I have moved this blog

Wanted more freedom and so moved this blog to:
http://www.mengos.net/wp/

Please bookmark this page instead!

office alternatives

Naturally we know OpenOffice. Now there is also NeoOffice for the Mac OSX.  Very cool.

MIT’s open access research and other open scholarly resources

MIT has done it again. After the MIT courseware and open source courses online, now it has created a space for researchers on Dspace which was “built to save, share, and search MIT’s digital research materials”. It even has theses collections. That is a fantastic resource.

Here are some more resources:

• Sofia from Gavilan College
• Connexions: where you can gather modules and compile a course. It also has open textbooks.
• Merlot: a repository of materials, animation, research and everything you need to build a course
• Open Michigan

Publishing venues and open online journals:

• JOLT: Journal of Online Teaching and Learning
• Virtual Center for Online Learning and Research.
• The Journal of Visualized Experiments [JOVE] [medical and sciences oriented]
• PLOS [Public Library of Science]. Submit research and it is peer reviewed.
• IJLM International Journal of Learning and Media. MIT
• Vectors University of CA.
• Center for History and New Media. It also has several projects, one of them is Project Zotera [to help save and organize your bibliography]. Another is providing digital tools for research, and a third for online curricula. It even has a search tool called Syllabus Finder!

photoshop alternative

Web-based alternative  to photoshop: Pixlr. I keep losing it in my bookmarks and even when I search bookmarks I cannot find it – so here it is in all its glory.

Even more fun is Sumo Editor… soooo cool!! link

impact of facebook

If ou ever doubted it, here are the stats for Facebook use across the globe.

http://img41.yfrog.com/img41/2347/facebookwqi.jpg

Talk about influence!!

influence, reputation and infotention

Influence and reputation – and to add Howard Rheingold’s infotension… those are the new buzzwords around. Very interesting and intriguing concepts. Wish I was at the Future of Influence Summit! what a great lineup of speakers and intriguing ideas!

What are they?

Influence: simply put, according to my understanding of that new term, influence relates to who is influential now. Before the digital age, media such as newspapers and power and wealth all created influence, hence wielded political power and also affected how society worked and changed. Now, influence is based on blogs, Twitter and new media that is created by the masses. This is affecting politics, society and also economics and marketing strategies.  They are called the Influentials or Influencers.

• Read also 5 ways influence is rapidly changing the media and advertisting landscapes
• Read also Unveiling the new influencers.
• View the landscape map of influence [pdf] to get a better understanding of what it is.
• The motivations of influencers and amplifiers: how content becomes prominent

“Increasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.” [Ross Dawson]

“Social media is all about human relationships, about how we shape our view of the world based on our peer communication. The extraordinary breadth of information and opinion that we are exposed to today, combined with the ability to converse, means our own opinions are often driven more by peers than traditional sources.

In fact this shift to the social means that media is becoming far more about peer influence than information and reporting.” [Ross Dawson]

Reputation: how influential you are depends on your reputation and credibility.  It is now known as the Whuffie  which  is “the measure of reputation used in Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Since we don’t have any other good words for describing collectively assessed reputation, whuffie has gained traction as a description of this phenomenon.”
Read: The Whuffie Factor and watch the video here.

Infotention: “a combination of ways of thinking and digital tools such as intelligence dashboards, news radars, and info-filters. A combination of attention, information, and intention. Applied infotention. Trained and untrained infotention. And especially mindful infotention” [this is the link to the announcement of the new term] and this is Howard’s concept map of the idea.

communicating with digital natives

I was asked to make a presentation at Pine Manor College in Brookline on August 27th. The meeting was a collaborative meeting between faculty from New England Institute of Art and Pine Manor.  I talked about communicating with digital natives.  It was more of a lively discussion and it was GREAT to talk to peers since we all are basically the digital immigrants.

do you want to date my avatar?

Fascinating and hilarious video [and series called The Guild]. Makes fun of MMOs and immersive environments and the current ‘computer culture’. Digital natives making fun of digital natives.

gaming with javascript

I was totally into two workshops – both about gaming, and in the end I chose to go to this one.

Teaching basic game programming using Javascript

Presenters: Phillip Chang and Pennsylvania Wu.

Need a language: why use Javascript

easy to learn, loosely design structure, cross-platform, os independent, high fault tolerance, require no installation, no complicated compilation, no initial investment – preferably open source. Javascript is a good candidate.

Advantages: loosely designed, cross platform, open source, test games immediately

Disadvantages: scripts, not self-executable programs, poor support on audio and visual efforts, poor support on 3D graphics programming, programmers have less controls on outputs.

Javascript browser game: structure is html page layout, css, javascript application.

Professor Wu showed examples of some games and showed their code. Games like Pacman, shooting aliens and Tetris. Games can be animation, handling user inputs, sprite programming, object movement, collision detection [motion], adding sound effects, artificial intelligence.

Javascript is easy to learn and implement, function sufficient, reduces the complexity level of teaching, motivates students by sharing their games online.

There are still problems cross-browser, but maybe we can just write a code to detect the browser first and use the programming based on it.

Javascript is not as functionable as other kinds of languages. Teaching students entry-level codes Javascript is great for that. You can also encouage the student by asking them  to upload to the web.

Remember that this is entry level for students because we see many students who are usuallydiscouraged by debugging and coding so this is a very good tool to encourage students to do gaming.

mythbusting davida with wikipedia

Very interesting assignment for students with Wikipedia.

Mythbusting: college students as Wikipedia editors, a surprising new pathway to information literacy.

Presenter: Davida Scharf, New Jersey Institute off Technology

Many people could use this technique regardless of the subject matter. She has been working collaboratively with another professor. [watch video Colbert on Wikiality because this is really what some people think of Wikipedia]. This is where she started her journey.

Can we make peace with Wikipedia? as librarians we thought it was great to be able to go online and find it with a question and then now with Wikipedia we hate it because people believe anything that is accessible rather than anything that is factual. She wanted to teach her students how to use it. She used to look up concepts in the Encyclopedia Britannica and not necessarily using it for citation but for understanding concepts. That is what should happen with Wikipedia.

About research papers: students think that it is usually boring, difficult, irrelevant. Professor’s challenge: need motivation for engagement. Librarian’s challenge: need to encourage self-reflection about research skills and sources.

Why Wikipedia? why did she decide to use Wikipedia? because she sees it as authentic. It has motivation and high engagement level. Also the world is the audience.

“The power of the commons is to convert the person from a reader to a writer.” [quotation]

Opportunities for learning – meeting two goals: tecg communications and information literacy through the use of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia assignments:

• evaluate web pages: the first assignment she gives students is an evaluation of web pages. They have to go through the same criteria that she uses.
• write Wikipedia proposal
• edit Wikipedia
• create online multimedia report documenting your work [ppt or video]
• make a case for your grade [what they did right and what they did wrong and students criticze each other and then themselves]

Number 1: Web page critique: access sources, judge tone. Answser questions using evaluation criteria [view UNC handout on print sources; NJIT]

Number 2: proposal: improve wikipedia. Follow W and assignment guidelines. Use sources of good quality, appropriate, tone, scope. Page must stay active until the end of the semester.There are no good or bad sources as long as the source is appropriate to your task. Also sometimes if you put up pages other people remove them or heavily edit them etc. so the page has to stay up.

• why is your topic worthwhile?
• what research will you conduct to verify or document your information [remember that facts are different from opinion and facts must be properly documented and cited]
• see our assessment rubric

The rubric:

• is content substantive?
• well documented
• well connected [with links to other articles such as "see such and such a link"]
• suited to target – [understanding the audience and what segment of the world is interested in your entry]
• demonstrates info literacy

Advice from a librarian: intro to W editing; picking a topic; finding sources; examples. They can get for example four books on Fidel Castro and add to the Fidel Castro entry with citations. That would be a contribution because not everything on him is in W.

A bit about W:

• launched in 2001
• many guidelines [five pillars, what it is not, perfect article]
• back end not transparent
• it has become a topic of study

The five pillars:

• an encyclopedia
• has a neutral pt of view

What it is not? there is a page on W on what it is not.

The perfect article:

• fills a gap
• has a good title
• starts with a clear description
• is not a dictionary article
• is understandable
• is nearly self-contained
• branches in and out
• is unbiased

Weaknesses are strengths: mutability, reliability, anonymity of authors, neutrality. We want students to evaluate and understand the changeability of W. Although anonymity of authors is a liability, yet it is a positive because it frees the students, especially on the discussion page.  Some students would engage and ask if they should change something in an article, so they engage with people all over the world and not only with their professor. If you find an article that is not neutral, go fix it. That could be an assignment just for students to recognize bias.

Number 3: report format: post proposed topic

Number 4: oral report-content : it is not about what they put up there but about how they did it and what they learned in the process.

• what: beofre/after
• Who: target audience
• why: reasoning
• how: execution details
• Q and A
• Performance

Examples: Lillian Gilbert; Sustainable architecture; BMW central building; specific weight; vortex power.

Number 5: self reflection

Why do this? student engagement; they really work hard and enjoy the assignment; teaching them research skills etc.

Pitfalls: time management [students have to begin working on it early]; neutrality