McMaster University Library is a blog just started by our new University Librarian, Jeffrey Trzeciak. Its good to have a Librarian who is comfortable with things like blogs and is willing to try them.
Category: Computers and Education
ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences
ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences has released their final report.
Their recommendates are:
- Invest in cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences, as a matter of strategic priority
- Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access
- Promote cooperation between the public and private sectors
- Cultivate leadership in support of cyberinfrastructure from within the humanities and social sciences
- Encourage digital scholarship
- Establish national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and exploits cyberinfrastructure
- Develop and maintain open standards and robust tools
- Create extensive and reusable digital collections
I note that the development of robust tools is one of the recommendations (along with open standards). See my earlier post Humanities Cyberinfrastructure.
Wireless Lecture Halls
Wireless browsing in classes has mixed benefits, CU research finds (Bill Steele, Cornell Chronicle) reports on a study of wireless use at Cornell in 2000. The study isn’t conclusive, but its clear a lot of students are using wireles to chat, surf, and do other tasks. Not that we didn’t do the same, but with paper.
This link came from an article in Slate Goes to College – A week of articles about higher education. Of interest is also the article about Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs – When academics post online, do they risk their jobs? By Robert S. Boynton.
Glion Colloquium
Thanks to the Tomorrow’s Professor Listserv at Stanford I cam across the
” href=”http://www.glion.org/?a=6202&p=1512″>Glion Declaration on “The University at the Millenium”. The declaration of the identified IT and alliances as two opportunities:
Two opportunities ó new alliances and the use of information technology ó now offer the possibility of expanding the range and usefulness of scholarship and providing unprecedented benefits to society.
Online Library Budgets
The Globe and Mail today had a section on Education with an article about A new world of digital libraries by Kate L. Barrette. The story quotes Michael Ridley, Chief Information Office and Chief Librarian at the University of Guelph to the effect that now they spend 63% of their acquisitions budget on digital resources (31% for print) compared to five years ago when it was 20% digital. That is a big change in the ratio of digital to print.
Continue reading Online Library Budgets
Canadian pioneers and education
IT Business has an article by Shane Schick on Canadian computing pioneers have issues with IT education (10/19/05). The article reports on IBM’s Centers for Advanced Studies: CASCON – CASCON 2005 conference where they brought together Canadian pioneers (those who got their Ph.D. before 1973 and spent time doing computing at Canadian universities.)
A short list of the pioneers that were featured is here.
Continue reading Canadian pioneers and education
Applying to Game Companies
“a graduate program for the left and right brain”
Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center has a project based Masters of Entertainment Technology. Their program is aimed mostly at developing games, thugh they define “entertainment technology” widely to include augmented reality, telepresence, and entertainment robotics.
They have a neat page with information on how to prepare applications and demo reels for the entertainment industry, see How To Documents. This is thanks to Paola Borin.
Council of Ontario Universities: Graduate Enrollment
Face the Facts Ontario is a page in the COU site with links to PDF reports. In particular there is a good one, Advancing Ontario’s Future Through Advanced Degrees (2003) on the need to double graduate enrollments. I suspect the recommendations and data in this report influenced the Rae Report on the need for more places for graduate students.
The report has a nice short history of Ontario graduate education – the first MAs were given in 1845 by King’s College and the first PhD in 1900. There is a wealth of data and interpretation in the report.
Continue reading Council of Ontario Universities: Graduate Enrollment
Teaching Knowledge Posters
In an iMatter meeting we were talking about poster sessions both online and f2f for sharing information. The Visible Knowledge Project has a nice example of virtual posters about learning and technology. These posters were created with a snapshot tool based on the Knowledge Media Laboratory KEEP tool. (See What is KEEP? for an overview.) KEEP encourages instructors to gather snapshots of their teaching experiments so that they can be shared easily as virtual posters. The underlying idea is that we need practices that let us share scholarship of teaching quickly.
Continue reading Teaching Knowledge Posters
Total Knee Replacement Edutainment
Edheads – Virtual Knee Surgery – Total Knee Replacement is an excellent and revolting Flash multimedia work where you walk through the replacement of a knee and then get to see pictures. (I have knee trouble, which may be why I find this hard to take.) This is from an interesting multiauthor blog from MIT, Technology Review.