Intralibrary Conference

A number of representatives of the NDLR (National Digital Learning Repository - Ireland's national resource for higher education) and others from NUIG are currently at the IntraLibrary Repositories Conference in Edinburgh listening to and presenting papers on various aspects of digital repository design and use. Intrallect have used the occasion to outline some of the key features of the new release (version 3.0) of their software.

It is fascinating to see the wide range of users of Intralibrary from across the international HE sector as well as to learn of future plans for interoperability with other web services, VLEs and other systems.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere is the world's first all-software audience response system. Unlike other voting or polling solutions, you don’t have to buy expensive proprietary hardware or “call for special pricing,” you just sign up and create text message polls in literally minutes.

Polls can be embedded into Powerpoint presentations and the students respond using their mobile phones. The results are updated live onscreen!

Of course, it's not available outside the US (yet!).

The Film Based Teaching Machine

The photo here is one that appeared in a book published by Harper & Brothers in 1962, entitled '1975: And the Changes to Come', written by Arnold B. Barach and the Kiplinger Washington Editors, predicting how technology would change our lives in 1975.

The caption associated with this particular photo is: "Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom. "

I think we might have achieved this one? Although, I can't remember - have we decided that repetition exercises are good or bad, or does it depend ...?

A Vision of Students Today

I'll let the video speak for itself. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.

Open Source Video Player marches on

Miro, the open source video player and subscription tool continues its growth in popularity (with over 3,400 channels available, including increasing numbers in HD quality) and is beginning to be adopted by national TV broadcasters in Germany (Deutshe Welle) and Norway, for example. This is in stark contrast to the UK, where the BBC have instead opted for their own proprietary system built in association with Microsoft, the iPlayer. Many have argued that such a decision from a state owned public service is a real pity, if not questionable, given the potential of open source solutions such as Miro. However, the BBC has decided that DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a key issue for them and they are closely protecting their content through this approach. In Ireland, no download service up and running yet from our national broadcaster, just access to some streamed video samples of news, etc.

Educause Conference

The Educause Learning Initiative's 2008 Conference is currently under way in San Antonio, Texas and the keynote presentations are being broadcast live and made available to view afterwards. You can catch up on these by following this link.

Educause (of which NUI Galway is a member) is a major organisation that focuses on the implementation of learning technologies and other IT systems in higher education. It is also responsible for the .edu domain name.

Berkeley (US) Law and Policy Podcasts

One of the top copyright academics, Prof. Pam Samuelson (wikipedia article), is to podcast her course of 16 lectures on Information Law and Policy delivered at UC Berkeley.

"This course introduces students to copyright and other forms of legal protection for databases, licensing of information, consumer protection, liability for insecure systems and defective information, privacy, and national and international information policy."

A link to the podcasts can be found here. There is a three day delay, so the first podcast should hopefully be available from Thursday.

double vision and 3D specs

Well, the BBC's technology pages are fairly upbeat about the improving prospects for 3D movies and television given the capabilities of modern digital cinema projection systems. A pity our current lecture recording systems are only 2D! Perhaps something we can look at in the future.

ITAG's Technology Tips for Parents

This list Breach the great technology divide with ITAG’s Top 10 Technologies for Kids was published in the Galway Advertiser yesterday and is also available from the ITAG website.

In the interests of being actively involved with their children, parents need to have at least a basic understanding of the ways kids use technology. ITAG has put together a "cheat sheet" to educate mums and dads and to help them get more involved in their kids' leisure activities.

It includes short explanations of YouTube, MySpace, Google, Blogs and Wikipedia, as well as SMS , iPods and (legal) Downloads. Tips are given as to how parents might use these technologies to interact with their children and get more involved with their activities.

The best tip, in my opinion, is the one related to Google:

Sit down with your kids and tackle a tough homework assignment with them; help them search for images and relevant news articles to make the project top-notch.


What better way to teach them to evaluate online resources and use Google in an effective way?

Banning Google?

I've just read the Guardian's interview with Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at Brighton University. She describes how she has banned the use of google by her first year students, by refusing to grade anything based on material she has not prescribed for them. From the article: "I give my first-years a good curriculum based on 200 extracts from refereed journals and books," she says, "and I'm happy for them to use those as sources exclusively."

At first this seems a little bizarre. Shouldn't the students be looking for reference material themselves? Emma Duke-Williams, on her blog, remarks "I'm assuming that she would allow them to use Google to locate other academics websites, to use Google Scholar to find new references..."

On one hand, I'm quite persuaded by Prof. Brabazon's explanation: "I'm not asking them to be independent scholars at this stage. Rather, I'm building what I call an information scaffold. I'm guiding them through complicated ideas, and getting them to read high-quality materials. Young minds are like diamonds. They need sharpening and polishing. Too many assumptions are made about their ability to manage the transition from school to university."

So, her first year students are not yet mature enough in their scholarship to make judgements about sources of information. I tend to agree with that. But I have to ask, when and how do we expect them to learn this skill?

The 1.3 kilogram computer vs the 3 ton computer?

With the launch of Apple's new MacBook Air this week, "the world's thinnest notebook", it might be worth reminding ourselves of how far technology has come since, say 1935?

The MacBook Air weighs a tiny 1.3 kilograms compared to the 1935 ballistic computer which weighed 3 tons!

Boing Boing published an interesting post citing part of an article published in the 1935 Science and Mechanics magazine, about the "Ballistic computer of 1935: the 3-ton "Big Brain" that could give a "not necessarily physical picture of the movement of one of the heavenly bodies, but a mathematical picture of it", in (eventual!) answer to the following problem: "... three or more heavenly bodies (like Earth, Sun, and Moon) are moving in their orbits at different rates of speed and varying distances, attracting each other. What will be the combined result of their forces, in changing the positions of each, in a given period?"

The Library of Congress Pilot Project on Flickr

Announced yesterday, The Library of Congress has uploaded more than 3,000 historical photographs to Flickr, the online photo sharing website. These are shared under a new No known Copyright Restrictions category, which means that the library is not the intellectual property owner. There are two possibilities:

1. There was a copyright and it was not renewed
2. The image is from a late 19th or early 20th century collection for which there is no evidence of any rights holder

The aim of the project is to invite us, the public, to tag the photographs, thus categorising them and making them searchable. Clever, eh?

There are two collections: 1930s-40s in Color; and News in the 1910s.