Adventures in ECIT

I've moved

2010-02-05T12:44:00.002-05:00

While I haven't been using this blog for almost two years, I still find that people occasionally look at some of what I've written. I'm glad that it continues to be useful, so I'm planning to preserve the record of my time in ECIT as long as Blogger lets me do so. However, I've decided to turn all commenting off to avoid spam as I've been receiving recently.

If you want to see what I've been up to recently, please take a look at my new website, which includes my current blog. You can also find my writing about the integration of technology and higher education at the group blog ProfHacker.

Call me back, Accordent!

2008-07-21T10:06:00.002-04:00

I was out of town for a chunk of this summer, and when I returned, I had a phone message from the folks at Accordent in response to this post that I did about class-capture vs. screen-capture. I listened to just the openings words of the message to understand that an Accordent rep was calling wanting to help me understand their system better and likely account for what I saw as its deficiencies.

At the moment, I didn't have the time to finish listening to the message and planned to return to it later. Unfortunately, the vagaries of technology and children have conspired to erase the message from my answering machine. I don't know the name of the person who called and I have no contact information for him. However, if you're still reading this blog, feel free to contact me at the same number you reached me at before.

Goodbye, ECIT

2008-06-19T16:33:00.003-04:00

And so, my tenure here in ECIT has drawn to a close. I just wanted to take a moment to publicly thank the three people who have mentored me through the year. Shannon O'Daniel has been a canny resource for discussing iTunes U, web design, and all things Apple. Alan Cattier has been a tremendous support in being always enthused and interested in what I have been doing here. And most of all, Wayne Morse has encouraged me to explore the different tools that ECIT offers, let me follow my nose to the things that interested me most, and given me opportunities to teach various groups here. I've learned a lot about academic computing and how to effectively use various tools this year, but I've also grown from the friendship of Wayne, Alan, and Shannon, as well as the other ECIT grad students. And I'm glad to say that working within timelines was not something I only did while in ECIT: I've also got my dissertation under review by my committee for an August graduation. So the fellowship did exactly what it was supposed to.

This blog will likely cease updating regularly, but I plan on starting a new, more permanent blog presence where I can continue talking about my use of technology in the classroom, as well as reflecting more generally on what I am about. One of the best lessons of the year has been the value of regular writing in this space and the interaction that I have had (online and off) about what I have written. I'll let you know the address when I resurface.

My New Website, AKA Behold the Power of CSS!

2008-06-19T15:16:00.002-04:00

My fellowship here in ECIT recently ended. As I had finished my timeline tutorial in the middle of May (but not yet, I'll concede, the Advanced Customization Page), I was left trying to think about what I could most profitably do here for the remaining days of my employment. I decided that creating a better web presence for myself made a lot of sense. And so I spent a few days looking at other academics' personal websites and thinking about what mine should look like.

ECIT occasionally is asked to teach faculty or students how to write their own web pages. This basically means giving people a crash course in Dreamweaver. And if you've never really spent much time learning anything about HTML, then it really turns into a crash course. Dreamweaver is not intuitive for first-time users and neither is our teaching all of the time. For example, when I was a student in an ECIT class that included some Dreamweaver instruction, a lot of time was spent talking about tables (!?!). One thing that has been exciting about the blog and wiki tools within Blackboard is that they allow students to create media-rich websites within a matter of moments using a very simple WYSIWYG interface. I'm personally not a fan of Blackboard, if only because it all lives behind a passworded interface that students are not inclined to check on a regular basis.

In any case, I have spent a lot of time this year using Dreamweaver for one thing or another, so I didn't have a problem using it to build my website. What I did skip out on, however, was using tables to arrange my website. Instead, I've done the current (and far better) thing and used CSS to compose the page. I started to learn CSS as I customized different aspects of the timelines that I have written this year. But I really caught the vision when someone pointed me to css Zen Garden. This site provides some information about the benefits of using CSS. But then it shows you how powerful CSS can be by using different style sheets for the same page. For example, this page uses all the same information in the Body of the web page but only has different CSS. This Boy Scout-themed one is another favorite, since I'm a fan of 1950s-inspired graphic arts. Browsing this site, you start to get an idea of what you can do with CSS, and it gives you a chance to start looking at how you can write your own style sheets.

Thus inspired, I spent some more time poking around and ended up getting my start using Owen Briggs's classic CSS boxes to help me design my site. I've done a bit of tweaking on the style sheets and have had a lot of fun doing so. Don't worry: every once in a while I remember that I'm supposed to be an English professor-type.

In any case, you can see my new website here. I'd love to hear what you think or if you find anything broken (besides the as-of-now empty pages where my course materials for this Fall will go). I'm still not sold on the yellow, so if you'd like to vote for other options check out the blue or green versions. Only the front page's links and visited links are in different colors here, but you get the idea.

Twitter in the classroom

2008-05-27T13:23:00.004-04:00

Dave Parry at academhack has a recent and very good post on how to actually set up a classroom of students using Twitter. I'm going to use Twitter in my "Your Digital Life" class this Fall and following these instructions will make it much easier for me to get the students off and running.

In other Twitter-related news, I'd like to point you toward Twistori for some conceptual art made out of tweets and to hashtags.org for information about putting metadata in your tweets.

For Twitter alternatives, in case I haven't mentioned them previously, check out Pownce, Jaiku, or FriendFeed. The last is an attempt to aggregate all of a person's social networks into one spot. I've set it up so people watching me in FriendFeed can see my activity at Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, del.iciou.us, and more.

Class Capture vs. Screen Capture

2008-05-27T12:42:00.001-04:00

Over the winter break this year, ECIT purchased and installed an Accordent Capture Station in one of our classrooms. The desire was to have a space in which video presentations can be easily captured as we move toward pushing more and more stuff to iTunes U for the public release this fall. The classroom now has two smartboards, a remote control camera, wireless mic, a Crestron control system, and a stack of computers and receivers.

When in class capture mode, one of the smart boards turns off, but the Accordent system captures everything that happens on the other board at approximately one frame per second. Simultaneously, it fires up the camera and starts recording video (30 fps). The resulting presentation, which is viewable in Real, has two screens: the smart board and the video of, presumably, you or the class. This is nice because it allows those watching a presentation to see not only the documents, spreadsheets, or PowerPoint/Keynote presentation but also the speaker's facial expressions, hand motions, etc. You get a better sense of what it might be like to watch such a presentation in real-life. What's more, we now have a dedicated space made for video capture so faculty at Emory no longer have to worry about getting a video camera taken to their classroom. The headaches saved by this feature alone probably make it worth thinking about using.

In order to test the system and think about its capabilities, I recently had the chance to record a med school lecture on the heart in the space. Even better, this last Friday I spent an afternoon filming my own presentation on--you guessed it--timelines. Essentially, I discuss the basic features of the interactive timelines I've been playing with this year and demonstrate how easy it is to add information to such a timeline within Google Docs. You can watch the presentation here.

Now, it just so happened that I recorded a presentation on timelines that was more or less identical to this one I made for my Timeline Tutorial using Camtasia. Having already made one presentation was helpful in the sense that I more or less knew what I wanted to say when I got put in front of a camera. More importantly, it gave me the chance to think about the relative advantages and disadvantages of both systems.

And there are plenty of disadvantages to the Accordent class capture system.

In my mind, one of the main reasons to make a video recording of a class in which you use a presentation on a computer screen is to capture faithfully what you put on the screen. Unfortunately, because the Accordent only captures a smart board image once every second, the presentation side of things is not so much a video as a rapidly advancing slideshow. You can lose a lot of important information if you don't have a perfect capture of what's on the screen, as I learned in making the med school lecture, which used a PowerPoint presentation with a lot of movies. The value of watching the heart in action was lost as motion was eliminated. If a presenter is made aware of this limitation of the system, he or she can move the mouse and/or screen more slowly and compensate for this time delay. I think I actually did okay with this in my presentation, but there is a definite loss.
- Camtasia, on the other hand, captures exactly what is happening on the screen and does so at an adequate frame rate that the full motion of the mouse or videos your are displaying is preserved.
The camera on the Accordent has a limited range in which it can recorded. This means that instead of calling it a "class capture" system, the Accordent should more properly be called a "lecturer capture" system. There are zoom and pan controls on the Crestron for the camera as well as 5 presets for the camera. But the range of the room that can be captured effectively is smaller than I would like. While recording myself, I had to mark where on the floor I could stand to be sure that I was within the camera frame. If someone else had been working with me, they could have used multiple camera angles. But the process for doing so is more complex than it should be: it requires watching a computer screen while simultaneously positioning the camera using the Crestron unit. Of course, the Crestron is touch-screen only so you have to look at it to use it. This results in shifting back and forth between two screens. Add to this the fact that the camera controls are on the herky-jerky side, and you have a situation in which the best production results from keeping the camera and the lecturer planted in one place.

Of course, with Camtasia you are similarly rooted in one place if you want to record video of yourself as you're talking about what you're showing on a screen as you are dependent on a webcam.

If you watch the Accordent presentation, you'll eventually notice that the volume of what I'm saying varies widely with where I'm looking. When recording the video for the med school, I had noticed that the lapel mic didn't have a very large range. I tried to compensate for this in my own production and positioned the mic so as to pick me up when I turn my head to look at the screen. Unfortunately, when I'm looking at the camera, the volume drops. More experimentation with the mic will likely help us iron out these problems.
- Still, in Camtasia I don't have to look away from the screen as I narrate what I'm talking about. This means that I can use a stationary mic and avoid similar problems.
Another problem with the Accordent system is that it takes a very long time for it to start recording once you hit the "record" button. It makes sense: it has to start two different video feeds and an encoder. Still, it is always surprising how long it takes. It requires having another person give you the high sign when things are finally rolling. Otherwise, you end up missing the first 30-60 seconds of whatever has been said. If you are recording by yourself, you end up watching the Crestron and looking down for the first five seconds of the presentation.
- With Camtasia, on the other hand, when you hit "record" you are going immediately. Once you hit "stop," there's a bit of a lag as you wait for the encoding to wrap up. But it's nothing like the time required for the Accordent to wrap up its recording.
So you've got a bit of dead space in the beginning of your Accordent presentation? Can't you just lop it off? Here's the real problem with our Accordent experience so far: a lack of editing tools. You have to do everything in one take. No trimming. No patching in a part where you misspoke. It's all or nothing. This isn't a radical oversight on the part of Accordent so much as it is due to the problems that would be involved in syncing the patched in/edited video with the smart board screen that has been recorded. When I was recording the medical lecture this was a real problem as a cell phone went off and we had to start a 20-minute segment over again. We've been told that there might be a tool we can buy from Accordent to edit our presentations. But since we've already spent tens of thousands of dollars on this tool, you'd think that this would come gratis.
- Of course, Camtasia is explicitly designed to allow you to edit your screencasts. You can go back and rerecord your audio commentary. You can cut in title screens (you'll notice that I had to use PowerPoint for titles in my Accordent presentation), and zoom to different parts of the screen. And because you can use a webcam in conjunction with recording the screen, you can also have a recording of the speaker (albeit, seated at computer) that plays simultaneously with what you have captured on the screen.
A final difficulty with the Accordent system is that it outputs exclusively to Real formats. This means that it won't play nice with iTunes and iTunes U. You can--it appears--put either the video or the presentation video into iTunes U. But the simultaneous videos can only be seen on a computer.

If it's not obvious at this point, I have to say that I prefer the results and experience of using Camtasia over the Accordent system. Compared to the latter, the former really embodies the ECIT mantra of being simple, easy, and scalable. Not that Camtasia is the easiest piece of software that I've used, but it only took a few hours to get comfortable with its different options. And it's a much richer tool. Camtasia also has the advantage of being much less expensive than the Accordent.

Of course, the Accordent is a new tool. We're still trying to figure out how to best use it, what sorts of presentations play nice in the space, and how to get faculty and grad students to make use of it. Still, the gauntlet has been thrown and for the moment, I know which way I'm leaning.

Del.icio.us

2008-05-16T14:34:00.003-04:00

I'm was a late comer to del.icio.us. The main reason being that I always found the site to be not that friendly for those who go to it for the first time. For starters, there's all that white space. I'm no design guru, but I find the site's layout to be a distraction because the visual hierarchy isn't quite what I expect it to be. After that, on my first visit to the site, I had a very hard time finding instructions on how to use the service. Perhaps I wasn't looking very hard as it's not all that difficult to find them. But I expected a site that is designed for social uses to be a little more friendly in getting me up and going. After all, they need my input to get the aggregated information that somehow (alchemically?) they turn into money. How hard would it be, del.icio.us, to make a screencast? I managed to do it.

But my quibbles aside, plenty of people seem to like del.icio.us. And I've been using it for two years. But recently Jason Jones did a blog post on del.icio.us that led me to poke into corners of the site that I hadn't even known were there. I'm most intrigued by the subscription and "links for you" features, especially since I can get both of them by RSS. Of course, in the case of the first, I still have to parse through the reams of information that comes cascading through teh interwubz. And in the case of the latter, I have to find people who want to send me links. I guess that's one of the downsides of social networking tools: if you don't have friends using the tools, then you don't get as much out of them as you might. I suppose I could start making friends on del.icio.us, but I certainly didn't go to grad school because I'm good at making friends. What's more, there's the whole problem of social network fatigue. I can only keep up with so many places. At the moment, that involves lala and its spinoff forums, some blogs that I follow, and Twitter.

In any case, read Jason's post if you want to have your ideas broadened about using del.icio.us. He even talks about using them in the classroom and has a del.icio.us assignment that you can pirate. I plan on using it this Fall in the sections of "Your Digital Life."

Timeline Tutorial is Finished!

2008-05-13T15:29:00.002-04:00

File this one under "foot in mouth." Back on 28 February, I wrote that my tutorial on building your own timeline should be done within two weeks. Given my weekly readership numbers here on the blog, I don't have any reason to think that I have greatly disappointed anyone.

In any case, I'm pleased to report that I have finally finished writing my tutorial for building your own timeline using Exhibit and Google Docs. You can see it (and my semi-awesome screencast) here. My goal was to take things in a very step-by-step basis for faculty and grad students who are interested in using a timeline within their courses but don't have much (or any) knowledge of HTML. On the other hand, I wanted to give people the opportunity to build every part of the timeline themselves and understand the choices they were making.

I haven't yet finished the Advance Timeline Customization page, but hopefully everything else is there. I'd appreciate any feedback you may have.

I'm excited about this as it's one of the biggest projects I have tackled this year at ECIT. While there are some other tools out there for timelines, I continue to think that the flexibility of the Exhibit-powered timeline has advantages over the others. I'm excited to have the possibility of trying out timelines in some classes next year.

Timelines in Your Zotero Bibliography

2008-04-28T15:31:00.003-04:00

I have previously written about Zotero. I like it very much as a bibliographic manager except for one thing: the fact that your collections are linked to a particular computer rather than shared across a network. I recognize that many people do most of their work from one computer and this isn't really a problem. I also know that exporting and importing citations into Zotero isn't hard. But since I work regularly from a laptop that is too ancient to have reliable Internet access as well as on a collection of different computers across campus and at home, Zotero hasn't proven to be as big a deal for me as I imagine it will be when version 2.0 comes out. This will allow you to not only access your collection from anywhere online but also to share your collections with others, create RSS feeds from them, and more. Until then, I'm going to stick with Endnote. (Yes, I recognize that EndNote doesn't play nice with sharing citations without a subscription to EndNote Web [I'm not even sure that Emory has a subscription].)

But here's what I'm interested in today: Zotero has added a SIMILE Timeline feature. You can read about it here. (Thanks, JBJ!) The timeline is fairly simple: it is designed to show you when the materials in your collection were either published (publication date), added (when you first added them to your Zotero collection), or modified (the date you last updated the entry). You can also highlight different items based on words in their title, filter entries by a keyword, just to a particular year on the timeline, or adjust the units of the three timeline bands.

The timeline appears in your browser, which is where Zotero lives. It does not at the moment, however, come with a stable URL which would allow you to share it with others. Instead, all the information (as is the case with all of Zotero) lives on your computer. Perhaps this will change when the new version of Zotero emerges and citations begin living on a web server rather than a small file on your hard drive.

Something else that I would like to see is the ability to highlight items based on terms beyond title words. At the moment, if I have a term in the "notes" field for a book, the book will not be highlighted when I use that term in one of the timeline's highlight boxes. Since terms that I associate with articles or books are not always (or even frequently) part of their title, the highlighting feature doesn't really serve the purpose that I think one would want for it: to show relationships between objects that are not immediately obvious.

Then again, one might ask whether having a timeline of your bibliography is the best place to reveal these relationships. Zotero has a "tag" feature, and if you've been diligent in assigning them, you can sort your collection within Zotero by those tags, without dealing with the timeline. A bigger question is about the whole implementation of a timeline in Zotero: does one really needs to visualize bibliographic data by date? I don't think that it's something that I will be using frequently. But then again, my work is not as date sensitive as that of people in the sciences or social sciences. My timeline works best when viewed by years and decades rather than months. Others would likely benefit from seeing how sources follow one another.

The larger benefit is something that I've been interested in throughout this year: the increasing ability to visualize data that is made possible by web 2.0 tools. I can't prove to you that having your bibliography in a timeline will lead to new ways to think about the sources or the datasets that they contain. But there's no reason to think that having this option wouldn't be of benefit. Just like Moretti's Graphs, Maps, Trees, you don't know what you can learn from a quantitative model (or quantitative-esque as far as Zotero goes) until you build it and spend some time looking at it. Perhaps if I added every source from Discourse Networks, I would learn something new about the shift in read/write technologies from 1800 to 1900. Or perhaps I could see where Kittler perhaps missed a crucial decade's worth of sources. In any case, something like the Zotero timeline is a tool to accomplish this.

P.S. As long as I'm passing along suggestions, it would be really amazing to see Zotero use SIMILE's Exhibit script in conjunction with Timeline, which would potentially allow the visualization of data to incorporate relationships between sources, their notes, tags, and more.

Build Your Own Social Network

2008-04-24T16:28:00.004-04:00

Despite my best efforts, I'm frequently behind the curve on web tools and platforms. Today I came across two different tools that essentially allow you to roll your own social network: ning and grou.ps. The idea is that rather than using a forum or wiki architecture, which are, respectively, either painful limited in what they can do or more complicated than the average user can handle, you have a WYSIWYG editor to compile your own Web 2.0 community.

To what extent are these something more than just a prettier forum? I'm not really sure yet. I'm thinking I'll have to play with these over the next few weeks. Anyone else want to play along?

Web 2.0 and Education

2008-04-24T15:03:00.005-04:00

Wayne recently sent me a link to K-12 Technology Specialist Steve Hargadon's blog. A post at the beginning of March (sorry for being slow) suggests that Web 2.0 is the future of education. Hargadon is nothing if not effusive about his subject. Several commenters question the reality of his vision, in particular whether it will be possible to educate educators to make use of Web 2.0 tools when they are already busy and/or comfortable with their current levels of technology. I think they are right to make these observations, but let me just draw on two or three points of Hargadon's that I find interesting.

Web 2.0 is primarily about publishing. Whereas the early web was oriented toward information delivery, the current iteration emphasizes the production of information by its participants. Create and remix are the orders of the day. We can take advantage of this by asking our students to participate in the assembly and creation of knowledge that is easily accessible to others. Students have in a sense always been creating, but publishing raises the stakes. (One of Hargadon's commentators correctly notes that the read/write opposition between Web 1.0 and 2.0 doesn't really hold because people were participating in email, chat rooms, etc. in the former. The difference, as I see it, is in the publishing of content so that third parties can read it.)
The ease of publishing in a Web 2.0 environment means that we are faced with increasing amounts of information. Hargadon's proposed remedy?
...Produce more content. Because it is in the act of our becoming a creator that our relationship with content changes, and we become more engaged and more capable at the same time. In a world of overwhelming content, we must swim with the current.
This is a noble idea, but I'm not sure that it holds water. My writing this blog doesn't necessarily mean that I have a better idea of what information is out there. I extract things that I come across that are useful and share my observations on what I've been working on. But that doesn't help me manage everything I don't have time for. Perhaps what it does, however, is give me a place to articulate what I find to be valuable. Pointing it out to others. But does this all boil down to just another Digg-like application? Where things get filtered out by mass aggregation? That doesn't seem all that different from the systems we already have in place.
"The expert is giving way to the collaborator." I'm of the opinion that there will always be a need for experts. After all, having an expert teach you something is quite frequently the fastest means of information transfer. And at ECIT, we are all about best practices. But at the same time, I believe that collaboration will increase in importance within the classroom. And it won't just be the students collaborating with one another, but them doing so with the teacher/professor. It might look something like a class taught by Sander Gilman in Emory's ILA during the 2006-2007 school year, where the undergrads and grad students actually wrote a book:
The end product of the course will be a collaborative volume on the history of dieting which has been commissioned by a major publisher. This course will demand real research, real writing, and will have a real product.
The English Department has been making grants available to faculty members and grad students who want to co-author an article. Although these endeavors don't necessarily employ Web 2.0 technologies, they do capture the Web 2.0 mentality. What's more, they provide a possibile answer to the comments to Hargadon's original post who wonder how they can get teachers to learn new technologies: offer a concrete reward that has nothing to do with improving one's teaching.

So. I'm interested in hearing what others think about these points. Do social networking applications change the dynamic in a classroom, regardless of whether the class is using them? Do students coming into college today expect something different than they did when I arrived as a freshmen in 1995? How can we collaborate with our students?

A different approach to mapping

2008-04-18T14:11:00.001-04:00

So although I've been dusting off my Google Earth skills a bit, this is going to go in a completely different direction. Last week, Shawn McCauley wrote about a new mindmapping tool--bubbl.us--on the English department blog. Mindmapping is perhaps a fancy way to say "outlining." But it's an exercise that many of us have used for our own work or taught to our classes as a way to begin a project. It can also be a useful brainstorming activity.

Shawn provides a good summary of the features of bubbl.us and also speculates on the classroom value of bubbl.us:

I can see bubbl having a variety of pedagogical uses, both individually and collaboratively, both inside and outside the classroom. From teaching brainstorming in composition courses, to having students collaboratively trace the genealogy of the novel, to providing a graphic representation of intertexuality or patronage networks to accompany a lecture or in-class discussion, potential mapplications of bubbl abound.

Finally, Shawn mentions two other mindmapping tools: Mindmeister and Mindomo as objects worth playing with if we were so inclined.

I hadn't previously played with mindmapping tools but checked out bubbl.us immediately as it seemed to be something more exciting than revising the dissertation chapter I was working on. Using bubbl.us proved so easy and fun that I began using it to collaborate with Rachel Bowser on a conference panel proposal we had been kicking around. After spending some time with bubbl.us, I decided that I would check out Mindmeister and Mindomo as well. In the past week, I've made several different mindmaps in each of the tools, and I think I have a good grasp on the advantages and disadvantages of each of them.

These are all useful tools that could be put to interesting use in the classroom, for group work, or for individual (student or professor) organization. They are all free (although two have subscription options) and are web-based so there is no need to install new software and your work is available wherever you can connect to the Internet. Generally speaking, Mindomo and Mindmeister are very similar to one another. They both organize materials in a tree structure. They're very orderly and allow you to collapse different elements of your tree to reduce the complexity of what you've built. And some of these maps can get very complex, as you can see from this mindmap of dermatology on Mindmeister made by Daniel Nygren. After playing with each of them extensively, I'd have to say that Mindomo is the definitely the more powerful of the two, but it also has a steeper learning curve. Mindmeister lacks some of the features of Mindomo, but the trade off might be worth it because its ease of use perhaps makes it more appropriate for the classroom. You can see example maps I made in both Mindomo and Mindmeister for people whom Rachel and I needed to contact about our call for papers.

bubbl.us is not as polished as the other two platforms, but there's a reason that I've spent most of my time with it. It's the easiest and the most fun of the three. Rather than using a tree structure, which is fairly rigid in how you can position different elements in relation to one another, bubbl.us allows you to position its topics and subtopics anywhere on the map that you'd like. There are some features missing from it that are really important, like the ability to add hyperlinks or images to your bubbles. But on the other hand, it appears to not even be in Beta yet--although still open to public use. It will be interesting to see where its development goes from here. (Note to Google: buy this site now!)

I could go on and on about the different advantages and disadvantages of the three different platforms (and you may think that I already have). But I've decided to use bubbl.us to summarize all of this for you.

If that's a bit small for you to be able to browse the information effectively--and I suspect that it will be, although the zoom buttons in the upper left corner can help--then you can browse a full-sized version here. Unfortunately, you can't drag the bubbles around or start making new connections between things on my map. So I'll just recommend that you sign up for a bubbl.us account (or one of the others, if you prefer their looks) and start playing.

Apple takes a step backward

2008-04-11T14:42:00.011-04:00

Last fall, when ECIT taught the Technology, Literacy, and Curriculum (TLC) workshop in conjunction with the English department, I was asked to conduct some assessments of the course. I wasn't surprised that all the participants had learned new things and that they anticipated using the various technologies and techniques we discussed in their upcoming courses. But what did surprise me was out of all the subjects we covered in 16+ hours, the one that students found most appealing was the demonstration on how to give presentations from their iPods.

This is an admittedly easy thing to do. Simply connect an Apple AV cable to your iPod and plug the other end into RCA connections on your TV.
Then you can simply play a slide show or videos on the TV. No need to worry about PowerPoint or bringing a flash drive to class. (ECIT always recommends, by the way, that if possible you do bring a second copy of your presentation in a different format so you have a backup route for showing something.) You can now give a lecture with slides or video and not worry about any equipment besides your iPod, which most people always have with them.

Of course, Apple was tricky with their cables. They changed the wiring inside the iPod so that if you used a regular RCA cables that come with, say, your digital camera or that cost less than $5 at an electronics store it wouldn't output correctly. However, if you played around long enough, you could eventually discover that if you plugged the red cable into the yellow jack, the yellow cable into the white jack, and the white cable into the red jack, you had a working solution. Even if you didn't want to play around, Apple's cables, which had the right color scheme only cost $20.

All this changed last September, when Apple introduced the newest line of iPods: the Classic, Touch, and newest version of the Nano. Instead of outputting through the headphone jack with regular or Apple-branded RCA cables, to output your signal to TV all of these new iPods require you to have a cable or a dock with an Apple authentication chip. This chip is available in new cables that Apple has released and that plug, not into the headphone jack as on the 5th Generation iPod, but through the iPod dock connector. Importantly, the dock connector is, like the authentication chip, a design that Apple holds a patent on as opposed to headphone jacks. Okay, you say. That sounds less than ideal. How much will I have to pay for this magical iPod cable? Hear's the really egregious part: $50.

Perhaps this isn't news. In fact, ilounge.com, one iPod enthusiast website, covered this subject two days after the most recent iPods were announced. But I came up against this problem last week when teaching a class on iPods and enhanced podcasts for postdocs in Emory's FIRST program. We had some trouble getting the TV out to work in part because I wasn't aware that the postdocs' iPod Classics used differently technology than the previous generation.

One lesson to learn from this is to make sure you have tested all your technology before your class begins. It's never good to have the guy who is teaching you how to use an iPod be incapable of making it work. But the second lesson is that Apple has made it that much more difficult for us to use in the classroom what was the easiest and, according to the students, the best thing that we taught in TLC. Sure, I suppose you can say that we just need to go buy another cable. But the reality is that for graduate students $50 can be a significant cost. It's even significant if Emory or another institution is paying for the cables. Especially when one considers that 80 GB iPods cost $250, the purchase of the cable amounts to a 20% price increase in order to use an advertised feature of the iPod.

Apple's made a name for itself for being the company the makes products you go just plug in and start working with, and ECIT has touted iPods for being a tool you can just plug in and start teaching with. It's too bad that plugging in costs you an extra $50 now.

Google Timeline Gadget

2008-04-03T16:38:00.001-04:00

I'm continuing to work on my tutorial for building your own timelines. I'm getting very close to having a final version of something I think can be useful for even those who have no experience writing HTML. If you've been following my work on this topic at all over the last six months or so, you'll know that I will suggest you host your data within a Google Docs spreadsheet. Well, a recent update to Google Docs may make the whole process even easier than that which I have come up with for the moment.

What's been added to spreadsheets is the ability to push your data through a "gadget." And one of those gadgets just happens to be a timeline gadget that is based on the Timeline code written by SIMILE. You can read about how to use the gadget here, but it is very simple:

Set up your spreadsheet with the appropriately titled columns.
Click on the gadget button that is in between the "Wrap text" and "Merge across" options.
Scroll down and select "Timeline Gadget."

You then have a number of options. You need to set the range of cells for the gadget to read. Then you can choose the units for the upper and lower bands (week, months, or years are the only choices). You can also set the width of these units and the background colors of the two different timeline bands. All in all, it's a very nice system.

There's just one problem...I haven't been able to get it to work. I keep getting an error message that suggests that I haven't titled all my columns correctly. After spending all this time working with Timeline and its scripts, however, I'm pretty sure that I've got that part right. I'm pursuing help with the powers that be to see if I can figure out how to get this working.

In any case, here's the part where I give you the positive and negatives to this approach and which will inevitably suggest that my chosen approach is particularly suited to what I want to achieve. On the plus side, it should be super easy to use. The gadget gets around your having to write an HTML side to a timeline. You can still share your spreadsheet with multiple people easily and thus have the database/wiki like feel to building and editing the timeline. Finally, the gadget includes an option that makes it easy to embed it in another web page or to include it in your iGoogle page. This means that you could build the timeline within a spreadsheet, but still place it within a page of your own design.

The disadvantages at the moment include the inability to customize the timeline as much as you might want to. You only have three units of time to pick from. You also cannot use more than two bands in your timeline. The events cannot be color coded by type of event. There is no search box nor can you restrict events by one aspect or another. And you can only use particular column headers at the moment. This means that the information you can include in your timeline is limited.

For these reason, I'm still a fan of the more robust timelines that I've been working with this year. That probably comes as no surprise to anyone. But there's at least one more option for you to use for now.

More love for Twitter

2008-03-25T15:42:00.004-04:00

You were probably getting tired of all my writing about Google. And it appears that this semester I've switched to being a big fan of Twitter.

In any case, I just found an interesting new tool allows you to integrate your Google Calendar with your Twitter account. I'm not sure that I'm using Twitter more than I'm using Gmail at this point, but just in case I can now use Twittercal to blast appointments more effectively.

Also, Alice of Beck Center fame sent me a link to a blog post on 17 different ways to visualize the Twitter Universe. The author breaks the different tools he has found into four categories: network diagrams, maps, analytics, and abstract. It's really interesting playing with these different tools. Here are some of my favorites:

Twitter Friends Network Browser: It's kind of like playing six degrees of separation, but with your Twitter family.
twittervision: I mentioned this in my first post about Twitter. But that doesn't mean that it isn't fun to play with still.
TweetStats: Get visualizations of how you've been using Twitter.
TweetVolume: search for specific words or phrases and compare them to each other. (Brian is a more popular word than Wayne, Jay, or Alan.)
Twitter Blocks: a Twitter-made application for visualizing your network and posts.
24 o'clocks: A very pretty way to browse your and your friends tweets on a calendar-like interface.

And there will likely continue to be new applications designed using Twitter's API in the near future.

I've been trying to explain to people for the last two months why I find Twitter intriguing. Maybe it's just because it's an easy web 2.0 platform or that it is very portable. It definitely has something to do with the pedagogical possibilities I'm imagining for it. But it also has something to do with the imagined communities that it is already allowing me to build. And that's enough for now.

Distributed fiction

2008-03-25T15:23:00.003-04:00

So I've seen things like this before, but I've never had the chance to play with one as it is developing. A new distributed fiction by Toby Litt has gone live today. The basic plot is that a teenage daughter who has been getting into trouble in California is taken out of her environment by her parents who suddenly move to England. The house they're in may or may not be haunted. We'll get to find out as things go along.

You can follow the fiction by reading the blog of the daughter ("Slice") or of her parents. (Of course, the author have chosen age-appropriate domains for hosting the blog. You can also receive updates on Twitter (Slice and parents) and on Flickr. Finally, you can email Slice and interact with the characters that way.

This appears to be something that is coming out of a six-week project run by Penguin in the UK. You can read about this week's story here. And you can read the previous week's story here, which runs in Google Maps. Hey, I had nothing better to do for the next few days...

Credit to academicdave for pointing this out. Via Twitter. Of course.

Another academhack post on Twitter

2008-03-18T12:36:00.005-04:00

academhack/Dave Parry has a new post up on his use of Twitter. In it, he addresses the two reasons he teaches Twitter. In the first place, he sees it as an emergent medium that is shaping how we communicate and, thus, shaping our culture. In the second place, as he has written previously, Twitter allows him to expand the learning community of his students beyond the walls of the classroom and throughout the day. Given the more nomadic lives of our students, knowing what one another is doing and thinking about is a way to bring more interactivity into the classroom to foster community/communal learning. He is persuasive and although I'm a member of the choir to whom he may be preaching, I believe he's correct on both points.

My own experience this past weekend using Twitter demonstrates the power of the smart mob/community that Twitter has put me in contact with. On Saturday afternoon, I learned from my wife that a tree had fallen on our house on Saturday afternoon in relation to the aftermath of Atlanta's tornado. I was waiting for Amber and the boys to come and pick me up at school, where I had spent most of the day when she called. Not having much to do, I decided to send out a tweet on the subject. Within a few hours, I had multiple people emailing to check on how our family was doing. Part of the distribution of the news was owed to my having integrated Twitter with Facebook. Some friends saw the tweet; others saw the updated Facebook status. But they more or less knew what was happening to me in real time. And they started offering to help in any way they could.

In returning to academhack's post, the one thing that I would really like to highlight is a point that he buries to a degree. He suggests that the networks between students and professors who are using Twitter is similar to the networks one has to learn to form in order to be successful in graduate school. In thinking back on my graduate school experience to this point, I think that Twitter could have made bridging the gap between myself and our department's faculty even easier. I understand why not everyone wants to spend their time Twittering or sharing their private lives with whatever grad students may want to listen in. But the chance to get to know faculty members outside of the seminar room and their office hours are equally rare and valuable. Twitter is a tool that allows us to readjust and strengthen these relationships.

And then to extend them laterally as we discover others who share our interests. When we don't all have travel/conference budgets to get out and meet all the people we would like to get to know, Twitter is a means for knowing what those whose work we are following in print are doing with their time. And it becomes the means to get to know them as well as or better than the people with whom you share an office wall.

Victorian Age Timeline being updated

2008-03-11T11:12:00.002-04:00

Good news to you timeline fanatics out there. The Victorian Age Timeline that JBJ and I built for his Victorian survey class is beginning to be populated with data. Check it out. Send us accolades and money.

(In other news, my documentation on building your own timeline is nearing completion.)

Who knew? Another timeline.

2008-03-04T15:29:00.007-05:00

So, less than a week ago I wrote about Timefo as a timeline building alternative. A week before that, I covered xtimeline. And it was in that post that I wrote, in supreme confidence,

Timelines are not, I'm afraid, going to go viral in the near future.

While I still don't think that building timelines will be all the rage, it appears that building tools to help others build timelines is.

Today, I came across TimelineIt. Like Timefo, it's based on SIMILE's Timeline script and uses a simple forms interface to allow you to add events to a timeline that you can scroll through.

Advantages of TimelineIt:

Dead-simple interface.
Very smart inclusion of tabs that let you shift the scale of the timeline from days to weeks, months, or years. Zoom buttons let you get closer to events without changing the scale so radically. Look at the upper left and right, respectively, of this image, which is too large to host effectively on Blogger.
You can use all the basic HTML coding that I use in my spreadsheets. This means you can use it to create italics or links within item descriptions or to host YouTube videos.
A much better name than "Timefo."

Disadvantages:

Lack of tags means that you can't group events into types or relate them in any way.
No way to build timelines as a group.
No way to "publish" timelines. I'm unable to show my timeline to others unless I pull it up for them while logged in to my account.
Dead-simple interface means no explanation of how to use the tool or how to take advantage of HTMLing things.
No photos or video (without already knowing how the Timeline script works).
No mapping (which Timefo does very well).

Overall, I can't recommend TimelineIt at the moment over Timefo or xtimeline. It's got a very nice innovation as far as the tabs and zoom buttons go. But that's about it. Let's hope they take that innovation and move forward in other ways.

One More Easy Timeline Option

2008-02-28T14:55:00.011-05:00

All right. I'm well into my documentation for creating your own timeline. I hope that it will be finished, tested, and posted to the Internet within two weeks.

However, as luck would have it, I've come across another option for creating timelines. I don't have a lot of information about Timefo, and it's still in its Alpha phase, but it looks intriguing. It has an easy form for adding events (see graphic at right). It allows you to incorporate images or videos (it prefers YouTube and Flickr). You can also provide a location for each event and the timeline automatically maps it via Google Maps. There's a search feature that parses the timeline's text for particular terms. You can add labels (kind of like an Event type in my timelines) and tags (so you can link various events of different types/labels). You can also highlight particular types of events. (Timefo manages to do these things in part because it is making use of SIMILE's Timeline API.) Take a look at this timeline of 2008 San Francisco murders to get a sense of how it works. (The site works best with Firefox.)

I've put a quick timeline together and I generally like the results. There are a few drawbacks at the moment. For instance, there is not a way to build a timeline with a group. I assume (or at least hope) that Timefo is planning on implementing such an option. I also think that they could do a better job explaining the difference between tags and labels and the tags could be better implemented. At present, it doesn't seem like you can search among events based on tags. At least, I haven't been able to do this on my timeline. Finally, when you click on an event, you almost always have to scroll down to read it all. The event description and the timeline never seem to fit completely on the screen. And it's not like I'm using small screens or resolution here in ECIT.

I came across Timefo through a post its authors made to the SIMILE listserv in January. In it, they suggest a few things they have planned for the future. These include populating a timeline with RSS (one hopes that it continually updates, unlike xtimeline) or Google Spreadsheets. One proposed feature that I like is the option to share the events on your timeline. What that means is that others could remix your events into their own timeline. So they are thinking about mashing up their own data from the beginning. Very smart.

Right now, Timefo is not really ready for public use. For one thing, it's still not really accepting sign-ups. (FYI You can sign up using the link that I've provided.) And it's lack of group building tools means that at the moment it isn't what I've been looking for in a timeline. But that doesn't mean it can't become that in the future.

Twitter on the Chronicle

2008-02-25T10:22:00.003-05:00

An article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education by Jeff Young examines the growing use of Twitter in academia. I was excited to see this article come out as I'd done a phone interview with the author regarding my recent blog post about Twitter. David Parry/academhack and Jason Jones both make appearances. Unfortunately, my comments seem to have not made the cut. I say unfortunate not only because my vanity can always use the boost, but also because what Jeff and I talked about was specific applications for how Twitter could be used in a classroom. To me, this is the real question: is it valuable for reaching an pedagogical goal? Nevertheless, the article is worth reading...especially since Jeff does a much better job at concisely explaining how Twitter works.

Exhibit Tutorial

2008-02-21T16:13:00.002-05:00

Just in case you are waiting with breathless anticipation for my instructions for creating your own timelines, you might want to check out Tom from Bionic Teaching's Tutorial on Exhibit. It was apparently written before Exhibit 2.0 was released, so there's a chance that it won't be perfect. Nevertheless, it's very good at walking you through what you need to do. I think the service my tutorial will provide will be to address at more length the different options in the timeline view.

A Kinder, Gentler Timeline (?)

2008-02-21T09:37:00.009-05:00

So Alice Hickox of the Beck Center put me on the trail of a new piece of timeline software last week. xtimeline is a typical enough web 2.0 service that went live last summer. Predictably, it allows you to build timelines on any subject. The results are actually quite nice:

(The timeline actually looks a lot better if you look at it in its native environment, where the width and height aren't restricted.)

As you can see, you get scrolling. You get photos. And you can even embed video within the timelines. The interface for posting the events to the timeline are very straightforward: the basic sort of forms you would expect to see on such a website (or on my Google Forms Timeline).
Each timeline can have multiple authors and can (obviously) be embedded in different websites or the blog of your choice. You can track the history of modifications made to events on your own timeline and revert back to a previous version of the event if something goes terribly awry. xtimeline also spaces events appropriately. What this means is that when there's a lot of events, the timeline shifts its units, as you see in the gap between Hemingway's birth and the next event. (You can do this same thing with Exhibit, but it's hard-ish.) Another advantage: you can upload photos directly to xtimeline, rather than having to use photos that are already hosted somewhere. This is a small thing but is important for making the process as simple as possible for those who don't know how or where to upload their own photos. All in all, I would have to say that the process of building a timeline on xtimeline is easier than it is when using Exhibit.

< aside >: Interestingly, xtimeline bills itself as a sort of social networking site. You can find other timelines to "like," make friends, and leave comments for each other timelines. Each timeline also comes with links so that you can embed the timelines wherever you want (as I've done above). In many ways, its interface resembles that of YouTube. But I don't really anticipate that this will be the next high-priced Google acquisition. I can understand the pedagogical purpose for timelines (you'd hope so at this point, huh?). And I can understand their value for news organizations and the like. And I can even understand that many people would have fun building something with a new tool. But I don't really think that people are going to be rabidly building and sharing these. Timelines are not, I'm afraid, going to go viral in the near future. < /aside >

However, for all the ease of xtimeline, there are some definite things that detract from the experience. The most important, in my book, is the process for building a timeline collaboratively. The best way to do this should be to start a "Group," have others join the Group, and in the language of an xtimeline blog post, "work together on creating timelines." The blog post indicates that the Group creator will have admin controls over every timeline in the Group. Furthermore, it says that the Group creator will be able to specify granular control over whether members can "modify all events (full cooperation) or only modify events they have created (limited cooperation)." Wow! That sounds great! It means that my students wouldn't be able to change each other's events or delete them on accident.

But it turns out that nothing in the Groups works the way it should. You cannot create a timeline within a group. Rather, you have to create one on your own and then post it to the group. Group members do not automatically get access to the timelines in the group to which they belong. What's more, I'm a Group creator (my group has one other user, the indomitable Erin Sells) and I have no controls over what the other Group members can do with the timelines (which is just as well, I suppose since they can't really edit them). I have been able to add Erin as an Editor to both of my experimental timelines. But I don't see the promised controls. And while it wasn't difficult to make her an Editor, it still took a step or two more than I would have liked. Using Exhibit, I know more or less who has control over the data (everyone, if you give them direct access to the spreadsheet; only me, if you use Google Forms).

That's the main problem. There are other problems with different xtimeline features. For instance, a very nice and easy way to start a timeline is with an RSS feed. I took the feed from this blog, put it in xtimeline and within 5 seconds, it spit out this timeline. But we all know that what is appealing about RSS is the way that it pushes events/information toward you. So what you'd expect from a timeline generated from an RSS feed would be that it would continue to get updated via RSS. That's not the case. You can go back and add more events via the RSS feed. But that gets a bit tiresome. (I wonder, however, what you could do if you ran a Yahoo! Pipe through xtimeline...). For the record, I think you could run a dynamic RSS feed through Exhibit, but I haven't tried to do this yet.

Some other advantages Exhibit has over xtimeline:

You can do text searches or display events from only particular categories within Exhibit. I've been unable to find something similar in xtimeline.
You can host your timeline wherever you want.
The above means that you don't get any ads, which are small but still there on xtimeline. Ads + educational tool=problem, in my mind.
Exhibit can have multiple timeline bands. xtimeline gives you two. In reality, two is what you need most of the time, but as the Victorian Age Timeline demonstrates, it can be useful to have others. Plus you can grab and drag the different bands with Exhibit and they scroll at different rates. And we all like pretty.
Because you are responsible for writing the HTML for your Exhibit (at least until I finish [or start] my documentation), you have much more control over what your timeline will look like. Of course, this involves knowing HTML and some CSS. But it turns out neither of those is that hard to pick up once you get going.
Exhibit works very well to generate a timeline. But the timeline is only one possible facet. The other views, especially Google Maps, add several other ways to interact with and view your data. And these extra modes of visualization increase the learning possibilities for your students.
Exhibit is open source. Thus, it has indie cred.

Now, I have to admit that I'm partial to Exhibit. I have to be, otherwise I've spent a lot of time working on it for, well, for my own education, I suppose. I've also not spent nearly as much time with xtimeline, so I might not get its ins and outs yet. Finally, I would suspect that xtimeline is working to fix things like the Groups functionality (although I've seen nothing to suggest it) and would be very surprised if they didn't integrate it with Google Maps.

xtimeline is still perhaps the best solution for someone who doesn't yet have a mystical Exhibit tutorial to work from or who wants the easiest tool for creating a timeline. It's worth playing around with.

N.B. Inspired by xtimeiline's capabilities, I have just tested the Exhibit-based timelines I've been working with, and I'm pleased to report that I can embed video in them. (Granted, YouTube does the hard work with the hosting and the embedding codes.) For an example, go to the Google Forms Timeline and restrict the results to the "Video" event type. It does seem to be fickle depending on which browser you use, by the way.

Google Forms Timeline is Back! Hurrah!

2008-02-18T16:24:00.004-05:00

Maybe I haven't found the secret button on Blogger that sets off flashing lights when one of my posts receives comments. As it is, I sometimes forget to check recent posts for comments. I'm glad that I did so today. A comment from Tom at Bionic Teaching regarding my Google Forms Timeline gave me the impetus to take a second look at it. (Plus, I finally have some time to do so.)

As I wrote previously, the Google Spreadsheet was forcing dates people entered with the form into a MM/DD/YYYY format rather than the YYYY-MM-DD format that Exhibit can read. Google Docs defaults to the former display mode for dates, but you can change the output for each column, and I had done so. I expected that doing so would correct the problem. The spreadsheet was showing the correct date format, but the timeline still wasn't showing the events that people had entered. I just figured something else was wrong.

But Tom's comment led me to check the Exhibit JSON on the timeline (the orange scissors you see when you hover your mouse over the timeline). And it turned out that even though I'd changed the formatting of the dates within the spreadsheet, they were still outputting incorrectly to Exhibit. I went back into the spreadsheet and changed the column formatting for the dates to plain text. And now that I've reentered the events, everything is suddenly working.

What I think this means is that although I was telling the spreadsheet to output the dates in a certain way that it nevertheless stores dates in MM/DD/YYYY format on its backend. It will change how it displays them to you, but as far as Google is concerned the data stays the same. And it obviously stayed in this default format when going out on the feed and consequently couldn't be read by Exhibit. Changing the columns to plain text will prevent the spreadsheet from cramming my data into a format that won't work.

What this means is that you can feel free to start adding events to the timeline. Try it out. I still believe, as I wrote in my first post, that there are some real reasons to give students access to the whole spreadsheet for creating a timeline. But this certainly presents another option.

Wikipedia and the New Digital Literacy

2008-02-13T09:57:00.003-05:00

David Parry from academhack has a new editorial at Science Progress that advocates for the importance of digital literacy and uses the Wikipedia as a model. Good reading.

Oops.

2008-02-12T21:52:00.001-05:00

Okay, this is a bit embarrassing. After posting both here on my blog and writing to the SIMILE listserv, it now appears that the Google Form Timeline is not functioning as it should. There have been at least three people who have used the form to add an event to the spreadsheet, but they are not being plotted on the timeline.

At first I thought that it had to do with the way the dates were formatted: the spreadsheet was forcing them into a format that Exhibit doesn't read. However, I've corrected that and I'm getting nothing, not even events that I've added subsequently added directly to the spreadsheet or via the form.

I tested this process with three different people this afternoon and didn't have any problems. Firebug isn't showing me anything wrong with the page. I'll work on hunting down what the problem might be tomorrow afternoon.

Thanks for the interest thus far.

Making Timelines Easier

2008-02-12T16:29:00.000-05:00

So this post isn't an announcement that I have finished the documentation on rolling your own timeline. That's still a bit away. But last week, Google added a new functionality to its spreadsheets in Google Docs. You can read about it here. (Thanks go to JBJ for pointing it out to me.)

Basically, sharing a spreadsheet with other people in the past required them to sign up for a Google Docs account. In order to skirt this issue, Google has allowed you to create forms to generate the data within a spreadsheet. I've spent a little time playing around with this feature, wondering if I could get this to work with my timelines, which, as you know, are powered by Google Spreadsheets. The result is the Google Forms Timeline.

You can add an event (or 18) to the timeline by filling out the form. A link is provided on the timeline's page, but you can get there from here as well. You can see the actual spreadsheet here.

I see some decided advantages to using forms for populating the spreadsheet:

In the first place, students don't have to interface with the actual spreadsheet. This is good because the spreadsheet isn't easy to understand in and of itself. There's no place for instructions within it as there is within a form.
There is no chance that the students could do major damage to the spreadsheet (erasing large chunks, etc.) because they aren't allowed to touch it.
Students don't have to sign up for a Google docs account. I'm guessing that most of them will have a Gmail account, but there will be a few Yahoo! reactionaries among them, I'm sure. To get around this, you can either send students the link or send the form to them within an email. They can actually fill out the form from within the email, which is pretty cool. (Warning, my testing shows that this function didn't work well with Hotmail.)

There are some disadvantages, however:

If students make a mistake on the form, there is no way for them to correct it since they don't have access to the spreadsheet. They would have to email you, and you would have to log in and change things. This could happen repeatedly.
More importantly, by not giving them access to the spreadsheet, it feels to me as if the entire process could become less collaborative. In other words, if students aren't interacting with the entire data set, it will feel less like a wiki and, maybe, even less dynamic. They can't repeatedly make small changes to their events and watch them update in real time on the timeline.

In my mind, I'm not sure that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I've always really liked the wiki/collaboration idea of this project. And I like the fact that the students are interacting with the database without the intermediary step of a form. The form might be easier in the short run, but it somehow makes the exercise or assignments that might come from the timeline less intriguing to me.

Twitterpated

2008-02-11T16:00:00.002-05:00

It's common knowledge that you can tell how au courante a person is by the rate at which they adopt particular practices, objects, or technologies. I'm here to tell you that I downloaded the new Radiohead the morning it became available. But as far as my newest tool is concerned, I'm about as courante as a Commodore 64.

Within the past month, I've been playing with Twitter. Apparently Twitter was very, very cool last March. I never even heard of it until this January, which tells me that I haven't been reading enough articles in Wired. Or even the Wall Street Journal. But now that I know about it, you're going to know about it.

(Predictably, I came across a mention of Twitter when I was doing some reading related to timelines. A blogger who writes under the blog name kepo-ing Zz85 spent some time integrating Twitter with SIMILE's timeline. I haven't tried it for myself yet, but he left very detailed instructions on how to do it.)

Twitter is basically a platform for telling others what you are doing right at that moment. In other words, it works in a similar way to a person's status on Facebook. Like Facebook, you can view a person's status online and update your status online. One thing that differs about Twitter from Facebook, however, is that you don't have to log in to a platform to read about a person. Each Twitterer gets his or her own URL, where people can go to see the person's stream of updates. For instance, my url is twitter.com/briancroxall. You'll also notice that you can get an RSS feed from the page, so you could receive each of my "tweets" (what an individual Twitter post is called) in your RSS Reader of choice as they appear.

Once you have an account, you can watch what other people are doing on the public timeline. But where Twitter really excels is when you find friends that are also using the service. You can choose to "follow" another person on Twitter. What this means is that everytime that person updates his or her account, you receive their update on your timeline. In essence, this gives you real-time updates of what I'm doing. Yeah, I know: thrilling.

You can follow as many people as you like, which can result in a relatively noisy stream of information. Particularly idiosyncratic Twitterers have already become popular and mini celebrities. But there are also real celebrities using the service. Barack Obama and John Edwards, for example, have pages and each are being followed by more than 5000 people. What this means is that Twitter becomes an effective means for information dissemination from sources that you trust or from friends whom you want to know more about.

But let's take it one step further. And this is where Twitter differs from an application like Facebook. Twitter is cross-platform. What this means, is that while you can read and post to Twitter from its dedicated website, you can also do so using your mobile phone or your IM client. So, when I decide to go get pizza, I can text "Going to Fellini's" to Twitter (the number is 40404), and you will instantly get that update. What's more, you can choose to receive all of Twitter's updates not only on your Twitter account page or in your RSS reader but also on your mobile phone. So when I text Twitter, you'll get the update texted to your phone within a minute or so. See? Real time updating. The same principles apply when using Twitter from your IM. (An important caveat is that you have to pay text messaging charges on all updates sent to your mobile. So if you are following a lot of people, you could end up getting a lot of messages very quickly. Fortunately, you can turn off this feature. You can even schedule it to turn off at night, so you don't wake up to a lot of messages.)

The connection to mobile phones and SMS explains why you can only use 140 characters in Twitter posts. Text messages can only be about 160 characters, so Twitter allows you to have 140 of them. An added benefit of this restriction is perhaps the fact that you have to practice brevity in your writing. And, dear readers, you know that I can really use some brevity in my world.

Once you've set up your phone or IM to work with Twitter, you can use one more feature of the service, which is to "track" particular terms. If you send the phrase, "track ecit" to Twitter, then every tweet that goes through the system that contains the word "ecit" will be sent to your phone/IM, regardless of whether it originates with a person you are following or not. academhack writes about using this function during MLA to track the word "MLA" and thereby getting a sense of how Twitter was being used by conference participants and disgruntled partners/spouses who are annoyed to see their family members jet off right in the middle of the holidays. Tracking, by the way, only works with your cell phone or IM. You won't be able to track things online.

Okay, so now that we have covered how the service works, perhaps we can talk about how Twitter can be used in a classroom since that's what I'm most interested in with all these technologies. Why would you want to get your students using Twitter? Why do you want to know every banal detail about what is going on in their lives? And why would you want to get it sent to a mobile device rather than simply watching their Facebook profiles?

A good place to start thinking about these questions could be a Twitter assignment that academhack gave to a class last semester. The students had to follow his Tweets and had to sign up to follow other classmates. As the students began Twittering, academhack or academicdave, as he's known on Twitter, noticed that the result was that his class began to have conversations outside of class and that the students became more comfortable in discussion within the actual classroom. What happens, in short, is that the students developed a community and a sort of sixth sense as is discussed in the Wired article I linked above (and which I found via academhack's Twitter assignment). You can read academhack's thoughts about the assignment and about the larger implications for academia with Twitter on his blog post.

I have to credit this post for getting me to start thinking about the larger implications of Twitter for my own classrooms. Others have apparently felt this way, given the amount of attention that academhack's post has received in the Chronicle of Higher Education as well as other places. Getting to the table even faster than academhack is EDUCAUSE, whose July 2007 "7 Things You Should Know About..." document (pdf) examines Twitter in its academic setting. JBJ has recently suggested in an aside that he is using the service to reflect briefly on his teaching.

Here--at last--then, are a few more suggestions on my part for how one could use Twitter. One is to use a Twitter client like Twitbin on a projected screen while I'm lecturing. Since students will be more in listen/note-taking mode, they can use twitter to comment on what I'm saying, asking each other questions, etc. I could occasionally check the feed to see if they're following me (pun intended). This sort of meta-commentary could be distracting, but it could also provide a useful record of where I need to go back over concepts. At the same time, I could use Twitter as a free clicker/PRS system. It provides an easy way to ask a question and get students' answers readily available. Granted, you'd have to read through each answer rather than getting the answers totaled for you by software.

Another use for Twitter that parallels these two would be to use Twitter as a VERY abbreviated note-taking tool, which would allow a class to crowdsource the note-taking process. They could take notes on their laptops about what I'm saying. In their archive, they would have a collection of class content. If students are following each other, they could collectively generate a lot of notes all at once. The downside to this could be that it might be difficult to read through the notes that had been taken in this manner since you can only display so many tweets per page.

I'm hoping to think about other ways I could use Twitter in a classroom, and I'm hunting around the ol' internetz for any suggestions. Please feel free to suggest yours in the comments. There's a chance that this could be just a fad (that I'm radically late to) or not all that practical. Nevertheless, given the dispersion of mobile phones and the relatively high incidence of text messaging among our students, this seems to be a very effective tool for reaching our students on their own turf and for bringing the classroom a little closer to them.

Finally, here's a few fun things you can do with Twitter. Twittervision is a mashup with Google Maps that shows you where tweets are coming from in real time. The 3D view is a lot of fun. Twittervision's cousin, Flickrvision is even more fun, perhaps. The British blogger at OUseful Info has taken a similar approach and designed a Yahoo! Pipe and used it to geocode your tweets. Read about how you can use the Pipe here. What I like about this second application is that while Twittervision is a random representation of the sum total of Twitterers, you can use the Yahoo! Pipe to plot just your own tweets using the RSS feed from your Twitter home page. It depends on your using a place name in your tweets, however. So you'd want to be specific in what you say in order to develop an accurate representation of where you're twittering from. You can, of course, also integrate Twitter into Facebook.

And a last: Using Twitterfeed, you can have every blog post immediately broadcast as a tweet. Just...like...this.

More on Timelines

2008-02-05T10:53:00.001-05:00

Jason Jones has a new post on his blog about the Victorian Age Timeline that we collaborated on. He's much better at explaining what's compelling about using Exhibit for this work:

But what if you could do all that with image support, the ability to color-code and filter events by type, and the ability to locate events on a map? And what if that timeline could read data in a variety of formats–xml, json, and others? And, finally, what if that timeline could update itself in realtime from, for instance, a Google spreadsheet? Well, what you would have is the SIMILE Project's Timeline.

Oh, and I guess that I might gain more Web 2.0 street cred if I were to refer to the collaborative project of populating the timeline as "crowdsourcing." I must remember this for my talk in April for the library.

CiteULike

2008-02-04T15:38:00.001-05:00

I just read an article from last week's Chronicle about CiteULike. CiteULike more or less works like del.icio.us, but it is for academics to tag what they are reading recently. It doesn't appear to have as much functionality as Zotero, which I wrote about last September. But--unlike the current version of Zotero--it is a shared resource. Others can browse your articles and you can browse theirs. What's more, the site draws from Emory's sfx service, and therefore can link you more or less directly to the full text of an article if we have access through our library's databases.

Based on what each tool can currently do, CiteULike is a much more useful tool for research. It allows you to watch what others are reading and to take your references with you (because they're all online). Zotero has a better interface, in my opinion, and is more full featured. But until the next big release, it is tied to your local browser. And that's more or less what EndNote is.

I don't know that I'm going to start using CiteULike regularly. But that's got more to do with my not having internet access of my laptop than anything else.

(Cross-posted with the Emory English blog, to reach multiple audiences.)

Google Bombing (Just because I haven't done anything on Google for a while)

2008-01-31T14:16:00.000-05:00

You may remember two months ago when I wrote about trying to increase my Google footprint. The goal was to push this blog up a bit higher on the Google hit list, over and above the random scatterings of Amazon and other such sites.

I managed to erase the trace of my commercial practices. But the blog still comes in only at the eighth spot on the list. I'm still being beat out by my Writing Center profile from last year (why is that still online?), a piece of creative writing from my Bakhtin seminar, the Yahoo! Pipes that I built last semester (see this post), and several threads from the SIMILE listserv (where you can see what a realtive n00b I am with writing teh HTMLz). Sure, you eventually get my blog, but it's not quite what I'd hoped for.

And that's what you get with the regular Google button. What happens if you use the we're-oh-so-quirky-and-such-an-Internet-company-that-provides
-gyms-and-Aerons-to-all-its-employees-along-with-free-lunch-and-copious
-stock-options "I'm Feeling Lucky" button? Well, you get the top hit: my Writing Center profile. And this brings us to the process of Google bombing.

Google bombing is where a group of people work together to link particular sites and words to a third site. If enough people do this, then the results of a "I'm Feeling Lucky" search become skewed. A recent and well-known example of Google bombing happened in 2003, when searching on the phrase "miserable failure" took people to the White House's biography of George W. Bush. (In an interesting, somewhat meta-commentary on this process, doing the same "miserable failure" search today points to a BBC article that discusses Google bombing and this particular example.*) There are other popular Google bombing phrases, including "french military victories" and "more evil than Satan himself" which used to take you to Microsoft's home page but now (again with the meta?!*) takes you to a 1999 CNN article that discusses the "anomaly caused by quantum fluctuations in Web space".

Enter 2008 and a fascination with all things Chuck Norris (a favorite Internet meme along with lolcats and ninjas). Try using the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button with the phrase "find chuck norris." Amuse yourselves.

Among many things I find fascinating with this process, one is how it exposes the fiction in which Google acts as an arbitrator of collective intelligence (one topic in the just-released 2008 Horizon Report, more to come soon on this). We generally assume that Google's algorithm produces an unbiased glimpse of what the web has collectively determined is most relevant to a particular search phrase. Google enjoys its current leading position as a search engine precisely because it so consistently returns results that match what you and I are looking for that we tend to naturalize the relationship between algorithm and the masses of people whose work generates it.

The reality is that manipulating the search results doesn't require anything close to a hive mind. The BBC article linked above mentions that it took perhaps as few as 32 web pages to produce the Bush Google bomb. If you know the basics of the algorithm, then, you can produce results that have the patina of collective intelligence, but are really just the work of a few individuals.

This is one of the key issues in digital literacy. How do we teach our students (and ourselves) to recognize the difference between a Google bomb and a larger, collective decision to change the structure and semantics of the web more permanently? It's much harder doing seeing the difference with Google than it is with the Wikipedia, where you can at least see who the people are that edit the articles and know how often the changes have been made. The Google bomb becomes even harder to demystify because every link to it (including this blog) reinforces it.*

This mediascape is our world and the world of our students. We've got to learn to read it properly.
------
* Incidentally, Google initially had a policy of not halting Google bombs. As of 29 January 2007, however, they began to link the bomb phrases to sites that discussed the phenomenon of Google bombing, such as the BBC site above. For more information, see the Wikipedia. Or maybe type "Google bomb" and hit the button...

Department Directories 2.0

2008-01-30T15:25:00.000-05:00

When I was going through the wonderful experience of the job market this past fall (score: 41 apps, 1 request for additional materials, 2 MLA interviews, 0 campus visits [thus far]), I spent a lot of time looking at department directories. You do this so you can get a sense of the department. You want to know how many other Americanists there are, how many people that do contemporary lit, how many people whose work you already know or should know. These are--apparently--important considerations when writing your cover letter and become even more important when you have interviews with schools. I say apparently because in practice my cover letters changed most frequently in response to the job ad. It was interesting exercise in fantasizing, however, to get a sense of who all these departments were and who my potential colleagues could be.

There seem to be two ways of creating online directories. There is the helpful version, of which Rutgers has an example. You get a page that lists people's names, but also where they received their Ph.D. and, most importantly, what their interests are. If you want to know more about a particular faculty member, you just click on his or her name and get a new page. There you get publication information, courses taught, etc. But the key here is that you can find out people's scholarly interests all on one page.

This one-page approach is what separates the helpful version from its counterpart: the we-want-you-to-click-a-lot (WWYTCAL) version. An example of this can, sadly, be found on the English department site here at Emory. Now, I can't deny that this page looks beautiful. It's certainly nicer looking than Rutgers's site. But the fact is that if I were trying to learn about Emory's faculty, I would have to open 43 separate pages (doing so is made much easier with the Snap Links add on for Firefox). I'd be sure to learn something interesting on each one, where all the same information as on Rutgers's site is present: publications, place of degree, courses taught, etc. But clicking through to each of these pages, multiplied by 26 other schools--my non-scientific data survey related to my job search indicates that 66% of departments go for the WWYTCAL version--is a LOT of pages to sift through.

Enter SIMILE (again) and its Exhibit javascript (again). Using these tools and a Google Spreadsheet (again), I've developed a dynamic department directory of the Emory graduate students. Not only can you see up front what people's interests and specialties are, but you can do a text search through the directory or use the attributes at the right to pull up what you want. Want to know all the people in the department who do 18th British lit? You've got it. Want to know who is interested in "Trauma Theory"? There you go. Want to know who does Caribbean lit and Victorian fiction? Alsjeblieft.

You'll notice that there are four different views on the page currently. The "Thumbnail" view in particular has not been polished and would look a lot better if it featured some photos of the grad students. But you get a sense of the different view options that have been built into the Exhibit code. My favorite is the "Hometowns" view, the data for which was initially provided by Shawn McCauley's post here. I like the map view because it gives a different sense of who we are as a department. If I had more time, I would go on and add a view to see where the grad students received their various degrees before coming to the Ph.D. program at Emory.

I've started work on a faculty directory for the department, but my attention is needed elsewhere in ECIT at the moment, so I'm not sure when I'll get back to that. And I'll be the first to admit that my grad student directory isn't as pretty as the one Emory currently has for its faculty. But I like to think that mine would fall into the "helpful" or perhaps even "very helpful" category.

Timelines redux

2008-01-29T15:29:00.001-05:00

Yes, it's been far, far too long since you've had any news about what's turning out to be my favorite thing to do this year in ECIT. And that means, of course, another post about timelines!!

While at MLA, I had a chance to meet up with JBJ (and A and the little man) and talk some about my experiments with timelines. JBJ was the person who initially noticed the work being done at SIMILE. Based on my experiments during the just passed semester, we discussed building a timeline and an assignment for one of the courses he is teaching this semester. And lo and behold, that's what's come to pass. You can see the Victorian Age Timeline here.

Like the Hemingway Timeline that I began earlier, JBJ's is running his spreadsheet from a Google Spreadsheet. His students will be populating the spreadsheet in the coming weeks. Each student will be assigned one year between 1832 and 1901 and will eventually create 4 events for each year on the timeline. You can read the details of the assignment on his class wiki. Not only might this assignment give you an idea of how to design your own timeline assignments, but JBJ's also provided concise instructions on how one interacts with the fields of the spreadsheet.

While JBJ had the hard job of deciding how the timeline would actually integrate into his class, I got to do all the fun stuff: coding the timeline. While you'll note similarities between the Victorian Age Timeline and the Hemingway Timeline, there is a significant difference. The Hemingway Timeline was a cut-and-paste job from one designed by one of SIMILE's head programmers. With the Victorian Age Timeline, I decided to take the time to learn what each line of code does and how to build an Exhibit-based timeline from the ground up. If you feel like learning more about the process, feel free to peruse the source. What I'm most proud of in this iteration of timelines is that I now know how to control the colors of the events within the timeline. This means I no longer have to use the default Exhibit colors, many of which are similar to each other and likely to be confused.

One of my projects for this semester involves creating documentation that will hopefully allow anyone with interest in creating a timeline from scratch to do so. SIMILE has provided documentation already for doing this, but my goal is to make the instructions comprehensible to those who are not frequently writing their own HTML.

Look for more updates here.

Professors Strike Back!

2008-01-29T15:17:00.000-05:00

Much as I hate to drive traffic to something like mtvU, they actually have an interesting page up right now called "Professors Strike Back!" The general idea is to give professors a chance to respond to comments left for them on ratemyprofessors.com. (Sadly, yours truly never generated enough antipathy or enthusiasm in his four semesters teaching and TA'ing at Emory to generate any comments on the vaunted website.)

What I want to know is how the audience of mtvU (who is their audience, by the way?) is supposed to understand the video responses. Are these videos there to provide a serious and open forum for professors to finally have a chance to say what they'd like about their students? Or is this supposed to document even further how out of touch particular professors are? Where's the entertainment value here? Is it in seeing professors light out against students whom are deserving of calumny? Or is it in seeing these attempts at lighting out fall flat?

Interestingly, ratemystudents.com is waiting to be developed...

Blogging vs. Peer-Review

2008-01-22T10:15:00.001-05:00

An interesting article in today's Chronicle asks details Noah Wardrip-Fruin's attempts to couple the peer review process with comments from a blog where he will be posting excerpts of the book. His editor at MIT is (probably wisely) not allowing the book to go without a typical peer review process, but that this experiment is taking place at all suggests how far we've come in digital scholarship.

(Cross-posted from the Emory English Blog...but I thought it applied to both. What it really makes me want to do is start playing with WordPress so I can use CommentPress on a blog. JBJ: This is your chance!)

And we're...back! AKA Libraries and the "Google Generation."

2008-01-21T14:12:00.000-05:00

I don't really know yet if I can be considered a "blogger." I mean, I guess I have a blog. But it seems like a "real" blogger would have not let a month go by without posting something. Be that as it may, I have been working on something that I'm getting ready to post about soon. I just need to get it into better shape. Because, you know, the world is reading this. I've also got a long overdue post about a superbly interesting course that was taught at Vanderbilt last semester. But for now, I just want to mention a report (PDF) from the UK on the "Google Generation." A convenient summary can be found here.

A couple of the findings are particularly intriguing for someone who is interested in teaching with technology. First is that the so-called "Google Generation"--those who have grown up with the Internet--is not any more savvy with interactive (i.e., web technologies) than other users. What the study does turn up, according to the summary, is that while young people are comfortable 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."

This opens an interesting problem that I think gets ignored frequently: what do we mean when we say "web-literate"? Do we mean the students who are most comfortable with computers? Those who can process the most simultaneous streams of information? Those who know the fastest ways to find a particular piece of information? Or the locations where this information might most logically be? Or do we mean those who can be "critical and analytical [in] assess[ing] the information they find on the web"? While I'm all in favor of critical and analytical skills--especially for those students who are in my classroom--I do not think that our older models of literacy are necessarily and 100% applicable to the concept of literacy in a web environment. After all, this is a new medium we are dealing with and who's to say that models of reading/literacy taken from other media such as painting, architecture, music, or engineering aren't better models of literacy for something that is so hybrid? How much does the definition of web-literacy at play in the report have to do with its originating from an institution that has natural biases toward reading printed texts?

Regardless where you come down on these questions, it becomes important to recognize that the students coming into your classroom--even graduate students, these days--are going to know a lot about how to find particular pieces of information very quickly. But this doesn't mean that they know how to decide which pieces of information are most germane to their arguments. I know that when I started college, I wasn't adept at always knowing what articles I'd read didn't really contribute to my term papers. The only difference between me then and them now is perhaps the number of hours I had to spend in finding the sources--and which I tended to think justified my citing as many of the things as I'd read/found as possible.

But the lack of critical skills qua materials should also serve as a reminder that just because a student knows how to use Google does not mean that s/he is going to be comfortable writing HTML or even blogging. Students who watch YouTube have perhaps never made their own video project. Or if they have, they haven't necessarily uploaded/hosted it anywhere. Some of our students certainly will have as much and more experience than we have. But those of us who teach with technology can, I think, sometimes forget that what we see as new, exciting, and useful might just be another unfamiliar task in a classroom full of unfamiliar tasks (like analyzing a novel or a poem).

The second of the report's findings that I find interesting is that all users, from freshmen through professors, show a tendency to be "impatien[t] in search and navigation, and [have] zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs." (I can certainly relate to this emotion. I was still using dial-up at home less than a year ago.) However, what is intriguing is the library's response: that libraries need to respond more accurately to the needs of these petulant researchers.

So...if the professors are just as impatient when working in a library as their students, doesn't this betray some radical shift in the literacy of the professoriate? Shouldn't these people be able to take the advantages of a quick, online catalog search--rather than card catalogs--and then graciously ascend to their library's stacks to put to use their "critical and analytical skills"? How is it the "fault" of libraries that we all suddenly expect them to play a different role now than they did a dozen years ago?

Of course, one can say that it is the duty of the libraries who have got us hooked on all this fast information in the form of the catalogs or of the databases they provide to become equally fast and flat in all its operations. But given my final dissertation chapter, I'm suspicious of all these claims of the advantages of speed. What libraries and universities as institutions stand for is, in part, a validation of the benefits of slow and careful study. This doesn't mean we must remain hidebound or that some changes or fields don't need to move faster than others. But in a world so saturated with RSS feeds delivering the latest information without your even having to remember the URL of where it is originating from, I see slowness as one of the principal things for my students to learn. And judging from my dissertation progress and the experience of compatriots, I'd say that a Ph.D. is all about the same thing.

How do I reconcile my suspicions about what digital literacy should mean and my unwillingness to blame libraries for my research-related ADD? I'm not sure. I suspect that this will be a thematic question that will haunt me throughout my career. And I suspect that it will matter to yours as well. The turn to the digital may not affect English types as much as the vaunted "turn to linguistics." But this will matter more to more people.

Penn part 2

2007-12-10T12:45:00.000-05:00

I've just received an email from John MacDermott, Director for Instructional Technology at Penn's School of Arts and Sciences (SAS). He indicates that currently the only course the specifically considers how to use technology for teaching was developed in the Romance Languages and German departments. This cross-listed course (GRMN 517 / ROML 691), developed and taught by Profs. Kathryn McMahon and Christina Frei, "focuses on the evaluation, design, and development of multimedia in foreign language teaching." Students in the class learn how to use video-, image-, and sound-editing software and read about current trends in education. All students create an online teaching portfolio and a multimedia instructional project. Profs. Frei and McMahon have assistance in teaching the class from Ed Dixon, who is the SAS's Foreign Language Support Specialist.

This sounds like an exciting class, and I know that Emory's language faculty make frequent use of instructional technologies in their work in conjunction with our Language Lab. But I'm not sure to what extent the graduate students who teach languages are given formal instruction in the lab or have the opportunity for it. This warrants more investigation on my part.

John indicates that Frei and McMahon's class wasn't developed as part of a larger push to introduce technology into graduate student teaching and that it has not yet inspired the development of similar courses in other departments in the SAS. He did, however, suggest that I I check Penn's Graduate School of Education (GSE). It appears that the GSE offers a Masters in Education in "Learning Technologies in Education." More and more schools appear to be offering degrees like this. The downside is that graduate students in something like Penn's School of Arts and Sciences are not likely to take (or be permitted to take) courses that are taught in the School of Education. What's more, the content in the latter will not necessarily address the specific needs of those teaching in college and university classrooms.

I'm glad to have more information about Penn's offerings to their students. Hopefully I'll hear more soon from Columbia and Brown--the other two schools that were (rightly or wrongly) underrepresented in my findings thus far.

Finally summing it up: TLC Comparison

2007-12-06T13:17:00.000-05:00

So there you have it. 9 Schools: Duke, Washington University, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Vanderbilt, Columbia, Brown, and the University of Pennsylvania. While you can safely say that each school offers workshops on different technologies, there are in many cases programs that go above and beyond these one-hour trainings on a particular piece of software to provide opportunities for graduate students to become more familiar with specific instructional technologies. Harvard and Princeton have, respectively, PITFs and GAITs that get in-depth instruction in one or more technologies and then get the added experience of working closely with one or more faculty members to create new tools for instruction.

The model of TLC/TPC that we are building on here, however, is most closely mirrored at Duke and Washington University. Here's what I wrote in my summary for the "Comparable Efforts at Peer Institutions" section of our proposal to the Graduate School:

As can be seen, several of our peer institutions have programs in place to train graduate students on technologies that can be used in the classroom. The programs at Duke and Washington University are closest to our proposal: they are specifically designed for graduate students; they teach the basics of many of the technologies we propose teaching; they emphasize the pedagogical uses of these technologies; and they result in a significant number of contact hours.

While the similarities of our proposal to programs at Duke and Washington Universities may recommend our program, we believe two differences in format make it most valuable to Emory’s graduate students and for the instruction in Emory College. First, instead of enrolling students from every discipline in the Graduate School, our program groups students into departmental clusters. This restriction fosters focused discussions about how technologies may be used in classrooms with similar and specific pedagogical aims. Second, while Duke’s course is taught by a faculty member who specializes in instructional technology and Washington University’s workshop is conducted by peers, our proposal employs three complementary layers of instruction: an instructional technology specialist (ECIT staff), a peer (graduate student fellow), and a faculty mentor. In our pilot program, the faculty mentor has led discussions on adapting different technologies to meet the particular goals of the graduate students’ disciplines. A faculty mentor provides the perspective on the classroom that neither a technology specialist nor a peer can provide and ensures that the workshop emphasizes that technology is not the end but rather a means to improving both one’s teaching and the learning of one’s students.

So, if any of you dear readers remain after this trip through the fabulous world of applied instructional technologies, what do you think?

How does TLC compare? Washington University

2007-12-06T12:23:00.000-05:00

The last school that I looked into is Emory's arch nemesis--at least if you believe our 2005 undergraduate student leaders.

I'm pleased to report Washington University (in St. Louis) has a program that, along with Duke's, most closely resembles TLC. The Graduate School there offers a yearly Graduate Student Summer Workshop (GSSW) that focuses on the "development and delivery of technology-enhanced course content." The workshop lasts two days (5 hours each day), and the technologies they cover are similar to those that we have explored thus far in T(P/L)C: course management software, web authoring, PowerPoint, wikis, and blogs. The course is peer-led, and there is a faculty panel discussion as a closing event. Participation in the seminar also fulfills one of the requirements for the Graduate School's Teaching Citation.

GSSW is open to students from every area of the Graduate School. In 2006 (the year for which I could find statistics), 36 students participated: 14 were from the Humanities, 13 from Social Sciences and Social Work, and 9 from Natural Science departments. Over 400 students have participated in the program since its inception in 1997. 1997? Wow: this is the earliest program that I have found so far. Is it any coincidence that this is the year that ECIT opened? I think not.

In addition to GSSW (which really needs a better acronym), Wash U has ITeach. This is an annual, day-long seminar that allows faculty to share ideas and insights about teaching with technology. Graduate students can register to attend, but it doesn't appear that they are frequent presenters. The program reminds me of EduCATE at Emory (which we might need to bring back soon).

One other interesting thing that I found on Wash U's websites was the Graduate Online Lecture Project. The project showcases the work of grad students who have applied to the program to gain the skills they need to develop a module to teach a particular "pedagogical challenge" in an introductory course for which they serve as TA. It is also an outlet for students to showcase their research in new ways, including Flash, a tool we don't teach at ECIT. Based on everything that I can dig up on the program, it appears that it has been defunct since 2005. Nevertheless, I think this represents something that, like Duke's e-portfolio project, is something that we should consider in the future of TPC as it would give our students something concrete to walk away with and to show to others.

In other news, there are several long-term digital projects in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, but these are mainly run by faculty.

My verdict on Wash U is that they have programs that parallel ours rather nicely. GSSW in particular is similar to what we are proposing because it has graduate students and pedagogy as its foci. I'm certain that teaching at Wash U and their graduate students have benefited immensely from the opportunities it fosters and the related discussion happening on their campus. There are some differences between TPC and GSSW, and I--perhaps predictably--believe that our program has important advantages. But I'll address those in a final post that summarizes the whole of my investigation.

My Google footprint

2007-12-06T11:47:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick one to break up all that TPC monotony gumming up your RSS reader of choice. I've been thinking recently about how being on the job market subjects me to a higher possibility of being Googled. What do you get? And how do you control it?

The current first hit on my name ("Brian Croxall") is my profile page from last year when I was a Dean's Writing Center Fellow. That's good, I suppose. Except it doesn't really take you anywhere else. Oh, and I had fun writing the profile. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I would hate to get a job interview where they ask me about my mastery of the "transdigital ukulele."
The next few hits are from the SIMILE mailing list archives. So I guess you could see that I"ve been interested in determining the pedagogical uses of interactive timelines.
Then you hit a piece of creative writing that I made in conjunction with a group, improvisational writing exercise that was the final activity of a class on "Bakhtin's Circles" taught by Walter Reed and Mikhail Epstein in Spring 2004. That's fun, I suppose.
A few more hits down one finally comes across a mention of something more "academic": a newsletter from the JFK Presidential library that mentions my winning an Ernest Hemingway Research Grant to do archival research. Of course, if you follow this link, you'll see that the page no longer contains this information.
And finally, the last hit on the page is for this blog.

Until a week ago or so when I first started thinking about this, the top hit on my name in Google was my Amazon wish list. I guess that' s nice if people want to buy me things. But it wasn't really the face I wanted to present to the world. There were a few other similar instances like that, and I've managed to remove these from the hits by changing my screen name from "real name" to a pen name.

I also decided to include my full name in my blogger profile--rather than just "Brian"--as I think this blog is at least a representation of my thoughts on subjects that I view formative for my future research and, especially, classroom practice. But thus far, it hasn't generated much of a bump up the charts.

Of course, the real solution to getting Google hits is to understand their algorithm (which I don't--especially since it's a trade secret) and to have other people link to pages that talk about you. This blog or any of the pages related to my academic work haven't generated many backlinks yet, and this is one reason that interesting things about me aren't really showing up.

Something exciting about the Internet is the chances it gives us to play with our identity. We all know that our interlocutors might be dogs. Or rather, we don't know if we know this. But sometimes we want to establish who we are online and we want to help people see relevant information about us. If you're a normal individual, it can be very difficult to work the system to the ensure that you have a real web presence and one that responds to what you'd want. Of course, there are arguments that I shouldn't have control over what people see about me. If you want that, you can ask me for my CV. A Google search, on the other hand, reveals a sort of Digg-like collective opinion of what's most important to know about "Brian Croxall."

There are, of course, two more things that I can do to try to increase my visibility. First, I can make a much more detailed and useful personal web page. And second, I can write a blog post on the subject of identity, include my identifier repeatedly and let the process take a meta-effect. Let's see how that works.

How does TLC compare? Princeton

2007-12-06T10:44:00.000-05:00

By the time I got to Princeton, I had become very good at knowing how to use Google and a university's own website to track down the places where I expected to find information about opportunities for graduate students to learn how to implement technology in their teaching.

So it wasn't that hard to find their workshops that they offer. They have two series:

The Productive Scholar focuses on "common and available desktop software to produce more with less effort." Word, Excel, Vista, and EndNote are all subjects that get discussed in the one-hour encounters.
Lunch 'n Learns address broader technology topics of interest to more general audiences. There was a recent session on how to make/use podcasts, but another on eBay sniping and human behavior.

One thing that sets these workshops apart from those offered at other schools I have looked at is that they are explicitly open to the public. I imagine that Emory wouldn't have too much trouble with the public attending some of our technology events, but we aren't exactly inviting them or trying to provide this sort of service to the larger Atlanta community.

Another interesting thing I found--and which I already reported on the Emory English blog--is that Princeton as a whole has a blog "for and about Princeton University faculty use of technology for teaching and research." There are no authors listed, so I'm inclined to view this as an official media outlet of the university. This means that this isn't a blog so much about discussion and going back and forth on ideas as it is a means for Princeton to represent to the world that they are doing something with technology. A lot of what gets reported here is on content presented at the Lunch 'n Learns.

Another nice tool that I found that Princeton has provided for faculty and staff is an Office Hours Scheduler. Since students can make appointments using the software, I would think this is something that would be a real benefit to a university community. There's no longer a need for students to pester you about your office hours repeatedly (if you've posted them, as Tenured Radical wrote about a month ago) and an added disincentive for particular faculty members who frequently don't hold office hours). Emory has Meeting Maker, but you have to be given an account and I can guarantee that students don't have this. There's possibly a way that you could do this with Google Calendar, but that would likely be on an ad hoc basis for each faculty member. Nope. Every university should have a program like this--even if it is currently in Beta.

But what we're really interested in as far as comparing Princeton's offerings to ECIT is their Graduate Associates in Instructional Technology (GAIT) program. This is a program designed to educate graduate students in particular technologies while simultaneously improving course content for faculty members. The program is very similar to Harvard's Presidential Instructional Fellows Program. Faculty, groups of faculty, or departments propose a project and nominate one or more grad students at a GAIT. GAITs then receive training from the Office of Information Technology in the technologies and skills needed for the project and then consult one-on-one with the faculty members seeking assistance. In addition to the training they receive, GAITs are paid (currently at $15/hour). The projects last a maximum of two semester and eight weeks during the summer, for a total of 160 hours.

I like the idea of getting graduate students the opportunity to work closely with faculty members on a particular project and, as I said about Harvard's program, this resembles something that we have kicked around about having "TPC-certified" students that faculty here could call on to help them realize projects they don't have the skills for. But what I would contend is missing from Princeton's program is the emphasis on the graduate students as an equal partner/beneficiary. Students interested in the GAIT program are not allowed to apply, but have to wait on interested faculty members in their departments to propose a project and then try to convince these professors that they are the students that should be picked. (This, in my opinion, was a downside for Emory's ECO program.) The GAIT program's description even seems to underplay the role of the graduate students: "[GAITs] also provide a much-needed communication path between faculty and the central IT support staff, thus insuring that IT support efforts are meeting faculty needs. [...A] key function of GAIT members is to connect faculty with the appropriate centralized support resources."

It's understandable that Princeton wants to invest in helping their faculty--after all, the faculty are the ones that will hopefully be at the school for several decades. And this program does allow graduate students a window into how one develops a large project with the intent of improving teaching. But I think the distinct advantage of TPC is that grad students are the sole audience and the focus is pedagogy.

I'm not sure how ECO will be developing given the differences that were instituted last year. I do think that there is room at Emory for a program similar to those at Harvard and Princeton. But I think that it would be complemented in important ways by the implementation of TPC.

How does TLC compare? Brown

2007-12-04T11:24:00.000-05:00

The story at Brown is much the same as at Columbia and Penn: there are workshops on various topics offered by Training.Brown. There are some courses listed specifically for grad students, but further investigation indicates that these are mostly the same courses that appear under the faculty and staff tabs. One thing interesting about the Training.Brown program is that, at least for undergrads, it combines training on technology with training about writing and research, led, respectively, by the Brown Writing Center and Library. The conjunction of these subjects seems ideal. All of these entities at Emory would be willing to see each other in complementary roles, but I can't say the the relationship has been formalized in any particular way, and I could see how doing so could produce specific benefits for undergrads, grad students, and faculty.

Apart from these specific training opportunities, Brown offers grants that will result in the Instructional Technology Group creating materials for your classes including customized websites, video productions, and animations to help teach concepts. As far as I can tell, however, these grants don't result in people learning new skills but rather in the people who already have the skills being directed to work on a project that faculty have imagined. This is nice for busy faculty, but it doesn't lead to a dissemination of knowledge and--again as with many of these grant programs--they won't necessarily benefit or be available to graduate students.

To help graduate students (and faculty) with projects involving technology Brown also offers Student Technology Assistants. The STAs are undergrads who can help with creating course websites, scanning and digitizing materials, or providing technical illustrations. Again, I'm not sure how much work the grad students do along with the STAs. Regardless, since one is interacting on a one-to-one level with an undergraduate, I'm going to guess that there is not much of an opportunity for discussing the ins and outs of pedagogy in the college classroom.

I'm going to try to call some people at Brown, Columbia, and Penn to see if there is anything else to the story that I might be missing.

How does TLC compare? Columbia

2007-12-04T10:55:00.001-05:00

Next on my list was Columbia. Again, there are courses on specific technologies offered by The Teaching Center of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The Teaching Center offers some interesting opportunities, such as a seminar earlier this year on "Preparing Future Faculty" that was held monthly from January to April. However, if you look at the navigation bar on the left of the Teaching Center's pages, you quickly discover that there are no events listed under "Teaching With Technology." Obviously the Graduate School believes that instructional technology is important enough to warrant notice on their front page, but at the moment it seems that any events connected to this subject aren't making their present felt online. (Of course, as I've mentioned previously, TLC has a similar problem. Anyone conducting research like I have on Emory might be hard pressed to find much about our initiatives.)

Columbia, like Harvard, seems to have many different schools under the umbrella of the university. As such, parts of the community are very invested in the academic application of technology to academic spaces. For example, the Center for Technology and School Change is a part of Columbia's Teachers College. As was the case with Harvard's TIE program, Columbia's CTSC is directed toward K-12 education and/or consulting. Teachers College has another program with similar aims: Communication, Computing, and Technology in Education. If I had to characterize the differences between the programs, I think the latter is a degree-granting one that prepares people to academically discuss technology in many facets of education and to go on to work professionally in related fields. The former builds on this mission with the specific goal of effecting progressive educational change via technology.

There are other programs throughout Columbia's infrastructure that address technology and teaching. But my overall impression is that the Graduate School (the entity to which I'm comparing Emory's efforts) is not offering much beyond short workshops.

How does TLC compare? Penn

2007-12-04T10:51:00.000-05:00

All right, I finished all of my research about the various peer institutions I investigated while writing our proposal to the Grad School about TLC, which is now being rebranded as "Technology, Pedagogy, Curriculum" (TPC) as we roll out to organizations beyond the English Department.

I'm still negotiating for the rights to post the entire proposal here on the blog, but until I've secured those I'm going to continue posting what I've learned about the different schools' programs.

So University of Pennsylvania. I'm a little worried that I might have missed something glaring here because there was actually very little that I could find on the subject of teaching/helping grad students with technology. There are, of course, the requisite lunchtime, hour-long courses that people can take to become more familiar with technology. Some workshops are geared specifically for School of Arts and Sciences instructors (read, faculty and grad students). Others are more for the student body (read, undergrads and grad). These are obviously good resources to have, but I continue to believe that there is value for educating grad students separately from undergrads and faculty (as well as together, at times0 on the uses of instructional technology.

Penn also has technology grants available to help with the design of technology components for courses or departments. But so far as I can tell much of the work on the grants is performed by computing services (read, faculty and students don't necessarily learn from the experience). And although I can't find a stipulation that only faculty may apply for these grants, inevitably things of this nature end up going to faculty (and rightly, I think).

Penn uses many of the same technologies as us. And they even have a page devoted to discussing technology with teaching, but it is basically a list of resources rather than a consideration of best practices.

My favorite thing that I have found at Penn thus far is that they provide an online tool for instructors to design and collect midterm evaluations for their courses. Of course we could do this SurveyMonkey...but it's great to see this in place.

My verdict? I would have to talk with some people at Penn to be sure, but it appears that there is little or no instruction aimed directly at graduate students on blending technology with their teaching.

Remediating Coupland's The Gum Thief

2007-11-27T11:53:00.000-05:00

So a week and a half ago I finished Douglas Coupland's new novel, The Gum Thief. I learned to appreciate Coupland early on in grad school when I read Microserfs, a mind-1990s book the chronicles the adventures of a group of programmers who break away from Microsoft and try to start their own company and end up forming a new form of family. I liked it immensely.

Last year I read JPod and found it to be far inferior--basically a retelling of Microserfs but with characters who were largely unsympathetic and a postmodern deus ex machina that has the author showing up in postindustrial factories around China. Parts of it were funny, but the charm (are grad students allowed to like charm?) of the first book didn't exist anywhere in its retread.

So my expectations for The Gum Thief weren't as high as they might have been last year. While the novel was definitely better than JPod, I still didn't like it as much as Microserfs. That's okay--my second book isn't sold nearly as charming as my first, after all. The novel is a series of interlocking narratives/novellas/epistolary passages exchanged between people working at Staples. It's perhaps a long poem to the frustrations (there...now I sound like an English student) of middle age and quarter life in the big box world of retailing. I'd read it again, but it's not high on my list.

Today, however, I discovered on YouTube that there are a series of videos that accompany the novel and its different narratives. In this hypertextual medium you can obviously enter the narrative as you will, but if you were to follow the path of the print book, you would likely begin by viewing a video about Roger, the dominant voice in the book. This project was commissioned by Coupland's Canadian publisher, Random House. One assumes that Coupland himself must have had something to do with this, but one can't determine the extent.

In any case, call me a pitiful millenial, but I think that these videos spark a lot more interest in me about the book as they could encourage different processes of reading and interpretation. And they invite responses in kind, which could be a fun project for a class or students.

New tool for reading

2007-11-26T15:55:00.000-05:00

Just in case you missed it: Amazon last week announced Kindle. This is an e-book that, like the Sony Reader before it, uses an "e-ink" that is a lot easier to read than any other screen you've ever encountered. I've seen one of these in person and found 98.42% as easy to read as a piece of paper or a regular book. (I can't tell you how I reached that figure. It's proprietary information.)

What's different about Kindle is that it has built-in Wireless and that Amazon is making the wireless access free. This means that you can buy books wherever you might happen to be. Oh, and surf the web. And listen to mp3s. And read your favorite blogs (RSS subscriptions cost a small amount.) And favorite newspapers (New York Times delivery and others start at $14/month.)

There are all sorts of places where you can read about the $400 machine (a bit overpriced and more than a bit ugly [it's obviously not an Apple product]) including Amazon's own web page, which includes a video of Toni Morrison talking about it. But a good one that you might not find otherwise is at Macworld.

If I had more money, I'd get this. As it is, I'm waiting for the prices to come down. And for them to try to implement easier PDF support. Life would be much better if I could read journal articles on this. Did I mention that you can make notes on the things you're reading?

Vanderbilt, part 2. Now improved with bonus bits of Wisconsin!

2007-11-26T12:24:00.000-05:00

I just got off the phone with Derek Bruff at Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching. We chatted a bit about what we are trying to accomplish with TLC and about parallels that Vanderbilt might have.

He indicated that there are a lot of programs at Vanderbilt that focus on helping students and faculty learn how to teach. These programs are run by varying organization and departments. The Center for Teaching provides some of these, but also tries to keep tabs on what the departments are doing.

Given this, he indicated that while technology makes up a portion of the discussion in pedagogy at Vanderbilt, there isn't any one course/workshop that does the same thing that TLC does: a focus on technology as the means to pedagogical ends. He also said that Vanderbilt had had someone at the provost level who was head of instructional technology, but that the position was eliminated a few years ago.

In a subsequent email exchange with Derek (begun after I started this post), he indicated that much of the technology instruction takes place within departments as the disciplinary differences were more important than any divide between graduate students and faculty. I agree that this is important and is something that we particularly like to emphasize about TLC in its current configuration. As I replied to him, "The advantage of TLC was that we had a room of English grad students who were familiar with each other's research and with the basic format for the courses we are teaching. There is also a shared assumption of what methods one uses and what we feel to be important skills for our students to gain. All of these things make it possible for us to discuss specifically how we would use a particular technology to teach in our classrooms. These discussions are assisted by our having had the Director of Graduate Studies and one other faculty member attend all of the workshops. They can lead these discussions in a particular way that the staff in ECIT cannot." This is something that Vanderbilt and I (or we, if I can be said to speak for ECIT and those involved in the project) both value.

Derek also indicated that the Center for Teaching had originally focused efforts on graduate students and faculty separately, but now aim their programs to both groups at once. This shift appears to have come at the same time as the focus on discipline. (Thus, programs that differentiated between grad students and faculty become programs that differentiated between departments.) ECIT has had success with programs that put faculty and graduate students together--particularly Emory College Online (ECO). Yet I feel that there was something gained by the graduate students having a space for themselves--assisted, of course, by Drs. Rusche and Elliott. To my mind, I think faculty who learn new technologies are supplementing the techniques they have already learned over a few or many years. Graduate students are, instead, learning who they are as teachers and have very different questions about the implementation of a particular tool.

Finally, Derek pointed me toward an interesting consortium that Vanderbilt is a part of: the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL). CIRTL is a group of universities (read the list here) who are working to improve the teaching of graduate students and junior faculty in the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Each campus has different initiatives related to this, but one of the most interesting are the courses that are being taught at the University of Wisconsin's Delta Program, the CIRTL center in Madison. These courses are available to graduate students and carry credit. Their topics range from "Diversity in the Classroom" to "Effective Teaching with Technology." This last looks very much like what we are doing with ECIT. Of course, it is limited to students in STEM, but Delta has made all of its course's syllabi and materials available via CIRTL as guidebooks. The idea is that any university could take the materials and more or less teach the same class from it. So with nothing more than a click you can have the 75-page guidebook. (It's when you read through this that you realize the differences between how we have talked about technology in TLC and how it might need to be done with people from other disciplines, say the GDBBS.) To me this seems like the ideal mode for scholarship and pedagogy: sharing our tricks.

Poking around Wisconsin's site lead to a couple more discoveries.

They, of course, have workshops available to faculty and graduate students on different instructional technologies. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly geared toward graduate students, however, and nothing that focuses on pedagogy so much as the actual technology.
The engage program appears to spearhead campus initiatives for the implementation of various technologies across the curriculum. This year there is a focus on podcasting (two English professors received awards for their use of the tool) and on simulations and games. The site has a very good summary of everything you might need to know about podcasting to get started, but I assume that there was hands-on training for interested parties.
They also have a site that lists all the grants available to members of the university to begin work on a technology project.
The strategic plan for the entire university calls for improving students use of information (scroll down to Roman numeral V).
Finally, Wisconsin sponsors the Information Technology Academy, a "4-year pre-college technology access and training program for talented students of color and economically disadvantaged students attending Madison Public Schools. Our mission is to prepare students for technical, academic, and personal excellence in today's Information Age." Students compete to enter at the end of 8th grade. It would be great to see Emory providing a similar outreach program here.

Hmm. I guess I've moved on quite a bit from Vanderbilt. My updated verdict, however, is that we seem to be ahead of Vanderbilt at the moment. Wisconsin has something in place for some of its students (sciences) that is similar to TLC, but it is a semester-long course. Both schools provide training on various technologies, although they might not necessarily be specifically for graduate students nor do they seem to be focused on particular disciplines nor include the sort of faculty mentoring that we are trying to get into place.

How does TLC compare? Harvard

2007-11-20T11:40:00.001-05:00

If I thought that Emory had a lot of institutes and programs that aren't connected to each other, it is nothing compared to the warren that is Harvard. I had flashbacks to applying to graduate school as I looked through the pages, remembering that one reason I didn't apply there was because their website was SO dauntingly bad. It's improved some today, but it is still not particularly friendly.

In any case, Harvard has some things that resemble various aspects of TLC, but nothing that replicates it or that any one single student could realistically encounter while s/he was enrolled. The most interesting program they offer is a Presidential Instructional Technology Fellows Program. This program is available to graduate students across the university by the Office of the Provost (which also sponsor grants and awards for faculty). The program trains fellows (PITFs), who can be undergrads or graduate students, to work with faculty to "to develop digital course materials with immediate educational benefits." This can take forms from improving websites to making PowerPoint presentations with video and more. Of course, they have a portfolio of completed projects. The portfolio I've linked to is specifically for students working with Faculty of the Arts and Sciences.

As I understand it, the faculty propose a project to their schools and the schools decide which projects to allocate to the fellows, who have applied independently to each school's program (Harvard Law, the Graduate School of Education, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences all have, for example, their own PITF applications). The fellows work on projects for either a summer term or for an entire academic year. According to a 2005 Harvard Gazette article about the program's first year, 65 fellows worked on projects in over 150 courses.

This all sounds very exciting--especially since it is a campus-wide initiative--but I've not been able to find anything specific about the training that the fellows receive prior to starting their work. The best description of the program lacks this information. Although it is obvious that some training is given, it appears to be on a more individual basis, where the fellow comes to something like Harvard's version of ECIT individually to get some information about how to complete a particular project envisioned by a faculty member. The fellow then works with the faculty member to finish the project. What TLC has that this program does not is a discussion of a wide range of tools and a conversation that is centered around pedagogy. In fact, this resembles an idea that was kicked around following last year's TLC that there could "TLC-certified" grad students who could then get paid to work with faculty on various projects.

The other program that Harvard has that appears to be similar to ECIT is a Technology, Innovation, Education (TIE) program in the Graduate School of Education that leads to an MA. This is a one-year program where the emphasis is on teaching, but technology is the means to this end. Their courses (they take a total of 8 and do not write a thesis) cover many of the subjects that we tackle in TLC, but they are much more in-depth and--again, as happens at Duke--they produce final projects that demonstrate the skills they have learned.

The obvious problem with this program as compared to TLC is that it takes a year. Emory is not interested in a project of this scale. There has been talk and scuttlebutt about a digital humanities certificate that the GSAS might start offering, and this might or might not be linked to the expanded TLC. But such a certificate would arguably provide a middle ground between TLC and TIE. Such a certificate would also, one assumes, encompass discussions about digital research and scholarship, something that TIE is not focused on, since it is not a PhD program.

My verdict? Harvard's PITF program is a great example of a university focusing on giving students and faculty a chance to collaborate. This collaboration leads to improved teaching and building skills for the students and faculty. There is not so far as I can see, however, a central plan for the fellows' training. Moreover, the focus seems to be on the product and not specifically on the use of the product in the classroom. I know this is a fine line, but I get the feeling there is more of a discussion in TLC on the impact of the technologies on the classroom. I think that this is assisted by the fact that TLC is a cohort of individuals. The TIE program at Harvard is, perhaps, a very expanded version of TLC. It's not what we want to do here. Between both programs, Harvard perhaps offers an experience that is close to what we envision for TLC.

Google footprint for TLC at Emory

2007-11-20T09:59:00.000-05:00

So this might be jumping the gun a bit, but I realized yesterday in discussing what I'm doing right now, that it would actually be very difficult to find anything on TLC at Emory if I were to do a Google search. It wouldn't be that difficult to find ECIT and the programs they offer, but you'd be hard pressed to see much about TLC. The best bit that we have is a little blurb that I did last year following the first iteration (scroll down for it). Depending on your search terms, this page comes up within the top five or so of hits on Google. But that's not ideal.

Obviously if TLC becomes more of a GSAS initiative it will get a bigger presence on the web. But something that ECIT should be consciously thinking about is how we can let others know what we're doing here.

How does TLC compare? Vanderbilt (with additional thoughts about mp3 services)

2007-11-19T13:17:00.000-05:00

As opposed to Duke, Vanderbilt does not have anything that approaches TLC. They do have a Center for Teaching, which seems analogous to our Center for Teaching and Curriculum (CTC). They offer a program similar to TATTO called TAO. They offer workshops on teaching, working groups on different issues, a teaching certificate program, and a Future Faculty Preparation Program. Both of these last two seem useful to me as far as filling a potential gap that Emory has (a GSAS-wide initiative beyond TATTO to improve teaching and to assist students with professionalization).

What they don't have is much in the way of training on technology. They do have a page on the Center for Teaching's website that is dedicated to an overview of teaching technology. The page has a number of resources, such as articles and book reviews. Unfortunately, most of these are far out of date (publication dates of 2001 and 2000 abound). The most useful things on the page are links to a second series of pages on things like class management software, online writing, and podcasting. These, however, turn out to be little more than FAQs. While they have some useful information--particularly the one on clickers--there is nothing about further training.

Further searches for centers of instructional technology and the like have turned up nothing. One thing I did find, however, is VUmix: Vanderbilt's music services for the school community. They can get, for example, Napster accounts and download an unlimited amount of music for $2/month. I wonder how this would affect their iPod ratios on campus since Napster only works with players that can handle WMA with DRM (i.e., almost every brand except for Apple). You can, of course, stream the music on any computer. If you're feeling left out of the good times and low-cost music, then you might want to check out Ruckus. It's a free subscription for all college students. The music is supported by advertising and can only be streamed. If you want to take it with you (on mp3 player), then you can pay $20 for a whole semester of this privilege. Of course you, again, need to have an mp3 player that is PlaysForSure capable. iPods need not apply.

In any case, my verdict regarding Vanderbilt's TLC capabilities? They don't seem to have anything like this. Nor do they seem to have a center of any kind that offers training to students or faculty on technology. I've placed a call to their Center for Teaching to try to get more information, but the appropriate administrator hasn't returned my call. Look here for edits in case I get more.

How does TLC compare? Duke

2007-11-19T11:50:00.000-05:00

My first stop was one of our perennial rivals: Duke. Duke has a CIT (Center for Instructional Technology) that seems to offer very similar resources as ECIT. Among these resources are courses and workshops that graduate students can take to familiarize themselves with technology. (I do find it telling that there is nothing listed under the upcoming grad student events.) Of course, students are welcome to attend the courses that are offered to faculty as well. I'm particularly intrigued by the workshop that offers to help people learn how to keep their students engaged.

More importantly, Duke does offer something that is similar to TLC. But whereas we have an 8-session workshop spread over a month, they have a one-credit course: Instructional Uses of Technology. Reading through their syllabus (PDF file) shows that they cover much of the same materials that we do. They meet once a week for an hour and 45 minutes and they have a total of 13 sessions. At the end of it, they must produce an electronic portfolio that showcases some of what they've learned as well as serving as a document they can use when trying to get jobs. You can see sample e-portfolios here, including some by English types.

As far as I'm concerned, the most advantageous part of this being a course is that you're required to produce something and that it must be a finished product. TLC thus far serves as an introduction to different technologies and a discussion of their implementation. This means that students don't have to create anything--nor do you have time to. Some of the feedback that we have received via our TLC survey indicate that this is something that people feel would improve the class. (I'm not sure yet if we will publish the survey results. I'm for it, but I need to take it up with all interested parties.)

The E-Portfolio seems like an important thing. You have to master skills to produce it. (This means you don't just fiddle with Dreamweaver for a few minutes and move on. ) So when you're ready to put your syllabus online, you know how to do it. There is a suggestion that these e-portfolios also include video of students teaching. None of the examples that I looked at include this, but it could be useful. Moreover, the course asks people to write a teaching statement that integrates technology into the statement. There are, of course, a lot of ways that you can do this in any teaching statement. But I believe that our ability to use these technologies are important marketable skills and are especially pertinent to our teaching and they should consequently be highlighted as such.

So there's the Duke report. My verdict? They have a comparable program, but one with a demonstrable outcome. Students therefore leave it feeling like they absolutely know how to do something, as opposed to having a basic knowledge and a feeling that they could do something and know where to go for help.

EDIT: One thing that I forgot to mention where Emory trumps Duke. Since this class is offered to everyone in their graduate school, you have a lot of people from different disciplines learning together. This is good for some things, but you lose the ability to have very specific discussions about particular needs in a particular discipline. Needless to say, the Duke class will probably not feature a second faculty member from a specific field who would be able to direct such a discussion.

How does TLC compare?

2007-11-19T10:49:00.001-05:00

Last week, Shannon, Wayne, Michael, and I met with Dean Tedesco to propose expanding TLC to more of the Graduate School. The meeting was very successful, and it seems like this is something that the GSAS is interested in supporting.

When proposing a program, however, you have to find funds. And the best way to get funds at Emory--and at other schools, I imagine--is to demonstrate to those who control the budgets that your "peer" institutions are already doing something like this and that there programs are comparable. This inspires fear in people and a "me too!" response. The other possible outcome is to show that no other schools are doing something like this or that their programs are inferior to ours. This then gives us a chance to see a niche that Emory is filling and doing well at. I would think that this second choice would be the preferable one, and that it would allow us to establish a name for ourselves. But my limited experience with suggesting initiatives to Emory administrators leads me to believe that the first is SOP here.

In any case, if you want to see the results of this search, you can browse my findings at del.icio.us using the tags "TLC+peer." I'll either update this post with boiled down findings or post additional entries. You know, to make your bloglines subscriptions shoot skyward.

Improving my Timeline

2007-11-16T13:43:00.001-05:00

I had some time today to play with my timeline again. You can see it here. I've figured out how to resize the bubbles so large images don't get cropped. I've managed to key the different types of events to different colors on the timeline. And I added a box that allows you to restrict certain types of events. If I wanted to specify more attributes for these events, I could bring in additional boxes as well.

I'm not happy about how the one "mixed" event is rendered in white against the light gray background. I've got an email out to the experts about controlling the color selection of both the timeline and the event types. I anticipate that their response might be for me to look at other examples source code (CTRL-U to the rescue), but while I've done that, I can't yet see how to implement this specific change.

I found another related tool today: The Universal Timeline Aggregator. This is basically a tool that takes an RSS or Atom feed and displays the information on a timeline. You can do it for this blog. But the low incidence of posting means that it isn't particularly exciting. I've tried it with more populated RSS feeds: CNN, The Valve, Go Fug Yourself. But they drop off surprisingly quickly. I'm not sure what that means--possibly that the Timeline Aggregator won't reach back past a certain point or that the feeds from these sites are restricted to be only so deep.

But you don't really come here to have problems solved, do you?

Another tool for Timeline

2007-11-14T11:22:00.000-05:00

I haven't had a chance to play with Timeline much recently, but I'm still holding out hopes that the Google Docs implementation (routed through Exhibit) will be what I need to make these tools available to my students.

Today I came across a website that uses a simple form for adding events to a Timeline, with the intent of using it as a calendar. It doesn't look like you can save this in any way and its scale (determined in days, rather than years) makes it much less useful for something like a survey course. In any case, it shows what might be possible to do if you knew more code than I do.

Convert on the fly

2007-11-14T10:25:00.001-05:00

A quick one for you right now. In thinking through Emory's implementation of iTunesU, one of the big problems is determining what specs we will require for the media and then making it easy for people to convert their media into the appropriate formats. We're hoping that we can identify good software solutions that are affordable and easy to use. In doing that thing I do here, I stumbled across Zamzar.

This web site converts--for free--files from one format to another. JPG to BMP. DOC to DOCX. XLS to CSV. WMA to MP3 to M4A. And so on. They then email you your converted files. The advantage of the site is that you don't have to have specific software for the conversion process. This is especially useful for when you need to convert a file and are not near your own computer. The downside is that the site has too many ads and pop-ups for my taste.

You can also use upload to Zamzar directly from URLs. This means that you can potentially use it to save, convert, and download audio files that are only meant to stream or YouTube videos. This, of course, is legally problematic and may violate copyright law. And of course, Zamzar is indemnified against legal action that might be taken against you. Nevertheless, you still might find a use for it.

Survey This!

2007-11-07T11:29:00.001-05:00

Today Wayne asked me to put together a survey for all the participants of this year's Technology, Literature and Curriculum (TLC). Wayne, Shannon, Michael Elliott, and I are getting ready to present the program to the Graduate School's Dean on Monday. Our ultimate goal is to get the Dean's blessing and money to expand the workshop to other departments, hopefully teaching at least one, and maybe two, TLCs per semester throughout the Graduate School.

But it's always better to present your case to administrators if you have some statistics to back you up. And so we're going to take a survey. (Of course, the purported validity of such a survey might be erased by having an English lit person write it. Nevertheless...)

We've all seen SurveyMonkey before. In fact, I got some experience designing with it last year when the Emory Writing Center decided to start taking all of its feedback about conferences online. What I didn't know until recently was that basic accounts on SurveyMonkey are free. There are of course some restrictions (you can only ask ten questions; you can only receive 100 responses), but I can't really envision myself needing much more than this. (Actually, I can't envision needing to really survey my classes at all apart from the requisite end of semester questions that are done by Emory.) So here's one more tool to throw in your arsenal.

Networking the social

2007-11-05T11:34:00.000-05:00

So I'm gearing up for a big post (at least it feels like it) on social networking in relation to the ever-looming Horizon report. But November 1st brought something new to the fore of these online tools. Google (again with the Google) launched a new service called OpenSocial. This is essentially a tool to help people write 3rd-party applications for social networking sites. These applications are one of the things that allow people to customize their spaces in MySpace or Facebook. You can see some examples of these tools for Facebook here.

Facebook has devised a particularly ingenious method for coaxing people to try these tools as your News Feed will report on which applications friends have recently added. It worked with me today when I was thinking about this and saw that a friend from high school had added Super Wall. I figured, "Hey, I'll try it out." In any case, what News Feed produces is a viral flocking toward applications.

While these tools are essentially small plug ins, but their viral popularity makes them big business (there are 7000+ for Facebook as of today). They can drive ad dollars and, in some instances, developers charge for the use of the software. What has been difficult thus far is that programmers who develop an application for one social networking site will--logically--want to allow those who aren't cool enough to know that orkut, friendster, and LinkedIn are so 2004 to use their application. Most of these different sites, however, have used different and proprietary APIs (application programming interface). This radically increased the workload for these programmers. And this in turn lowers the number of viable alternative social networking sites since less and less people are making new and interesting applications for these less popular sites.

What Google has done is proposed a new API that will be compatible across social networking sites. This means less work for the programmers. Oh, and more traffic for Google. An amazing number of the social-networking-erati have signed on for the project, including MySpace. The exception is Facebook. There are of course reactions (some negative and some positive) to the Goog's latest move.

My thoughts? I think Facebook is right on this count, from a business perspective. With Microsoft's recent investment in Facebook, the company could be realistically valued at $15 billion. That's about 10x the value of YouTube. It makes sense because while everyone loves a viral video, what people like even more is when that viral video is brought directly to you via your friends (and not through an email forward) but through the News Feed feature.

Fixing computers

2007-11-01T10:20:00.000-04:00

< geekish blog post >

We've been having a problem with Firefox on the Windows computers in ECIT. Essentially, although the software was updated to version 2.0.0.8, FF kept trying to update to 2.0.0.7. What this really meant was that every time you launched the browser, you got an error message or two. This is annoying once. When it happens to you repeatedly throughout the day, it gets tiresome rather quickly.

Not so tiresome that we have spent any great amount of time fixing it to this point, however. Today, I resolved that I was going to quash this bug. I first tried reinstalling on the admin side (where the bug was not manifesting). That didn't work. Next I tried uninstalling all of my "Add-ons" (the real reason to use Firefox. See some of my favorites here.) Didn't work. Finally I decided I should try what I should have started with: a web search. Within ten minutes, I'd found a Mozilla forum dedicated to support issues and specific advice for solving my problem. It just goes to show you, the wisdom of the masses will trump that of any lone geek 99% of the time.

< /geekish blog post >

Emory Horizons

2007-10-31T10:28:00.000-04:00

So I've been a bit slow on posting more thoughts about the 2007 Horizon Report. But I'm getting back into looking at this document as Wayne and I are planning a course--"Emory Horizons: [insert explanatory phrase here]"--for next February for members of the Emory community to discuss how we see our campus reacting to these technologies that are on the horizon. In the spirit of Web 2.0.0.7, we're making some of these planning documents available for others to read.

Of course, you say, if we are teaching in 2008, won't we be a bit behind the curve? What about the 2008 Horizons? Good point. So we're dropping and rolling and getting geared up for the technologies that will be in the new report. EDUCAUSE et al have been working for most of the year on the new report, and we can already see the short list of twelve technologies that will shortly be narrowed down to the final six. All of 2007's six trends are still in the running, but others that I think are more important to highlight have been added (online collaboration and online mapping, in particular). You can also peruse the resources the authors of the upcoming report have found at del.icio.us using the tag "hz08."

So the point is that Emory will be one of the first campuses in the nation to offer up a response to the upcoming report. Become a part of it.

Oh. Did I mention that in ECIT I'm supposed to learn Photoshop too?

Make Them Yourself: Google Maps

2007-10-29T12:14:00.000-04:00

Now I swear I'm not the ECIT Woodruff Fellow in Applied Googletechtonics or anything like that. If I was, perhaps my stipend would be a bit larger.

Be this as it may, I have another G-related observation. In addition to planning the upcoming Emory Horizons event, I have also been experimenting with making my own Google Map. Why would you want to do this? Well in my case, I figured it would be an easy way to represent my job search. I can get a general idea of where the jobs are at and refer to it when I have to make those tough choices between Tufts, Rutgers, and Westminster. This is also an easy way to share this information with my family and, eventually, to start thinking geospatially about my future.

This is actually really easy to do. All you have to do is to be logged in to a Google account, and go to their maps page. Click on the "My Maps" tab partway down the page, and you can start adding place markers, drawing lines, and/or shapes on your map. You can then get a URL or the code to embed the map. Of course, you can make the map public or private. Or as KML for use in Google Earth.

More and more, I think that geospatial information is going to become more and more a part of everything we do. And this is an easy way to get a start mapping your own experiences.

View Larger Map

Timelines again

2007-10-25T12:36:00.000-04:00

All right, I have continued playing with my Timeline, and I'm happy to report that I'm getting closer to solving most of the problems that I discussed in my previous post. Mainly, this means that I now have a way to take information from this Google Spreadsheet and use it to dynamically create a timeline. Moreover, I can give other users access to the spreadsheet as a collaborator, and they can add events (or erase them) from the timeline as well. (Wayne, for example, added the Battle of Hastings to the current timeline.)

I have also found out how to add images (click on "Men Without Women") and links (click on "Nobel Prize in Literature") to the descriptions. The latter took a little bit of coding, but nothing obscene. I think it would be easy to hand the students a list of basic commands to accomplish making their own links.

What is making this timeline work so much better than my first one is it is being powered by the SIMILE Project's Exhibit software. This software is--to borrow a term from our TLC conversations--allows you to make mashups of information by building a database and linking objects together in whatever relationships you want. It also provides a good way to filter this information. They have numerous examples: billionaires in history, US Presidents, and cereal mascots. You'll notice that the first two use geotagging (as well as Google Maps) to produce their results. A less visually stunning, but perhaps more useful example is this conference schedule which someone built within Exhibit. The filtering seems really useful (as well as the ability to search on any field). You can also view the conference as abstracts and as a Timeline. This is because Timeline is a component you can add into your Exhibit. And Exhibit, fortunately, allows you to take feeds from Google Spreadsheets.

There are still a few things that I would like to work out on this timeline. At the moment, I can only use years with events; months and dates don't display accurately. I would also like to have the ability to have events show up in different colors based on the "type" of event they are, something I have specified in the spreadsheet. So I have some questions out to the folks at MIT, and we'll see what they come back with.

At the very least, however, this means that I could run a spreadsheet in my classroom without too much work on the part of the students. Good times.

Getting Photos into Google Earth

2007-10-23T12:01:00.001-04:00

I was playing around very quickly yesterday with my Picasa Web albums and noticed a new feature. But wait, let's back up. Picasa is Google's photo editing software. In the grand Google tradition, it was the product of a company that Google bought out a few years ago. I've been using Picasa for over two years and I've found it's a very nice tool for keeping all of my photos and movies organized on the computer. When you have children, you quickly realize that you need a tool for organizing almost as much as you need one for editing.

The editing tools in Picasa are nothing special. Basic color fixing, basic cropping, some special effects. Red eye removal. I've found, however, that they are more often than not all that I need for touching things up. The biggest bonus, in my opinion, is that Picasa saves a copy of all the changes I make to a photo and makes it possible for me to always return to the original image if I want to. That way my experimenting with the image doesn't ruin it permanently. Of course, there are other tools out there that do this: Microsoft has Office Picture Manager, Adobe has Photoshop Elements, and I could go on. But an advantage of Picasa is that it is free. And that's something we like in both the Croxall household and in ECIT. (It is also a very good tool for doing progressive backups of your photos, which helps you keep second copies off your hard drive and get secondary backups off site to your parents in Utah.)

Another thing that I really love about Picasa is how it integrates with Gmail. You can bundle photos to send out to people straight from the photo software. Again, you can do that with many other programs, but what was essential for me was that Picasa automatically resized the photos for me when I mailed them out. Since we have an 8 MP Canon camera and we didn't have broadband at home until about six months ago, this meant that sending photos could be a real pain. Picasa took care of all that for us. This isn't so much of a problem on our end anymore, but it is still nice to use the software to prevent our sending out those massive, 8x bigger than your screen photos.

Okay, so we've covered Picasa as it functions on your computer. About two years ago, Google also created a web presence for Picasa that allows you to host photos online and share them with others. Of course, there are a lot of other services that allow you to do this as well: Kodak Gallery, Photobucket, and, of course, Flickr. These tools are great for sharing photos with others (because--at least with Flickr and Picasa--you get an RSS feed of people's photos and can then read them in your feed reader of choice [see previous blog post]). And of course, they allow you to tag your photos, use each photo's individual URL for hosting it in a blog or some such thing, and more.

Another new thing that at least Flickr and Picasa have included is the ability to geotag your photos. What this means is that you can identify where a particular photo album was taken and then drag and drop those photos onto a map to give an even more precise idea. You can see how this works in Flickr (photos geotagged to "Amsterdam, Noord Holland") and in Picasa (an example of photos mapped along the Strip in Vegas). I'm not as familiar with Flickr as I am with Google's tools, but I have to say that I like the latter a little better because it gives better outlines of buildings.

So this brings us to last point (which is really where I started). If you are looking at a Picasa web album that has been geotagged (like this one of photos I took during the Dragon Con parade), then you also get the option (in the right hand corner) to view the photos within Google Earth. When you click on this, you can either run it immediately in Google Earth or download the kml file. And suddenly you have your photos plugged into Google Earth for you. Magic!

Now of course, you can insert photos directly into Google Earth without too much trouble. But if you are already using Picasa Web, this will save you some time. Even if you aren't using it, however, this might be an easier way for people to get photos into Google Earth than having to deal with the coding that is otherwise required.

Another Pipe

2007-10-19T12:36:00.000-04:00

So it occurred to me this morning that I perhaps should have used my Piping powers for good and not for idle entertainment. As such, I've created this Pipe that parses several academic blogs for content relating to the job search. Of course, you can edit the Pipe source and add blogs that you'd prefer to see here. But maybe this will prove useful to those of us who can't seem to get enough information about this madd(en)ing process.

Yahoo! Pipes

2007-10-18T10:32:00.000-04:00

So just when you thought you were getting sick of the whole Web 2.0 thing and that you'd seen every possible mashup possible, Yahoo! comes up with a new tool--Pipes--to help you mash all by yourself (no servers or complex coding required). It's basically a visual tool for taking various information (RSS feeds, CSV documents, geolocators and more) and joining, filtering, and/or combining them to produce a specific output that you want.

So what can you mash together? Well, the first thing I did was to take news feeds from CNN and Google, combined them together and put them through a filter to pull up everything on the search terms "Tibet," "Tibetan," and "Dalai." (You can tell what's going on at Emory at the moment.) You can see the result here. You could then use this page for a continual update on this subject--or you could use the page's RSS feed in your reader of choice and get the particular news items delivered to you. No more searching through Google or CNN for the particular stories you're interested in (as long, of course, as you know the search terms that will likely appear in the story). You can see also the representation of the pipe in the lower right corner of the page, and if you have a Yahoo! log-in, you can edit the pipe itself to adapt my work and make it more suitable for your own.

But wait! There's so much more. I then decided to take the Emory news feed, filter it to only bring me news related to Tibet and the Dalai Lama and rolled this together with photos on Flickr that are of Emory University and have tags that relate to the same search terms. The results are here. What's new with this pipe is that it also returns a map. One of the photos has been mapped to a particular location within Flickr by the photographer, and Pipes automatically incorporates this information. If you click "Links" about the map, you will see the results: as of today, there are two hits from Emory News and two photos from Flickr. You can again edit the pipe yourself.

I then wanted to create a crazier looking pipe with more variables. The result was taking the news feed from Emory and using all the photos from Flickr that relate to Emory (not just ones with Tibet related tags). You can see the results and edit the pipe, as always.

But there are a lot more tools within Pipes. Say you want to read the sports from Le Monde, but your French is just not where it was back when you had to, say, pass a Ph.D. translation exam. You can get the feed from their sports page, run it through a translation loop, and get the results. It might not be perfect, but it's a sight better than my own translation.

Other functions within Pipes allow you to map things. I've been trying to figure out if I could use Pipes to solve my Timeline XML problem, but that has yet to happen. To get more ideas about how to build interesting pipes, you can check out the public gallery and copy their source and fiddle with it.

In any case it is a fun service to use and a lot easier than similar things I've tried in the past. It appears that the other big names in the online world (Google, Microsoft, etc.) are developing their own similar tools. But now you can be the first on your block to have piped.

Timelines

2007-10-11T13:59:00.000-04:00

I've been busy with TLC in the last few days, so I haven't had a lot of time to be adventuring in ECIT. Today, however, I finally started work on a project I've been interested in for about a year. Again, I'm going to have to give Jason Jones the credit for uncovering the technology: interactive timelines. Jason wrote about his plans to try to use this in a course during Spring 2007 on his blog. Unfortunately he has since restructured his blog (moved domains or something techno-geekish like that). You can, however, still read about Michael Elliott's discovery of Jason's blog post here.

In any case, the technology for these timelines has been developed by MIT's SIMILE Project. To steal a bit of their boilerplate, "Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. [...] Just like Google Maps, Timeline can be used with zero software installation, server-side or client-side. And like Google Maps, you can populate Timeline with data by pointing it to an XML file." So yeah. There's a mouthful. However, the results can be stunning.

I've got a couple of different ideas for using timelines like this. You could use them in a survey class to map texts and historical events to put things into context. You could also use them to help you read one particular novel--something with complex chronology like Slaughterhouse-Five or Jazz. Or you might use it to track Emily Dickinson's output. Of course what would make this most is the ability to build the timeline collaboratively among class members. There's not a whole lot to be gained in my opinion, if you are just asking the students to look at the work you've put into it. Instead, you want to help them start mapping (chronologically, of course) the subject of the class. And if you go the extra mile, you can use the timeline as a discussion tool. For example, if you look at the timeline for JFK's assassination and click on an event, you will notice in the lower-right corner that there is a "discuss" link. This link takes you to a wiki page devoted to that event. Linking your timeline to a wiki could allow students to discuss when an event should be situated. Look at all this technology converging! Whee!

Of course, the difficulty is getting your timeline up and running. And let me tell you that so far it has not been a picnic. The "basics" that MIT provides on the timelines are not really all that basic (or legible). The "how to" for creating timelines is not much easier and assumes that you already have a decent grasp of writing HTML. After spending several hours with the how-to page, however, I and my trusty pal Dreamweaver were able to create a VERY simple timeline.

The difficulty in making the timeline, as I'm discovering is entering the events. This has to be done in an XML format. You can see mine here. Timelines with more data understandably require much more coding (as you can see with the JFK timeline's XML). Still, the coding and the formatting is not that difficult. The problem as I see it currently is that I want my students to be able to work collaboratively and on the fly with the data. As in, Suzy Q logs in to *insert name of fantasy software here* and can quickly edit fields for "date," "event name," "event description," and maybe some extra fields like "image" or "link." She can immediately hit refresh and see her work on the timeline. At the same time, George X can be working within the same piece of *fantasy software* and be editing his own portion of the timeline or making some changes/corrections to what Suzy has been doing.

I could ask the students to just cut and paste my XML formatting and substitute their own language. They could then email the code to me. And I could then upload it to my webdrive or something like that. But that's not what I want to have happen. I want this to be as automated as possible. And there's the stumbling block--for the moment. I have a hunch that Google spreadsheets or perhaps Zoho's database can help me out of the bind. Or perhaps it's Google Calendar that can come to the rescue. We'll have to see. And I'll keep you updated.

Just in case you don't like Google...

2007-10-11T13:41:00.001-04:00

Today I came across (thanks to Jason Jones) a new suite of online tools for online collaboration. Zoho provides the three big tools that Google Docs does: word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations (aka PowerPoint). However, it has a larger suite of tools including databases, online conferencing, note taking, and wikis. It also offers email clients, chat, and more. In some ways, though, Google is offering--or will be offering soon--many of these same tools, they just aren't necessarily part of Google Docs.

One thing that I like about Zoho is that it should play nicely with MS Office. There's a plug-in that allows you to work offline and keep your documents in Zoho up to date with the changes you make on your desktop. Something else is that Zoho's editing features within, say, documents are more robust and advanced than Google's.

So if you want a little bit more functionality and interoperability than Zoho might be a good solution.

Behold the power of MS Office!

2007-10-04T12:27:00.000-04:00

So a number of us in the English department are setting off into the job market. We all know that this is an endeavor fraught with all sorts of hidden codes that we must negotiate in order to secure that lucrative 40K position at Northwest South Dakota Tech. (There are so many of these dang codes that one wonders to what degree the profession keeps them so that a handful of professors have the opportunity to write books about the subject. Of course, these books sell far more copies than my dissertation ever will.)

One of just many difficulties is the rise of digital communication in the job application process. Rather than simply stuffing everything into an envelope and addressing it to "Chair, Search Committee for Asst. Professor of Media, Culture, and Information Flows (?!)," we now get to email things directly to a person or, more likely, go through each university's individual application process at which point we upload some of our carefully workshopped documents. The electronic application is nice in the sense that we can send things later (a few minutes before a deadline) and that it is more likely that the "letter" will reach its addressee (Derrida notwithstanding).

A marked disadvantage of sending an emailed cover letter, however, is that you might lose the chance to make an impression on a potential employer through Emory's letterhead (something we have traditionally picked up from the department office and then printed onto). So today, instead of learning more about social networking, I decided to monkey around with the newest version of Microsoft Office. I've heard a lot of people complain about the interface, particularly of Word, but I find it a lot more intuitive than previous versions of the software. Of course, if you've been using previous iterations it becomes counterintuitive. But I'm getting used to it and love the amount of control that is presented to me on the front page. I like it quite a bit--especially since we students can get the entire Ultimate Office Suite for $60.

In any case, coupled with the Office tools and some guidelines from Emory's Office of Brand Management--where was this site in 2004 when I taught my class about branding? They even have documents that tell you which colors coordinate well with Emory blue (see page 15)--I was able to mock up something that looks remarkably like the English Department's letterhead. Start your letter where I indicate, and you're good to go. Just don't mess with the margins and make sure you don't go onto the third page (where the header will show up again [it's on every odd page; this seemed like a nice coercion to make me toe the line on length]).

There are slight differences between this and the official, printed-for-us letterhead. I won't bore you with the details (although I could be convinced to bare all in the comments), but I did stick to the published guidelines for stationary.

In any case, I hope that this will make it easier for all of us to get jobs. I'm surprised, honestly, that Emory hasn't come up with an interactive letterhead to take care of things like this, but until then we've got this. Feel free to point it out to other departments' students, since it is easily editable.

Kicking off TLC 2.0

2007-10-02T09:19:00.000-04:00

So a group of 9 English department students met yesterday in ECIT for the opening session of TLC (scroll down for the blurb). (On a side note, I thought it interesting that for the 9 "students" in the course that we have 5 instructor types. I guess Emory is trying to massage its student to instructor ratio or something.)

TLC is something that we are hoping we can role out to more of the graduate programs within Emory with a goal, of course, of providing the training in technologies that will be especially appropriate for the various teaching situations in each of the different disciplines. Doing this will hopefully facilitate discussions among the graduate students and faculty attending that will help everyone discover new methods for teaching materials--even if these methods have nothing to do with technology.

In light of this, I found it interesting how each of the 9 TLC participants already had ideas for how they want to use technology in courses they are or will be teaching in the near future or for specific technologies they want to learn more about:

Mapping the action in 24-hour novels
Hosting photos a class is taking of the community and podcasting
Blogging and building websites
Developing a wiki project for the class
Blogging and wikis
Dreamweaver and creating websites
Using technology collaboratively as a way to get them away from regular discussions
Using technology to bring people together and work collaboratively

Some of these goals/ideas are very similar, and I think it's interesting that most of them revolve around the idea of user-created content. These are obviously interesting technologies to people who want to help students take some of the control of their own learning processes.

It's also nice to see that ECIT will be able to help people with each of these projects. Mapping? Try Google Earth, which will allow you to customize layers very easily through XML. Wikis and blogging? You can use the new functionality in Blackboard 7.1 or you can find alternate solutions. Photo hosting? Flickr is just one of many options.

As always, the key remains knowing when to use a new technology and when to use an older one (pencil, paper, chalk, eraser). But it's exciting to see--even over a year's time from when I was doing TLC--how much easier the tools for accomplishing some of these projects have become.

Google Trends (more on my beloved Google)

2007-09-25T13:08:00.001-04:00

More on Google tools. This time it's all about Google Trends. You can use this application to track searches (done through Google) and news reference volume for any topic. You can change the length of time you're looking at, the regions where you're looking, and get all sorts of other interesting data.

For example, you can see how many people search for Emory and can correlate spikes in searches to newsworthy happenings around campus. Emory looks pretty good until you put some of our "peer" institutions into the mix. Alas.

In any case, this is an interesting tool with different applications. If you're in an English department, you could track the interest of the online community in authors or particular texts (although be wary of how you use search terms like "Lolita"; to get the right response, you need the author's name too). If you're into politics, you can watch not only the spectacular demise of Sen. Larry Craig, but also the spectacular demise of the nation's interest in the story here. Or you can see how Craig stacks up against some of those in the race for the presidency here. There's a dissertation or a short paper in here for someone who wants to analyze the predictive nature of web searches.

The search history only goes back to 2004, and one has to be careful about how you search for trends. But this is an interesting record of what seems to interest us.

P.S. If in writing about this I'm as woefully out of date as Stanley Fish opining about coffee shops, then I hope someone will please tell me to move onto fresh material.

Bloglines vs. Google Reader

2007-09-25T12:28:00.000-04:00

I'm curious about feed aggregators. I haven't used them a whole lot except on my igoogle page. I know some of this blog's reader (you faithful few) are partial to Bloglines. I've also fiddled around with Google Reader (given my slavish devotion to the big G and a desire to keep things within one account where possible).

So I'm wondering if anyone can argue for using one service over another. Within Bloglines, can you share your feeds with others? I've discovered how to share materials in G'Reader (you can see mine here or subscribe to the feed here). But what I'd really like to do is to see the feeds that good friends, like RB or SAP, or supervisor-types, like WM or ME, peruse regularly. I'm not seeing that in the Google version at the moment.

In any case, I'm interested in getting opinions here about how you read blogs. Consider this your chance to participate in Web 2.0 and create some content yourself.

Horizon report, pt.2

2007-09-25T11:31:00.000-04:00

So I'm just reviewing parts of the Horizon report and want to start talking about the technologies the consortium has highlighted. The first one up is user-created content.

This is a topic we've all heard so much about that I'm not sure that I have anything to add at this moment. We all know that one of the key trends for Web 2.0 are applications like del.icio.us, flickr, and, of course, YouTube. We know what is interesting about these sites are the ways in which people can openly share content that they have either found on the web or have created with others. We know about blogs, Digg, and other sites that let us choose what we want to say and (collectively) what information should rise to the forefront of the web's consciousness. And we know that with all of these tools, the real key is tagging the information in a proper manner so it can collated effectively.

We know some things about how we might use these technologies in our classroom: we could use del.icio.us to create a set of shared bookmarks on, say, a Toni Morrison novel. Each student who is looking for relevant materials could save their locations to a tag or set of tags (say, "English_363" and "Jazz"). We can ask students to write responses to readings or class assignments in a blog as well as to read each others' thoughts on the subject. We can assign a video project throughout the semester and watch its iterations as students upload each version to YouTube.

The two new things I learned in the report were about Zotero, which I've written about already, and an interesting project at UPenn, where they have created their own tagging system to be used throughout the university. It appears that you can tag not only URLs from around the web, but also items in their library catalog and those from subscription databases like JSTOR. What I really like about this idea is the implementation within a library catalog. Have you ever had difficulty finding something in EUCLID? Or, more likely, have you ever wished there was a way to browse the books on a subject without being in the library or having to depend on the Subject headings? Well, if we were able to tag our library's collection, then we would have a way of identifying important texts for ourselves or for the classes we teach and we would have the benefit of others' experience with texts insofar as they may have tagged them in ways that the acquisitions department might not have known about or thought important. You could then follow the tags to other interesting materials or follow the tagger(s) to see what other projects they have been working on that might be of corollary interest to you.

Unfortunately, the Penn system doesn't show the tags within catalog entries, which I think would be ideal. Otherwise, I'm not sure what the difference is between what they've been doing and simply using del.icio.us (except that someone, somewhere can talk about how s/he instituted a social computing at Penn on his/her vita). Perhaps it makes it easier to link to subscription services. In any case, they have a start on creating their own tags and I would hope that this would make it possible for the library to implement them in a new and interesting way.

So, I'm left asking myself how best to use user-created content in our courses. I really like the idea of having students do some blogging or author parts of a wiki to teach them some different writing skills. As students learn the conventions of writing in different media, we gain the opportunity to teach them about differing rhetorical exigencies that pertain to each type of writing. I like the fact that students who write in a shared/open space have the opportunity to receive feedback on their ideas (not their grammar, most of the time) from their peers as well as from their professor. I really appreciate the ease with which these tools work; that they are mostly free; and that the publication of these materials can help students feel like their work is not just a very one-sided conversation between them and the professor.

The difficulty with user-created content--and specifically with tagging--is that it can produce so much material to sort through. If I'm tagging materials on Jazz and if all of my students are, how do we determine which of the articles are worth reading? And if we use the same tags from year to year we will amass even more materials (although with the benefit of having a wealth of materials).And don't even get me started on the problems associated with misspelled tags or the inability to edit them.

I like the technologies and platforms that come along with user-created content. But as with everything, we need to think about how we will use them in the classroom. Hmm. I'm guessing I'll be able to end most every post this way.

P.S. I'm very proud of myself for resisting the whole meta-implications of this post.

Teaching with Google Earth

2007-09-24T10:57:00.000-04:00

I'm fascinated by Google Earth, as you may have previously noticed. I was poking around today and found a really great blog with ideas for teaching using the software. A recent discussion there examines using video and audio embedded within Google Earth to teach something like Huckleberry Finn. The blog on the whole seems aimed toward people teaching in K-12, but there's definitely something we can learn by reading other people's ideas for their classrooms.

7 Things You Should Know

2007-09-24T10:21:00.001-04:00

So in connection with my reading up on The Horizon Report, I stumbled across another series of documents over at Educause: "7 Things You Should Know About...". This is a monthly series that highlights a particular technology or tool that can and is being used in education and quickly identifies what it is, how it works, and where it is going in the future. Past articles have covered blogs (way back in 2005; they're not THAT out of date), RSS, Wikipedia, and haptics.

If you're not familiar with these tools, it's worth quickly reading through them and learning what they are and what you can do with them.

Digitizing the Analog

2007-09-21T11:45:00.000-04:00

I spent some time over the last two days learning to use some of ECIT's audio equipment and software. I decided to learn how to digitize some analog material and so brought in a live recording of the band I played with during my freshman year of college: The Shriners. This was the first recording we'd made other than setting up a bad tape recorder at the back of a venue where we were playing. We used a DAT deck, routed through the sound board of the place where we performed, and then used the recording to make 300 or so shiny red cassette tapes that we sold for $2 each.

Not wanting this piece of nostalgia to degrade any further than it had after 12 years, I brought the tape into ECIT. Using a tape deck, a sound board and Sound Forge, I recorded the tape into a digital file. It took a little bit to figure out the levels of the input because I wanted to avoid clipping, but within 10 minutes I was up and running. After inputting the entire tape (the tape deck I was using was nice and automatically flipped the audio to the other side while I was recording so I only had one track), I used Sound Forge to trim down the silence that began and ended the recording. SF is an very powerful tool, but since I mainly wanted to archive the audio, I used it to save the track out to a WAV file (which is lossless [meaning it captured perfectly the imperfect quality of the tape]) and was more or less done.

I then moved on to another computer to play with Audacity, which is also sound-editing software. My goal here was to change take the WAV and save out individual tracks to mp3. I could have done this with Sound Forge as easily as Audacity, but I went with the latter for a few reasons. First of all, it's a tool Shannon and Wayne have wanted me to learn to use. Second, what's great about Audacity is that it is free (as opposed to SF's $300 price tag), it's cross-platform (SF is Windows only), and it is open source (meaning that it's constantly getting improved by a collaborative community of coders).

I thought that I would have to manually split the tracks of the WAV into chunks before encoding it into mp3, but Audacity has a tool to analyze for stretches of silence. Using this, the program found the breaks in my file, allowed me to label them with the titles of the tracks, and then export to mp3. The process took at most 3 minutes. And you can hear the results here. Just think of the career I gave up in upbeat-based music to come and spend time at Emory.

In any case, the lesson learned is that it's VERY easy to come in and digitize older materials (LPs, cassettes, VHS, etc.) for archival use (if you own the copyright) or for use in the classroom. As Emory moves more toward iTunes U, these tools will also help us splice, edit, and improve (or add wahwah) to the recordings we are making.

Ways to Waste Time with Google

2007-09-21T11:16:00.000-04:00

I don't know that any of us need to waste any more time. But just in case you do, here are two things I recently discovered that Google and its co-brands are trying to seduce us with.

First is Blogger Play: It's basically a stream of photos that have recently been uploaded to various blogs hosted by Blogger. You can read more about it here. It's fun to jsut sit back and think about what people might be saying with or about these images.

Second is Google Image Labeler: This is an interesting game-like application. Basically you are given a series of photos and asked to provide descriptive labels for them. You have 2 minutes to label as many photos as possible. The catch is that you are working simultaneously and blindly with a partner. You don't get to move on until you both match a label. The more descriptive your matched label is, the more points you get. At the end of the time, you get to see your partner's suggestions and the ones you matched with. Your score accumulates and--if you were to play long enough--you could have one of the top spots. So why is this out here? It's basically helping Google refine their image search, giving them agreed upon labels for particular images. Smart.

What I find interesting about both of these applications is the way that user-created content (uploaded photos and photos the Google Bots find across the web) becomes the object of attention in a way that differs (slightly, in the case of the first, and more so, in the case of the second) from other Web 2.0 sites such as Flickr or YouTube.

EndNote Alternative

2007-09-21T11:14:00.001-04:00

I've been a fan of EndNote since I discovered it about 3/4 of the way through my undergraduate career. It's a great tool to keep all your notes about a particular project or all the research you've ever conducted in one place. That it can help you build bibliographies is just icing on the cake, in my opinion. Oh, and for those of you who don't know, you can download EndNote for free from Emory's software servers.

I just discovered a new Firefox-based alternative to EndNote, however: Zotero. It serves most of the functions of EndNote, except that it works within your browser and can automatically create records from many of the pages you're looking at (like the Emory Library Catalog or subscription databases like JSTOR). You can also export your bibliographies into documents.

The next version of the software will allow you to share files/references with others/groups of scholars and even use RSS feeds to get the latest information that, say, the Nineteenth-Century Fiction Association might want to make available to its members.

This looks like a really interesting tool. You can watch a video tour of it here. It's a project supported by, among others, the Mellon Foundation, so you can trust its credentials in that sense.

At the moment I see two drawbacks:

Firefox only.
It's based in the browser and NOT in an online account. What this means is that if I use a computer at Emory for my library, it won't be on my computer at home. Of course, it's very easy to export the files. But it would be nice if you could log in to your Zotero account on matter where you were on earth. Hopefully this is something they will think about including in the new version of the plugin.

Still, this is a good sign of technology to come to help us become more effective researchers.

An experiment...

2007-09-18T12:06:00.000-04:00

So, thanks to the tools BlackBoard provides me, I know that not a lot of people have been looking at this blog yet. I can't really blame you since it's not like I'm dishing on the latest in celebrity fashion, music, or even academic discourse.

But another reason, I suspect, that people haven't looked at what I've been writing is because you have to go through so many hoops to get at the BlackBoard blog. It's not a bad tool here (although design elements are obviously limited), but it is a restricted interface. Even more problematic, there's no RSS feed to alert those of you who use Bloglines, Google Reader or something else as your primary blog reading device can't get updates. And since part of what I'm doing here is thinking about how to make the tools I'm using useful for others, it seems obvious that I'd want a community to respond to the writing. Finally, while Blackboard offers me a lot of control over who can and can't see what I'm doing, there's not an easy way that I could show off this blog as part of my scholarly portfolio (whether I'd want to is another thing we can take up at a later date).

What's this all mean? Well, it means that I'm going to host this blog simultaneously here and on Blogger. I want to see if traffic increases to one or both portals when I make a second one available. So you'll be able to continue finding the blog here as well as at http://ecitadventures.blogspot.com/. Take you pick. Sometimes I'll write a post in this environment and sometimes in the other, just to see the strengths and limitations of each. The trickiest things will be the links to hosted content. I'm using Blackboard's Store & Share feature for files you can download (like the Camtasia movie or the Google Earth kmz files). Right now the links in Blogger point back to Blackboard. You should be able to access the materials by logging in; but I can't promise that for sure. I'll fiddle around with my Emory web drive and see what I can throw up there to make sure the materials are available.

In any case, feel free to tell me if you like one platform over another or if you just don't care. C'mon. I promise I can take it. I still don't really think I'll get many comments. The idea is to get the information out there and available and are interested.

Update: I've changed the links here at Blogger to point to my Emory webdrive rather than the Store and Share on BlackBoard. Let me know if you have any problems getting those links.

Horizon Report, pt.1

2007-09-18T11:41:00.001-04:00

Wayne gave me a copy of The New Media Consortium/Educause Learning Intitative's Horizon Report about two weeks ago, and I'm going through it again. The report is a yearly product of the Horizon Project, which "seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education." Obviously this is something that we at ECIT care about and something that I'm personally interested in exploring.

I have to admit that I haven't read a lot of strategic reports in my day, so I was a bit taken aback by the identification not only of six "Key Trends"--including such things as "The environment of higher education is changing rapidly" and "Academic review and faculty rewards are increasingly out of sync with new forms of scholarship"--but also six "Critical Challenges" facing higher education over the coming five years: #1, "Assessment of new forms of work continues to present a challenge to educators and peer reviewers"; #4, "There is a skills gap between understanding how to use tools for media creation and how to create meaningful content." I think their identification of these issues is spot on--especially those about how we as educators both teach students to use the new tools they have and how we then evaluate (read, "grade" or "peer review") the products our students and colleagues produce. I do think, however, that they could have cut some of the business speak.

Based on these Trends and Challenges, the report has identified 6 technologies that are on, predictably, the Horizon of higher education:

User-Created Content
Social Networking
Mobile Phones
Virtual Worlds
The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication
Massively Multiplayer Educational Games

As I'm reading through the report, I'm trying to think about how Emory, ECIT, and I can start to think about implementing these tools and technologies in our classroom. Feel free to throw in your own thoughts.

iTunes U Transcoding

2007-09-18T11:39:00.001-04:00

I know we're a long way out from fully implementing iTunes U, but one thing that we have already discussed is coming up with standards for the files we will allow to be uploaded. Do we want to make things as easily playable as possible? Then we should perhaps consider using mp3 for sound. AAC and WMA are two other widely used formats, but it is only the rare media player (and especially a portable media device [aka iPod or Zune]) that can play them both. For this reason, mp3 seems to be the safest. But what bit rates to encode at? Do we use CBR or VBR mp3? And I could go on. This problem gets a WHOLE heck of a lot more problematic when dealing with transcoding video, as the format supports are even more varied and the terms of the conversation become even more esoteric.

The role for ECIT will be to provide students and faculty with the tools they need to convert audio or video files into the iTunes U supported format(s). Since our brief is to teach people how to use the technology for themselves, we need something that is not too difficult: preferably with a nice interface. VisualHub is a good example of this. A downside of the product is that it is Mac only. But it is relatively affordable at (as of today) $23.32 US. I haven't found a good example of Windows-based, easy transcoding software. Jim Kruse has suggested that MediaWorks might provide this. This software is nice because it is dual-platform. I haven't sat down to fiddle with it, however, so I can't speak to its abilities yet.

But since we need to be able to work with any format that people bring in, we need to have some backup software that can handle anything that we throw at it. So far, I think that I've identified two options, both of which are free and both of which, unfortunately are Windows only. My personal vote is for MediaCoder. It's interface is nothing to write home about and you can get lost in the options. However, it has a number of "Extensions" built into it that offer more or less one-step transcoding of files into formats suitable for a variety of different devices. What's more, you can design your own Extensions very easily (although sorting through all the options is daunting). My mp3 player hasa built-in mic, and I use MediaCoder to transcode the WAV files into manageable mp3s.

Another option, with an even worse interface is Super. I've not had much experience with it, but it also appears to be a powerful tool to get things from one format to another.

I'd give MediaCoder an 85 and Super a 93 on the User Learning Curve (ULC), where 0 is my grandmother and 100 is the evil spawn of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They are not easy to use or learn. However, I think their advantage is that they could be distributed for free to the entire Emory Community via Software Express or the EOL CD. And if my dreams of guerrilla recording are to come to fruition across the campus, then we'll want everyone to have the tools in her/his room to get the materials uploaded to iTunes U as soon as possible.

If you're interested in seeing what other software I'm finding for the purposes of transcoding, check my list of ECIT+transcode bookmarks at del.icio.us.

Camtasia

2007-09-18T11:34:00.001-04:00

I've already had a fair amount of experience with iMovie HD and iDVD, given the work that I have done recently for Emory's Writing Center (although I still haven't gotten to the bottom of the awful 34506 error). So the first piece of software that I've tackled from my list is Camtasia. Camtasia essentially allows you to record everything you do on your computer's screen. You can then use the tools within the software to edit the recording, to add zooming, highlights, and other effects (noticeable feature lack: star wipes). You can also add voice narration, captions, and quizzes. It's more or less intuitive when you sit down with it (although the tutorial videos DID teach me a few new tricks). You can use the software to create a tutorial for different tasks or you can use it to turn a PowerPoint presentation into a self-contained movie (with narration, again).

To learn something about the software, I decided to film myself building some of the Google Earth tools I used in my talk last week. I did this ex post facto, but it cemented some of what I had already learned about Google Earth. I then produced a movie and threw in as many of the tools as I could. You can watch it here.

I learned a couple of things in doing this. First, there is a limit to how long you can record within Camtasia. And if you don't stop before this time elapses, the recording will stop and you will lose everything that you've done. This happened when I filmed a 15 minute or so segment of playing with Google Earth. There's a chance that I missed something, but I've yet to see it made explicit how long you can record nor what determines this recording length. Second, even though I tried to go through the motions of building my maps rather slowly, it was still too fast when I sat down to record the narration for the video. It seems, for this reason, that if you really want to create a tutorial, you should aim for step by step instructions and perhaps create a different movie for each one. It's much easier to work with five 30-second segments than with a 2.5-minute segment. The whole thing would have gone smoother as well if I'd had a script planned out ahead of time for both my motion and for the narration. This will allow you to time things better. However, the newest version of the software, which ECIT will get soon, has additional features that help you get around moments when you find you are talking longer than you thought you would in a particular segment.

What's the pedagogical application for Camtasia? Well, you can create tutorials for your class if you need them to learn how to use software and would like to post refresher videos online for them to review. You could use it for review materials for your class (slapping together some PowerPoint presentations or a new one) and even include assessments (quizzes), so students can see if they really know the information. Other uses? I'm going to have to keep thinking about it. But the results you can get for either of these two goals are really impressive.

P.S. Now that I have finally finished producing the project, it looks like not all of the elements synced up in quite the right way. The zoom and the video seem to be in sync. However, the captions are ahead of the narration, and the yellow highlighted box (what Camtasia calls a "call out") is late from where it should be in the video. The call out is, however, synced with the vocals as I compare the project in Camtasia and in the flash file that I've posted here. The quiz seems to show up at the right time in the narration and in the video, which seems strange.

In any case, watching it right now gives me a slightly queasy feeling. It's all off slightly. Wayne and I tried exporting it to .wmv instead of flash (.flv), but that didn't seem to fix anything. (In fact, there was no sound and the frame rates were badly off.) So I'll continue to fiddle with this. It's obviously not a good tool if you can't get all its elements to line up with one another.

Mapping My Work

2007-09-18T11:33:00.001-04:00

Last week I had the chance to sit down for several hours with the library's new GIS librarian, Michael Page, to learn the inner secrets of Google Earth. This was all related to a talk I was giving for the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program on the last chapter of my dissertation. To sum up very briefly, I did a reading of William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition that shows how the novel depicts both trauma and technology in terms of speed. I wanted to make an argument about how fast communication technology works to enable information to move from one character to another, but in order to do so I needed to know how far the characters traveled within the environs of London, specifically Camden Town. (On my pitiful stipend, I couldn't afford the research trip to London.) I at first turned to Google Maps, but then tried Google Earth to get a better idea of what the area looked like. I wrote the argument into my chapter and thought I was done.

When the talk suddenly loomed on my horizon, I wondered if I could bring the pictures of Camden Town in with me to help make the argument more convincing. People wouldn't have to take my word for how little time elapses in the particular passage I was concerned with, but could see it. One thing led to another and spilled over from some other research I'd done in connection with New York City (where, again, I've never been) for the chapter, and I decided to map four different parts of the novel: Camden Town, Tokyo, and New York on 9/11 and on 9/19/01. Michael helped me learn how to use paths, fly throughs, and other tools to dress up my maps. You can see the results here. Just download the .kmz files and open them in your own Google Earth application.

I was very pleased with the results of the talk. At first I thought the technology would help to keep people's attention from what I was saying. ("Ooh, pretty 3D renderings!") In actuality, I think that it helped me to make my arguments effectively and to also help those who were unfamiliar with the novel and its plot have a better, more concrete, if you will, sense of what happened in the novels. I was no longer simply reading a paper at people; instead they were watching the areas of the novel come to life. A prime example of show, not tell. Finally, I think interacting with the computer forced me to go off script and to talk more like a human. This is always a plus when doing a presentation like this. For this reason, I don't think I would ever turn these presentations into movies, although Google Earth Pro offers that functionality. It seems to me that it was important for the audience to see me interacting with the software--even changing the settings--so they got a sense of the tactility, for lack of a better word, of the environment I was using. And hopefully it gave them a sense that this was something they could do themselves.

I'm really interested in continuing to think how our reading of novels would differ if we use mapping techniques like this. I'm going to lay the blame squarely on Franco Moretti's shoulders.

Getting My Feet Wet

2007-09-18T11:32:00.001-04:00

So. The suggestion for this blog came from Wayne, who thought it might be an easy way to keep track of everything I learn and experiment this year in ECIT. I've been tasked with the rather harsh job of beginning my time here by learning the following software:

1. iMovie
2. iDVD
3. Acrobat Pro
4. Dreamweaver
5. Audacity
6. Wimba (via Blackboard)
7. Camtasia
8. RealProducer
9. Interwrite PRS

I know. It's rough. I for one welcome my new ECIT overlords.