This video from TED 2006 features Hans Rosling talking about changes in birth rates in the developing and developed world. He uses data visualization tools to really bring the data to life and in the process shows how these tools can make statistical data engaging for the rest of us.
Tidbits…
Vijay Kumar has recently co-edited a book called Opening Up Education which discusses the need for shifting from a teacher centered methodology to a active learning, student centered one. This is not a new argument but Kumar incorporates the impact of Web 2.0 and how these technologies make a compelling argument for changing education now to utilize these ubiquitous technologies. Trent Bateson from MIT who wrote a chapter in this book that talks about evidence based learning argues for this shift now.
A central component of the technology that can drive this shift are ePortfolios. There are several options in this space. A few worth mentioning are Open Source Portfolio, Digication, Ning, and Elgg. Tuft’s University has licensed VUE which is a visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. Tuft’s University has also devloped SPARK which is an amalgamation of tools such as wikis, blogs, podcast publisher, forums, maps, and a media annotator.
Mark Frydenberg teaches IT concepts at Bentley College. He uses mashups in his Web 2.0 class focusing on three areas: technology, strategy, and community. His students concentrate on six actions: appreciate, participate, investigate, communicate, colaborate, create as they delve into Web 2.0 technologies. Mark uses Microsft Popfly to teach his students IT programming concepts.
An interview with Stephan Mader, wiki evangelist, provides a good summary for using wikis in higher education. Stephan’s blog is a rich resource for exploring the use of wikis in depth.
Live blogging from CALI 2008: Len Davidson from the DuFour Law Library at Catholic University of America has created several widgets for students to access library resources. DuFour has not made it’s widgets publicly available yet so it’s impossible to provide usage statistics but stats from UPenn’s library say .4% of UPenn students use their widgets (from widget box) to access their library resources. The take away here is widgets are easy to build but it’s difficult to get target audience to use them. Business Week has published a couple of articles on widgets and their effectiveness. There are many resources out there that talk about widgets or widget tools. Magtoo is a cool widget that stitches pictures together into a one panorama picture. Len has a nice review on his blog.
Live blogging from CALI 2008: Thomas Ryan and Timothy Divito from Rutgers School of Law – Camden are discussing laptop encryption. They recommend all deans, department chairs, faculty, clinical staff, admin staff, and clerical staff have encrypted drives. They posit that most laptop thefts are not for the purposes of identity theft but rather for the system itself and that the majority of thefts are inside jobs. Regardless of the impetus, rules and regulations require disclosure of the theft to all who may be affected. This is obviously an undesirable situation.
They reviewed many different products but are highlighting two today: Free CompuSec and Truecrypt. CompuSec’s nicest feature is GlobalAdmin which is a central management system. CompuSec supports Windows (2000, XP, Vista) and Linux and has additional sw packages such as single sign on, encryption of CDs, Floppies and other removable storge, single file encryption, SafeLan (for network storage) and VOIP encryption. Time for encryption: 40GB drive, 3-4 hours, 80GB, 6-7 hours.
Truecrypt now offers full disk encryption. It is an open source product. It differs from CompuSec in that its original purpose was to encrypt individual files. Accordingly, it’s install is very quick-only two files. TrueCrypt forces you to burn a rescue disk with the key while CompuSec stores this key in a file which you can store anywhere-USB key, network share, CD, etc. TrueCrypt is recommended for single laptop encryption for advanced users while CompuSec is recommended for multiple systems because you can use the same key for each system.
It seems easier to deal with full time employees of an institution if the hardware is owned by the school. What is less clear is how schools deal with students who often use their personal machines when working on client files particularly in clinics. What policies and procedures should be in place to protect client data on student machines? Should schools ban the use of student personal machines when working on client cases? Should schools provide students with encryption tools? Or should schools mandate students have encryption software much like they would mandate the use of an administrators password? There are no easy answers here but it’s clear schools need to do something to address the risk of confidential information becoming exposed due to theft or loss.
Live blogging from CALI 2008: Joel Garreau is a student of culture, values, and change. Most recently he is the author of Radical Evolution Joel is a reporter and editor at The Washington Post and principal of The Garreau Group, the network of his best sources committed to understanding who we are, how we got that way, and where we’re headed, worldwide. He has served as a senior fellow at the University of California at Berkeley and George Mason University, and is an affiliate of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at Oxford.
OK. Let’s see where this goes. Joel is describing a scenario of super humans, enhanced human beings, silent messaging…this is interesting. He’s arguing that Moore’s Law is leading us to a place where this kind of ability will be possible. Look around, he suggests, Barry Bonds, Dolly the sheep, brain implants, these technologies are here and are advancing fast.
I think I’ll read his book.
Live blogging from CALI 2008: Larry Farmer is a true proponent of deliberate practice. His work on using deliberate practice is compelling. While deliberate practice is not for every type of law class there are subjects where it is applicable. MediaNotes supports this type of practice. He developed this software to support deliberate practice in his teaching of interviewing and counseling skills. Students capture their work using MediaNotes and a web camera. Student reviews their video and makes comments on salient moments in the video. Adjunct faculty member reviews video and provides additional feedback. One interesting note…students are told if they excel in the class they will be entered into a pool to participate as adjunct faculty the following year. Each class, four to five students really buckle down on the work because they want to teach.
Live blogging from CALI 2008: This presentation is a view from two schools, University of Georgia Law School and University of Maryland School of Law, about their implementations of BePress’ IR technology.
IR: an institutional repository is a means to collect the intellectual digital output of an organization; includes a variety of formats, provides open access to materials, collects and orgs output into one virtual location.
SSRN v Digital Commons:
Factors to consider:
Level of promotion: SSRN favors the individual, while digital commons prioritizes the institution.
Depth of Content: SSRN contains only text documents; digital commons allows a variety of file formats to be included.
Search Engine Visibility: SSRN at one time only allowed search engines to look at metadata. This may have changed recently.
Their conclusion: SSRN and DC are not redundant; each serves a different population.
Obtaining Content:
- building buy in is key but you need to build a strategy to promote awareness. they populated each category with one representative document and included at least one document from each faculty member
- ease of submission is critical. you can deploy direct submission and/or mediated submission. Mediated gives more control over the content.
-Feedback to faculty is provided in digest form on weekly basis.
- Clear content policies should be developed. for example, they created a popular media category to distinguish this from scholarly content. And they encouraged faculty members to set up selected works pages.
Copyright Procedures:
1. Assume permission from your own authors
2. List out all existing publications and sort by type, e.g., journal entry, book, etc. and manage copyright with centrally. Do not put responsibility on the faculty member.
3. Batch requests for contacting each journal to ask permission to upload identified articles both to Digital Commons and the author’s own web page (selected works).
4. For newer works, encourage authors to include these rights in any future publication agreements.
UM School of Law also uses BePress. They include student work as well as faculty. They use it in a similar moderated manner as University of Georgia.
BePress is a hosted solution and provides a niche service to higher education.
Live blogging from CALI 2008: USC Gould School of Law has implemented iTunes U, You Tube, and Google Apps in the last year. USC Law relies on central university for network, email, and CIFS. Law students complained about email the most so USC Law IT looked to Google apps for mail. Students have mail, calendaring, documents, and sites, and will eventually have blogs. USC Law decided to move to Google Apps because they felt it would grow with student expectations. IT prepared a well rounded training web page but found that most students didn’t need training. 50% of their student body was using Google mail prior to migration. USC Faculty and staff are on Exchange for mail and calendaring. However, USC Law has accepted the issue with subpoenas by agreeing to work with Google’s general counsel to fight the subpoena but since Google owns the content, they ultimately can do what they want. This is a huge red flag in my opinion. USC developed a YouTube channel for the purposes of outreach. They set up a main University channel then each school in the University have their own channel. USC Law is not using it for class recordings yet but has primarily added content for prospective students and advertising. USC decided to have adds on their videos; YouTube shares 50% of ad revenue with host institution. USC also set up a spot on iTunes U. USC students only see content for the classes in which they are enrolled. They also have a public view for non-USC students. Apple limits USC to one terabyte of space. USC law has used profcast to sync audio with powerpoint slides before uploading to iTunes U.
