Technology: July 2007 Archive Page

A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is "this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn?t work for 'my subject.'" Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include "thought experiments" where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt --on the spot -- to invent a game or other Digital Native method for learning it. Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. The Holocaust? Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps, as opposed to the films like Schindler's List. It's just dumb (and lazy) of educators -- not to mention ineffective -- to presume that (despite their traditions) the Digital Immigrant way is the only way to teach, and that the Digital Natives' "language" is not as capable as their own of encompassing any and every idea. --Marc Prensky --Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (marcprensky.com)

Extremely relevant when it was written in 2001, and still important now. When I recently gave a talk about simulations in Holocaust education, I didn't mention this passage, but I probably should have.

Similar sites have captured the imagination of ordinary users with a so-called "citizen" brand of journalism, but NowPublic is gaining attention for the size of its fast-growing army of 118,000 members who write and post news stories, cellphone camera pictures, and videos from 3,600 cities in over 140 countries.

"Think of us as a new kind of wire service that has eyes and ears all over the world," said CEO and co-founder Leonard Brody in an interview. "When the cyclones broke in Oman a few weeks ago, AP's bureau chief in Saudi Arabia couldn't get there. By the time he left his driveway, we already had eight photos and stories filed." --Joanne Lee-Young --News site secures landmark capital funding (Vancouver Sun)

NowPublic makes money in part by charging mainstream media for access to its citizen reporters. Do we have a scorpion-on-the-back-of-the-tortoise situation here?

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of "publishing". Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy. --University Publishing in a Digital Age (Ithaka)

Filing away for the ol' tenure application.

Update, 01 Aug: IHE report; McLemee analysis.

Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn't much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden's in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws for those who do return are free money and kinky sex. On a random day in June, the most popular location was Money Island (where Linden dollars, the official currency, are given away gratis), with a score of 136,000. Sexy Beach, one of several regions that offer virtual sex shops, dancing, and no-strings hookups, came in at 133,000. The Sears store on IBM's Innovation Island had a traffic score of 281; Coke's Virtual Thirst pavilion, a mere 27. --Frank Rose --How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life (Wired)

I recall scratching my head in puzzlement last year when the Second Life stories started appearing in the media. Didn't the VR hype fizzle out with the 90s?

An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world's top RPG gamers after one criminal's girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google's social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim's head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for $8,000. And yes, the story gets even better. --Gang Kidnaps Gamer to Get Password Using Fake Orkut Date (Gizmodo)

The story points to a website that appears to be in Portugese, so I can't investigate this story any further. It fulfills so many stereotypes it just doesn't sound credible... the kidnap victim isn't named, for instance. I don't see any coverage of this outside the gamer weblogs and fansites, so I'm leaning towards "PR hoax" on this one. Perhaps time will tell.

Here's a quick three-step photoshop tutorial to make coloring pages for your kids from any digital photo. Kids will love coloring pictures of themselves and their family (what could be more fun than giving grandpa spiky purple hair and a green beard). --coloring pages from your photos - 3 easy photoshop steps (fototiller)

Asking contributors to "write the story on open-source car design" had all the appeal of asking people to rewrite their college term papers. Asking them to talk to someone they admire and respect was met with a far warmer response. --Jeff Howe --Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned (Wired)

An assessment of Wired's pro-am journalism experiment. Can a crowd of volunteers produce quality news reporting?

Your job is very simple! All you need to do is look out for the features that mark out sprial and elliptical galaxies. In fact, as you're a human and not a computer, most galaxies should be easy to classify since they're obviously spirals or obviously ellipticals. On this page, you will practice classifying galaxies. On the next page, you will take a short trial to test your skills. If you don't pass the trial, you can try again. Once you pass the trial, you can start contributing to Galaxy Zoo science!
--Galaxy Zoo

I got a 13 out of 15 score on the qualifying test.

I gather that astronomers have developed software that chops telescope images up into chunks centered on bright objects, and that people are better at identifying the bright spots as clockwise spiral galaxies, counter-clockwise spirals, oval galaxies, or something else (like a star or a satellite). Or, to be more precise, the effort it would take to create a computer program that surpasses human skill is not worth investing, when it is possible instead to get an army of volunteer humans to do the work. (This is called "Flintstoning," which refers to the usefulness of certain low-tech solutions, such as Fred using his feet underneath the car.)

For a long time, I have daydreamed about making a computer program that asks students to evaluate short writing samples, such as thesis statements or news leads. The idea is that I would first train students with samples that I have already graded. Then those students who have demonstrated that they are good at evaluating the writing samples (that is, those whose answers closely match mine) start being asked to evaluate samples written by their peers. I imagine that a particular student sample would get evaluated by at least two peers; if the peers disagree, then the system would flag that sample, and I would break the tie.

I wouldn't use such a system to mark assignments for a grade -- my thought that it would be useful for the kind of assignment where students get credit for simply doing the work, and the added value would be that students would get some kind of structured peer feedback. I would make sure to read and comment on at least a handful of exercises in each set, and this system would help me identify which students are not only doing a poor job writing their own exercises, but are also unable to recognize when a sample exercise meets the criteria.

—What People are Doing [US Social Networking Sites] (Businessweek)

An interesting, but not very well-sourced graphic, that shows 70% of youth (ages 18-21) are members of social networks, but only 37% create content on those sites. (I’m not sure what the researchers count as “creating content” — there’s a separate column for “Critics” who comment on and rank the content others create, so presumably, according to this chart, leaving a message on someone’s wall doesn’t count as content creation.)

Found via Reeves Library.

Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years.

* User-Created Content. It's all about the audience, and the "audience" is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small tools and easy access have opened the doors for almost anyone to become an author, a creator, or a filmmaker. These bits of content represent a new form of contribution and an increasing trend toward authorship that is happening at almost all levels of experience.

* Social Networking. Increasingly, this is the reason students log on. The websites that draw people back again and again are those that connect them with friends, colleagues, or even total strangers who have a shared interest. Social networking may represent a key way to increase student access to and participation in course activities. It is more than just a friends list; truly engaging social networking offers an opportunity to contribute, share, communicate, and collaborate.

* Mobile Phones. Mobile phones are fast becoming the gateway to our digital lives. Feeding our need for instant access, mobile phones are our constant companions and offer a connection to friends, information, favorite websites, music, movies, and more. From applications for personal safety, to scheduling, to GIS, photos, and video, the capabilities of mobile phones are increasing rapidly, and the time is approaching when these little devices will be as much a part of education as a bookbag.

* Virtual Worlds. Customized settings that mirror the real world--or diverge wildly from it--present the chance to collaborate, explore, role-play, and experience other situations in a safe but compelling way. These spaces offer opportunities for education that are almost limitless, bound only by our ability to imagine and create them. Campuses, businesses, and other organizations increasingly have a presence in the virtual world, and the trend is likely to take off in a way that will echo the rise of the web in the mid-1990s.

* The New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication. The nature and practice of scholarship is changing. New tools and new ways to create, critique, and publish are influencing new and old scholars alike. Although this area is farther out on the horizon, we are beginning to see what new publications might look like--and how new scholars might work.

* Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming. Like their non-educational counterparts in the entertainment industry, massively multiplayer games are engaging and absorbing. They are still quite difficult to produce, and examples are rare; but steps are being taken toward making it easier to develop this kind of game. In the coming years, open-source gaming engines will lower the barrier to entry for developers, and we are likely to see educational titles along with commercial ones. --The Horizon Report 2007 Edition (PDF) (New Media Consortium / EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative)

I'm glad to have found this document, as I start to pull together materials for my tenure bid.

"The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags," says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year's International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds.

"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased -- which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making." --From Rags to Riches, Or How Undergarments Improved Medieval Literacy (Alpha Galileo)

Filing this for a future "history of the book" unit. Via Language Log.

Sites like the Blake archive mark an important point of departure from expensive clothbound volumes available in university libraries -- and unique items in private collections -- to high-resolution facsimiles freely available to anyone with Internet access. Even the nonspecialist (like me) can easily spend hours appreciating Blake's aesthetic achievement beyond reading the unadorned transcriptions of his poems one might find in an anthology.

The editors have performed a great service for the general public, but what about the exacting standards of literary scholarship? Does the Blake archive meet the expectations of professionals?

[...]

Yes, young scholars, you may cite the Blake archive. --"Thomas H. Benton --Authoritative Online Editions (Chronicle of Higher Education)

It isn't clear whether Linden Lab simply took the Woodbury island offline, or actually destroyed the software behind it. Dori Littell-Herrick, an assistant professor and chairwoman of the animation department, said she believed it was the latter. If so, the university would need to build another island if it re-established a presence in Second Life.

Ms. Littell-Herrick suggested that Woodbury's island could have attracted unruly avatars because it was more open to outsiders than other college sites in Second Life. And while the island is gone, no Woodbury faculty or student avatars appear to have been barred.

"We need to see what went wrong because obviously getting shut down was not the result we were looking for," she said.

Edward Clift, an associate professor and chairman of Woodbury's communications department, who is responsible for the creation of Woodbury's island, railed against Linden Lab's action in an interview with the Second Life Herald.

"The destruction of the Woodbury 2.0 campus is, in my view, an egregious shot across the bow of academia," he said. --Andrea L. Foster and Dan Carnevale --The Death of a Virtual Campus Illustrates How Real-World Problems Can Disrupt Online Islands (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

Among other tactics, middlemen for the countries misrepresented themselves to gain access to the Defense Department's surplus sales or bought sensitive surplus from U.S. companies that had acquired it from Pentagon auctions and weren't supposed to allow its export. --Sharon Theimer --Jets shredded, kept away from 'bad guys' (Yahoo! | AP (will expire))

My kids were watching an episode of Batman from the 60s. In it, Batman calls up a naval officer and asks whether Uncle Sam has recently sold any top-secret submarines. An officer looks in an index card file and says yes, in fact they recently sold a submarine to a Mr. "P. N. Gwynn," who left a post office box for an address. Upon hearing Batman's curt response, the officer looks like a chastened puppydog and says something like, "Was that bad?"

The story notes that the government changed the way it handles sensitive surplus equipment after the AP reported how unfriendly forces were getting their hands on sensitive surplus equipment. Noting the chronology is not the same thing as explicitly claiming a cause/effect relationship, but the implication is clear.

Here's a great quote that helps create a mental picture:

The shearing machine, which uses pincers to rip apart the planes, weighs 100,000 pounds. The shredder is 120,000 pounds. An F-14 weighs about 40,000 pounds.