Teaching with Twitter (and introducing 12 Seconds)

Hear how David Parry, a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, uses Twitter, a messaging service, for his courses here.

See 12 Seconds for a video tool that functions in a similar manner.

Timeline and catalog of Internet Memes

For those of you exploring Internet memes with your students you might find this site useful. It compiles an interactive history of memes going back to 1982 with the emergence of the emoticon.

Other formats included within the site are a list, flipbook, and map, so users can select the view they like best.

Michael Wesch on Media Literacy and Teaching

I've been working my way through this video from Michael Wesch on media literacy and the college classroom. Those of you who've seen his videos on The Machine is Us and Today's College Students will find some familiar material at the beginning, and he goes much further here into how he uses web 2.0 tools for his courses. Very interesting work.

Digital Literature from Penguin Publishing

PenguinUK has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story - designed specially for the internet.

Their We Tell Stories project took six authors and offered them six weeks to create six interactive, online stories. Check out the 21 Steps story...great fun! Hard Times is intriguing, too.

Elit 2.0: A Guide to Literary Works on Social Software

Do you want to teach Web 2.0 technologies but need some exemplary creative texts for students to "read" as examples and/or illustrations of the tool's creative potential?

Check out ELit: A Guide to Literary Works on Social Software

"While students are still developing literacies in new technologies it is important that their adoption involves more than just accepting the software at interface value. What these technologies are and can be has yet to be decided and this set of electronic literary works offers an artistic exploration of their possibilities that will enrich the quest for software literacy."
From: WRT: Writer Response Theory: a blog and podcast dedicated to discussing text arts forms

Flickr and libraries

Thanks to "hot tipper" Fiona for this article on uses for flickr in a variety of library and educational settings.

The UWB/CCC Campus Library has a flickr tour - I hope to do some new photos this summer!

Creating a research repository in del.icio.us

Gray and I, with the help of Leslie, have created an assignment for the interdisciplinary inquiry course in which students use the social bookmarking and online information organization tool del.icio.us to thoughtfully save, categorize, describe, and share information resources.

Through internet research and emerging Library tools, students are creating a research repository online that will be at least 20 resources deep. The "bookmark & share" widget that has been added to UW's WorldCat catalog, for example, enables students to seamlessly post specific research resources and annotate them. After reviewing student work, and compiling their feedback, we will report back on the success of using this free web 2.0 technology to enhance student research.

Embedding Media in Blogs and Other Sites

Apture is a new tool that enables you to embed a variety of media into a blog post or web page.

You can see a demo on this blog from their site.

There would seem to be much potential here for teaching and learning, even while I do wonder if there might also be a tipping point of Too Much Information if used carelessly.

Flickr blog

This companion blog to the photo organization and sharing site Flickr posts selections from the site, provides commentary on changing photo formats and techniques (see the recent post on the death of Polaroid film), and lists events and meet-ups with flickr members.

The UWB/CCC Campus Library has a photoset on Flickr, and I am curious to see how courses and students may use Flickr - it seems like a perfect tool for studio art students, photography students, and as a way to visually track a group project, video, play, etc.

YouTube Hall of Fame.

I am working on a new blog called the YouTube Hall of Fame. I want to feature videos here that have had a tremendous cultural impact. Many of the videos here have multi-million view counts. What other videos belong here?

Literature, Google Earth, and Writing for the Web

We Tell Stories will publish six pieces of "digital fiction" in the next six weeks, using a variety of interactive platforms to tell/show/reveal the story. The first uses Google Earth to track the movements of a man "in the wrong place, at the wrong time".

Ewan McIntosh, one of my favorite bloggers on learning, teaching, and and Web 2.0 posts a number of links to blogs by and published interviews with project authors.

How amazing it would be to create course assignments using similar technologies.

YouTube in Education

Here's a sampling of other institutions who have YouTube channels.
University of California, Berkeley: http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: http://youtube.com/mit
Duke University: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=DukeUniversityNews
Purdue University: http://youtube.com/purdue
Princeton’s UChannel: http://www.youtube.com/user/uchannel
Auburn University: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=AuburnUniversity&p=v
Old Dominion University: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=odu
Carnagie Mellon University: http://www.youtube.com/user/carnegiemellonu
Vanderbilt University: http://www.youtube.com/user/VanderbiltUniversity
University of Notre Dame: http://www.youtube.com/user/NDdotEDU

UWB's channel isn't full-fledged like these examples yet (it requires an institutional commitment that must be approved by YouTube), but hopefully we'll get there!

UW Bothell's YouTube channel!

University of Washington Bothell has its own YouTube channel! It's still young, but check it out!

Here's one video featured on the channel:

Flow TV Journal - new issue

The new issue of the journal FlowTV is online. FlowTV is a critical forum on television and media culture published by the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

Highlights from this issue include:

• Confessions of a Television Academic in a Post-TV World
• Uncle Stevie vs. Aca-Fan: What CopyBlogger can teach us about Popular Scholarship">Uncle Stevie vs. Aca-Fan: What CopyBlogger can teach us about Popular Scholarship

Wikipedia and social change.

Here is an interesting event on whether Wikipedia is helping or hindering social change.

Mapping and tracking web 2.0 tool usage

I heard of WikipediaVision (beta) from a snippet in the Feb 2008 edition of College & Research Libraries News, and while that tool has potential, it led me to even more 2.0 tool/Google maps mashup applications that I found to be more impressive (mainly just because they're further into their development).

Check them out to see in (almost) real-time the usage and content people are contributing:

• FlickrVision 3D
  
• TwitterVision - also in 3D version and can be set up to pull from Facebook "twitter" messages.
  
• SpinVisionTV - pulls from YouTube postings

Caveats: Only certain user's activities will be reflected in these tools, depending on user information made public and other functions of the selected tools.

Websites as graph/art

This tool is pretty neat. Enter the url of the website of your choice, and it will graph it and display the site in a visual manner. It's really quite beautiful as the graph is generated, too, as it's an animated process.
This image is the graph for this blog, and it's still growing and taking form as I write this entry!

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Signs: Studies in Graphic Narrative - new scholarly journal

SIGNs – Studies in Graphic Narratives – is a new, international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on Comics (or, in contemporary jargon, Graphic Novels), from modern times up to the early decades of the 20th century. Read more here.

Wikipedia's Top 50 - Visualized

For those of you fascinated by the visual display of info as I am, this graphic nicely visualizes the top 50 wikipedia searches from 8/06-5/07. Edward Tufte would be proud of the creator.

It's interesting to see what topics were popular in concordance w/ what was going on in the news of politics and entertainment at the time. It's also kinda funny how one of the top things searched on were 'wiki' and/or 'wikipedia.'

Wikipedia’s Top 50 Visualizations Link

via English Education Professor by Todd Finley on 1/27/08

Scholarly communication: Harvard opens up

In an exciting development in the push for open access scholarly communication, Tuesday's Chronicle of Higher Education news blog posted: Harvard Faculty Adopts Open-Access Requirement. The policy requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online through Harvard's institutional repository. There appears to be some confusion regarding when the articles can be posted (after peer review? after the article is published?). This is another facet of what MIT's open courseware project has done to make course materials available free online.

Related links:
SPARC
MIT Open CourseWare

One million monkeys.

I have always been struck by how the logic of Wikipedia has not really affected the production of content- except for the use of blogs by major media outlets. I can easily see Wikilogic being applied in the creation of literature, advertising and even textbooks. (I am aware of Wikibooks- but it is not the force it needs to be, IMHO.)

Now, we have an interesting example of collaborative story telling- one million monkeys. They seem to have very interesting ideas on how stories can be generated using a collaborative approach. Members upload snippets and readers can take stories off in interesting directions based on their preferences. At the end, the book is not a linear progression. Rather, it is a hypertext tree! Check it out and post your thoughts here.

Open-Access Student Video Contest

North Carolina Student Wins Open-Access Video Contest

via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog on 1/22/08

A library group that promotes open access to scholarly data today announced the winners of a contest that had students producing short videos that advocate sharing of ideas and information. Habib Yazdi, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won first place for this video called “Share.”

The first runner-up was a video by Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, of Carleton College, titled “Pri Vetai: Private Eye.” And the second runner-up was “An Open Access Manifesto,” by Romel Espinel and Josh Hardro of the Pratt Institute. —Andrea L. Foster

A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom

Here is an interesting way one professor used Twitter in class and for assignments:

A Professor's Tips for Using Twitter in the Classroom

via The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog on 1/28/08

Twitter at first seemed like a bad idea to David Parry, an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas. For those not in the know, Twitter is a service that lets you micro-blog your life by dashing out very short notes (140 characters max) to a select group of friends or other subscribers, who can receive them as text messages on their cell phones. Mr. Parry’s first instinct was that Twittering would just encourage students to speak in sound bites and self-obsess.

But then he gave it a try, and he now sees Twitter as a useful classroom-communication tool.

How is that? He outlines several “Ways to use Twitter in Academia” on a post on the blog AcademHack.

Last semester he required the 20 students in his “Introduction to Computer-Mediated Communication” course to sign up for Twitter and to send a few messages with the service each week as part of a writing assignment. He also invited his students to follow his own Twitter feed, in which he sometimes writes several short thoughts each day. Yesterday morning, for instance, he sent out a message that read: “Reading, prepping for grad class, putting off running until it warms up a bit.” Last week, one of his messages included a link to a Web site he wanted his students to check out.

The posts from students also mixed the mundane with the useful. One student twittered that she just bought a pet rabbit. Another noted that a topic from the class was being discussed on a TV-news report.

The immediacy of the messages helped the students feel like more of a community, Mr. Parry said in an interview Monday. “It was the single thing that changed the classroom dynamics more than anything I’ve ever done teaching,” he said.

One downside: Some students have to pay a small fee for each text message they receive, and that means all this Twittering can add up to real money. Students can avoid such charges by setting their Twitter account so that they receive e-mail messages instead of text messages, but that eliminates much of the point of the service.

Should more professors use Twitter? Have you tried it in your classroom? —Jeffrey R. Young

Expressive Processing: An Experiment in Blog-Based Peer Review

Participate in a blog-based peer review experiment!

Expressive Processing is the name of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's forthcoming book about digital fictions and computer games, scheduled for publication next year by the MIT Press.

He's decided to do something a little different with Expressive Processing: ask the Grand Text Auto blog community to participate in an open, blog-based peer review.

Digital Toy Chest

Digital Toy Chest for Online or Downloadable Tools

via Machina Memorialis by John on 1/15/08

From Alan Liu, via Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 21, No. 465:

“Toy Chest” collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. Most of the tools gathered here are free or relatively inexpensive (exceptions: items that are expensive but can be used productively on a free trial basis). Also on this page are “paradigms”–books, essays, digital projects, etc.–that illustrate the kinds of humanities projects that software thinking tools/toys might help create.” Each entry includes a descriptive annotation, screenshot, and link. Included at present are tools for diagramming, game creation, mapping, mashup creation, simulation & modeling, text analysis, visualization/pattern-discovery, and machinima.

New Journal: Memory Studies

New Journal: Memory Studies

via Machina Memorialis by John on 1/23/08

Via the H-Net’s H-Memory:

SAGE Publications has released the first issue of Memory Studies. They describe the journal thusly

Memory Studies responds to and seeks to shape public and academic discourses on the nature, manipulation, and contestation of memory in the contemporary era, and examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. [Read more.]

They’re allowing free access to the first issue (with registration), and it is most definitely worth checking out.

frustration aesthetics

I’m intrigued by the term, as Douglas uses it in his analysis of Interactive Fiction (which looks quite good as a whole, btw)….I wonder if, in part, that “frustration” is part and parcel of the expeience of art since at least its modernist fragmenations, growing autonomy? Art is the genre that knows how and works to frustrate its own tradition, expectations? Thereby opening up something different, giving chance a chance….

YouTube Ethnography Project

This YouTube video introduces the YouTube Ethnography Project, lead by Dr. Michael Wesch of Kansas State. Read more about the ongoing digital ethnography project.