DigiPlay is a UK network around technologies of leisure like computer games that has been running seminars.
CRIC has recently been awarded funding by the ESRC to organise a series of six seminars on technologies of leisure and create a virtual network of UK and international researchers in his area.
The seminar model they are using to bring people together has some interesting themes like “Leisure Constraints, Entitlement and Access to Technologies of Leisure.”
Software, Tools, Lists, Resources is a good list of resources for computational linguistics. It has a nice list of lists like stop words/function words.
I should check the functionality of these tools against TAPoR.
This came from StÈfan Sinclair.
My wife just attended a talk by Pierre Fillion where he argued that successful mid-sized cities have:
He argued that parking and malls are not helpful. A downtown should be different from surburbs or no one will bother going downtown. See Archives: Journal of the American Planning Association for his article on “The Successful Few: Healthy Downtowns of Small Metropolitan Regions”.
Continue reading Successful Mid-sized Cities
The Women in Film and Television – Toronto commissioned an interesting study from EKOS Research Associates, Frame Work: Employment in Canadian Screen-Based Media – A National Profile. The Executive Summary is available in PDF format for download.
The Executive Summary looks at the Screen based industries from Film to New Media. It pays special attendtion to diversity issues and has a nice summary of where new media jobs are expected.
As technology advances, so does the need for a skilled workforce. Today, the screen-based media industries face the critical challenge of ensuring our workforce is trained to exploit new digital technologies on the one hand, and the increased need for creative/sophisticated business and financial skills on the other. (p. 14)
The Logitech Advanced io2 Digital Writing System is a pen which stores the paths that you write and draw for downloading to the computer. It works with special paper that has a pattern of tiny dots that are tracked by a sensor under the nib. (See LogitechÆ io‚Ñ¢ Digital Writing” href=”http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm?PATH=products/features/digitalwriting&PAGE=products/features/digitalwriting&CRID=1545&REF=CRID=1545&countryid=19&languageid=1″>Logitech Products >Logitech’s Digital Writing site.
The underlying technology is called Anoto and it is also being used in products like LeapFrog’s FLY pentop computer for kids. Fly lets kids draw out a piano keyboard and then lets you play the piano by pressing the pen to the keys. A sound synthesizer plays the note.
Such pen and voice systems suggest a whole new type of interface that is not screen or touch pad based. You could have a pen shaped phone where you just write the phone number down and it calls it. The trick is the paper that lets it tack its absolute position even if you raise the pen and move it. I’m sure we are going to see innovative uses for this technology that take advantage of what you can do when you don’t need a screen.
Continue reading Digital Pens (Anoto, io2, and Fly)
Slate has a cute review on Defining Bullshit – A philosophy professor says it’s a process, not a product. By Timothy Noah (Wednesday, March 2, 2005). The review essay concludes that bullshit is a lie (or lying), but a disregard for the truth – the bullshitter doesn’t really care what is true – they just want to spout and be heard. Sounds like a lot of blogs to me.
What would a high-end computer supported visualization studio look like? The Alias Visualization Studio, from the look of the web site, is a space for smaller groups to visualize design ideas (developed with Alias software no doubt) and discuss them. Unlike caves and walls that I have seen, this seems to use mostly projectors and seems to have benefited from an architect who thought of the whole space. How could we use these in education?
Thanks to Mark Chamberlain for this.
Notes on text analysis and toys is a blog by a student here at Mac, Matt Patey, on a project for visualizing the neighborhood of a web site. He is combining text analysis techniques to build picture of how a page sits with others with a similar profile.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: An Annotated Bibliography is a useful bibliography (as of 2002) coming out a movement from the “classic” report by Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate which identifies four types of scholarship from scholarship of discovery to scholarship of teaching. The bibliography works for me because it is annotated concisely and because they haven’t tried to include everything.
What’s also interesting is how “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” seems to be the catchphrase for treating an investigative approach to teaching as research – if teaching can’t beat research it should join it. Of course, a scholarly approach to teaching doesn’t mean good teaching … though it probably makes a difference.
For many in higher education, the most salient history begins with Scholarship Reconsidered, the 1990 report by Ernest Boyer, writing as president of The Carnegie Foundation. Boyer contends we must “move beyond the tired old ‘teaching versus research’ debate and give the familiar and honorable term ‘scholarship’ a broader, more capacious meaning,” one that includes four distinct but interrelated dimensions: discovery, integration, application, and teaching. In thus staking a claim for the scholarship of teaching, Boyer seeks to bring greater recognition and reward to teaching, and is also suggesting that excellent teaching is marked by the same habits of mind that characterize other types of scholarly work (he does not sharply distinguish between excellent teaching and the scholarship of teaching). Scholarship Reconsidered has given powerful momentum to a wave of reports and recommendations from both campuses and scholarly societies that share this agenda of bringing greater attention and recognition to teaching.
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