ITT Technical Institute

EduResources Weblog--Higher Education Resources Online

• The University Channel
  posted on July 30, 2005 08:14:03 am
  The University Channel is based at Princeton University; it provides "A collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world-- for you to view, listen to, stream or download." The Channel includes both a podcast feed and an RSS feed; the resources are organized by topic headings and a search tool is included. "The University Channel makes videos of academic lectures and events from all over the world available to the public.  It is a place where academics can air their ideas and present research in a full-length, uncut format.  Contributors with greater video production capabilities can submit original productions." Participating contributors currently include Harvard University, Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, USC, University of Pennsylvania, the Chicago Access Network, and others, but the Channel plans to broaden to include global contributors. This video repository is still under development but already includes some useful resources for self-study and course supplementation. ____JH (Thanks to Distance-Educator.com for information about this resource.) 
• Information Visualisation: Interview with Katy Borner
  posted on July 26, 2005 08:04:45 am
  This fascinating interview with Katy Borner appears in the July 2005 issue of InfoVis; the interviewer is Juan Dursteler. (Links to many interesting maps are included in the article.) The importance of information displays grows as the amount of accessible information becomes greater. Anyone concerned about finding and using online instructional resources needs to be concerned about how information is organized and displayed in online repositories and portals because, if users can't locate the information, it does not exist for them. ___JH "Domain maps of abstract semantic spaces aim to serve today’s explorers navigating and managing the world of science. These maps are generated through a scientific analysis of large-scale scholarly datasets in an effort to connect and make sense of the bits and pieces of knowledge they contain. They can be used to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, collections, grants, papers, journals, ideas, etc. in a domain of interest." "There is an increasing interest in the analysis and visualization of streaming data collected via sensors, instruments, etc. Many of the commonly used analysis and visualization algorithms are not applicable to incrementally growing, dynamic data sets. Sense making of very large scale datasets requires a tight coupling and fine tuning of database architectures and data analysis and visualization techniques. Information visualization researchers will have to work very closely with database design, data integration, and data mining experts."
• Site Profile: IMLS Digital Collections Gateway
  posted on July 23, 2005 09:53:01 am
  The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Registry provides a gateway to collections funded through IMLS, "a resource for educators and cultural heritage professionals." The entryway points to an "array of digital collections from all subject areas - art to science, literature to home economics - and from all types of institutions such as museums, libraries, and historical societies." The site is browsable (by Subject, Object, Place, and Collection Title)  and searchable. The subject headings are organized according the classification scheme used by the Gateway for Educational Materials (http://www.thegateway.org/) , consequently searchers familiar with GEM will recognize the structure used at IMLS. The collection is extremely diverse, which makes finding detailed materials in a single subject difficult, but it is worth a visit. _____JH (Thanks to the Resource Shelf for this reference.)
• Reflections on a Decade of Metadata Consensus Building
  posted on July 20, 2005 10:35:27 am
  I'm reposting this July D-Lib article by Stuart Weibel that I first saw referenced in Scott Leslie's EdTechPost (Scott's comments on the article are listed below). I receive D-Lib but had overlooked this elegantly written article; part of the great value of web sharing with rss feeds from weblogs and electronic journals is in getting multiple opportunities to consider and reconsider resources.  I agree with Scott that the author, Stuart Weibel, provides a useful perspective on the history, development, and current state of metadata work. My own experience has been that metadata is NOT often likely to be provided by the creators of resources and that the burden of doing metadata entries often shifts to semi-clerical workers who know little about the subject matter. Weibel states the problem this way: "The idea of user-created metadata is seductive. Creating metadata early in the life cycle of an information asset makes sense, and who should know the content better than its creator? Creators also have the incentive of their work being more easily found – who wouldn't want to spend an extra few minutes with so much already invested?  The answer is that almost nobody will spend the time, and probably the majority of those who do are in the business of creating metadata-spam. Creating good quality metadata is challenging, and users are unlikely to have the knowledge or patience to do it very well, let alone fit it into an appropriate context with related resources. Our expectations to the contrary seem touchingly naïve in retrospect.  The challenge of creating cost-effective metadata remains prominent. As Erik Duval pointed out in his DC-2004 keynote, 'Librarians don't scale' [7]. We need automated (or at least, hybrid) means for creating metadata that is both useful and inexpensive." _____JH    _____ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july05/weibel/07weibel.html Rarely do you get a chance to read reflections by someone with as much experience as Stuart L. Weibel, the Senior Research Scientist with OCLC, on 10 years of work around Dublin Core and digital metadata standards. And frank too - he concedes that we've all perhaps been too optimistic about the 'author contributed' model of metadata submission, and also that metadata in general has to find its place (if it has one at all) in the full-text searchable digitized world of the web. Check out also the great pictures of the bogeys (wheel carriages) that move entire trains between railway lines of different gauges between China and Mongolia. - SWL[EdTechPost]
• Site Profile: Tufts University OpenCourseWare
  posted on July 18, 2005 05:11:27 pm
  The Tufts University OCW site is modeled after the very successful MIT OCW site (it is the third US university to emulate the MIT model, along with Utah University and Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health). Six courses are available in the pilot opening:  Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Microbiology, Pathophysiology of Infectious Diseases, Theories of Public Policy, Histology, and Zoological Medicine. The courses are well presented including Syllabi, Lectures (with full text and slides), Exams and Quizzes, Readings, and Supplementary Materials. The Tufts site is a worthwhile addition to the OCW movement and is framed within the "Tuft's University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK), to support faculty and students in teaching and learning. TUSK provides a portal to an integrated body of knowledge and ways to personally organize the vast array of health information through its online curricular materials and related applications." "Tufts OpenCourseWare is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT where course content is accessible for free to everyone online. Tufts' initial offerings demonstrate the University's strength in the life sciences, as well as a multidisciplinary approach, an international perspective and an underlying ethic of service to our local, national and international communities." _____JH
• Multimedia Informatics, Issue No. 62, ERCIM News
  posted on July 17, 2005 06:08:55 pm
  The July 2005 issue of ERCIM News is devoted to reports about multimedia information. ERCIM is the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The issue is available in html and pdf formats. Topics are diverse, ranging from "Maps of Music," to "Managing Personal Digital Photo Archives," to "Personalised Enriched Broadcast Experience." Instructional designers will find valuable information and tools in these articles; the articles are short, but the authors can be contacted for more information. ____JH
• Survey of Web-Based Educational Resources in Selected US Art Museums
  posted on July 13, 2005 07:54:26 am
  This article from the online journal First Monday is definitely worth studying. The authors, Robert Varisco and Mitchell Cates, present a careful analysis of art museum educational resources based on a series of research studies. Their report will be of interest both to art and history instructors, who may make use of the resources for instruction, and to a more general audience, who will be interested in the authors' exemplary analytic methodology.  ____JH (Thanks to Distance-Educator.com's Daily News for notification about this resource.) ________________ "Abstract.  Art museums in the United States share a common mission to educate many people — from families to teachers to researchers. But how do these museums use the World Wide Web to extend their educational mission? More specifically, what kinds of educational materials do U.S. art museums offer to online visitors, and how broadly available are such resources across the Web? This study set out to answer these questions and to tie the findings to the contextual model of museum learning. Conclusions are drawn about how museums from the sample fit within a technology adoption curve." "Conclusions.... While this study helped us see broadly the kinds of educational content currently available on U.S. art museum Web sites, the findings are mixed. On the one hand, museums are presenting numerous online images, explanatory text and printable materials to spread understanding of collections and exhibits. On the other hand, tools for social collaboration, video– and audio–based resources, and online instruction are scarce or non–existent. This scarcity may be due to staffing issues, funding issues, or where we are in the development of the Web." 
• Learning Objects: a Rose by Any Other Name
  posted on July 12, 2005 09:37:47 am
  In this July/August EDUCAUSE article Susan Metros surveys the current state of activity and inactivity regarding LOs. She concludes that the early excitement about LOs may have stalled and that significant problems persist, but promising efforts are still underway. ___JH _____________  "Numerous reasons can be given for why learning objects have not fulfilled their promise of transforming education. The definition was too ambiguous and broad. Faculty were not accustomed to sharing and reusing course materials. Developing high-quality learning objects required much time and costly professional expertise. The lack of indexing standards made it difficult to retrieve objects. Institutions have not invested in managing knowledge. And lastly, there was little documented proof that learning objects supported learning any better than the traditional, linearly organized course." "Although institutions of higher education are far from disassembling their long-established discipline silos, they are showing a renewed interest in multi-, inter-, and cross-disciplinary studies. Unlike textbooks, learning objects—with their ability to be navigated nonlinearly, to incorporate multimedia, and to be interactive and customizable—exist in a virtual world that can be accessed within and across disciplines, both vertically and horizontally. Some in the academic research arena are beginning to look back and to document best practices while initiating formal research studies. However, the question of whether educators are willing to change their age-old teaching practice and to develop, use, and share knowledge, in the form of 'learning objects,' still begs to be answered."