MIT – Visualizing Cultures

Here’s a link to a web-based project in visual studies developed together with a course at MIT entitled Visualizing Cultures.  The following is a brief excerpt from the website:

What is Visualizing Cultures?

Using new technologies, Visualizing Cultures weds images and commentary to illuminate social and cultural history in innovative ways. A narrative “Core Exhibit” not only gives the historical significance of the images, but also addresses issues such as genre and medium. Each unit comes with a comprehensive curriculum and carefully annotated digital archive of images from public and private sources.

The current units address topics relating to modern Japan; future units will deal with other countries and cultures as well.

Visualizing Cultures is published on MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW), which makes MIT course materials freely and openly available on the web. All materials on OCW have been cleared for copyright, so both the images and narratives may be used in and out of the classroom.

Comments and Annotations

Here’s a brief item on what could be a very useful tool for sharing comments and annotating texts with students.

Social Scholarship

Kevin Wiliarty at Academic Commons has a useful intro to Laura Cohen’s post on “2.0 scholarship”. Wiliarty discusses a number of additional social software resources worth investigating including SlideShare, Scribd, Zoho, and ThinkFree.

Institute for the Future of the Book

While this website is becoming more and more visible to a general academic audience, it continues to develop in a number of interesting ways.  Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Avi Santo have been working on the Media Commons project.  Here’s a brief “about”:

MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, will be a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network.

“Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet”, an article on the IFB website, is a report on — and a nice example of — the work in progress by Fitzpatrick and her colleagues.  While it focuses on the problems and prospects for change in academic publishing and the traditional tenure review process, it places these issues in relation to those of the public sector, media, and communication.

Web 3.0?

The folks at MIT have developed a new design tool for realtime online demonstrations that take the “whiteboard” to another level. (FYI…Whiteboard is a feature of most online “learning management systems” such as Blackboard, WebCT,etc. It simulates writing on a board with a marker.)

Here’s a brief and very simple demo of their “Assist Sketch Understanding System“. Imagine what our digital design students would do with it.

More than one way to Google

Google has done it again…they’re now providing a free service for creating web-based documents that can be created, edited, and published collaboratively.  It’s called Writely.  Here’s how it’s described:

With Writely, you can:

• Use our online editor to format documents, spell-check and more.
• Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text.
• Download documents to your desktop as Word, PDF and more.
• View your documents’ revision history and roll back to any version.

Plus, since its [sic - please edit] online, you can:

• Invite others to share your documents by e-mail address.
• Edit documents online with whomever you choose.
• Publish documents online to the world, or to just who [whom?] you choose.
• Post your documents to your blog.

Yale Ups the Ante

Eleni Litt, our new Director of Academic Support, forwarded this link to a recent piece on the Inside Higher Ed blog.  Yale, with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is putting videos of full course lectures on its website in addition to other selected course materials.  All of the materials are open to the public in the spirit of the OpenCourseWare Project started by MIT several years ago, also with support from Hewlett.

"We want to add another dimension to open courseware,” said Catherine
Casserly, a program officer at Hewlett. She said that video components
used at MIT and elsewhere have been very popular with people all over
the world. “We’re trying to make that bridge” to the audience for high
quality American education, she said. Casserly said that Yale’s
initiative — starting with seven courses this year, with plans to grow
quickly — was the first open courseware effort based on lecture videos.
“We hope to see this spread to other universities,” she said.

Bob Berkman’s Recommendation

In a comment to the TNS 2.0 post below, Bob Berkman recommends the work of Peter Morville and his recent book Ambient Findability.  Here’s what Bob says:

Of everything that I’ve read so far about Web 2.0, my favorite source
is a book by Peter Morvile, an "information architect", titled Ambient
Findability. In my classes on Web 2.0, this is an assigned text–it is
a clear, compelling and fascinating discussion about all the various
threads that make up the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Thanks, Bob.  I’ve added Morville’s blog with info on AF under "Links" in the right panel. 

We don’t have the capacity for multiple authors on this modest blog.  But keep in mind that the comment section below each post is a useful way to add content, raise questions, and make recommendations of your own.

Facebook & College Social Networking

There’s a brief history of Facebook over at Mashable!, a social networking 2.0 blog. Facebook began at Harvard in 2004 and spread quickly to Stanford, Yale, and beyond.

It’s not the free-for-all one finds at Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace, Friendster, and many other popular social networking sites. One of the reasons is that to participate at Facebook you must be on a supported network at a college or university, high school, or company.

That filters out a lot. But in spite of the clubby nature of Facebook, it still has some startling stats concerning its use.

For instance, according to an internal September 2005 survey, approximately 85% of the students in the supported colleges had a Facebook account, with 60% of them logging in daily. A survey conducted by Student Monitor revealed Facebook was the most “in” thing after the iPod and tying with beer, and comScore Media Metrix discovered users spend approximately 20 minutes everyday on Facebook. Another 2005 survey said 90% of all undergraduates in the U.S. use either Facebook or MySpace regularly, and a detailed questionnaire analysis by Chris Roberts revealed that 76.2% never click on its ads. Perhaps the most amazing statistic of all may be that Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the U.S.

There’s probably more than you want to know about the history of Facebook at Mashable. But it provides one more indicator of the prevalence of social networking on today’s college campuses.

TNS 2.0

I’ve created this weblog to pull together (the web lingo is “aggregate”) resources that may be of use to those of us working on e-learning projects at The New School. In particular, a number of questions have been raised in several committees (NSO, Sloan, Bachelor’s Program Curriculum Development, etc.) concerning the term “Web 2.0″.

• What does it mean?
• What kinds of resources are we talking about?
• How is it different than the way the web has been used in the past (Web 1.0?)

The first set of links in the panel on the far right side of this page serve as introductions to educational social software and Web 2.0 as a practice. If you roll over the titles of the links with your mouse you should see a brief description for most entries.

Notice that there is a space just below this post for comments. This will appear under each post. Feel free to make use of it. If you would like to be added to the blog as a team member (with superpower privileges such as posting, creating links, etc., let me know. And if you find things we should add but don’t want to do it yourself, just put them in a comment box or email them to me and I’ll add them to the links on the side of the page.