Academic Computing Blog

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Title: 7 Things You Should Know About Clickers (ID: ELI7002)
Category: Contributed by EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (Formerly NLII) (2005)
Author: EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative
Organization: EDUCAUSE
Subject(s): Instructional Technologies | Learners and Learning | Student Response Systems | Teaching and Learning
URL: http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=ELI7002

Abstract: Interaction and engagement are often limited by class size and human dynamics (a few students may dominate the conversation while most avoid interaction). Interaction and engagement, both important learning principles, can be facilitated with clickers. Clickers can also facilitate discipline-specific discussions, small work-group cooperation, and student-student interactions. Clickers—plus well-designed questions—provide an easy-to-implement mechanism for enhancing interaction. Clicker technology enables more effective, more efficient, and more engaging education.

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) “7 Things You Should Know About…” Series provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, how it works, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use ELI’s “7 Things You Should Know About…” briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview, either for yourself or for colleagues who are pressed for time.

Title: 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking (ID: ELI7001)
Category: Contributed by EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (Formerly NLII) (2005)
Author: Cyprien Lomas
Organization: EDUCAUSE
Subject(s): Folksonomies | Instructional Technologies
URL: http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=666&ID=ELI7001&bhcp=1

Abstract: “7 Things You Should Know About… Social Bookmarking” addresses a community—or social—approach to identifying and organizing information on the Web. Social bookmarking involves saving bookmarks one would normally make in a Web browser to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. The community-driven, keyword-based classifications, known as “folksonomies,” may change how we store and find information online.

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI’s) “7 Things You Should Know About…” Series provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, how it works, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use ELI’s “7 Things You Should Know About…” briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview, either for yourself or for colleagues who are pressed for time.

Cybercafés and their potential as Community Development Tools in India
Anikar Michael Haseloff, Universität Augsburg

Abstract: The following article examines the role of Cybercafés in urban, semiurban and suburban areas of India. Cybercafés have become an important access point for different urban communities in India, and the paper discusses their role in an urban development context. To examine the role of Cybercafés, a broad quantitative and qualitative analysis of cybercafes has been made in different urban, semiurban and suburban areas in India, including a user survey of 1500 users and 30 interviews. This paper discusses some of the findings, shows some up to date trends of the Indian Cybercafe Scene and shows some interesting potentials that Cybercafés in urban areas have to serve different communities.

Abstract: http://www.ci-journal.net/viewarticle.php?id=68
Full Text: HTML : http://www.ci-journal.net/viewarticle.php?id=68&layout=html

Eric Nee disputes World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a Semantic Web in which computers can comprehend the meaning of information through the encoding of metadata within every piece of online content. He also dismisses the concept of an intelligent Semantic Web agent that can carry out complex tasks with the capability of a human being as impossible.

Berners-Lee’s strategy for imbuing meaning in Web content is to develop new standards for posting such content, but the W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema, and Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards have not been universally welcomed. OWL and RDF have a steep learning curve, take a long time to use, and are unworkable, according to experts such as XML developer and Sun Microsystems technology director Tim Bray.

In contrast to Berners-Lee’s approach, Google creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed software that infers the meaning of content using different indicators, thus avoiding the need to change processes for posting content. “I’d rather make progress by having computers understand what humans write, than by forcing humans to write in ways that computers can understand,” Brin told InfoWorld’s 2002 CTO Forum. Challenges the Google approach fails to address can be tackled by other technologies–RSS and XML, for instance–that are simpler to use than Semantic Web standards. Nee predicts that the Internet will evolve not into Berners-Lee’s highly ordered Semantic Web, but into “a patchwork quilt of homegrown solutions and standards.”

Citation: Eric Nee, CIO Insight (05/05) Vol. 1, No. 53, P. 25.
http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1397,1817758,00.asp

Found on ACM TechNews – Friday, June 3, 2005

The National Science Foundation’s “Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences” workshop has released a final report that “leverages the immense expertise of NSF communities to develop useful and usable cyberinfrastructure to support breakthrough science and engineering research and education for the 21st century,” according to NSF director Arden Bement.

Report co-author and U.C. Berkeley professor Henry Brady said the study organizes a roadmap for how cyberinfrastructure and the social sciences can complement each other for mutual advantage. Among the critical issues the expansion of cyberinfrastructure can help address is the development of a secure information infrastructure that is more resistant to intrusion and cyberattack, the testing of new policy proposals via Web-based models to catch problems before they can cause major policy failures, and the distribution of shared public data and computing resources to handle “peak” or “urgent” demand.

CISE/SCI division director Sangtae Kim stressed that the workshop also investigated cyberinfrastructure’s economic ramifications and the potential for fast technology transfer, and he called the expertise of the workshop’s participants particularly applicable. “We have not yet tapped the enormous potential for collaboration between these research communities to frame, build, understand, and use cyberinfrastructure effectively, and the March workshop has provided a plan and a way forward to promote that collaboration,” said Wanda Ward of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. She said the workshop played a key role in bringing the social/behavioral sciences and computer science research and education sectors together to address challenges related to cyberinfrastructure.

Full article: AScribe Newswire (05/31/05)

Source: ACM TechNews – Friday, June 3, 2005, http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

NEW YORK — There’s been a change in Ellen Lichtenstein’s study patterns. For half her classes this past year, she no longer had to visit a library to get the reading materials professors had placed on reserve. Instead, she only needed Internet access and a password.

“It’s as simple as logging into my e-mail account, clicking on a few links and printing it,” said Lichtenstein, 21, a New York University communications senior from Birmingham, Ala. “There’s no going to the library, waiting on line, waiting to Xerox it, there’s none of that.”

And publishing companies are worried precisely because of that ease and convenience — it’s another way for publishers to lose sales.

Anick Hesdanun, Associated Press, Publishers get more concerned over e-reserves on campuses,
Wednesday, May 18, 2005. http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/05/19/special_reports/science_technology/20_36_225_18_05.txt

A group of academic publishers is challenging Google Inc.’s plan to scan millions of library books into its internet search-engine index, highlighting fears that the ambitious project will violate copyrights and stifle future sales, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

In a letter delivered to Google on May 23, the Association of American University Presses described the online search engine’s library project as a troubling financial threat to its membership, which consists of 125 nonprofit publishers of academic journals and scholarly books.

eSchool News. Publishers protest online library project. May 27, 2005. http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showstoryts.cfm?Articleid=5681