IT in the Humanities 5th Annual Conference

Next Monday (21st April) the final year undergraduate BA students who take IT as one of their subjects at NUI Galway are having their “conference”.

To explain … one of their modules concerns Information Technology in the Humanities. Each student self-selects a topic that they are interested in, and spends the year doing some research in the area. They produce a conference paper (in a specific format, with strict referencing enforced) which goes into a conference proceedings. They also have to give a 10 minute conference presentation on their topic.

I would certainly encourage, if you are available on Monday at all, to pop along to a session that interests you. Pat Byrne, who runs the module, would be delighted to have a wider audience, and it gives the students a huge boost to present in front of a wider group.

The schedule kicks off at 9.15am in IT125 and continues, with breaks for coffee and lunch, until 3.15pm. Topics include (5 plucked from a list of 25):

• The application of Information Technologies to Sports Parachuting (Skydiving)
• Are Video Games Art?
• E-Learning: A Focus on Interactivity and the challenge of overcoming the lack of human interaction
• Social Networking and its Effects
• The Open Source Movement: Components of a Revolution

Blog IT

Jane Hart's E-learning Pick of the Day yesterday was Blog IT, a Facebook application that allows you to post to your blog from within Facebook. So, I thought I'd give it a go and it seems to work. This is coming from my Facebook space!

I'm not sure quite how it's going to be useful!

Digital whiteboards, three-D graphics and more for $40

From TED: Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.

Blogged to death???

From the Guardian today:

...in March, Russell Shaw, a technology contributor to Zdnet and the Huffington Post, died from a heart attack a few months after Marc Orchant, another US tech blogger, died following a massive coronary. Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting stress, sleep disturbance and exhaustion among members of the blogging community, and there is a question being bandied around: did blogging kill these people?

Read on....

Pangea Day - World Wide Film & video Event

Pangea Day - the first global event to link film, video and images across the world will take place on May 10th. To find out more about this exciting project visit the Pangea Day website and view the trailer below.

Spaces for learning, spaces for thinking?

In recent years there has been a lot of interest in the design of learning spaces with some really interesting examples appearing in educational institutions across the world of innovative approaches and greater recognition of the potential of group based learning. Some well known examples include the Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University in which students can even inflate little 'pods' to have group meetings, London Metropolitan's new science lab or numerous other new learning centres in what used to be called libraries!

Interesting to see then, that when Google unveiled its new headquarters building in Zurich, bursting at the seems with the expected wacky, cool workplace features such as a slide into the canteen and pool tables (try playing them all day and I wonder what would happen!), they also built a space modelled on a traditional library with comfortable armchairs, a fireplace and plenty of books! Perhaps a realisation that the design and decor of the environment sets a tone for the activities that take place therein and the importance of 'slow time' and space to think amidst the seemingly headlong rush towards a mass, large-scale, industrialised model of educational 'delivery'.

Miro's new campaign for support

I know we've mentioned Miro before a couple of times on this blog and at the risk of sounding like a persistent salesman, can I dare mention it again?? For those who don't know, it is an internet video player which is committed to open standards and is run by a non-profit organisation (the Participatory Culture Foundation) and its primary aim is to fight against the dominance of proprietary systems in this important area of media production and dissemination. A number of public service TV and internet channels have started their own branded versions of Miro and hence show their support, but disappointingly (and somewhat controversially in the UK) the BBC chose Microsoft standards instead.

Miro are currently campaigning for financial support by asking for donations as well as seeking volunteers to use their I ♥ Miro scheme for purchasing from Amazon whereby any purchases you make lead to a commission being paid to support Miro. It doesn't cost you anything and is the simplest way of showing your support - unless you wish to become a more generous benefactor!

All you need to know in one click!

Ever wanted to have a simple way of gathering together the latest news, articles, podcasts and videos in your area of interest into one simply organised listing? Well, as we've mentioned before, netvibes provides such a facility for anyone to do this, but to make things even easier, especially if you are interested in educational technologies, higher education and 'big ideas' we've even produced a pre-built netvibes 'universe' for you. As we come across other interesting sources and feeds we'll add these to the collection, but even at the moment you should find what we've gathered to be useful. Remember, this is based on RSS feeds and so anytime a new journal article, news item or podcast is published by any of the organisations to which we link, this page will update itself - so you never need worry about losing track!!

The link to "CELT's Launchpad" is here, but we'll also add it to the side of this blog.

Research Channel

The Research Channel produces and broadcasts documentaries on various aspects of university research on Cable, Satellite, the Internet and via iTunes or even youTube.

Over 3,500 programmes are available and you can browse through the collection by subject category. It's certainly an accessible and innovative way of getting across the range of research activity that is taking place in the member institutions. It is of course, currently essentially US universities and related organisations (e.g. the American Meteorolgical Society), but who knows, maybe more international members will appear on the scene soon?

St. Patrick's Day in Second Life.

As reported on the BBC website today, Tourism Ireland is hosting a celebration of St. Patrick's day (albeit happening on Sunday) in Irish spaces in the virtual world that is Second Life. SL's Dublin is a popular venue (mainly for all the shenanigans in "the Blarney Stone" virtual pub) and has a mock up of Trinity College, Bewley's Cafe (see picture!) and other locations in the city centre.

Nicholas Negroponte's TED talk from 1984

Watch 25 minutes of Nicholas Negroponte's 2 hour talk from the very first TED conference in 1984. The full talk will be made available, but needs to be restored.

This is absolutely fascinating, especially if you can remember back to 1984 and the sorts of technology that were available. I had an Apple II at the time and considered myself very sophisticated. We had no idea that this work existed or had even been thought of (outside of Science Fiction novels).



Download the talk and see the comments on the TED page.

Is it cheating if it's on Facebook?

A story was published on Monday in the Montreal Gazette concerning a first year computer engineering student at Ryerson University in Toronto. He was the administrator of a virtual study group on Facebook, where 146 of his classmates discussed solutions to homework problems. The student has been accused of academic misconduct and could be expelled from the University. His hearing was yesterday, as reported in the Global and Mail, and he will be informed of his fate within five days.

The story prompted many commentaries, including one on Stephen Downes' blog and another on Emma Duke-Williams' blog, about whether a virtual study group is any different from the usual collaboration that takes place in the canteen. Was it naive of the lecturer to expect that the homework problems he set (which were individualised for each student in an effort to prevent cheating) would not be discussed?