The Office of Multicultural Affairs is sponsoring this symposium on March 28th and 29th for UVM faculty. This event will address “the challenges that emerge when gender, race and sexuality intersect and shape how students learn and how we teach.”
To learn more and register, contact Janet.S.Green@uvm.edu or call 802-656-0856.
Download the program here [PDF].
The ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia is the acknowledged venue for high quality peer-reviewed research on linking. The web, the semantic web and the Web 2.0 are all manifestations of the success of the link. … One of the most exciting recent developments in Web science is the rise of social annotation, by which users can easily markup other authors’ resources via collaborative mechanisms such as tagging, filtering, voting, editing, classification, and rating. These social processes lead to the emergence of many types of links between texts, users, concepts, pages, articles, media, and so on. We welcome submissions on design, analysis, and modeling of information systems driven by social linking.
ACM Hypertext 2008 will be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 19th-21st 2008 and is hosted by the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences. The conference is co-located and scheduled directly after ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (http://www.jcdl2008.org/).
Details may be found at http://www.sigweb.org/ht08/home/soclinking.html
Image from Howard Rheingold, Friendster (Beta): Social Network Web of Trust. The Evolution of Reputation, December 26th, 2002. http://www.smartmobs.com/2002/12/26/friendster-beta-social-network-web-of-trust/
We were all delighted to see Shirley’s (Shirley Gedeon, the CTL’s former director) blog about her sabbatical in Bosnia – a lively read and vicarious getaway. Wow, Shirley, you GO.
Jeffrey Young asks “What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?”
And continues:
“That’s the question being posed by an unusual experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press.”
The article is in today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed, titled “Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better.” The book to be reviewed is “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies” by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego.
Mr. Wardrip-Fruin and several colleagues also fun the blog “Grand Text Auto.” The blog offers an academic take on interactive fiction and video games, and is read by academics, readers from the video-game industry and video-game players. The plan is to publish parts of the book on the blog and request comments. The publisher, MIT Press, will, simultaneously, have the book peer-reviewed in the traditional way, allowing for “side-by-side comparison of
reviewing old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls the
new method ‘blog-based peer review.'”
Complete article at:
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1322n.htm
The Economist (Economist.Com) is sponsoring a series of debates on the future of education. Each debate topic considers the educational impacts of technology, globalization, and changing nature of social relationships. The third (and final) debate, which runs from from January 15th through January 25th, focuses on “social networking,” specifically on the proposition :
The debate is based on an online variant of the Oxford Debate rules – each speaker has three chances to advance his view – an opening statement, a rebuttal, and a final summary. Observers (who must register) may participate, mainly though a discussion with the moderator who will raise relevant points to the debaters. In addition, Observers may also vote for the side of the proposition they most agree with.
The University of Vermont is now a member of Educause’s Learning Initiative (ElI).
ELI explores the interaction among learners, learning principles and practices, and learning technologies. Membership benefits include reduced rates on ELI events and access to all resources on their web site, including archived web seminars and podcasts.
There are three upcoming events that may interest you:
January 14: Teaching and Learning with Web 2.0 (online event)
January 28 – 30: ELI 2008 Annual Meeting – Connecting and Reflecting: Preparing Learners for Life 2.0 (San Antonio, TX)
March 18 – 19: Real World and Technology-Rich: Learning by Doing, Learning in Context (Raleigh, NC)
To access ELI resources and register for events, you will need to set up a member profile that connects you as an UVM affiliate. Go to the the Educause home page and follow the directions in the “Manage your personal profile” (under the “What would you like to do?” section).
We hope that you will explore the resources on the ELI site. If you find these resources valuable and/or are interested in attending an event, please let us know.
The Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog links to an article in the journal portal exploring student information seeking activity. Oregon State University librarians Jane Nichols and Margaret Mellinger studied student attitudes, knowledege, practices, and skills in an effort to determine if and how students would use a proposed subject based library. Their study, Portals for Undergraduate Subject Searching: Are They Worth It? The short answer, “probably not.”
Among the findings:
Overall, the study concluded that students were task and goal oriented, and not likely to use portal like features. They suggest an interesting alternative instead – building course specific library web pages reflecting the specific needs of the course. This approach would provide a degree of automatic customization and better present existing library and course resources.
UVM is participating in Focus the Nation, a national educational initiative of faculty, staff, students and community members at over a thousand colleges, universities, and high schools in the United States. The goal is to collaboratively engage in a nationwide, interdisciplinary discussion about “Global Warming Solutions for America.”
UVM Focus the Nation events will take place Sunday, January 27 – Friday, February 1, 2008. Events will include faculty lead Teach-Ins, workshops, round table discussions, and visually engaging “Image Events” such as carbon calculators and art installations. UVM students are taking the lead on organizing these events – no small task! If you would like to develop a workshop or teach-in please email Samir.Doshi@uvm.edu or Valerie.Esposito@uvm.edu.
For a schedule of events (continually updated), please visit UVM Focus the Nation.
Just stumbled upon a new service at the Library. It’s called “Get This Book.” If you search for a book and the Library doesn’t have it, but it is in the catalog of one of several university presses (including Oxford Univ. Press), you will see the usual record and this logo: 
If you click on the logo the Library makes you this offer:
“Get This Book! is a service available to UVM students, faculty, and staff. Bailey/Howe Library does not currently own this book, but we want to purchase it for your use and the library’s permanent collection. If you need the book immediately, we will do everything we can to have the book in your hands within 3 working days.”
Neat!
On Sunday (November 25, 2007), Justin Pope interviewed a number of university faculty to explore how faculty and students are handling the large lecture class. He begins his article with some telling comments with Carl Wieman, University of Colorado Nobel Laureate (Physics, 2001) who observes:
Students often tune out and are turned off. Charismatic lecturers get good reviews but, the data show, are no more effective than others at making the most important concepts stick.
Most remarkably, when it comes to teaching not just “facts” but conveying to students the scientific approach to problem-solving, research shows that students end up thinking less like professionals after completing these classes than when they started.
“In a very real way, you’re doing damage with these courses,” Wieman, now a leading voice for reform, said in a recent interview.”
The article then provides a nice exploration of the scope of the issue as well as how several colleges are dealing with the recognized problems in the lecture format class through a variety of pedagogical, technological, and institutional reforms.
Thanks to Beverly Wemple, Department of Geography, for suggesting this article.
Article: Justin Pope, Colleges Cope with Bigger Classes, The Associated press. http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3908417
Image: Steve Helber, Students use computers in the Virginia Tech Math Emporium in Blacksburg, Va., Thursday, April 5, 2007. AP Photo. http://www.abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3908417
