Edtechkat

We have had a LibX Firefox extension for our library for about 6 months. We are about to add details of it to our web pages and start promoting it. I made this screencast to embed in the page, Murdoch University Library Toolbar (LibX Murdoch).

[blip.tv ?posts_id=954395&dest=-1]

Blip.tv turned out to give a clearer embed than YouTube or Viddler.

I’m doing a demo of LibX for the Learning Technologies Steering Group tomorrow. Here are the links that I will need to open on setup to do the same as I did in the screencast.

A. Web page with LibX unmarked http://screencast.com/t/iisxsipBX

B. LibX page marked up on screencast.com http://screencast.com/t/BLvysxLOx

1. The Murdoch Library Lib X pages on the Development server

2. The LibX Murdoch edition home page

3. kittenwar.com

4. Amazon.com. Intorduction to Phenomenology

5. Google search for Introduction to Phenomenology

6. Google search for author Shri Rai . (Highlight the text and drag to Google Scholar). Google home page .

7. sciencedirect.com http://sciencedirect.com

I’m also doing a demo of Zotero, so here’s a link to JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/

Today JISC (in the UK)  released the report “Great Expectations of ICT: How Higher Education Institutions are measuring up”.  From their description on this page: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/greatexpectations

JISC commissioned Ipsos MORI to undertake research among first year students studying in higher education to:

• Understand first year students’ experiences of ICT use and provision in HEIs, particularly in light of the expectations which emerged from the first study in June 2007
  
• Examine whether there is a mismatch between expectations and reality

The research re-visits a cohort of the school and college students who participated in phase one² of the research in June 2007 to explore how their current experiences of ICT in their first year of higher education match up with their expectations. A representative sample of first year students from across the UK was also surveyed to identify whether findings emerging from the cohort were reflected across the wider student population. Over 1,000 students were researched using quantitative and qualitative techniques.³
Download the full report³ (pdf)

The first link provides a very nice table and summary of the findings.   From a library perspective, they point out that ”There is also an opportunity to help students understand best practice for checking the validity of internet sources used for research, something which 69% of students believe they are doing despite evidence elsewhere suggesting they may lack the critical and analytical skills to do so rigorously.”

Zotero is a Plug-In for Firefox that harvests and stores bibliographic data from many formats of web objects, including online journal articles, web pages, pdfs, images and video clips. It interfaces with a number of other programs including Wordpress and Endnote. It also helps you organize and store electronic documents.

I’ve used it a tiny bit for preparing conference papers, with my Zotero library saved on a thumb drive along with portable FF where I have installed the Zotero plug-in.

The web based collaborative version (Zotero Commons) - which would make it an absolutely killer ap - has been rumoured to go live in June, but it has been a long time coming. It is being developed in collaboration with the Internet Archive using a Andrew W Mellon Foundation grant.

This White Paper from the (rather better funded) equivalent of LTSG at Penn State University is excellent. 7 Things You Need to Know About Zotero: a white paper from Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State. http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wp-content/uploads/zotero_hot_team.pdf

1. What is it?
2. Who’s doing it?<
3. How does it work?
4. Why is it significant ?
5. What are the downsides?
6. Where is it going?
7. What are the implications for Teaching and Learning?

Here is a test post that I am writing with Peter Wright

These 3 short clips from the Centre for Digital Ethnography in Kansas are about 1. changes in the way we use information, 2. the way we store and retrieve information and 3. the relevance of the classroom to todays’ students.. I have seen the first one played at probably 5 different conference presentations and embedded in many, many other places.

The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g&hl=en]

Information R/Evolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM&hl=en]

A vision of students today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&hl=en]

If people aren’t showing the first one above at conferences, then they usually show the “Shift Happens” video – which outlines the political and technological shifts that today’s students will need to deal with.

Did you know 2.0 ? (Official update to Shift Happens) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U&hl=en]

Lecturefox describes itself like this:

What is Lecturefox?

It’s all about the joy of learning.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics. In the category “faculty mix” you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

It’s here http://lecturefox.com/ and includes opencourseware from universities like MIT, Yale, Harvar, UC Berkley, UNSW.  There are a large number of maths and sciences, but also other topics under “Faculty mix”. There are coursenotes, videos and audio.

I had a very quick look, but couldn’t find an introductory, basic maths course - although there are quite a few like “Mathematics for Computer Scientists”.

This clip touches on email, print media and wristwatches among other irrelevancies to today’s students. Made for the Association of Fraternity Advisors (!!) Presenter is mildly annoying and you need to watch past the first 56 seconds.

 http://www.mediasauce.com/afa/

 
Via Stephen’s Lighthouse.

At Beyond the Hype, I went to a presentation by Elliott Bledsoe, a lawyer who works in the Creative Industries faculty at QUT, principally involved with Creative Commons. He presented about this report: Legal Aspects of Web 2.0 Activities: Management of Legal Risk Associated  with Use of YouTube, MySpace and Second Life.

Basically, if we can control whether an item is on a site or not (eg comments), we are responsible for it, thus the publisher, thus liable if there are legal implications - eg. defamation.