academic technology

The Consortium for School Networking has posted a web 2.0 and mobile acceptable use policy (AUP) guide (PDF download). Though brief, the resource outlines AUP policy formation and, most significantly, lists relevant laws for a couple dozen U.S. states. The guide also links to sample policies and additional resources.

will things work in your blackboard? test from Dartmouth

a website that catalogs infographics from across the web. Visual.ly has more than 5,000 infographics arranged in twenty-one categories. Some of the infographics are useful displays of information and others, like the one below are just for fun.

Did a quick pass of this MediaSite presentation and it appears to bring up some valid points about the benefits of lecture capture. Worthy of a Diigo tag, I think.

Article on how to use Diigo with students. Especially geared for k-12 (?). Ideas for things like shared annotation roles, shared bookmarking roles, Handouts are at the bottom of the page.

you can easily create and synchronize your subtitles to any online video*, store them on the Overstream server, and send the link to the subtitled video overstream to your friends.

ADELAIDE airport is using interactive maps of the bird life on the site to avoid collisions with planes.

We recommend making an archived copy of your site if you'd like this content preserved, and we are happy to work with faculty who need assistance in recreating content located in areas that we cannot move. For more information on making an archived copy of your course, see 

Use bFree to open a Blackboard™ course archive file and display an outline of the course. Preview and extract individual content items, or extract any or all content as an independent web site that mimics the original Blackboard™ course.

Create your own app for a conference

crowdsourcing is a serious solution to serious problems. Way to save money, spot problems, innovate solutions

Posted on this site are excerpts of original manuscripts, each of which has been annotated by undergraduates who have spent a semester critically evaluating the work and assessing the authors' own perspectives. Deep research by UGs. By including their interviews with primary investigators, links to background information, and tips for understanding and critically interpreting data, these undergraduates have developed a unique pedagogical tool that should enhance their peers ability to navigate and understand the primary literature. Developing scholars will benefit from their colleagues' insights as they are invited to explore the living history of a scientific inquiry.

hour video plus learning materials

There are lots of reasons that you might use Google Spreadsheets instead of Microsoft's Excel or SPSS. Here I'll focus on just a narrow set of the benefits you'll find with Spreadsheets.

 An 87-page animated PowerPoint isn't going to render well on an iPhone even if converted to a PDF. However a 5 minute YouTube video would be great. But most faculty do not want to re-make their course materials into something new and modern. and they certainly don't want to publish their stuff on YouTube. So students are left having to access traditional formatted course materials with their modern devices. It is clunky. And they don't like it. But that it not an LMS issue at all.

I thought I would share a training document I was asked to put together on Twitter in the classroom. The section you may be most interested in is a step-by-step guide to publishing a twitter feed to a blank page within a blackboard course. Please feel free to extract those pages if they are any use to you.

pretty good intro for beginners. Covers tweetdeck

I realized something tonight as I read the story of how Virginia Tech professor John Boyer landed a Skype interview for his World Regions class with Aung Sun Suu Kyi, leader of the democratic movement in Burma - I don't give near enough credit to Skype as a disruptive educational technology.