October 2007 Archives

I do like reading the mass media's take on different technologies or aps/resources like Web 2.0 resources. As I was flying on Southwest on Sunday, I thumbed through Southwest Air's in-flight magazine, Spirit. Over the past few years I've seen a number of pieces of interest, such as an article about iPods, and last year met guests of friends who had a short piece on Wikipedia and I was called upon to explain it. I got the same look that I get from my students -- what the heck is he talking about?

If you thumb through the current Spirit, you'll find an article titled "Everyone Should Blog." I don't think it will convince other readers that they should be blogging. However, the author did get the point across that blogs serve different purposes and beyond sharing your laundry mishaps with eight of your friends, blogging is good for engaging in journalism or political activism. It opens a door "that the media and political establishments used to keep shut to people like you and me."

In a totally different part of the magazine, the Free Time section, is a very short piece about a blog called License to Rant. Seems someone saw a license plate with the tag SIZZRZ and found the idea that anyone other than Edward Sizzorhands would want such a vanity tag was too bizarre for words. So, Kjaere Carpinteria started License to Rant. So people shoot dig photos of the oddball vanity tags they see and send them for the blog. Nothing particular philosophical about it but I find it fun to look at. And if I ever have my EasyShot with me when I see one of those stupid plates, ...

Jim Austin found some background about the YouTube video "A New Vision" embedded in the previous entry. The course's instructor wrote in his blog:

This video was created by myself and the 200 students enrolled in ANTH 200: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, Spring 2007. It began as a brainstorming exercise, thinking about how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in. We created a Google Document to facilitate the brainstorming exercise, which began with the following instructions:

There is another video called Information R/evolution that is also quite good. I plan to show it to my class later this afternoon.

The latest ed tech YouTube video going around is "A Vision of Students Today." Thanks to Wayne Brent for posting the link.

The blurb on YouTube describes it as "a short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University." The most interesting part for me is that it was created "in collaboration with 200 students." I think it makes the message more meaningful than the slicker videos prepared by for-profits and consultants.

There is an interesting article in today's eSchool News Online, "'Fair use' confusion threatens media literacy: Report says many teachers, schools define 'fair use' of digital materials too narrowly." The article discusses The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy, [PDF] a report published by researchers at Temple University's Media Education Lab, American University Washington College of Law's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, and American University School of Communication's Center for Social Media.

Part of what makes this report important is that its findings report on the consequences the perceived ambiguity around Fair Use have on teaching media literacy. Wayne Brent, my colleague here in the LTC, got me interested in visual literacy and media literacy a year or two ago. I've added content about both to my course on information technology, in the context of 21st Century Skills. It looks like a good report to share with others in your professional circle.

Here are a several quotes from the article to give you an idea of the issues the report identified.

Teachers face conflicting information about their rights, and their students' rights, to use copyrighted works, the report says. They also face complex and often overly constrictive copyright policies in their own institutions.

In layman's terms, fair use is "a statutory exemption to the rights of copyright owners," says Kenneth Crews, a legal scholar at the Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis. There are four key factors that help decide whether use of copyrighted material constitutes fair use, he said: (1) the purpose of your use, (2) the nature of the work, (3) the amount you're using, and (4) the effect of your use on the market.

With the excitement around Bruce Springsteen's a new CD coming out, you might have missed our news that the UA is now listed on the iTunes U list of participating institutions. This is great because it makes finding UA on iTunes U simple. Of course, you can still go to our iTunes U access page and click the button.

In the last couple weeks we have added tracks for the College of Law, UA Foundation, Artists Series, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and UA Museum of Art. We have a few tracks in the hopper right now too. I should have several new ones added by early next week.

I started adding information on what's new to a page called, you guessed it, What's New on UA on iTunes U and am managing it monthly. As this is early October, the October page includes tracks added this week. view September's What's New page.

Just pulled together some stats for fall semester's blogs. There are 202 discrete blogs for courses and programs at the UA (We only support blogs in instruction) and a total of 722 authors. I put a list of fall semester's blogs together on the Blogging @ the LTC website.

Blogs used in instruction this semester display the usual mix of individual blogs for each student in a class, a single course blog where all students may author entries, a professor's blog where the instructor posts entries and the students comment on entries, a professor's blog where the instructor posts entries about course news, assignments, events, etc., and blogs for programs related to instructional applications.

About half a dozen of the blogs and authors created were never used, which is par for the course. Of more interest to me are the new-comers, like Al Classen, who embraced the use of blogs and wove a course blog into their pedagogy. There are also a few on-going blogs that have had a number of new authors added. My favorite is e-mentoring, a blog accompanying MCB396i, an "initiative was borne of the desire to encourage and retain more [female] students in science."

A couple weeks ago, the New York Times announced that it was ending it's practice of charging for almost all of its archived articles. Here's an article about this from August 7th that I found Googling just now.

A student in my IRLS571 class posted an entry to one of our discussion forums about "an article highlighting some of the best/most interesting NY Times pieces from the archives." If you're like me and have experienced first-hand the 'Net's evolution from text-based communications service (e.g., email, BITNET listservs, Usenet newsgroups) to the mass media, sales & marketing tool it's become, I think you'll enjoy reading "The Executive Computer; A Web of Networks, an Abundance of Services," by John Markoff (published February 28, 1993).