Academic Computing Blog

Jill Weber, the Project Director for NEIRTEC – the New England and Islands Regional Technology in Education Consortium laboratory, one of 8 such centers nationally.

A key point of her presentation was “them and us” – a full 50% of the worlds population is under 25, but almost all of the world’s teachers are in the “other” half.

A key point was an observation from Marc Prensky, a self labeled visionary, who, when asking a 10-year student to describe himself, was told: “The three words that describe me are athletic, smart, Gameboy-addicted.” Students today are a different species.

The younger generation has been call the digital natives – computer technology has been with them since day 1. By the time they graduate from college, they’ve:

• played 10,00 hours of video games
• read 250,000 emails
• chatted 10,000 hours on cell phones
• logged 20,0000 hours of TV
• been exposed to 500,000 commercials
• and have spent < 5,000 hours reading books

  Ecomomically,

  • downloaded 2 billion ring tones a month
  • downloaded 2 billion music downloads a month

  The “digital imigrants”, on the other hand, are digital with a heavy accent

  • Print out emails to file them
  • print document to edit them
  • make little use of IM
  • think “real life” happens off line
  • invariabley follow up email messages with a “Did you get my email” phone call

  The way to bridge the gap is:

  • don’t focus on the technology
  • don’t focus on the content
  • do focus on the person

  The role of the teacher is to become a partner in the student’s education.

Dynamic Landscapes is the annual confernence put together by VITA-LEARN (Vermont Information Technology Association for the Advancement of Learning), an ISTE affiliate. The conference comes in two parts, one North, one South, and highlights the use of information technology in schools.

The Dynamic Landscapes North conference was held on Friday, May 13th, at Champlain College. It was small – about 150 registrations total – but exciting. Other than the keynote session, the two sessions I managed to catch were primary school level; first and second graders writing for the web, 3rd and 4th graders writing a fairytale told in a 3-D interactive learning environment.

Gerry McKiernan, the blogging, theoretical, visual librarian sent this to the digital library list:

John Markoff, Your Internet Search Results, in the Round, The New York Times, May 9, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO, May 8 - For decades, computer researchers have experimented with the idea of displaying textual information in visual maps, but the concept has been slow to find practical applications. Now, one of the pioneering companies in the field is hoping that by making its software available as part of a standard Web browser it will be able to wean surfers away from the simple ranked lists of search results offered by Google and Yahoo.

Groxis, a San Francisco-based company founded in 2001, has converted its desktop Grokker software program, which displays a Web search as a series of categories set in a circular map, to run as a Java plug-in for browsers.

On Monday, the company will begin allowing computer users to view Yahoo search results with its visualization technology at http://www.groxis.com .

[MORE at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/technology/09yahoo.html

Gerry McKiernan's post includes links to good historical papers:

[1] Gerry McKiernan, New Age Navigation, Innovative Information for Electronic Journals, The Serials Librarian, Vol. 45(2) 2003. p. 87. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf

[2] Gerry McKiernan, The Big Picture(sm): Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web Databases, Cyberstacks, March 21, 1999. http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm

Online search categorizes how humans label things, CNN Technology, May 3, 2005.

NEW YORK (AP) — Here’s how we tend to organize our digital photos: We stick them into a folder on our computer and label it “Hawaii trip,” or whatever.

Here’s a new way: Forget folders or albums. Just “tag” the photos based on what’s actually in each frame.

Now, extrapolate this concept to the ideas, images, videos — and people — you meet or wish to find online. If they’re properly tagged, they’re far easier to find.

That’s “tagging”, and it’s currently all the rage among the digerati.

… “People are awash in an overwhelming sea of stuff,” said Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, a service for tag-enabled online bookmarks. “Our ability to produce content far outstrips the ability to sort and consume it.”

… Before, you had to scan through albums one at a time. With tags, you simply label photos individually when you first store them — with descriptive words such as “birthday,” “vacation,” “fall 2004″ and with the names of the people in each picture. You can then search for your wife’s tag.

Complete article at http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/05/03/social.tagging.ap/index.html

For more information about tagging:

Flickr maintains a list of currently popular tags, usually updated on a 24 hour basis. They include a short introduction to the art and technology of tagging.

del.icio.us introduces the closely related art of social bookmarking.

In an era of quantum dots and genome maps, science education faces an interesting challenge: How can students come to grips with the complexity of the infinitesimally small?

The answer: Fire up the copy machine.

UW-Madison’s Biology New Media Center has added a new tool to its gleaming fleet of technology dedicated to making biological concepts come to life. The Z-Corp Three-Dimensional Printer, purchased for $57,000 this spring with support from an instructional technology grant, can create customized and remarkably lifelike 3-D replicas of virtually anything under the sun.

Ted Pan, a technology specialist in the center, exhibited a table full of early experiments with the printer, including double helices, complex proteins, bacteria flagella, animal skulls and – for kicks – a toy sports car. One particularly menacing looking mass of horn-shaped proteins was a replication of the anthrax bacterium. Another model was of a new protein discovered by a UW-Madison scientist, who is bringing handy “copies” of the structure with him to conferences.

[More]

Source: University of Wisconsin News, Can I get a copy of that molecule? Biology goes 3-D with new technology (Posted: 5/4/2005), http://www.news.wisc.edu/11152.html

Matt Sedensky, Computers Now Grading Students’ Writing, Associated Press, May 7, 1:03 PM (ET) http://apnews.excite.com/article/20050507/D89UF9P01.html

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) – Student essays always seem to be riddled with the same sorts of flaws. So sociology professor Ed Brent decided to hand the work off – to a computer.

Students in Brent’s Introduction to Sociology course at the University of Missouri-Columbia now submit drafts through the SAGrader software he designed. It counts the number of points he wanted his students to include and analyzes how well concepts are explained.

And within seconds, students have a score.

… continues at http://apnews.excite.com/article/20050507/D89UF9P01.html

Bonjour – Rendezvous has been renamed Bonjour, a simple little thing that makes the whole system friendlier !

Spotlight on Mail – The first time you run OS X 10.4 mail, a lot of time will be spent indexing the files so that spotlight can handle them ! 80,000 messages took me about an hour to index. Yawn :)

Act 1

Yesterday, I did a simple (minded) upgrade install from the DVD. When the installation completed, it restarted the machine and booted to “blue” screen of death ..

I chatted with Bess, and she suggested I (1) first run disk warrior to fix any file system problems, and then (2) install using the “archive and migrate” path.

Moral 1. Don’t start a system upgrade late in the afternoon.

Act 2

Bright and early this morning, I came in and started with Bess’s Step 2.

The archive and migrate users installation went smoothly … except that I didn’t have enough disk space to install the printer driver packages. I don’t really need them, do I ? :).

I went to the cybercafe with my trusty and x.200, and lo, it would not connect to the network there. So Geoff and I spent time trying to figure out what’s wrong with that system. It worked fine in my office, but not in the cybercafe; something is tricky in the network.

When I came back to my office, Tiger had booted to the login screen, and everything looked fine. I returned the disk to Bess, and she said, “I really, really, really recommend you run DiskWarrior. It fixed my installation problems.” So I returned to my office, rebooted to disk warrior, ran the scan – with about 50 error – and then found out I didn’t have enough free contiguous disk space to install the repaired directory tree. :(

I went back to Tiger, rebooted, and except for an error in the Palm Pilot installation, almost everything was working. Yup, I really need some printer drivers. So I downloaded the HP drivers, installed the ones I wanted, and was almost happy.

I decided to clean off some disk space, repair the directories, and reinstall with all of the drivers. Alas, now even with 8 Gbytes free (on a 28 Gbyte) this time around, DiskWarrior said … “I can’t handle this new disk type. Please upgrade me.”

Moral 2: The cleaner your system, the easier the install.

Act 3

This time, an archive and migrate install with 8 gbytes free.

Moral 3: Happiness is a clean kitchen.

Wired

“The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”

Google it : http://tinyurl.com/asmc8

Tired

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”

Google it : http://tinyurl.com/75gaa

“Tagging” made it to the headlines this morning with an AP article (found at excite.com) …

NEW YORK (AP) – Here’s how we tend to organize our digital photos: We stick them into a folder on our computer and label it “Hawaii trip,” or whatever. Here’s a new way: Forget folders or albums. Just “tag” the photos based on what’s actually in each frame. Now, extrapolate this concept to the ideas, images, videos – and people – you meet or wish to find online. If they’re properly tagged, they’re far easier to find.

That’s “tagging,” and it’s currently all the rage among the digerati.

Source: Anick Jesdanun, ‘Tags’ Ease Sifting of Digital Data, AP Wire, May 1, 8:51 PM (ET). http://apnews.excite.com/article/20050502/D89QNJ380.html

Tagging is a core feature of flickr.com, a “Yahoo” property.

Technorati.com, a blogspace search engine, prominently features tagging. A good example of it working is with the tag bemani (a DDR jpop phenomenon). An example of it not working so well is apple – which mixes recipes for Granny Smith’s Apple Pies with Apple’s Macintosh OS X reviews.