blackboard

2007-04-27T10:49:00.000-05:00

I try to set aside time each week (usually on Friday) to do research. Research for me can fall into a number of different categories. It can be much like the research most scholars do: reading articles and books and perhaps writing. It can also be reading blogs and online journals, just generally keeping up with what's going on in the ed tech world. But sometimes it's playing around with new tools and software. Today, I played around a bit with some Blackboard plugins that we haven't implemented yet, but have installed on our test server. The first tool is something called Blackboard Scholar, a kind of social bookmarking tool within Blackboard. (For a review of social bookmarking, see my entry from a couple of years ago.) Blackboard is trying to implement some tools that are more Web 2.0-y. For those of you who don't know what that means, basically, web 2.0 tools involve the ability for users to create their own content. It's generally social in nature (i.e. people share information in a public space). The Wikipedia puts it this way:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004,[1] refers to a perceived second-generation of Web based communities and hosted services — such as social networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O'Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase, and it has since become widely adopted.

One complaint I often hear about Blackboard is the closed nature of its content. It's hard to share information from one course to another. Scholar offers one way to do this. The web site for scholar shows the bookmarks that people have added, from within Blackboard, and made public. I have to say that it's kind of a cool tool. You can search for links that other people (from all over the world) have added or you can add your own links. Those links can be tagged, both with keywords and with course tags. The course tags might be especially useful as one is setting up new versions of courses. You can add a "stream" of links based on that course tag. You can also add streams based on discipline and keyword tags. Here's an example of one I added for "Instructional Technology":

Although this shows some promise, it's still limiting. Only bookmarks added through this particular service are available for searching. Of course, this is a problem more generally since there are a number of social bookmarking services out there. It's also not quite fully integrated with Blackboard, which makes it feel like a separate entity. Like many things in Blackboard, there are a few too many steps to add it to a course, but if you're used to those steps, it's not any worse. I'd like to see the ability to tag course content more generally and perhaps make those tags available across an institution. Wouldn't it be cool if while you're setting up your course, you have the option of searching a set of tags that would then display content from your colleagues that you could use? Then you could simply click checkboxes next to those items and voila! they are added to your course. Or maybe Blackboard Scholar could recommend links based on the tags you have for your course? Lots of possibilities if Bb will think outside the box a little.

Another tool I explored was the Google Scholar plugin for Blackboard. This is a simple tool that allows you to add items or search results to your Blackboard course. This, too, is okay, but not thrilling. It, too, is not seamlessly integrated and in fact, pops open a new window when clicked on (even as a student). That's kind of annoying. Unlike the Bb Scholar stream above, search results aren't displayed as a list, which I think would be a pretty nice feature, saving everyone a click.

I guess Blackboard is trying to bring the outside in a little more, allowing connections from within Blackboard to external sites in more dynamic ways, but it's still very limited in its ability to let the inside out. The bookmarking tool makes a baby step in that direction, so we'll see if that goes further in the future.

The Great Wikipedia Debate

2007-04-04T08:52:00.000-05:00

The podcast is online now. I was unable to attend myself, but I'm off to listen now.

Another look at Zotero

2007-03-28T09:41:00.000-05:00

I'm planning to show some of the librarians Zotero tomorrow and so, I was reviewing it once again. I wrote about Zotero back in November. To review, Zotero is a Firefox plugin that allows you to manage a bibliography. It's quite easy to use and is a really effective way to manage your research. I'm still struggling myself with managing my information, using del.icio.us for managing the plethora of web articles I want to keep track of. I started using Furl and moved to del.icio.us about a year ago. Mostly I wanted a way to pull up articles from the web no matter where I was. But del.icio.us and other social bookmarking tools also allow me to find even more material. Zotero doesn't yet have this sharing ability, but hopes to add it soon. Not everyone wants to share, but I've found it really useful to see sources that others use related to my own. I've found sources that I might not have found via a regular library or web search.

Zotero's strength is its congruency with the academic work flow. Along those lines, they've recently released an alpha version of a plugin for Word. What this allows you to do is to add citations and a bibliography right from Word. I gave it a try and it works okay. It is alpha, so one shouldn't expect much anyway. It installed very easily. You have to copy a .dot file to the proper place, but they have very clear instructions. I'm assuming this will be automated in future releases. It currently doesn't format the citations correctly, putting the parentheses in the wrong place. They're working on that. But, creating the bibliography itself worked like a charm. They're also planning a plugin for Open Office (which is what I'm writing my own dissertation in).

I continue to be impressed with Zotero and I still highly recommend it as a bibliography tool. If you haven't tried it yet, what are you waiting for?

What we need to know

2007-03-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

This video paints a compelling vision of the future and how we need to prepare ourselves and our students.

via Will Richardson

Embedding a YouTube Video in Blackboard

2007-03-20T14:32:00.000-05:00

So you've found the perfect YouTube video and you want to link to it in your Blackboard course? Easy as pie.

You actually have several options. You can always just link to the video using the url YouTube provides. Either copy the url from the browser's address bar or copy the url from the box to the right of the video. Paste the link into Blackboard using the "External link" button. You can have the link open in a new window or not. One advantage of linking is that students will have access to the rating and comments section so they can see what others' think about the video.

If you don't want or need the comments and ratings, you can embed the video in Blackboard directly. Once you've found your video in YouTube, select all the text within the "Embed" box to the right of the video (use ctrl-A on a PC or apple-A on a mac). Then copy it. In Blackboard, navigate to the section where you want to include the video. Choose "Add Item." Name your item. In the text box, click on the brackets to switch to html mode (<>). Paste the html code you just copied from YouTube (ctrl-v or apple-v). Then hit submit. You're done! Here's what it would look like:

Using digital images

2007-03-09T08:56:00.000-05:00

Academic Commons has a great interview with Henry Art of Williams College on how he uses images in his teaching. I'm really impressed with some of the projects he and his colleagues have done.

Editing Wikipedia

2007-03-08T14:45:00.000-05:00

It seems like every other day, I'm witness to or participant in a conversation about Wikipedia and its value or lack of value. I still find it interesting that people constantly dismiss it. Yes, it might not be the best source for academic level research, but it definitely has value. We use it all the time at home at the middle school level. When I was in middle school, I had to go to the public library and use World Book.

At any rate, at least one faculty member has decided to take matters into her own hands and have her students edit the Wikipedia as an assignment. She's using the assignment to help students learn the content of her course, but more importantly, she wants them to learn "first hand how knowledge is produced." She's also having them create their own articles.

My response to people who mention specific errors in Wikipedia has been just that: fix it yourself. You can't do that with the print versions very easily!

via Wired Campus

PAETC Recordings

2007-03-05T16:58:00.000-05:00

Jean-Claude has all the recordings up, so now you can experience the conference virtually.

Click and Double-Click: Online Discussion

2007-02-28T16:43:00.000-05:00

A new episode of Click and Double-Click where we talk about ways of managing and grading an online discussion.