Recently in Web 2.0 Category

Jamie's coffee read on the costs of purchasing tech is one that's close to my heart. I came from a single-income household, but my mother decided to we needed invest in a computer - which was a Coleco Adam with a whopping 80K of memory (this was before I met Mac). Thanks Mom!

But I'm still in a single-income household (for 2 people) and once I found myself still on the divide when it comes to ... mobile tech. Truthfully, it's not the price of the phone that bugs me ($100-400) but the high monthly fee ($840 per year on the iPhone plan), especially since I rarely find need of a cell phone. At least I watch cable TV most days.

So after some research, I did go with the iTouch, and even though I'm not regularly on the Internet, I'm finding the potential uses very interesting.

First, I found an amazing array of calculators (programming, basic, thermal units, financial,...). And of course, I checked out the games - hours of entertainment from one little software package. I've also been checking music (great sound) and even used iPhoto to import photos. Not only can I show off the corgi, but I can show pieces I've stitched - a great mini portfolio. And if you plan carefully, even a small iPod may have plenty of room for you, and most utilities are cheap ($0-1.99). Once you get over that initial hurdle, there are a lot of good options out there.

And once I did connect to the Internet at home, I was able to tap into the other cool apps like YouTube, Pandora and Wikipedia and the all-important movie time schedule. Cool.

You may already have discovered all of this, but I am relieved that I will be enjoying my iTouch without the extra $70 per month. It's much more affordable this way.

The Penn State Multimedia Teaching Objects are a set of objects which can be downloaded under the "Penn State Open Source License". While this license is not Creative Commons, it actually has the same terms as a liberal GNU/Creative Commons license - namely:

This MTO item can be used royalty-free under the following conditions. See the MTO Item Open Source License for complete terms.

• The item is distributed AS IS with no implied or stated warranties.
• The item is restricted to educational or personal use only. Commercial use is not permitted.
• Copies may be distributed, but only for educational or personal use. This item cannot be sold for profit.
• You have permission to modify the item, but the derivative work must remain open source and cannot be marketed for profit.
• Copyright of the original item is held by Penn State.
• If this item is used, attribution to Penn State is requested.

So why not just use Creative Commons? Because when this project was developed several years ago, Creative Commons was not what it is now. At the time we were investigating this, the closest Creative License version I could create was a Canadian one. If, for some reason, someone had borrowed a file and made a billion dollars, it looked like Penn State would have had to file a law suit in Canada.

Looking at the site again, I do think there might be more merit to the actual license...but I don't regret asking qualified attorneys to review the issue. That's why we consult content experts!

Update on Aug 14

I just read in this New Media & Technology Law Blog (found via a Listserv) that a Federal Circuit court says open source licenses are legally enforceable in the U.S. As I interpret it, it means that if you use an open source license, and someone violates it you can sue in court, even if there are no monetary damages per se. I would presume that this is good news for the Creative Commons effort.

I anticipate a quiet Web 2.0 period on this topic, but I did like the Live Question tool from the Harvard Law server. It lets a large class send questions with minimal interruption, and the voting lets other students participate even if the coffee hasn't quite kicked in yet.

This is a good case for letting everyone have their laptops open in class.

My colleague Mary Janzen has an interesing blog post about her trepidation to use Twitter, and I have to say that she's not the only one... I do follow some Tweets periodically (especially now that they are easy to read on the hall monitor), but thus far I have not joined in.

I have to agree with Mary that the word "tweeting" does not sound like a serious activity, so I'll replace it with the more academic "microblogging." And yet, I still won't microblog in public. What is my problem anyway?

It's a dual problem for me. One is that the microblogging is very micro, specifically 140 characters. It doesn't allow me the space to elaborate on whatever profound point I plan to make. Abraham Lincoln (or maybe someone else) is supposed to have apologized for not having a chance to shorten his first draft, and I knew exactly what the speaker meant. The short haiku like elegance required for a classic Tweet may take longer for me than a rambling blog post.

I could be a little more spontaneous (like in the ANGEL Doc meeting), but, seriously, I do not know who at Penn State is watching. I'm still a little unnerved (sorry). I really believe the adage that anything with an http:// protocol is potentially in public view even if it is "password protected"

The other issue is reading time. Unlike blogs, you have to follow Tweets fairly frequently to get the full sense. It's kind of like being on AIM and the cell phone...and when was the last time you saw me on AIM or a cell phone? It's a personal style issue. I do confess I like Twitter as an announcement platform (like PSU Txt), but again how many Tweets are announcements that are critical to me?

FYI - If there was an ETS Announcement Tweet channel, I would definitely follow the RSS

And finally there's the time taken to WRITE the 140 character messages. I did two days worth of recording my potential Tweets in a text file (see next blog post), and the output was what you might expect (which was a little punchy). For me they were written at pauses in my day when I was a little punchy, so yes there if is a goofy element.

After the two Tweeter production days, I went back to my old ways, and found I was less distracted (blissful silence broken by an occasional blog post).

That's not to say that I will never get a Twitter account or that I don't unerstand the appeal to so many others. But I will say I have new sympathies for the those who say blogging doesn't work for them.

I'm a fairly cynical creature, so it's not often that I find a philiosophical presentation mind-blowing, but this one did it. The presentation was innocently title Religion Online, but the speaker, Edward Lamoreux of Bradley University (a practicing ethnographer), raised some questions about the relation of religion and the Internet that would never have occured to me.

I should note that the questions raised are ones that may touch your most cherished assumptions. If the entry offends, it is unintentional, but possible unavoidable.

Potential Hazards of a Media Revolution

First, I applaud him for remembering that other great media revolution - the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in the West. This was the invention that made it practical for more people to have access to key documents such as the Bible...and yes this did have some major consequences such as the Protestant Revolution (one of the debates was whether the Bible should be translated for anyone to read or kept in the original language for trained specialists). As Lamoreaux points out, a major religious schism is not what Gutenberg had in mind when he created a press with Movable Type.

Information vs. Ritual

Back in the 21st century, the main question is whether the Internet can be used as a source of information only or whether actual religuous ritual can happen online. For mainstream religions, the answer seems to be that certain "peripheral" activities are OK online, but there is a hesitation to conduct the most important rituals online.

To take Second Life (or chat room) as an example, it is fairly common for users to meet for Bible study (or Torah study) or for counseling sessions sponsored by religious groups. However, Second Life is less rarely used for weekly services even though there are virtual churches/synogogues available. For instance there is NO sanctioned Catholic mass online. One exception is for some non-mainstream services such as the Church of Elvis or the Church of Linden.

Contemplative Building

Interestingly though, a common activity is for users to build elaborate churches, cathedrals, abbeys or other places of worship. In fact so many graphic designers have built churches that it is difficult to separate non-sanctioned churches from islands sponsored by official religious organizations. However, Lamoreux speculates that the act of building is itself a religious or meditative activity for many people. Even in the secular world, Lamoreaux stated that the most common type of Second Life building was avatars creating a personal space to "chill."

However, it may be that for some people, the building can have an even deeper connection to their spiritual life. To be sure there are many religions in which creating or building a design is considered to be a way to connect to God or a higher plane - the most obvious example is creating sand mandalas in Tibetan buddhism. "Contemplative" art is fairly common in the Internet (e.g. fractal art galleries), but I'm not sure it's something I've seen discussed in a serious manner.

Is the Interet Worth the Risk?

Returning to the "hazards" of new technology, Lamoreaux discusses that for many religious groups, the Internet is a double-edged sword. After all the Internet can expose your group to pornography, alternate theology and the temptations of a secular lifestyle. Having said that though, I think more religious groups are taking advantage of this new outlet than we might think.

Looking back through my personal bookmarks, some interesting sites I have encountered have been:

• The Original Ten Commandments in the Original Semitic Script ($75.00)
• Hebrew Alphabet (Judaism 101)
• Art of Arabic Calligraphy
• New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia
• Liturgical Year (Vatican) - excellent color-coded rollovers
• Virtual Christianity Bibles (Multiple versions, multiple languages)
• Internet Sacred Text Archive
• Sikh History Com
• Ásatrú (neo Nordic) - for those who practice neo-Nordic (pagan) religion

• Hellenion (neo Hellenic) - if you want to still worship the Greek Gods seriously, you can
• Arguments we think creationists should NOT use - Alas, I'm still a neo Darwinsit myself.
• What a Biblical Scholar should Know about Unicode - couldn't resist

As you can see it's a varied list, but the sites all have one thing in common. As far as I can tell, they were all built by people who are genuinely devout or at least believe in the importance of spirituality. Clearly, the Internet is being used creatively for spritual outreach.

I should say that we did NOT touch on a notorious use of the Internet and that is as a communication tool for some extremists to plan acts of destruction. Hopefully though, these sites may show that we may be able to co-exist peacefully one day (if nor amicably). Even a cynic sometimes likes to dream.

My colleagues commented that some of the sessions were mislabelled (see below), but I was actually satisfied with what I got to see - which were some interesting examples of how new technology is playing out in the classroom

Maps & iPhone

Probably the presentation with the newest tech was Columbia's iPhone project for mapping African American historical places in New York City. This was one which has been evolving over time for them. First that added some text, video and images (borrowing heavily from the NY Public Library archives), then they added a Google Map overlay...and then the iPhone. More interestingly, the entire site was built in Movable Type - but they did a lot of clever manipulation of the templates to make less of a blog and even more of a content managment system.

MAAP: Mapping the African American Past
http://maap.columbia.edu/

Because iPhone already works well with Google Maps, they did not need to add too much to the backend, although they did create a Movable Type template which generates an iPhone friendly version for each page - if you go the Web site on an iPhone, you will go directly to the maps.

I had been seeing educational applications, especially for museums, incorporating mobile phones with GIS data, but this is the first iPhone version. It looks like the iPhone is that smart phone in the U.S. with wide enough acceptance to make it worthwhile for a U.S. academic institution. At Penn State, I know there are a few applications in agriculture and sciences as well as history. At one point, we had been thinking of using a guided tour of Penn State landscape features via a Palm Pilot, but this could be easily ported to the iPhone.

Mapping in the Humanities

As if that weren't enough GIS, I went to the Mapping in the Humanities session lead by a panel of Princeton professors. This was a good panel if you were interested in some of the guts of GIS manipulation. For instance, we got a quick demo of ESRI.

I have to admit that for humanities, the big question is how you handle historical maps. The answer is that you use "custom tiles" from the Google Map API to build your own world. Apparently the historical maps of Venice are too difficult to align with modern Venice satellite maps even though both are fairly accurate.

The most memorable classroom application was a course in which students were able to travel to Venice over spring break and make blog entries about different historical sites. Another semester they got to go to Crete (and report on Venetian sites there). Myself, I'm thinking we can document some sites in Pine Grove Mills or Bellefonte.

Decision Making Seminar (actually Games)

The most misleading label for a session was probably the one about "Decision Making" in different courses (doesn't that sound exciting). Surprisingly this was a session about GAMES (I actually hit the motherload). This presentation was done by a group out of the University of North Carolina Greensboro, who admitted that they had a lot of (ahem) budgetary support from the Provost, so everything was very WOW.

The highlight was a course in economics which was constructed as a game where students in the post-apocopolyptic Earth have to re-establish mini trading economies. Fortunately, they get rescued in the end. One module that was especially interesting was a game where students had to allocate resources to rescue a neighboring community from an incoming hurricane. Clearly, this game could have applications beyond economics, so the group said that they made it portable so that it could be adapted for other courses...good forward thinking.

I ran into three Flickr "Contest" Areas where users post photos/digital art on certain themes (e.g. color, abstract and black & white) and a user group votes on it. You can even invite people with a striking image to submit to the contest. I had heard that Flickr was becoming a place to show off your digital art, but I hadn't realized the extent of it.

• Abstract - http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractart/
• Color - http://www.flickr.com/groups/colourart/
• Black and White - http://www.flickr.com/groups/bnwart/

Not only are the images lovely,but I also found the artist commentary very helpful. Might be a great opportunity for our budding digital artists at Penn State.

The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (http://wals.info/feature) from the Max Planck Digital Library is a great new resource that maps languages with phonological, morphological or syntactic features.

I wrote it up in my linguistics blog If you've ever wondered which continents have tonal languages, go visit http://wals.info/feature/13.

I love that all the data sources are cited and that you can export map data as XML or KML (for other GIS programs) - I could recreate a version for myself if I wanted. My only recommendation is to shrink the size of the icons to 10.

We're selecting books to recommend for the upcoming TLT Symposium, and we thought we would blog about some of them. One of our likely selections will be Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom by Will Richardson.

Should you buy?

This book is written for the instructor who is completely new to the Web 2.0 world. If you've heard of "blogs" and "wikis" only as buzzwords, but want to know more, this is for you. I should mention that it's aimed for a K-12 instructor audience, but I think most of the principles apply to higher education. It starts out with definitions of the terms, adds educationally sound examples then shows you some tools to get you started. It also covers issues important to instructors such as making sure students understand the rules of blogging in your course. It also has great coverage of one of the most important "hidden" technologies - RSS.

Another great feature is that it's short and to the point, and for busy instructors, this could be the tipping point of whether the book gets read or not. But short does not mean incomplete - far from it. Richardson manages to touch on blogs, wikis, podcasting, RSS, tagging, mashups, social bookmarking (aka del.icio.us) and image galleries (aka "Flickr"). I think this is a book that will help you "get" Web 2.0.

The other good news is that even if you've become "Web 2.0" savvy, you'll still find great examples and new tools to consider. Even now, I'm looking at Flickr in a new way.

Sumamry

This is great for the Web 2.0 newbie who needs it all explained and helpful for Web 2.0 veterans who can always a few more new ideas.

I just ran into the site German GROW, a site with cultural links for German teachers at http://www.aatg.org/content/view/255/ It's run by the AATG (American Association of German Teachers).

Like the icons? It looks very Web 1.0. But click each link and it actually takes you to a del.icio.us page that the AATG has set up. For instance the Musik link goes to http://del.icio.us/GermanGROW/Musik As you can see, the AATG has established their own folders within del.icio.us.

This is an interesting design which I like because the interface is intuitive to a Web 1.0 educator audience, but actually leverages Web 2.0 technology. If you do understand del.icio.us, you can go directly to http://del.icio.us/GermanGROW/ and even suck in the RSS feed. You can even add your own resources if you know how to tag.

But if you haven't had a chance to get acquainted with tagging yet (and many instructors are still in this position), the Web 1.0 interface will still let you get to that content without learning a new set of terms. As my colleague Tim Perry noted recently, "RSS remains an elusive concept."