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News: The Promise of Digital Humanities - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...es_digital_humanities_projects digitalhumanities humanities support lcl
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 29 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Amid financial crises, humanities departments at many public universities have been razed. But even amid cuts, there has been a surge in interest in the digital humanities -- a branch of scholarship that takes the computational rigor that has long undergirded the sciences and applies it the study of history, language, and culture.
  • The NEH held a symposium on Tuesday for 60 recipients of its 2011 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, most of whom were given between $25,000 and $50,000. They were allowed two minutes each to describe their projects.
  • “While we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them,”
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • role-playing games
  • enabling learners to “experience” historical events or places instead of reading off a page.
  • visual representations
  • of data
  • One recurring theme in the presentations was the need for “linked open data” — types of research data that are tagged and stored in such a way that they can integrate with other research.
  • If one researcher had architectural data about New York City, and another had demographic data about the city, and each were able to cross-reference the other’s data with her own, it would deepen the context and understanding for both.
  • With linked open data on the rise, the same could soon happen with research data
  • “Linked open data is a very technical infrastructure, but the result of that is information that’s shared widely for free. A lot of scholarly data over the last hundred years or so is locked up in expensive journals that the public could never afford to subscribe to.
  • That could be the key to winning back support for the humanities
  • Barbara Lindsey on 29 Sep 11
     
    Could the creative use of technology help humanities scholars win back public support?
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Open for Learning: The CMS and the Open Learning Network | in education - 0 views

ineducation.ca/...-cms-and-open-learning-network cms learning openlearning wiley mott
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 06 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Light's examination of the impact of group study among students at Harvard is particularly compelling. In Making the Most of College, Light presents evidence that "students who study outside of class in small groups of four to six students, even just once a week, benefit enormously. Group meetings are organized around discussions of the homework, and as a result of their study group discussion, students are far more engaged and better prepared for class, learning significantly more" (2001, 52).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 06 Sep 10
       
      One could argue, I think, that our LTL courses, in addition to their language component, do just this.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      One could argue, I think, that our LTL courses, in addition to their language component, do just this.
  • no record left behind of the activity and learning that occurred within them. This is a pattern that repeats from semester to semester, throughout a student's learning career at a particular institution.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      Do you agree with this statement? Do you see any issues with this current situation?
  • blogs, and wikis
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      What is your initial reaction to our public blog and wiki?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • No longer do students sit passively in the classroom, restricted only to the authority of the instructor and their textbook for the final word on the subject matter of a lecture. Now they can Google terms, concepts, and events mentioned by the instructor, they txt, Facebook, and Twitter each other about what's being said, and they carry their notes and even the lecture itself out of class with them, recorded on laptops, MP3 recorders, and digital pens to be reviewed and shared.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      Your reaction to this?
  • instructors have largely employed the CMS to automate the past,
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      What is so bad about 'automating the past'?
  • which learners select as they engage in their educational experiences (p. 59).
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      Does this seem like a radical departure from our current educational paradigm? If so, in what ways? What would this require of you as an educator? 
  • When combined with tools and environments that afford opportunities for social interaction, educational resources become semiotic tools that influence learners' actions and mediate the learning process.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Sep 11
       
      This is a key statement.
  • This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
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Education Week: Science Grows on Acquiring New Language - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...09window_ep.h30.html language learning brain research
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • For example, when babies born to native-English-speaking parents played three times a week during that window with a native-Mandarin-speaking tutor, at 12 months, they had progressed in their ability to recognize both English and Mandarin sounds, rather than starting to retrench in the non-native language. By contrast, children exposed only to audio or video recordings of native speakers showed no change in their language trajectory. Brain-imaging of the same children backed up the results of test-based measures of language specialization.
  • The research may not immediately translate into a new language arts curriculum, but it has already deepened the evidence for something most educators believe instinctively: Social engagement, particularly with speakers of multiple languages, is critical to language learning.
  • “The key to that series of studies is exposure and live interactions with native speakers,” Ms. Lebedeva said. “The interactions need to be naturalistic: eye contact, gestures, exaggerated phonemes.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “Human brains are wired to learn best in social interactions, whether that learning is about language or problem-solving or emotion,” Ms. Lebedeva said, “but language is such a ubiquitous human behavior that studying it gives us an example of how more general learning takes place.”
  • at the science-oriented Ultimate Block Party held in New York City this month, children of different backgrounds played games in which they were required to sort toys either by shape or color, based on a rule indicated by changing flashcards. A child sorting blue and yellow ducks and trucks by shape, say, might suddenly have to switch to sorting them by color. The field games exemplified research findings that bilingual children have greater cognitive flexibility than monolingual children. That is, they can adapt better than monolingual children to changes in rules—What criteria do I use to sort?—and close out mental distractions—It doesn’t matter that some blue items are ducks and some are trucks.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 26 Oct 10
     
    researchers long thought the window for learning a new language shrinks rapidly after age 7 and closes almost entirely after puberty. Yet interdisciplinary research conducted over the past five years at the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, and other colleges suggest that the time frame may be more flexible than first thought and that students who learn additional languages become more adaptable in other types of learning, too.
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The Associated Press: Aid groups enlist Google to help in Haiti effort - 0 views

www.google.com/...-jszLQ5zDKHih_j9SFouAD9E6LJF00 googleearth disaster aid help
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 03 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Over a normal Google Earth screen of Haiti, blue spots appear showing where Haitians have settled. Some are named by street, zone or landmark, and others are simply numbered as "IDP" — internally displaced persons — camps.Each blue spot can be clicked on, calling up an information box that gives a site's longitude and latitude, commune and estimated number of families and individuals. The details are updated regularly so that, in theory, charities and government officials can foresee aid shortfalls, and potential dangers such as landslides and floods.
  • "It gives you a quick snapshot: 'Hey, look, there's no water there,'" Kelly said. "When something happens, the initial questions we ask are: 'Where is everyone? How are they living? What services are they getting?'"
  • "A lot of time and effort goes into logistics. If you don't know what's coming, where to take it, you are in trouble," Kelly said. "We need to understand, not in month three but in week two, where people have moved and what their conditions are. This is going to cut through a lot of bureaucracy."
  • Barbara Lindsey on 03 Mar 10
     
    Aid workers, with the help of Google Earth, are uploading key information onto the Web to illustrate the needs of hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by Haiti's earthquake - an innovation that could significantly boost the ability to respond to future disasters.
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The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and ... - Google Books - 0 views

books.google.com/books higher ed critique book
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 17 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 17 Feb 10
     
    Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge. At a time when competition to get into and succeed in college has never been more intense, universities are providing a less-useful education. Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, The Marketplace of Ideas examines what professors and students--and all the rest of us--might be better off without, while assessing what it is worth saving in our traditional university institutions.
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The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery | Both Sides of the Table - 0 views

www.bothsidesofthetable.com/...itter-in-information-discovery twitter value communitiesofpractice rss aggregator finding filtering information informationliteracy
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 21 Dec 10
     
    Does a good job of explaining the value of Twitter as an information aggregator, curator and way to explore complexities of issues of importance to you.
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Language Log » More on "culturomics" - 0 views

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll finding filtering information datamining
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Barbara Lindsey on 26 Feb 11
     
    When I was a student at the end of the 1970's, I never dared imagine, even in my wildest dreams, that the scientific community would one day have the means of analyzing computerized corpuses of texts of several hundreds of billions of words.
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ASCD Express 5.18 - Cell Phones Allow Anytime Learning - 0 views

www.ascd.org/...518-varlas.aspx mobiles mobile Kolb ascd
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Jun 10 - Cached
  • She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Cases for Using Students' Cell Phones in Education: A Practical Guide to Using Cell Phones in K–12 Schools, which looks at 11 U.S. and 5 international case studies of teachers integrating students' own cell phones into instruction.
  • One of Larry Cuban's (Teachers and Machines, Oversold and Underused) theories about why ed technology often fails in schools is that we use this top-down approach where administrators or tech coordinators introduce the technologies to the teachers, and they in turn try to introduce and teach it to the students. It's a very foreign concept for the students, as well as the teachers. And often what happens is maybe a handful of teachers end up using this very expensive technology, and students don't have any access to it outside of school. Cuban recommends a much more bottom-up approach to ed technology. Rather than making specialized software and hardware just for school learning, students and society introduce the technologies that schools should be integrating into learning.
  • People who know the history of ed technology know that it hasn't been that successful, long-term, with sustaining learning because it's often attached to a tool that students don't have access to outside of school.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For many schools, the hardest part is making it acceptable to turn to technologies that aren't traditionally used in schools. It's a culture that has to be cultivated at the school itself. In the book I'm working on now, many of the teachers in the case studies I discuss approached their administrators with something they'd been using with success outside of school, and their administrators were open to trying it out within school. Kipp Rogers at Passages Middle School in Newport News, Va., has done a phenomenal job modeling that approach and valuing not only his teachers, but also his students, who are involved in planning, as well.
  • Q: From what you've seen in the field, what's the most interesting instructional use of mobile devices happening now? Keren-Kolb: Definitely what's going on in Australia. Teachers are using QR (two-dimensional bar codes) for activities and learning. In the United States, about 60 percent of the phones can do this, but in most other countries, it's almost universal. So, in some Australian schools, this means [that] students come in on the first day of class and their entire syllabus is on a bar code they scan directly into their phone—same thing with some books and homework assignments. They'll scan a code for their homework, and it'll link to video tutorials and activities. So, moving away from textbooks and moving toward paperless learning that's much more interactive. I think that's exciting—how much information you can attach to that little bar code, and use it to extend learning.
  • When students can use whatever tools are around them, obviously, testing changes. It's not just about a right or wrong answer—it's about inquiry, collaboration, and the higher-order thinking skills we want students to do.
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10 Rules of Teaching in this Century -- Campus Technology - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...-teaching-in-this-century.aspx learner technology highered learning2.0
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • the knowledge developed during the course does not pre-exist the course. Second, since the knowledge of the course does not exist before the course (because you and the students develop the knowledge during the course), your chief challenge is to manage the process of knowledge discovery.
  • Now, because learning resources and opportunities are infinite, make the move: Don’t just tell students the key knowledge in your field, but help them discover it through problem-based active learning. Change your curriculum from a list of what you will say to a list of essential problems (or questions) that students will address, with your guidance, throughout the semester.
  • It may well be better to re-state learning outcomes in terms of essential problems and the research associated with those essential problems, and build rubrics based on the problems within a problem-based learning structure.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Move most assessment activity away from testing and toward evaluation of student evidence of learning.
  • In the new paradigm of active and varied learning, testing is less appropriate but assessing student evidence is more appropriate.
  • You, as a faculty member, must be as adept as your students in using Web-based applications, and there is no better way to learn the new breed of applications than to use them yourself for important professional purposes.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 01 Oct 10
     
    Talks about how we now can really walk the walk and have a learner-centered environment and the technologies nec. to support that.
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2008 Horizon Report » Key Emerging Technologies - 0 views

wp.nmc.org/...key-emerging-technologies 2008 beyondwebct horizonreport
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Taken as a set, our research indicates that all six of these technologies will significantly impact the choices of learning-focused organizations within the next five years.
  • The essential ingredient of next generation social networking, social operating systems, is that they will base the organization of the network around people, rather than around content. This simple conceptual shift promises profound implications for the academy, and for the ways in which we think about knowledge and learning.
  • New displays and interfaces make it possible to use mobiles to access almost any Internet content—content that can be delivered over either a broadband cellular network or a local wireless network.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Virtually anyone can capture, edit, and share short video clips, using inexpensive equipment (such as a cell phone) and free or nearly free software.
  • In the coming years, we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence—evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging—and implicit collective intelligence, or data gathered from the repeated activities of numbers of people, including search patterns, cell phone locations over time, geocoded digital photographs, and other data that are passively obtained.
  • Nonetheless, while there are abundant examples of personal and professional uses for mobiles, educational content delivery via mobile devices is still in the early stages. The expectation is that advances in technology over the next twelve to eighteen months will remove the last barriers to access and bring mobiles truly into the mainstream for education.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 09 Sep 08
     
    Taken as a set, our research indicates that all six of these technologies will significantly impact the choices of learning-focused organizations within the next five years.
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Education Week: Information Overloaded - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...44washington.h26.html information readinglist
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07 - Cached
  • If we’re going to insist that students bring home the information booty on Bradford by extracting the main ideas from his journal instead of simply admiring the book’s aesthetic values of form, rhythm, and content, then we need not bother with him, really. For proficiency’s sake—and ever since the information-overload bomb dropped, it’s all about proficiency (read: testing)—we can amass far more data in less time with a secondary text, whether a CliffsNotes or wordage from an American history scholar.
  • Clearly, living under this full-court press of information overload forces a few key questions for students and adults alike. What do we need to know? Why do we need to know it? And, given the fact that by the end of our lives we will only have absorbed and converted to knowledge a sliver of the information available to us in this new database-and-blog universe (the Web-page world, after all, is expanding and contracting at the rate of 1.5 million pages a day), should we bother knowing it?
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 10 Sep 07
       
      Halo effect of Internet information access? Does it exist really? How do we determine what students read and analyze. Has the Internet changed that at all?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “We are no longer reading,” she writes, “we’re searching.”
  • What will run at a premium is the ability to inspire students to turn up gems of original knowledge in the digital-information mine, thoughts and ideas that advance thinking rather than regurgitate data.
  • The pursuit of knowledge is less a process of acquisition than one of hurling irrelevant material out the window.
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Taking Diigo Beyond the Bookmark - 0 views

knowthenetwork.com/...king-diigo-beyond-the-bookmark diigo research collaboration writing
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 11 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Any writer knows the value of good research and with Diigo the process just got easier. Here’s a couple of ideas: tag items based on chapter, subject tag items for a bibliography jot a few notes to give context or your thoughts at the time highlight the section you intend to use and save the time of reviewing the entire page Diigo becomes even more essential in a collaboration project. The Forrester team used Delicious during their research for the book  Groundswell and I bet they could have used Diigo features like highlighting, comments, groups, and conversations.
  • tag recipes as appetizers, entrees, or desserts tag as vegetarian, diet, gluten free, or my favorite “enough-calories-to-make-Paula-Deen-blush” disclosure: the above link leads to my wife food blog MakeLifeDelicious.com, it’s the greatest food blog on earth #unbiased tag by ingredients highlight cooking times and pics
  • I love Diigo too. My son (10 years old) is working on his IB Exhibition on Water Pollution. He is working as part of a team. I helped them create a group for their topic so that they and their teacher can add resources, highlight text and tag interesting facts about the subject from home. Also, I am in a master's in education media design and am using Diigo to organize my resources for my Action Research project. Diigo is a great tool. Thanks for posting.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • A real revelation for us, however, has been to use Diigo for internal staff communication. I've set up a News group for people to share any useful careers-related articles they come across. We also have various Jobs/Scholarships groups to share relevant graduate vacancies we find. The RSS feeds from these then post to Twitter and our own Jobs and Further Study pages. Saves a lot of time entering the details into our own database and gets the information to our students and graduates quicker. Hopefully! It also keeps staff abreast with up-to-date jobs information. Diigo is great!
  • Barbara Lindsey on 11 Feb 10
     
    Writers Any writer knows the value of good research and with Diigo the process just got easier. Here's a couple of ideas: tag items based on chapter, subject tag items for a bibliography jot a few notes to give context or your thoughts at the time highlight the section you intend to use and save the time of reviewing the entire page Diigo becomes even more essential in a collaboration project. The Forrester team used Delicious during their research for the book  Groundswell and I bet they could have used Diigo features like highlighting, comments, groups, and conversations.
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2010 Horizon Report » Technologies to Watch - 0 views

wp.nmc.org/...technologies HorizonReport technologies
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 28 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The near-term horizon assumes the likelihood of entry into the mainstream for institutions within the next twelve months; the mid-term horizon, within two to three years; and the far-term, within four to five years. It should be noted that the Horizon Report is not a predictive tool. It is meant, rather, to highlight emerging technologies with considerable potential for our focus areas of teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.
  • virtually all higher education students carry some form of mobile device, and the cellular network that supports their connectivity continues to grow. An increasing number of faculty and instructional technology staff are experimenting with the possibilities for collaboration and communication offered by mobile computing. Devices from smart phones to netbooks are portable tools for productivity, learning, and communication, offering an increasing range of activities fully supported by applications designed especially for mobiles.
  • Far more than a collection of free online course materials, the open content movement is a response to the rising costs of education, the desire for access to learning in areas where such access is difficult, and an expression of student choice about when and how to learn.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Already in the mainstream of consumer use, electronic books are appearing on campuses with increasing frequency.
  • applications for laptops and smart phones overlay digital information onto the physical world quickly and easily.
  • Devices that are controlled by natural movements of the finger, hand, arm, and body are becoming more common. Game companies in particular are exploring the potential offered by consoles that require no handheld controller, but instead recognize and interpret body motions.
  • Visual data analysis is an emerging field, a blend of statistics, data mining, and visualization, that promises to make it possible for anyone to sift through, display, and understand complex concepts and relationships.
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Welcome to Wesley Fryer's Website: Moving at the Speed of Creativity - 5 views

www.wesfryer.com/default.htm digital story telling
shared by Celeste Arrieta on 15 Mar 10 - Cached
  • This is a guest blog post by Sherman Nicodemus. I've agreed to share a series of blog posts here on "Moving at the Speed of Creativity" this week. Hope you find this series helpful! If you have
    • Kemen Zabala
      Kemen Zabala on 15 Mar 10
       
      I didn't read it, but it is probably very interesting :)
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 15 Mar 10
       
      I'm sure it is, I agree
  • a web-based learning management system (LMS)
    • Chenwen Hong
      Chenwen Hong on 15 Mar 10
       
      the comparison of LMS and Open Source Lerning
  • Wesley Fryer
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 15 Mar 10
       
      Not to confuse with Paolo Freire
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 21st century
  • Thanks to the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and, ironically, the successful development of an iPhone application by NASA (bound by the Freedom of Information Act) the secret iPhone Developer agreement is now public. (PDF) EFF summarizes the key highlights of the agreement: Ban on Public Statements [by developers] App Store Only [for distribution] Ban on Reverse [...]
    • Christopher Laine
      Christopher Laine on 15 Mar 10
       
      These abbreviations are confusing.
  • [by developers]
    • Emmanuel Buzay
      Emmanuel Buzay on 15 Mar 10
       
      Who are they ?
  • live in the most exciting age of earth history for anyone with ideas they want to share with a global audience!
    • Catherine Ross
      Catherine Ross on 15 Mar 10
       
      It's scary too!
  • Technology in Education.
  • This is a guest blog post by Sherman Nicodemus. This is my second post in a series I'm sharing on "Moving at the Speed of Creativity" this week. If you have questions about this post I'll be glad to answer them via comments here. The advent of digital encoding technologies has brought a revolution to the [...]
    • Inas Ayyoub
      Inas Ayyoub on 15 Mar 10
       
      seems like it is about copyright issues!
    • Celeste Arrieta
      Celeste Arrieta on 15 Mar 10
       
      and there's a change going on...
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Offbeat Bride | Copyright, Creative Commons, and your wedding photos - 0 views

offbeatbride.com/...wedding-photo-copyright copyright
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 13 Mar 10 - Cached
  • The purpose of copyright law is to promote the progress of science and art.
  • most of what you find online is under copyright, even if there is no copyright symbol and no attribution and no source listed
  • Copyright comes with a set of exclusive rights.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The right to make copies. The right to distribute copies. The right to make derivative works. The right to perform or display the work.
  • The way the default rules of copyright ownership work, the photographer you hire to shoot your wedding holds the copyrights in your wedding photos.
  • But that's just the default. You can change all that with the contract you sign when you hire your photographer. Most wedding photographers these days do retain the copyrights in the photos they take of your wedding, but they may give you a license to make personal, non-commercial uses of your photos. This is especially common when photographers offer a CD or DVD containing the high-res files of all your pictures. You usually have to pay extra, but a license like this means you can print copies yourself, post your pictures on Facebook, and send them to your friends, without asking for permission and without violating your photographer's copyright. These are all good rights to have, and I highly recommend reading your contract carefully to see if you get them, and if you don't, to ask.
  • Many photographers, artists, musicians, and authors – including the ones who make a living from their art – now use Creative Commons licenses because they recognize that it is good for them. They always get credit as the creator, and it's easier for people to discover and fall in love with their work when fans are free to copy and share it.
  • Her biggest concern was that if the license was attached to high-resolution versions of the photos it would be too easy for people to make infringing uses, especially in print
  • we compromised with an agreement that we would be allowed to attach a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license only to low-res versions of the files. This is enough to allow for web-based reuses of our photos, but was limited enough that our photographer was comfortable giving it a try. We edited the language in her standard photographer contract to reflect the new license, and that was it.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 13 Mar 10
     
    Another excellent post by Molly Klein about copyright
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Social Media in Africa, Part 1 - 1 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...ial_media_in_africa_part_1.php
shared by suzanne ondrus on 05 Apr 10 - Cached
  • undergoing a connectivity revolution
  • Africa
  • Part One of this series looks at social media contributions from Africans, Part Two looks at mobile and connectivity innovations and Part Three looks at how local Governments, NGOs and nonprofits are being affected.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The three biggest success stories of independent social media projects taking off in Africa are Afrigator (a South African aggregator of African blogs and news), Zoopy (a YouTube/Flickr like service also out of South Africa) and Ushahidi (an SMS crisis reporting and mapping engine from Kenya). All three have drawn international attention which resulted in a major investment for Zoopy and Afrigator's acquisition (ReadWriteWeb's coverage). Meanwhile Ushahidi has successfully raised several rounds of funding after winning the Net2 Mashup Compeition prize of $25,000.
  • Technology unconferences and Barcamps have sprung up all over the continent, everywhere from Kenya to Nairobi to Madagascar to Uganda and Senegal.
  • The applications to follow are definitely the ones that leverage the mobile telephony infrastructure. An overwhelming portion of African users have no convenient access beyond cellular terminals - and that has spawned very innovative solutions based on existing and widely accessible technologies such as SMS. Examples abound such as Mpesa, Celpay, Etranzact and everyone else who is thriving in that formerly almost entirely cash-bound insecure environment. Underdeveloped banking and underdeveloped fixed telecommunications infrastructures are huge opportunities.
  • Zoopy is a South African social media tool created by Jason Elk that allows users to upload videos, podcasts, and pictures and share them on the web.
  • Ushahidi relies heavily upon GoogleMaps, which it uses for mapping reports of incidents. It's built on the Zend framework for PHP and uses a number of different protocols for SMS, GPRS and mapping data.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 05 Apr 10
       
      Example of mashup and use of geomapping.
  • Afrigator defines itself as "a social media aggregator and directory built especially for African digital citizens who publish and consume content on the web."
  • The Web Community
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 29 Apr 10
       
      Internet is expensive in Africa, at least where I was in Benin. It was a dollar an hour where I was. And teachers only earned $3 a day.
  • Mobile phones
    • suzanne ondrus
      suzanne ondrus on 29 Apr 10
       
      I was in Benin for nine months in 2006-2007 and can attest to how expensive it is to talk on cell phones- for local calls! A 15 min. local call cost about $20. I remember thinking how calling from the U.S. to Benin was cheaper than making local calls in Benin.
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The Device Versus the Book -- Campus Technology - 0 views

campustechnology.com/...he-Device-Versus-the-Book.aspx ebooks campustech
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 05 May 10 - Cached
  • reading for learning is not the same activity as reading for pleasure, and so the question must be asked: Do these devices designed for the consumer book market match up against the rigors of academic reading?
  • Each school ran its pilot in courses that used texts without color graphs or complex illustrations, so that the known limitations of the devices’ E Ink grayscale electronic-paper display wouldn’t be a hindrance in the students’ learning.
  • There were qualities of both the Kindle DX and Sony Reader that the students felt showed promise, and that made them enthusiastic for the day when e-readers’ functionality as an academic tool becomes a reality. These features include the easy-to-read E Ink screen; the size, weight, and durability of the devices; and the long battery life. But students encountered limitations in the devices that made them inadequate for reading academic texts.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • students need to be able to highlight important passages, make notes in the margins of the text, and quickly skim through passages to refresh and compare information. In all three pilots, the students felt that e-readers were not yet ready to meet these academic needs.
  • the Kindle’s small keyboard makes the annotation process very labor-intensive
  • Because the keyboard is so small, and because there was a significant latency between typing the note and the note appearing on screen, a lot of students found that they were overtyping. Many of the students got fed up with the keyboard, so they would just read on their Kindle and make notes in a separate notebook.” Also, the Kindle allows readers to make annotations only in e-book-format files, meaning that students couldn’t insert notes on any PDF-format files that were on the devices. “I think the first [e-reader] manufacturer that figures out how to make a PDF that you can also annotate is going to snag this market,” Temos predicts.
  • He is hesitant, though, to say that this problem is primarily because of a deficiency in the device, when it could just as easily be that the students need to adapt to using a new technology. “[ASU is] going to look at whether this is something that students get used to in the second semester of the pilot and eventually prefer, or if it remains consistent that they continue to prefer paper,” he says. “I think we don’t know that yet.”
  • Highlighting text with the Kindle was not much easier or more satisfying for Princeton students. Much of the difficulty was due to the inability to highlight in color on the grayscale E Ink screen. “The highlighting on the Kindle isn’t actually highlighting; it just makes an underline,” Temos explains. “The students want something more emphatic than that.” Students also found it awkward to highlight long passages using the trackball. “Highlighting over a page break on the Kindle is a real feat,” Temos laughs. “If you actually extend your highlight from one page to the next you feel a real sense of accomplishment.”
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danah boyd | apophenia » "Real Names" Policies Are an Abuse of Power - 0 views

www.zephoria.org/...real-names.html onlinerights onlineprivacy
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 04 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. T
  • what many folks failed to notice is that countless black and Latino youth signed up to Facebook using handles. Most people don’t notice what black and Latino youth do online. Likewise, people from outside of the US started signing up to Facebook and using alternate names. Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers. Real names are by no means universal on Facebook, but it’s the importance of real names is a myth that Facebook likes to shill out. And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.
  • privileged people
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously. Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name. Quite the opposite; many people are far LESS safe when they are identifiable. And those who are least safe are often those who are most vulnerable.
  • Likewise, the issue of reputation must be turned on its head when thinking about marginalized people. Folks point to the issue of people using pseudonyms to obscure their identity and, in theory, “protect” their reputation.
  • The assumption baked into this is that the observer is qualified to actually assess someone’s reputation. All too often, and especially with marginalized people, the observer takes someone out of context and judges them inappropriately based on what they get online.
  • There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.
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Actually Going to Class? How 20th-Century. - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...126519 highered learning2.0 education2.0 technology chronicle
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 20 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Mr. Somade told me recently that "the general idea is that if I don't have to come to class, I don't want to come to class—and technology is giving students more and more reason not to come."
  • In an era when students can easily grab material online, including lectures by gifted speakers in every field, a learning environment that avoids courses completely—or seriously reshapes them—might produce a very effective new form of college.
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 11
       
      How do you respond to this?
  • much of what students rate as the most valuable part of their learning experience at college these days takes place outside the traditional classroom, citing data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual study based at Indiana University at Bloomington. Four of the eight "high-impact" learning activities identified by survey participants required no classroom time at all: internships, study-abroad programs, senior thesis or other "capstone" projects, or the mundane-sounding "undergraduate research," meaning working with faculty members on original research, much as graduate students do.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • At the start of each session, Mr. Campbell gave the 11 students a strange kind of pop quiz. For one thing, it was anonymous, so no grades were given. And rather than ask questions about the content of the homework, he asked students to detail how much time and effort they spent preparing for class. Among the questions: Did you talk to a classmate about the assignment? And how many hours did you spend on the reading?
  • The scores started low—between 4 and 5, meaning the students did far less than the assigned homework. Something happened as the term progressed, though, as students bought into the concept
  • "The commenting and linking are crucial," he says, "as those activities are essential parts of being in the real blogosphere."
  • If the core activity at college shifts away from the classroom and into practical activities, do students even need to come to a campus?
  • "There is definitely a broader array of options available to students who wish to forgo the commute to class altogether in exchange for online classes that essentially provide the same content that professors regurgitate to students in lecture."
    • Barbara Lindsey
      Barbara Lindsey on 25 Sep 11
       
      What would George Siemens (Teaching in Social and Technological Networks) say to this?
  • Barbara Lindsey on 20 Aug 11
     
    fall 2011 syllabus
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Hearing Bilingual - How Babies Tell Languages Apart - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...11klass.html bilingual babies languages research
shared by Barbara Lindsey on 12 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • “What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. “They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.
  • In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different.
  • Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.
  • Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.
  • “This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting,” Dr. Kuhl said. “They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way.”
  • Barbara Lindsey on 12 Oct 11
     
    One of the key take aways for me is this quote: "This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting," Dr. Kuhl said. "They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way."
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