March 30, 2009 • 11:39 pm
If you’re an academic and you don’t know about Zotero, you should take a few minutes to check it out. It’s immensely useful for collecting and annotating a wide variety of web-based materials, and whenever the opportunity presents itself, I recommend it to colleagues and students. I’m not surprised at all to see that it’s now been recommended by more than 100 colleges and universities.
For those Zotero enthusiasts, they’ve put together a list of 10 Reasons Your Institution Should Adopt Zotero. Here are the notable highlights for me:
- Open Source
- Cross-platform
- Extensible (e.g., Concordia University’s Vertov)
- Synch-able across machines
- Multilingual (30 languages)
Maybe the next step, if they haven’t done so already, is Zotero swag.
Technorati Tags:
Open Source, Zotero
Filed under: Research
March 25, 2009 • 10:08 pm
Campus Technology has a story on a collaboration between Moodle and Google. Specifically, MoodleRooms will be integrated with Google Apps for Education. So practically this means that,
[t]hrough the integration, users loaded into Moodle will be automatically loaded into Google Apps Education Edition
Although, it’s been a while since I’ve ventured into the Moodlesphere, I’ve done some informal piloting of Google Apps for Education in some of my classes and anecdotally, students have mentioned that they’ve found it to be fairly intuitive. Another benefit was familiarity: every student knows the Google name/brand; also, the university logo appears at the top of the login page.
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Moodle, Campus Technology
Filed under: LMS, Open Source, Tech, software
The Open Education Conference has its Call for Papers available. It’s set up around what they call three broad strands
: Startup Camp; Sustaining Steps; and The Future. Under the sustainability thread, one sub-topic that looks interesting is their exploration of the link between the level of participation and the choice of tech tool (How can technology choices foster architectures of participation?).
Credit: Creative Commons blog
Technorati Tags:
Open Education, Conference
Filed under: Collaboration, Open Source, Teaching
March 21, 2009 • 11:19 am
Jakob Nielsen has some thoughts on the most recent Amazon Kindle. Part of his review discusses the Kindle app for the iPhone; he finds the Help a little wanting. Specifically, he mentions that it doesn’t include an embedded help file, but simply directs people to the general Amazon help site, which is optimized for PC display rather than for a mobile viewing context. Not surprisingly, the W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices extensive guidelines helps designers and writers better meet the challenges of mobile contexts.
Technorati Tags:
Amazon, iPhone, Kindle, Nielsen
Filed under: Tech, Usability, software
In my Writing for the Web class, I typically suggest GIMP as an alternative to Illustrator. It’s free and doesn’t restrict students to one of the campus labs. But getting acquainted with the interface and learning the GIMP-specific terminology can present a bit of a challenge for some. So where to go? The GIMP has a good set of layered tutorials, but Six Revisions has also recently posted some good tutorials. Visually-oriented learners might want to head over to Meet the Gimp.
Technorati Tags:
GIMP, Six Revisions
Filed under: Open Source, Teaching, software
The New Mexico Linux Fest has its list of Session Tracks available here. It offers a nice variety for those new to Linux (Essentials for the New Linux User
), as well as social networking aficionados, and power users.
For those interested in submitting speaking proposals, you can find those details on the Speakers page.
Technorati Tags:
New Mexico, Linux, Albuquerque
Filed under: Linux, Open Source, software
Twitter has become all the rage with even late-night comics like Jon Stewart parodying it. With this immense popularity comes a wide variety of third-party clients. Two of my favorites are TweetDeck and Twhirl.
I’ve been thinking a bit about the user interface of each of these. TweetDeck has been my go-to of late with its nifty 3-column layout, and sorting and searching options. Twhirl does a lot of great things too, but one feature I like better than TweetDeck is the nofification feature because it displays the name of the tweet-er and the tweet, whereas TweetDeck just shows a generic notification message. With Twhirl, I can know right away who the tweet is from and what it’s about just by quickly glancing at the notification window and this makes it much easier to prioritize and multi-task.
Technorati Tags:
Twitter, Tweetdeck, Twhirl
Filed under: Collaboration, Design, Tech, software
Web Worker Daily reports on two new features to the enterprise collaboration tool, SocialText.
- A Twitter-like feature they call Signals, and
- Desktop that allows you to stay current on what’s going on in the (virtual) workspace even when you’re not inside the space.
You can customize Desktop with options such as showing all activity or only those you’re following (a la Twitter). It will be interesting to see if LMSs move in this direction. With the intersection of mobile computing and learning, it seems like this would be another way to make access to, awareness of, and participation in the learning space that much easier. Would it be easy for a university to do with this with Moodle? As an add-on to a campus blog platform such as Penn State’s? Designing learning spaces to be agile seems to be key here.
Technorati Tags:
Socialtext, Web Worker Daily, Moodle, Penn State
Filed under: Collaboration, Design, Distance Education
Some faculty from the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) have a very interesting article in Educause Quarterly that describes a classroom re-design project — the “Learning Studio.” In this Learning Studio, the emphasis is on modularity (e.g., reconfigurable tables) as well as top-notch tech equipment (e.g., laptops, touch displays) and how these can facilitate collaboration and de-centralize learning. Interestingly, one of the initial advocates was not from science, technology, or business, but humanities – specifically the English Department. In assessing the results of the studio space, they did something rather interesting. Besides the usual quantitative measures, they set up a running blog where both faculty and students reflected on their experiences in using the space.
Overall, the early results of their assessment of the Learning Studio shows solid promise, but they balance this by considering the Hawthorne effect. It seems to me that another thing to consider would be the impact of mobile computing. A lot has been written about this already and so I look forward to seeing more educators writing about how this might change the look and feel of classroom learning spaces. For example, if students brought their own mobile devices to the learning space how would that change the economics? The approximate cost for the UMSL Learning Studio was a little over $200k. Not an insignificant cost.
Technorati Tags:
Educause, University Missouri-St. Louis
Filed under: Collaboration, Design, Teaching
