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November 10, 2006
Report: Using Digital images in Teaching and Learning
"Using Digital Images in Teaching and Learning: Perspectives from Liberal Arts Institutions," details the results of an intensive study of digital image use by more than 400 faculty at 33 liberal arts colleges and universities in the Northeast.
Commissioned by Wesleyan University and the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), the study focuses on the pedagogical implications of the widespread use of digital formats. But, while changes in teaching and learning were at the core of the study, related issues concerning supply, support and infrastructure rapidly became part of its fabric.
The report suggests how the teaching profession as a whole can better harness these new resources, and it makes recommendations for optimizing their deployment on campus.
The full report and an executive summary are available at Academic Commons, an online forum for new technologies and liberal education:
Posted by hag at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)
Zotero: The End of EndNote?
Just before the web burst into public consciousness, historian Roy Rosensweig demonstrated the power of multimedia to make history come alive with his CD-ROM "Who Built America." Continuing to explore the possibilities of applying technology to scholarship, in 1994 Rosezweig founded the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. As part of its mission to "combine cutting edge digital media with the latest and best historical scholarship," the CHNM has created several tools useful for scholars. Zotero is the latest of these tools. It is described as a "next-generation research tool that makes it easy to gather, organize, annotate, search, and cite materials you find online and off" and is being called the "EndNote replacement" by many.
Like EndNote, Zotero can be used to store references to books, articles, and other forms of information. Unlike EndNote, it is integrated directly into your web browser, making this process easier. According to the Zotero web site (http://www.zotero.org) Zotero is a "free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct field."
I took it for a spin and found that it does what it claims, in an easy, direct way. Like other Firefox add-ins, Zotero sits in the corner of your browser window, available to be used when needed. Like EndNote, it allows you to create multiple libraries to store your references. These can be information about books, articles, web pages, or any number of resources. It can also store entire web pages, snapshots of pages, your own notes, and attachments like PDF files.
Its most interesting feature is the ability to "sense" reference information from a web page. For example, if you are looking at a book in Amazon or Google Scholar, Zotero will display an icon in the URL bar. Click on the icon and Zotero will automatically capture the reference and store it in the library of your choice. More importantly, it can do this for other sites as well, including most of the major online databases like WorldCat, etc. It can even grab reference information from sites that EndNote cannot, like JSTOR, the popular Arts and Sciences database. It cannot yet "sense" reference information from UVM's catalog, Voyager.
Here's a sample image of Zotero in action. The top half of the window shows a book listed in the Library of Congress' online catalog, while the bottom half shows how Zotero has "sensed" the bibliographic information and pulled it into the library.
Is it ready to replace EndNote? Not quite. Still missing is the powerful "Cite While You Write" feature that lets you use EndNote from within Word to capture reference information in your documents as you type. However, this is the feature that Zotero is currently working on and promises to implement next.
In the meantime, Zotero provides an easy way to capture reference information. You can then export it to EndNote for use in the Cite While You Write feature.
You can download it from http://www.zotero.org. The installation is fast and easy. Give it a try! And let me know how you like it.
Posted by hag at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 9, 2006
ELO Electronic literature
Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One Released
College Park, Maryland, October 26, 2006 — The Electronic Literature Organization today released the Electronic Literature Collection,Volume One. The Collection, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, is an anthology of 60 eclectic works of electronic literature, published simultaneously on CD-ROM and on the web at collection. eliterature.org. Another compelling aspect of the project is that it is being published by the Electronic Literature Organization eliterature.org under a Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5), so readers are free to copy and share any of the works included, or for instance to install the collection on every computer in a school's computer lab, without paying any licensing fees. The Collection will be free for individuals.
The 60 works included in the Electronic Literature Collection present a broad overview of the field of electronic literature, including selected works in new media forms such as hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Contributors include authors and artists from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is framed with brief editorial and author descriptions, and tagged with descriptive keywords. The CD-ROM of the Collection runs on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and is published in a case appropriate
for library processing, marking, and distribution. Free copies of the CD-ROM can be requested from The Electronic Literature Organization.
The Collection will also be included with N. Katherine Hayles'
forthcoming book, Electronic Literature: Teaching, Interpreting,
Playing (Notre Dame University Press, 2007).
The editors can be contacted to discuss the project via email: N.
Katherine Hayles (hayles@humnet.ucla.edu), Nick Montfort
(nickm@nickm.com), Scott Rettberg (scott@retts.net), and Stephanie Strickland (strickla@mail.slc.edu). Contributing authors will also be available for interviews.
The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. Since its formation, the Electronic Literature Organization has worked to assist writers and publishers in bringing their literary works to a wider, global readership and to provide them with the infrastructure necessary to reach each other. The Electronic Literature Organization is a national organization based at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH).
Posted by hag at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)
November 3, 2006
Postliteracy
"Post-literate society" is not a new term, but here is an article that takes a more accepting stance. Note thesource, though!
What is the worth of words? - The Practical Futurist - MSNBC.com
excerpt:
"December 25, 2025 — Educational doomsayers are again up in arms at a new adult literacy study showing that less than 5 percent of college graduates can read a complex book and extrapolate from it.
The obsessive measurement of long-form literacy is once more being used to flail an education trend that is in fact going in just the right direction. Today’s young people are not able to read and understand long stretches of text simply because in most cases they won’t ever need to do so. "
Posted by hag at 9:48 AM | Comments (1)