Hope's Centre-Table

Under the rather provocative title, the Association for History and Computing, UK branch, has gathered a day-long conference that explores the role and uses of information (computing) technology in higher education history teaching and research.
Of particular interest is where such things as digital history methods belong. Should they be taught? At what level? How? Should students be ‘absorbing’ this information on their own? How will students, when they become researchers and teachers, know how to apply digital history methods if these skills are not taught?
http://www.hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk/confweb/2007/conf07.htm

Presentations include:

• Postgraduate Research Training and ICT: the Roles of Computing in the PhD
• How do you know it is true? Digital Diplomatics for the History Syllabus
• Using ICT in degree-level history teaching: issues of progression and differentiation
• ‘It’s not what you know it’s the way that you know it’ – key skills in history and computing

The last item presents the result of a study that has found widespread use of digital materials among history students and researcher, “but far more limited use of computer applications to explore historical issues and even less training in the creation of historical research material in electronic and digital format or advanced ICT methods.” They conclude that there is a clear need for work in this area, particularly in the creation of digital history methods courses.

The Educause Current Issues Committee, composed mainly of CIOs and IT Directors, recently published the results of a survey on issues in IT infrastructure in Higher Education. According to the report, “survey participants—the primary representatives, typically CIOs, of EDUCAUSE member institutions—were asked to check up to five of thirty-two IT issues in each of four areas: (1) issues that are critical for strategic success; (2) issues that are expected to increase in significance; (3) issues that demand the greatest amount of the campus IT leader’s time; and (4) issues that require the largest expenditures of human and fiscal resources.” The top ten issues to emerge were:
1. Funding IT
2. Security
3. Administrative/ERP/Information Systems
4. Identity/Access Management
5. Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
6. Faculty Development, Support, and Training
7. Infrastructure
8. Strategic Planning
9. Course/Learning Management Systems
10. Governance, Organization, and Leadership for IT
(from Educause Review, vol. 42, no. 3, 12-33)
Given the original survey and its participants, it is perhaps not surprising that these top ten say little or nothing about teaching, or learning.
This lack has not gone unnoticed.
Educators such as historian Dan Cohen wonder how to bridge the apparent gap between IT infrastructure and educators while Geoffrey H. Fletcher, editorial director of T.H.E. Journal, expresses a similar concern in an article that reports on a session at the recent Campus Technology conference. The session focused on the changing role of IT in education and the presenters discussed “organizational changes—or lack thereof—that have been made at their respective institutions to account for IT’s new dual and often shifting roles.” They also noted that “IT has traditionally been charged with deploying infrastructure, but not with understanding and applying principles of teaching and learning.” Fletcher concludes that “No one denies the importance of either function—you must have an infrastructure to deliver information and instructional tools to students and teachers, and the infrastructure would be wasted to a large degree if it were not used by students and faculty in teaching and learning.”
The “Top Ten” list does include the item “Faculty Development. Support, and Training” and quite a few colleges and universities have Centers for Teaching and Learning. How do the efforts of IT organizations and CTLs mesh? How do universities’ implementations of IT support and enhance their visions for teaching and learning? This is not a new issue, but it seems to be a perennially perplexing one.

First it was Robert Biral from the Honors College who had questions about electronic portfolios during last week’s WebCT workshops. Then along came Mary Cox who is part of a group in Engineering/Math looking for “an e-portfolio program.” Then, of course, there is Education’s current implementation of its e-portfolio system, TaskStream. A couple other mentions of the topic from various faculty this summer have me wondering if this is the year for e-portfolios, and, if so, what LRG’s role might be in this.
One idea that seems to be consistent is that “we need a software program that will help us do e-portfolios.” Now, as we know from experience, too often the process of finding a solution to a given problem starts with the question “what software?” instead of with the more important questions: what are you trying to do? how do you define or perceive what you are trying to do? how will it be implemented? who will implement it? what are the hoped for outcomes?
The topic of e-portfolios can be particularly murky. Is an e-portfolio a way for students to conceive of, coordinate, reflect on, and build upon their own learning? For example, would an e-portfolio allow them to gather all course materials together (syllabus, course notes, papers, projects, etc.) in a way that they could refer to them from course to course and begin to understand the connections. Is an e-portfolio seen as a place to store “best examples” for assessment purposes, both their own and their professor’s or even their colleges for accreditation data? Or is it a place for students and even faculty to display their accomplishments to the rest of the world, the so-called “super resume” model?
In terms of use, would an e-portfolio project be adopted across department? across a college? or is it seen as an integral part of a student portal system? Would students be expected to use it on a course by course basis or across all courses?
As various constituents grapple with this topic, can the CTL/Acad Comp or LRG as a whole, assist in the process? Would a round-table work? I’m envisioning something slightly more formal than a tea, with invitations to those in Education who have already implemented an e-portfolio system.The purpose would be to give participants a chance to refine their ideas about what e-portfolios are, about what IT options exist, and to consider how they would actually implement an e-portfolio program. Our role would be as facilitators, not solution experts!

Google is offering three new services to educators:
1) The University Research Program for Google Search,” is designed to give university researchers “high-volume programmatic access to Google Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for understanding the structure and contents of the Web.” More at Google Univ Research Program
2) Google Translate, will allow researchers “programmatic access to Google’s translation service,” including “detailed word alignment information” and “a list of the n-best translations with detailed scoring information.”
3) One to definitely keep an eye on, is Google’s leap into the fray of keeping CS students and interested others current with the ‘how-tos’ of new technologies. They have put together a website with tutorials, samples, and video lectures. Current topics include AJAX programming and Distributed Systems. Also included is the Google Curriculum Search that “will help you find teaching materials that have been published to the web by faculty from CS departments around the world. You can refine your search to display just lectures, assignments or reference materials for a set of courses.”
http://code.google.com/edu/

The Social Software Showcase is an online unconference occuring around and during the time of ALA Annual 2007 (June) to showcase and discuss social software by librarians and leaders in the field.
Presenters/topics include
* David Free and David Lee King: Twitter
* Casey Bisson
* Lichen Rancourt: Web 2.0 and why libraries should care
* Michael Casey: AudioIndex
* Michael Porter: facebook and libraries
* Tim Spalding: LibraryThing
* Tom Peters: Web Conferencing Software
* Iris Jastram: Meebo Rooms
* Jessamyn West: portable software applications
* Simon Spero: folksonomy
* K.G. Schneider: LOCKSS
Main Page – Social Software Showcase

A new 100+ million word corpus of American English (1920s-2000s) is now
freely available at:
http://corpus.byu.edu/time/
The corpus is based on more than 275,000 articles in TIME magazine from
1923 to 2006, and it contains articles on a wide range of topics –
domestic and international, sports, financial, cultural, entertainment,
personal interest, etc.
The architecture and interface is similar to the one used at the British National Corpus (see http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc)

“Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods. DHQ seeks to provide a forum where practitioners, theorists, researchers, and teachers in this field can share their work with each other and with those from related disciplines. ”
“DHQ is an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities. Published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), DHQ is also a community experiment in journal publication, with a commitment to:
* experimenting with publication formats and the rhetoric of digital authoring
* co-publishing articles with Literary and Linguistic Computing (a well-established print digital humanities journal) in ways that straddle the print/digital divide
* using open standards to deliver journal content
* developing translation services and multilingual reviewing in keeping with the strongly international character of ADHO
DHQ will publish a wide range of peer-reviewed materials, including:
* Scholarly articles
* Editorials and provocative opinion pieces
* Experiments in interactive media
* Reviews of books, web sites, new media art installations, digital humanities systems and tools
* A blog with guest commentators”
Available at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq

Recently revised:
University of Maryland Libraries has published its Guidelines for Digital Collections. This comprehensive 81-page (pdf) file covers copyright, selection, standards, metadata, methods, etc.
The site also links to their Administrative Metadata Tag Library and their Descriptive Metadata Tag Library, as well as to a digital imaging primer.

Common-place:
“Common-place is a common place for exploring and exchanging ideas about early American history and culture. A bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Common-place speaks–and listens–to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900. Common-place is a common place for all sorts of people to read about all sorts of things relating to early American life–from architecture to literature, from politics to parlor manners. And it’s a place to find insightful analysis of early American history as it is discussed not only in scholarly literature but also on the evening news; in museums, big and small; in documentary and dramatic films; and in popular culture.”
The latest issue, titled “Revolution in Print” focuses on graphics in Nineteenth-Century America.

NYU College of Dentistry Takes Textbooks Online
The article discusses NYU Dentistry’s partnership with VitalSource/Bookshelf to put course materials online. The concept is one that has long been touted (by tech promoters), anticipated (by students tired of lugging glossy 20 pound textbooks) and resisted (by several groups). This adds to the “textbooks online” idea by making available other materials, access to online databases, and linking it all from with BlackBoard.
Of special interest to me are these paragraphs from the above-linked article:
“The materials are submitted yearly to a company called VitalSource Technologies, which creates online versions of the content for the college in its Bookshelf product. The electronic textbooks are complete with hypertext links to references and the ability to search, print, highlight, organize, and add “sticky” notes.
Students are also given, through VitalSource, access to the NYU College of Dentistry library, and to other faculty-reviewed and -approved items.
Over the last seven years of working with VitalSource, the College of Dentistry, located in the heart of New York City, has created a vast digital library of textbooks, papers, lectures, and other internal and externally produced scholarly reference materials, all available to its students and faculty through VitalSource. For reference, a graduating student retains access to content that was current during his or her final year of school.”
also
“As use of the Internet has evolved, so has student use of Bookshelf, according to Leila Jahangiri, chair of the Department of Prosthodontics at NYU. “Students’ experience with computers is changing,” she said. When the e-textbook program was first introduced, printing out material to read, study, highlight, and retain was much more common. Today, she said she sees little of that. “Students are now accessing all their course materials on Bookshelf.” Faculty members, she said, now tend to be the ones printing out content much more often than students. . . The easy access to online materials helps counter students’ tendencies to go online to the general Internet for every answer, Jahangiri said.”
“At the beginning of the academic year, Jahangiri explained, every department in the College of Dentistry submits books or other content they would like to see added to VitalSource. The college began the program originally with textbooks only, but over time has gradually added faculty lecture materials, PowerPoint presentations, PDF documents, manuals, selected educational sites, and online access through VitalSource to the Waldmann Dental Library at NYU.
“Students who need to access electronic journals and various other materials that are in the library … can just go online and click,” Jahangiri said, to access materials through the VitalSource platform.
Students can download those textbooks they need and use regularly; to save space, others can simply be accessed online as needed. Essentially, students and faculty can create their own personal bookshelves each academic year, downloading the basic books required, along with other materials they might use often.”
And they have integrated it with BlackBoard:
“The College of Dentistry uses Blackboard as its course management system; each course offered by the college has a Blackboard-created page with the course syllabus, then links to information that can be found in Bookshelf. A syllabus line describing a Monday lecture can contain a link directly to the chapter that will be referenced, along with the PowerPoint presentation itself and other internally produced material, all stored in Bookshelf.”
“Copyright is not a problem; VitalSource secures a copyright that allows unlimited use of material for academic purposes.”