De bello Judaico by Flavius Josephus.Since the dawn of history, the written word has served to define us as a species and to provide us with a vessel to pass down insights through generations. Each individual written work—from scroll, to...
This month the Urban Education Leaders Collaborative (UELC) at Teachers College, Columbia University and the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) launched the Education Leadership Development Experience (ELDEx). Under the leadership of Zuki Kekana, Assistant Director for...
Evaluation is a key component of all of the University’s online initiatives, including its venture into massive open online courses (MOOCs), a new and potentially disruptive mode of distance learning. Unlike traditional online courses, which are aimed at select audience...
Last week, CCNMTL reached two important milestones: the center completed its 15th year of operations, and the eLearning Faculty Fellowship (eLFF) concluded its two-year run. The appreciative smiles on the part of the eLFF faculty fellows reminded me how much...
This past fall Jim Fowler, a visiting professor in Ohio State University’s math department, moved to a tenure track appointment based on his demonstration of teaching excellence in online courses, including massive open online courses (MOOCs). In an interview...
From political forums to pundit roundtables to the family dining room, education is a hot topic. Many perceive growing deficiencies in access, affordability, and the value of education. Some argue that modes of education should be more student-focused, rather...
Published eight days after John Brown’s execution, this Philadelphia newspaper features engraved portraits of the protagonists and a depiction of the “scene of the execution.” From the Sydney Howard Gay papers, Columbia University, Rare Book and Manuscript Library Shadowbox.init();...
This past week, Columbia University’s first course on the edX portal ended. The portal, ColumbiaX, launched with Part I of a three-part MOOC series with Professor Eric Foner on the Civil War and Reconstruction. While it will take us some...
Interested in movies to teach with – but face too many rights issues? Or too many platform choices? Whether documentaries are your thing – or old silent films – or horror and noir, westerns, or comedies – the Open Culture...
CamScanner is an app and cloud service that uses your smartphone's camera as a capable, on-the-go scanner. The software snaps, squares, crops, enhances, and PDFs single- or multi-page documents in seconds. Use the sharing features to post to your favorite...
Microsoft’s Office is the most-used office productivity suite in the world. Redmond claims that one-in-seven humans currently uses the suite. The software is complex; Word itself boasts nearly 1,200 menu items according to an intrepid Google Forum user, Pat...
Researchers from Harvard and MIT have sifted through data from 17 edX courses to produce a series of working papers on the first year of open online courses. The papers cover courses from Fall 2012 to Summer 2013. A post...
The term “web literacy” or “information literacy” is often used broadly to describe the ability to navigate the internet and evaluate information on it, but until recently the concept did not have a clear set of objectives attached to...
Wikispaces is one of the many tools that CCNMTL offers to the Columbia community. With the addition of two new widgets to their suite of tools—Quizlet and GeoGebra—Wikispaces becomes an even more enticing solution for instructors who want to include...
From lecture recording to student audio projects, there are a number of reasons Columbia instructors may need access to video and audio equipment. While select departments (Barnard College, Film Studies Department, GSAPP) have A/V equipment and related inventory that...
CCNMTL has been experimenting with various formats of electronic texts since 1999. From Multimedia Study Environments such as Frontiers of Science to iBooks QMSS e-Lessons and the Major Minor training environment, the organization has pushed for the innovative use of...
Socrative is another of many web-based audience response systems, but it has one of the main features we like to see in such systems: ease-of-use. To start, log in to your instructor account, set up a "room", establish a class...
The Conference on College Composition and Communication passed a resolution in March that stated, "plagiarism detection services can compromise academic integrity by potentially undermining students' agency as writers, treating all students as always already plagiarists, creating a hostile learning environment,...
On July 1, 2013 Google Reader will officially shut down. Reader is the web's most popular RSS reader with a simple user interface, Google Reader will be missed by many. However there are two good alternatives out there: Feedly: Feedly...
Earlier this month, a short innocuous announcement appeared on Columbia’s IT department’s notifications page alerting everyone of the upcoming “QuickTime Streaming Server Retirement” scheduled for July 1, 2013. The three-sentence message referenced a machine named Mineola, which probably made sense...
"How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!" Remember that old joke from grammar school? It’s ridiculous but it's certainly an accurate way to describe how daunting the task of producing a web-based educational experience can be....
The Silfen Forum at UPenn, held yearly at the Irvine Auditorium, featured a distinguished panel discussing “Open Online Learning and the Future of Higher Education.” The event coincided with the Coursera Partners' Conference, which added to the level of interest...
WeVideo is a cloud based web video editing application that allows you to upload content to a private or shared media library. From there, you may use the WeVideo suite of editing tools to produce your own video project that...
The New Media Consortium has released its 2013 Horizon Report, the tenth annual report identifying emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression in higher education. The report identifies emerging technologies likely to enter...
There has been a plethora of white papers, magazine and newspaper articles, and other publications around online learning and its effects on higher education. Many faculty and administrators are looking at the benefits of “flipping the classroom” and other pedagogical...
The challenge of building websites that accommodate the many types of web-enabled devices is formidable. Building websites for each specific device or device category (tablet, smartphone) is an unsustainable option. What's a designer of educational websites to do? Welcome to...
The Columbia Spectator reports that CUIT will add twenty new e-rooms to its roster by Fall 2013. This will bring the total to 115 e-rooms, which means that most registrar-hosted classrooms at Columbia will be technology-enabled. This is good news...
One of our most popular EnhancED post featured a graphic developed by Delta Initiative that showed the birth, growth, and mergers of learning management systems (LMS). The graphic was developed in 2009, and while still useful, it had gotten a...
Dropbox.com is running a promotion pitting universities against each other. The more affiliates that sign up (or sign in, if you already have an account), the more points that the university accumulates. Those points translate to additional Dropbox.com storage...
Understanding how to purposefully use technology in the classroom may be challenging, and reading articles and web posts on best practices applied can sometimes leave one confused with educational technology terms. Next time you read about the latest MOOC or...
Last week, CCNMTL staff attended ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship 2012, a conference in New York City that featured a number of presentations on issues around credentialing, online learning learning, and their affect on universities. The session, "Credentialing: Diploma, Certificate, Or Badge?,"...
As some small programs at Columbia start requiring tablets of its students, the following infographic from OnlineUniversities.com offers a worthwhile summary of the tablet market. The infographic captures salient trends in the use of tablets in the classroom, including some...
A recent EDUCAUSE Executive Briefing, entitled What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs, covers the basic issues around massive open online courses (MOOCs). The three-page briefing describes how MOOCs work; the current trend of featuring courses from disciplines that...
It is often difficult to analyze data across multiple sources. Data points like "personal income" might be called "income, personal" or "personal inc." or "pers incm" or any number of other, similar names across datasets. Google Refine helps normalize datasets...
There has been a lot of buzz about mobile apps on college campuses lately: the New Media Consortium selected mobile apps as one of its key technology focuses for 2012, and the topic of mobile apps on campus has received...
A new two-year license has been obtained by various Columbia departments to provide access to Lynda.com to faculty, staff and students. Lynda.com is an online service that provides video-based tutorials and resources on just about every web and software technology...
We've all used (and reported on here) a number of video conferencing options over the years. Many do a very good job at their appointed task, but very few come close to ticking off all the boxes that make for...
According to a major recent study by the Babson Survey Research Group, online learning is growing at a rate of about ten times that of overall enrollments in colleges and universities. The infographic below illustrates the trends over the past...
BigBlueButton is an open-source web conferencing platform with a simple vision, that “starting a web conference should be as easy as clicking a single metaphorical big blue button.” It is also a platform that is designed for use in higher...
TED, for Technology, Entertainment, Design, has become one of the Internet's most recognized brands devoted to "ideas worth sharing." TED has spawned a number of initiatives, such as TEDTalks, TEDx, and TED Prize. Their newest initiative, TED-Ed, aims to be...
By Jami Carlaccio and Brian O'Hagan Most university instructors use a learning management system (LMS) to deliver their course content, such as a syllabus and readings. They also use the LMS framework for threaded discussions, online chats, and often, the...
Faculty and instructors looking for tools to help make grading and assessments easier can take a look at Flubaroo. Flubaroo is a free tool that helps you quickly grade multiple-choice or fill-in-blank assignments created using Google Docs forms. Flubaroo is...
By Dan Beeby, Jami Carlacio, Brian O'Hagan, and Steve Welsh Google+ offers a number of features that aim to rethink how people stay in touch and keep connected. One of the social network’s features that provides a unique tool for...
Zotero is a free tool that helps users collect, organize, cite, and share research sources. Zotero was first released in April 2009 as a FireFox browser extension and later developed into an extension for other browsers. The Zotero team recently...
There are dozens of screen sharing utilities out there (including those built directly into most popular video conferencing apps), but if you simply want to share your screen with a person or group at a distance there are two options...
EDUCAUSE’s 7 Things You Should Know About Flipped Classrooms (PDF) describes how professors are taking an “upside-down” approach to teaching. And it seems to be working. Though some professors have been using the flipped model to teach their large lecture...
Apple recently released a new product that is likely to cause ripples in the e-book world. IBooks Author is similar to a page layout application, but can be used to build multi-touch books that include images, videos, and a variety...
The New Media Consortium has released its 2012 Horizon Report, the ninth annual report identifying emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression in higher education. The report is produced jointly by the New...
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) recently announced the release of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, a statement of "fair and reasonable approaches to fair use developed by and for librarians who...
On December 29th 2011, CUIT upgraded the New CourseWorks system to Sakai version 2.8. With it came a number of new features and interface improvements. The interface of the system has been upgraded to better utilize space and ease navigation...
CCNMTL has assembled a playlist of videos on YouTube for faculty. Visit this article in the CCNMTL Knowledge Base to find a forty-five-minute screencast (with table of contents) of a recent New CourseWorks workshop. Other documentation is available in the...
HackCollege has published an helpful infographic that provides some useful "Googling" guidelines for students and researchers alike. The infographic is embedded below. (While many of the examples use Mac keyboard shortcuts, they are applicable to Windows users as well.) Here's...
EDUCAUSE's 7 Things You Should Know About MOOC describes massively open online courses (MOOC), a new format that has been tried by a few faculty to extend the reach of their courses. The MOOC are typically paired up with a...
Created by a pair of Columbia students, the Codeacademy offers courses on JavaScript using a series of simple steps that build on each other, while offering plenty of encouragement and feedback to the learner. The site has gotten a lot...
Originally created for the auto industry by Toyota, Quick Response (QR) codes have become more ubiquitous in magazines, catalogs, and advertisements. QR codes are also beginning to appear more frequently on campus print and digital signage to bridge the physical...
Google Docs recently announced expanded features for receiving feedback on documents by releasing a "Can comment" permission level to docs. In the past, users could create a document and select "Can edit" or "Can view" as sharing options, but there...
Using a tag line "still images, moving images and sound advice," JISC Digital Media lives up to its billing. The site offers numerous resources that permit educators to "embrace and maximise the use of digital media - and to achieve...
Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship recently launched an online Assessment Portal aimed at assisting Georgetown faculty with course and program assessments. The portal includes practical guidance and examples for an entire reflective teaching cycle from...
The Center for Social Media at American University released in 2008 the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video (html, pdf). The document describes six practices that fall under fair use. While the document is primarily aimed...
Embed Plus is a free web-based YouTube enhancement tool, which is great for segmenting, annotating, and providing interactive tools on video for educational purposes. With a simple YouTube link, Embed Plus loads the video and provides a web interface for...
There's an allure to interesting infographics that is hard to ignore. Here's one from an outfit that serves as an educational guide for graduate students interested in education and teaching. It covers trends and use of social media, online learning,...
EDUCAUSE's 7 Things You Should Know About LMS Evaluation describes the process many institutions take to evaluate what is likely to be their most significant enterprise application for teaching and learning. It also notes that many institutions are upgrading their...
Web-based screencasting tools make it easy to create short screencasts without resorting to expensive software on your computer. We highlight three services that allow you to quickly create a narrated screen recording, which can be shared via popular web channels....
TokBox, the video conferencing service, has moved toward supporting their OpenTok API and has closed down its stand-alone video conferencing service. (See also our recent entry on Zipcast for a product based on their OpenTok API.) TokBox will now focus...
Zipcast is a new tool from the makers of SlideShare with which you can lead a video-enhanced live presentation to a private or public group. With the tagline "it's free and simple, no downloads for anyone," the makers of Zipcast...
Highslide is an open source JavaScript multimedia viewer and popup replacement. Similar to Highcharts, featured earlier this month, this library requires no plugins to work. It supports a range of content types such as text, images, Flash, video clips, iframes...
Highcharts is a web-based solution for high quality, interactive graphing and charting data. This open source library is written in JavaScript and it supports a gamut of chart types that includes line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie and scatter...
The Body Browser is a plugin-free web-based application by Google that allows a detailed and complex three-dimensional exploration of the human body. It leverages Web-based Graphics Library (WebGL) technology and HTML5, and unlike other similar apps, the Body Browser doesn't...
When it comes to setting up simple web site at Columbia, one must first author HTML pages, properly manage and organize the files, and FTP them up to your "public-html" folder on your CUNIX account. There's documentation on how to...
Teaching and Learning in the Interactive Classroom: this 2006 article is an excellent first-hand account of a professor changing from a lecture-based classroom to an interactive classroom. The article describes the initial negative reaction by students used to sitting passively...
Today, the folks at wikispaces.com have expanded their free wiki program to all educators, from K-12-PhD. The ad-free version of wikispaces' service used to cost $50 annually. While at Columbia, we run two private label versions (http://wikispaces.columbia.edu for course work...
The Google Art Project puts more than 1,000 works of art on your browser in high resolution. The project is a collaboration with some of the world's most renowned art museums: Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Germany Freer Gallery of Art,...
The New Media Consortium has released its 2011 Horizon Report, the eighth in the annual series of reports identifying emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression in higher education. The report is produced...
Universal Subtitles aims to improve access to captions and subtitles in video content, claiming that the lack of captions and subtitles is major obstacle for people with hearing disabilities and foreign viewers. The outfit has built open source tools to...
In 2009 we described the useful file management features that are part of Dropbox.com's online storage service. Since then, the service has released an update to the desktop component that promises improved performance and broader syncing and sharing options. A...
Google Docs can be used to store your files in any format using the upload feature. Files can be converted to Google Docs format (presentations, documents, and spreadsheets) or they can be stored as is. The storage limit per account...
From Mix Online, a Microsoft subsidiary for designers and developers, comes The Archivist, a tool that lets you archive, analyze, and export tweets. (Export option since removed.) The Archivist can be accessed with and without an account. Without an account,...
OpenStudy is a publicly accessible website that allows anyone to set up and join a study group. On this site, study groups are areas where group members can ask and respond to each other's questions via text, and can...
This week the Times ran an article about the use of clickers at Northwestern University. The article points out a couple of interesting "lesson's learned" from both faculty and student perspectives. Faculty appreciate the fact that clickers can increase students'...
We have previously covered Prezi as an alternate presentation tool. See the entry "Create Stunning Presentations with Prezi". Educators can now get a free upgrade to the "Enjoy" level (normally $59/year) at Prezi if they sign up for the service...
Mahara is a free, open source e-portfolio system built on a social networking platform that includes blogging and resume creation features. Mahara is designed to collect and organize all of your digital work such as documents, blogs, multimedia files,...
IDEO, the design consultancy, is promoting debate on the future of the book on its website and on the Big Conversations Facebook site. The company just produced a video offering three concepts for e-book designs called Nelson, Coupland and Alice....
Crowdmap is a tool for mapping crowdsourced information--information "outsourced" or gathered by a large community of individuals through an open call for participation. This is a free service run by the team that built the crisis mapping software platform Ushahidi....
Mobile phone tools for capturing, editing and sharing video are growing in sophistication and are now able to produce high quality video easily in the field. Some products, like the ReelDirector app from Nexvio try to improve on Apple's iMovie...
If you need to connect your computer, netbook or other devices to the Internet when you are traveling, in a remote location, or at a conference, MiFi may be your best option. MiFi is a brand name that is used...
Radbox.me is a free service that lets you save videos from popular sites on the web to your personal web page so that you can watch them later. Unlike Magma and other video aggregators which gather thousands of videos into...
If you have trouble finding your bookmarked articles and websites due to the large number of them that you have collected, Historious can help. After registering you can install the "historify" bookmarklet button to your browser's bookmarks toolbar. When you...
Scitable is a collaborative learning space for science from Nature Publishing Group where students, instructors and researchers can collaborate on scientific work. The creators of the site believe that science education should be social and interactive, allowing students and...
Columbia's Copyright Advisory Office director Kenneth Crews has just posted a helpful roundup of rules and regulations that apply to programs based on distance or distributed learning. An amendment to US Copyright Law known as the TEACH Act (that is,...
EDUCAUSE's 7 Things You Should Know About LMS Alternatives describes how institutions and individual faculty are increasingly turning to various combinations of Web 2.0 tools and other resources to support their unique learning environments and goals and to perform all...
YouTube has released a new browser-based video editing tool, simply called YouTube Editor, which provides rudimentary tools for assembling compilations from a group of existing videos within a user's YouTube channel. Users can select clips from their existing collection of...
Jing is a free software application from Techsmith (OS X and Windows) that allows you to take screenshots or videos of your computer's desktop, which you can share over the web. Videos (which can be full-screen or a small segment...
Google Sidewiki is a free browser tool that allows you to add simple comments to any web page without having to leave the page. Sidewiki is less a wiki and more a commenting tool. Google Sidewiki works with the Google...
Twitterfall is a website that allows users of Twitter, the free micro-blogging tool, to search tweets and view trends and patterns of tweets in real-time. The appeal of the site comes from the fact that you can search and follow...
Magma is a free web video aggregator that allows you to watch, track, search and collect videos from over 12,000 web channels. When you sign up for an account and add your first video, Magma automatically creates your own...
Bookmarklets are small software programs, usually written in JavaScript, that are stored as the URL of a bookmark. The word is a blending of bookmark and applet. Bookmarklets can be placed on a browser's bookmark bar and act like one-click...
Producing a video file that is web and mobile compatible is not an easy task. There are a large number of file formats in which video can be produced, and only a fraction of these formats are supported in web...
Tableau Public offers a free software application that can illustrate your numbers in charts, tables and maps and then lets you publish them to the web where others can interact with them. Tableau features a desktop authoring application (Windows, only)...
VoiceThread is a collaborative multimedia slideshow tool that holds images, documents and videos, allowing users to share information and comments using voice (via phone or mic), text, audio files or video (via webcam). Each VoiceThread is a tool for having...
CoveritLive, the live blogging tool that can be easily embedded into your blog, wiki or other website, allows you to quickly launch and host a live online event. CoveritLive is free and requires no downloads. Just go to the website,...
RefAware is a convenient service from RefWorks, the bibliographic citation management software company, that keeps you notified of newly released journal articles in your subject area of interest. RefAware canvases the Internet 24/7 for new content from over 8,000...
Last fall, Professor Matthew Gold of New York City College of Technology (City Tech), led students in a collaborative multimedia project called "Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman." The NEH-supported...
Google has released new versions of Google Docs with improved features for their document and spreadsheet editors, and they've also turned the Insert Drawing tool into a stand alone collaborative drawing tool for sharing graphics. With the document editor, you...
Widgetbox is a self-service software platform that enables users to create and share widgets, the simple dynamic web applications that you find on web pages. Widgets can be windows and text boxes that you interact with like a quiz...
Woobius Eye is a free collaborative web application that enables you to mark up images while having a conversation via phone or Instant Messaging, so that you can visually illustrate your discussion or explain hard to describe details. It takes...
Mendeley Desktop is a free software application that indexes and organizes all of your PDF documents and research papers into a personal digital library. Similar to the previously EnhancED Noted entries Papers for Mac and Zotero, Mendeley allows you...
If using CUIT's CUNIX systems or firing up the Terminal application on your Mac gives you the willies, then check out the FLOSS Manuals Foundation's excellent introduction to Unix commands. The manual is a thorough but fun introduction to Unix...
The documentary Citizen 3.0 explores the relationship among media, technology, culture and democracy through the lens of copyright law. Subtitled, "Copyright, Creativity and Contemporary Culture," the movie features interviews with artists, legal scholars, lawyers and educators while exploring copyright issues...
EDUCAUSE's 7 Things You Should Know About Mobile IT describes how the use of mobile technology is impacting higher education. It briefly explains what the technology is, how it is being used at universities and why it is significant. With...
MovieClips recently opened their library to users worldwide. The web site houses over 12,000 legal movie clips that you can search, view, discuss and share. MovieClips has added plenty of metadata (e.g. title, genre, mood, character, theme, to name a...
George Siemens writes about the role of the teacher in this absorbing blog post on teaching in social networks. Mr. Siemens describes a world where "for educators, control is being replaced with influence. Instead of controlling a classroom, a teacher...
Twitter has released a new set of (easily) embeddable widgets that are cropping up all over the Internet. These widgets make it easy to embed tweets, or even the results of a search (supporting a relatively complex set of search...
The New Media Consortium has released its 2010 Horizon Report. This annual report seeks to identify emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on research and teaching and learning. The report is produced as a collaboration between the New...
The Educause Center for Applied Research has released a research bulletin, "Capturing Lectures: A Sticky Wicket" by Joshua Kim, Dartmouth College. ECAR Abstract: "this research bulletin describes how the formerly separate domains of lecture capture technologies and the emerging options...
YouTube Time- If you'd like to quickly generate a new link to a YouTube video that specifies a particular starting point within the video, try YouTube Time. Just insert a link to a YouTube video on this website, then specify...
BookGlutton offers a number of interesting options for ebook aficionados. First, it is a self-contained epub format reader for your browser. It offers a simple, clean, and effective online reading option, similar to what you find on an iPhone...
PolicyMap is a geographic information system and data analytics web service that allows users to access a powerful mapping and data tool that can produce custom maps, reports, charts and data analytics through a simple web interface. Data describing...
The next time you need to set up a conference call, you might consider using FreeConference. The company offers a simple and reliable teleconferencing service for little or no cost that can accommodate up to 150 people per call....
Weebly, a browser-based website creation tool, was rated one of Time Magazines top websites of 2007, offering users an easy way to build a website using a set of predefined drag and drop page elements. Weebly has now released...
The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) released its annual study of undergraduate students and information technology report earlier this month. The report is available in a number of forms and formats at this URL: http://www.educause.edu/Resources/TheECARStudyofUndergraduateStu/187232 The full title of...
Wiggio focuses on group collaboration, providing email, chat, conference calling, and meeting space in one place. The Wiggio toolset is extended by integrating text messaging and social networking tools such as Facebook. Wiggio is targeting academic and student groups as...
"Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment, when the benefit to society is larger than the damage to the copyright holder. It is an essential part of copyright policy in the United States, where...
We've written about several annotation tools in the past, but the number of tools and the functionality that they offer seems to have exploded recently. What follows is a review of some tools and resources where you can learn more....
Update 2011-04-25: SurveyMonkey acquires Wufoo. Wufoo is an web service that helps you build online forms easily. It automatically builds the database and other code necessary for interactive functionality and storage of data. After you set up an account,...
Aviary, already known for their online image tools, has released a simple and powerful web-based audio editor named Myna. The audio editor includes a professional loop library, that can add polish to your recordings. Finished audio files can be exported...
There are a number of ways to "live broadcast" your desktop to audiences small and large. They include tools like VNC, Adobe Connect, Skype, iChat... the list goes on. One stands above the others for ease-of-use, cost, and compatibility: Zoho...
Dimdim.com offers free web video conferences for up to 20 participants. The service is fairly simple to use, but highly customizable. Invitees need a browser with Flash support, but do not need a Dimdim account to participate. In under ten...
The California State University, via Delta Initiative, an independent consultant, released a report on the state the learning management systems (LMS) market. The report is available as slides and an hour-long WebEx presentation archive that helps give context to the...
Scribd is an online platform that lets you publish, share and discover documents on the Web. Scribd works like YouTube, but you browse and upload texts instead of videos. Started in 2007, usage has grown dramatically and now it is...
Alexander Street Press' Critical Video Editions combine extensive collections of video with a powerful suite of searching, video clipping and sharing tools specially designed for teachers and researchers. The collections include famous and rare video from the performing arts as...
Prezi, the zooming presentation editor from the media lab Kitchen Budapest, may change the way that you think about creating presentations. Prezi uses a zoomable user interface concept to turn flat slideshows into visually stunning canvases that you navigate...
The New Media Consortium Summer Conference 2009 was held last month, and the NMC has released a number of videos from the event, including the two engaging keynote presentations from Kathy Sierra and Marco Torres. Kathy Sierra: Creating Passionate Learners...
There is a lot of buzz right now around the native <video> tag specified in HTML 5. The introduction of the <video> tag is a pretty big deal. Up until now, to display video in a browser, you needed to...
SlideShare is a free web service that allows users to upload, tag, embed, comment on, and share PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Keynote, and PDF presentations. While other companies like Scribd and Google Docs offer some of the same features, with SlideShare...
The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT), based in the UK, has compiled its third annual top 100 tools for learning by "inviting learning professionals from all over the world to share their top 10 tools for learning." The...
Twitter, the free social networking and micro-blogging tool that is built on instant messaging technology, continues to be one of the largest and fastest growing member-driven sites on the World Wide Web. Launched in 2006, Twitter appeals to a wide...
According to aviary.com, "Aviary is a powerful suite of browser-based design tools for people who create." The company has released four web applications: Phoenix, a layer-based image editor; Peacock, a filter editor for effects and visualizations; Toucan, a color manager;...
VideoANT is a simple, easy-to-use online environment developed at the University of Minnesota that synchronizes video with timeline-based text annotations. VideoANT is designed to engage learners by supporting interactions between students, instructors, and their videos. VideoANT can handle YouTube...
The Commons on Flickr is a project that makes some of the world's greatest public photography archives available at no cost. Thousands of photos are available for download and can be used by faculty and students for teaching, research, presentations,...
Two illustrative talks on how digital media and participatory culture are changing students are presented here. These two videos from well-known thinkers in the field are amazingly rich and overlap in interesting ways. While the videos are long, the 120...
"Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work--in the web browser itself." The Zotero 1.5 Beta Firefox extension offers a number...
If you like saving useful articles, papers, and pages from the web for to read later but want more than just the tagging features of bookmarking sites like Delicious or CiteULike, there are several easy-to-use products tailored to provide this...
The award-winning Papers for Mac (OS X only) is an application that makes it easy to organize science papers and journal articles, integrating smoothly with sources like Google Scholar, JSTOR, Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed to automatically pull metadata...
The demand for lecture capture continues to grow on campuses and some studies show that the benefits are clear. Here are three different perspectives on the topic: A 2008 survey of almost 7,500 University of Wisconsin-Madison undergraduate found that an...
Freebase is an open database of the world's information. Similar to Wikipedia in goals, Freebase differs by how information is organized. Freebase focuses on facts and statistics rather than articles. Freebase data is meant to be reusable for other purposes...
The New York Times is prototyping a feature they call article skimmer. The goal is "to provide [the spread-the-_New-York-Times_-on-the-tabletop] experience anytime.... We display as many stories as we can fit into the space of your screen." The article skimmer...
Price aside (nearly $300 for Photoshop for the academic license) Photoshop is sometimes overkill for most of basic photo editing needs. Enter online photo editing sites. There are a lot of them, but CNET has assembled a concise, tabular...
New mapping technologies are increasingly being used by teachers to creatively engage students in field work projects. Prof. Kenneth Jackson's New York Neighborhoods Wiki used Google and other mapping software to help students create unique research about local New...
Incorporating learning management systems into the classroom is no new idea in higher education. Many of these management systems, such as Blackboard and Moodle, do a good job distributing information and providing a place for users to record and store...
Vimeo is a video-centric social network site, supporting many features such as embedding, sharing, video storage, and user comments. Unlike YouTube and other video sharing sites, Vimeo allows only user-created videos, and caters to high-end video content creators, offering higher...
YouTube is now offering some content creators the option to add a Creative Commons license to their video uploads. In a related move, YouTube has added an option to allow downloading of certain videos. Downloadable videos are free or include...
WilsonWeb, a comprehensive search tool to which Columbia subscribes, recently added a "listen" button next to its full-text HTML articles. The automatic reader sounds surprisingly natural. Because the audio can be downloaded, this is a great resource for on-the-go researchers...
Educators can become broadcasters with Ustream.tv. Ustream allows anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and a webcam to quickly set up their own channel and broadcast live. The broadcast can be password protected for situations where you want to...
The Columbia University Libraries have released a customized version of the popular LibX plugin for Firefox browsers. The LibX plugin can be customized to perform searches on the local library catalog. Once installed, LibX enables direct Columbia catalog (CLIO) searches...
The annual Horizon Report seeks to identify emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on research and teaching and learning. The report is produced as a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE. The 2009 report identifies six...
Pedagogy in Action is a portal site from the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College that seeks to improve education through projects that support educators. On the site are numerous pages covering teaching methods, activities, and research on...
Provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act serve as a deterrent to teachers and instructors in the use of copyrighted materials under fair use at a time when media literacy competencies are most needed. The Library of Congress Copyright Office...
There are several web-based "audience response system" packages available. Poll Everywhere offers some pretty nice features including various input methods (SMS, Smartphone or desktop/web-based voting), polling/output views (e.g. hidden polling results during voting and customized output graphs) and Powerpoint integration....
The flexibility of YouTube videos continues to improve with additions helpful for many educators. Here are a few highlights to add to earlier postings about YouTube features. Widescreen Video YouTube changed the aspect ratio of its video player from 4:3...
Xtimeline.com is a service for creating timelines through an easy-to-use interface. Timelines can be collaboratively edited and data can be imported via a CSV file or and RSS feed. See an example: The History of Video Games...
Instructors looking to add a class mapping assignments that include a 'field work' component should take a look at EveryTrail. EveryTrail is a free service that allows you to record, visualize and share any trip using geotagged photos. New to...
YouTube has released a new caption feature for videos. As summarized in a recent YouTube Blog posting: "[W]e've added a new captioning feature which allows you to give viewers a deeper understanding of your video. Captions can help people who...
Mashable.com has a posting covering digital notebooks for scholarly and research use. While not a full review, the article does offer a list of contenders for anyone looking around for a solution. The list includes iLeonardo, Google Notebook, and Zoho...
Anyone interesting in delving deeper into the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign will find a new site released by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond of some interest. Voting America is a mapping site that allows users to...
While this Educause article relates mostly on to the conversion from audiotape lecture-capture system to a digital one, there are interesting lessons to be learned from a school that has been recording lectures for a long time as they might...
The American Library Association recently released a digital slider tool allowing you to check various copyright terms for works released in the United States. The tool can be viewed at the following location: http://librarycopyright.net/digitalslider/...
Sometimes it is imperative to run Internet Explorer (IE) because a website depends on IE features. For example, some CourseWorks elements only work on IE. For Mac users, this is a problem because IE no longer exists for OS X....
The Educause Center for Applied Research released a research bulletin, Web 2.0, Personal Learning Environments, and the Future of Learning Management Systems by Niall Sclater, Open University (subscription required). The bulletin offers a critical look at the role of LMS...
YouTube recently announced the addition of a video annotation tool. YouTube describes that users can add three types of annotations to their own videos: speech bubbles, notes, and spotlights. Links, which presently only point to other parts of YouTube, can...
"Dipity is the easiest way to make and share interactive timelines about the people and things you care about." Dipity's newest product is TimeTube, combining YouTube and Dipity timelines....
More than another web-based video tool with a stupid name, Omnisio enables users to: select clips from YouTube and other video service embed comments in the video assemble your own video compilations from edits you've made sync a video to...
There are dozens of concept mapping tools available on the Web. Many are free and quite good. One that stands out is mindmeister. It is exportable in several formats, embeddable, and has many wiki-like features. For example, see a concept...
An experiment from Digital Ethnography @ Kansas State University : The World Simulation, thanks in part to the use of Twitter and Jott, allowed students to send live updates of major events through their mobile phones. The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgbfMY-6giY The...
Alexandra Juhasz, Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College, in Claremont, CA, ran a course on YouTube, called Learning from YouTube, in Fall 2007. The goal was to better understand this new media-cultural phenomenon, and how it can be used...
The Harvard University Department of Romance Languages and Literatures compiled a survey of what technologies students find most helpful. Their abstract: "Project Mission: As digital technologies become a more important part of students' lives both inside and outside the classroom,...
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) 7 Things You Should Know series provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, how it works, where it is going, and...
Access to restricted Columbia University Libraries resources such as databases, ejournals, and other commercial services is limited to Columbia network users. To provide remote access to Columbia affiliates, the Libraries operate a proxy server. When you connect to restricted resources...
A helpful introductory piece from the folks at WordPress.org on blogging. It describes the terminology, such as trackbacks, pingbacks, syndication and more. They describe a blog as "a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles on...
The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition makes available the Cmap Tools program for constructing, navigating, sharing and criticizing knowledge models represented as concept maps. The free desktop application is available for Windows, Macs, and Linux computers....
