Perma, and Figshare

Thanks to Twitter I’ve come across a number of new online tools of use to academics:

Perma comes from Harvard Law and allows you to create a permanent archive of something you are linking to. You go to the site, enter a URL that you want archived and it gives you a new URL for the Perma version which lets you see what the page looks like now and what it looked like when archived. This allows us to quote web pages that may either disappear or be changed. Here is the link to the archived version of Theoreti.ca: http://perma.law.harvard.edu/0f8ojk5Phmc – this is a version before this blog entry.

Figshare is a cloud based archive for academic data. You upload data and then provide metadata for the dataset. People can comment on it, download the data and so on. It seems to do in a fairly clean fashion what university repositories do. I’m not sure of their business model. I uploaded Wendell Piez’s electronic edition of Frankenstein to try it out.

 

Lessons Learned from Vanderbilt’s First MOOCs

Derek Bruff of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt has posted a nice essay on the Lessons Learned from Vanderbilt’s First MOOCs. They have run three MOOCs starting with one on Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software. With this one they found only 7% were awarded some sort of statement of accomplishment (which is a measure of how many finished the course in some fashion.) They had better luck with the next two MOOCs on leadership and nutrition.

The essay then discusses a number of lessons learned (which I quote):

  • Teaching online is a team effort
  • There’s more to MOOCs than lecture videos
  • Open content is our friend
  • The cognitive diversity seen in MOOCs is far greater than in closed courses
  • MOOC students are well-motivated students
  • Cognitive Diversity + Intrinsic Motivations = Crowdsourcing Success
  • Accommodating students on different time tables can be challenging
  • Instructor presence is important

They have a MOOC coming up on Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative which I think I’m going to take. This raises the question of how many students of MOOCs are other pros wondering how MOOCs work.

Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online

The New York Times posted a story on online Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online. The story is a balanced discussion about how the Georgia Institute of Technology is going to offer a master’s in computer science through a MOOC. The story rehearses the usual opportunities and concerns. No one is really sure whether there will be significant savings for comparable quality.

I tend to think that free non-credit MOOCs are really just more content (to be compared with book or other web sites) that won’t do more than act as branding for institutions. It is the credit courses, and even more importantly credit programmes offered online or in hybrid formats that are worth watching as they could change access, costs, and the international distribution of higher education. For this reason the Georgia Institute for Technology experiment is worth watching. It is also worth remembering that there a number of online or distance graduate degrees already in place – MOOCs have drawn attention to the issue of scale and faculty attention, but distance access isn’t new.

“Online is a scale game, so the Georgia Tech thing is interesting,” said Phil Regier, executive vice provost of Arizona State University Online, which takes in $90 million annually in revenue. “What we’re seeing is different price points for different levels of faculty involvement. If you want no touch, or very little touch, they’ll deliver that for $6,000. If you want a higher-touch program, taught and graded by regular faculty, with a lot of faculty interaction, it’s going to be more expensive.”

I came to the story from Twitter post by Ian Bogost pointing to his blog entry WHAT GROWS WHEN MOOCS GROW? where he moves from commenting on the financial speculation behind MOOCs to asking what sort of growth we would see if there similar investment in other forms of growth,

The growth of private MOOC companies is driven almost entirely from financial speculation, speculation with an interest in private, short-term gain via industrialized scale. It’s worth imagining what other kinds of growth might be possible if we had the stomach for a different kind of speculation meant to benefit long-term social institutions like schools instead of just the market.

Reshaping New York

The New York Times has a fabulous new interactive visualization called Reshaping New York that shows how Bloomberg has changed the city of 12 years. It shows new buildings, the rezoning, the introduction of bike lanes, and the celebration of the waterfront. The visualization is more of a tour that combines a 3D model of the city with images of before and after Bloomberg.

Animethon 20

Yesterday I went to the Animethon. This is a convention about Japanese anime, manga, games, cosplay and related culture that takes place every year in Edmonton on the campus of Grant MacEwan City Centre Campus. The three day event attracts thousands (probably around 6000). A sgnificant portion of participants are dressed up for cosplay. You can see my photographs on Flickr in my Animethon 2013 set. The best of the cosplayers I saw was the Hello Kitty samurai knight in the photo above.

It is tempting to compare this Japanese pop culture event in Canada to ones I saw in Japan, but I haven’t seen enough on either side of the Pacific to be sure. What is clear to me is that Japanese pop culture is big here in Edmonton and not just among youth. While there were a lot of kids (some with parents), there were also older fans (like me.) I loved the inventive costumes and there seemed to be almost as many men cosplayers as women. Many took real pride in their costumes.

Some of the panels I went to included one on the Touhou Project and one on ball-jointed dolls (BJD). There was a cosplay contest with some fabulous costumes. I also spent time in the exhibit hall were I picked up a WonderSwan and some games, including a copy of Rez. Now I need a PS2 to play it on!

The ball-jointed doll session was the most interesting as it was a community I didn’t know much about. There is apparently a strong BJD club in Edmonton and they meet to trade and teach each other. Many of the participants had brought their dolls (see my photos) and they seemed to be mostly mature women, though there were some men there too with dolls. I can’t help wondering about the differences between the doll culture in Japan and here. Here it seemed to be a hobby in the tradition of collecting dolls. In Japan there seemed to be a subset of male owners for whom these dolls are more than collectibles, but that may be a projection.

Why the spammers are winning

The Guardian has a good article on spam,Why the spammers are winning that is based largely on a new book Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet by Finn Brunton. The article tells about what may be the first modern spam message which was distributed on a Sunday evening of 1864 by a telegraph company. The urgent message was from a dentists company advertising their hours.

What is interesting is that spam filtering and spam filter bypassing agents are text technologies that are getting more and more sophisticated. As filters got better spam is no longer a matter for amateurs. Spam is also changing – there are more an more inventive ways to get you to read junk ads. For that matter at the end of Guardian articles there has been a collection of links to articles in the Guardian and elsewhere that feels a lot like clickbait. The links are paid for and provided by Outbrain. They tend to be ad cloaked as stories.

Multipoint Touch Variorum

MtV on Vimeo on Vimeo

Luciano Frizzera has put the video up that he showed at Digital Humanities 2013 in our INKE panel. His video shows his multi-point touch variorum edition prototypes. He has been prototyping how we could use gestures on large screens, especially tables. He has interesting ideas about how people can discuss something on different sides of a table.

Rowling and “Galbraith”: an authorial analysis

JK Rowling has been recently uncovered at the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling which was submitted under the name Robert Galbraith. The Sunday Times revealed this after a hint on Twitter and some forensic stylometry. Patrick Juola, one of the two people to do the analysis has a guest blog where he talks about what he did at: Rowling and “Galbraith”: an authorial analysis. Great short description of an authorship attribution project.