CIT Blog http://cit.duke.edu/blog What's new and interesting in instructional technology Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:38:43 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en Wordle: making Tag Clouds into ‘Beautiful Word Clouds’ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/07/03/wordle-making-tag-clouds-into-beautiful-word-clouds/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/07/03/wordle-making-tag-clouds-into-beautiful-word-clouds/#comments Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:20:49 +0000 Shawn Miller http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1161 What are tag/word clouds?

Tag clouds (or ‘word clouds’) are visualizations made up of sets of words from a document, website or set of ‘tags’ (ex: bookmarks from your del.icio.us account). These word collections may use color, word size or even position to better illustrate the frequency of word use. A popular example of word clouds in action would be the recent use of word clouds to analyze presidential speeches. Here’s a screenshot of Chirag Mehta’s tool that creates a word cloud for several presidential speeches:

Bush State of the Union Word Cloud

This cloud reveals the most 50 most frequently used words in Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address. The standout terms are obvious. The thing that makes Mehta’s tool really interesting, is that he’s included a ’slider’ (look above the word cloud box) that can be moved to cycle through word clouds from other speeches from the past. Here’s one of Harry Truman’s State of the Union Address speeches:

Harry Truman State of the Union

How Can You Use or Create Tag/Word Clouds?

Several great tools for visualizing text and tags exist on the web. For analysing del.icio.us tags, extisp.icio.us or the tag tool at Hub Log work just fine. Another popular tool, Tag Crowd, takes things a step further than just sorting del.ico.us tags, and allows users to copy/paste text from documents or even analyse a webpage. Here’s the CIT Strategic Plan for 2008-2011 copy/pasted into Tag Crowd, then filtered down to the 50 most frequently used terms:

Tag Crowd CIT strategic plan

Not surprisingly, ‘teaching’, ‘technology’, and ‘faculty’ come up quite a bit. This works well enough, but what if I want to make this look, er…pretty? That’s where Wordle comes in. Here’s the same text from the Strategic Plan pushed through Wordle:

Wordle CIT strategic plan big

Now, that’s a ‘pretty’ word cloud. Wordle includes several options for enhancing the visualization: multiple font choices, color palettes, and overall layout of the text (ie: horizontal, random, vertical, etc). Wordle creations can be printed out or posted to a public gallery on the web. Here’s another version of the word cloud above, reduced to a frequency of 50 words, with a color palette applied:

CIT strat plan wordle color

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/07/03/wordle-making-tag-clouds-into-beautiful-word-clouds/feed/ Attack of the Online Photo Editors http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/25/attack-of-the-online-photo-editors/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/25/attack-of-the-online-photo-editors/#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:24:51 +0000 Shawn Miller http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1131 A recent blog post on LifeClever briefly sums up several new online photo editors. These are web-based applications that generally handle most average photo editing tasks that larger software packages like Adobe Photoshop would normally be used to do.

So just what are the advantages to using these tools? Here’s an example. To the left, I’ve included a picture I took in Princeton. This is actually a very large photo that I wanted to do a small bit of color correction to and shrink the overall size of the image down so that it wouldn’t bloat this blog post. Using the application Picnik (a free application mentioned in the LifeClever post, as well as recently integrated into Flickr), I not only managed to quickly pull the photo up from my desktop computer, but I quickly adjusted the color, tint and size of the picture, and, just for fun, added a stylish border to the whole thing. This took <5 minutes and then provided me options for saving the picture back to my computer, sending it to someone via email, or posting it to a variety of sources, such as Flickr, Picasa - even Facebook.

What’s not to love? Some of these applications are awash in advertisements and gimicky clutter for one thing. You’ll not only find standard photo editing options, but sometimes you’ll also find downright silly icons and ‘eye-candy’ that really only get in the way of the stronger features. You’ll also be hard-pressed to find any of these applications that work well with really high resolution imagery (not even the recently mentioned online version of Photoshop)…a task still really reserved for Photoshop itself.

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/25/attack-of-the-online-photo-editors/feed/ “Clicker” articles http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/25/clicker-articles/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/25/clicker-articles/#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:38:13 +0000 Hugh Crumley http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1121 “Desktop faculty development, 100 times a year.” This is the description of Tomorrow’s Professor mailing list, which posts short articles every three days or so that address concerns of future and new faculty. These postings occassionally focus on instructional technology– two recently posted articles are about the use of personal response systems (”clickers”) in university classrooms. The posts, #883 & #884 at http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/postings.php, are summaries of two very interesting articles that can be found here:

1. Teaching with Clickers
2. An Instructors Guide to the Effective Use of Personal Response Systems (Clickers) in Teaching

Recommended reading if you are interested in using (or improving your use of) clickers. For more info about clickers at Duke, see the CIT classroom tools page on the PRS.

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/25/clicker-articles/feed/ iPhone 3G - Second Gen device http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/13/iphone-3g-second-gen-device/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/13/iphone-3g-second-gen-device/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:03:58 +0000 Neal Caidin http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1111 The second generation iPhone was announced earlier this week, though it won’t be available till July 11. The main new features include 3G, GPS, and much cheaper price! The 3G provides for faster web page downloads over 3G cellular networks, as compared with the EDGE technology used by the original iPhone. Not all locations have 3G wireless but we appear to be covered pretty well in the RTP area (to see this for yourself, go to http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/ and in the Legend, click on “Show 3G coverage in select areas”). The GPS is “real” GPS, rather than just using triangulation from cell tower signals or wireless networks, which means that it is accurate. The cheaper feature is maybe the most amazing thing. The entry level iPhone second gen cost $199 for the 8 gig model, down from $399.

Apple had already opened up software development on the iPhone with the announcement of a free SDK (software development kit), which has been downloaded about 250,000 times since the announcement in March. In conjunction with this, Apple is launching an App Store for distributing 3rd party applications. The SDK has potential for the education market. Apple will have a special ad hoc distribution available so that a developer can register 100 iPhones. Steve Jobs gave an example of a professor teaching how to develop iPhone apps in class and then having the class distribute their applications over email (which they can do because their devices are registered). It also means that educational institutions potentially have a way to develop applications that meet their administrative or teaching and learning needs and distributing those applications for instructors and students to access.

There is also a potential Blackboard connection here. Blackboard has rolled out a free service called Bb Sync which provides Facebook integration as a Facebook app. The student has the option to install the application, or not, and it provides notifications of new materials posted in Blackboard course sites, and easy links to the materials, delivered straight to Facebook. In the process of creating this service, Blackboard created a central service to handle most of the actual security and functionality, with the Facebook application itself being used mostly as a means to provide the front end interface. As a result, this new infrastructure provides the potential for Blackboard to roll out services on many different devices, including the iPhone. Blackboard, Inc. mentioned the iPhone themselves in an April webinar this year. With the opening up of the iPhone SDK, Blackboard apparently has all the tools it needs to create such an application.

For more information about the new iPhone see:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/

http://gizmodo.com/5015052/iphone-3g-complete-coverage

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/13/iphone-3g-second-gen-device/feed/ Bemidji State University’s Dual-Boot Experiment http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/10/bemidji-state-universitys-dual-boot-experiment/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/10/bemidji-state-universitys-dual-boot-experiment/#comments Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:39:25 +0000 Laura Atkinson http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1101 I recently attended a conference presentation where Bemidji State discussed the results of their transition to a dual-boot campus. There are definitely pros and cons to such a move, but this is the most enthusiastic endorsement of the idea that I’ve yet seen.

Duke has one OIT-managed dual-boot lab. CIT will soon be implementing dual-boot to some extent.

The idea is hardly bleeding edge anymore, but it seems that the technology has just recently evolved to the point where implementing dual-boot is almost “easy”.

No one solution can fit in every environment, but if it’s true that total costs can actually go down with dual-boot computers, I expect to see this really start to propagate in the very near future.

Being an environmentalist, I am intrigued by the idea that dual-booting might cut down toxic electronic waste and electricity usage.

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/10/bemidji-state-universitys-dual-boot-experiment/feed/ YouTube adds annotation feature http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/05/youtube-adds-annotation-feature/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/05/youtube-adds-annotation-feature/#comments Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:14:19 +0000 Randy Riddle http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1091 YouTube, the popular and ubiquotous video sharing website, has added a new annotations feature.  After uploading a video to the site, you can now add “pop ups” with text that point to or highlight parts of the video frame to add commentary or additional information for viewers.  The annotations can be turned on or off by the viewer; the feature only works with videos at YouTube, not those embedded at external websites.

blog entry at Google Operating System

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/05/youtube-adds-annotation-feature/feed/ Are You Feeling Lucky, Edupunk? http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/03/are-you-feeling-lucky-edupunk/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/03/are-you-feeling-lucky-edupunk/#comments Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:08:11 +0000 Neal Caidin http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1081 Edupunk, a term coined by Jim Groom of University of Mary Washington, appears to be about having a do-it-yourself (DIY) attitude towards the use of technology in teaching and learning.  Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard, make creating a course web site incredibly easy, but is easy necessarily good?

Here is the short article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed

We especially invite comments from members of the Duke community.

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/03/are-you-feeling-lucky-edupunk/feed/ Technology changing the nature of historical research http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/02/technology-changing-the-nature-of-historical-research/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/02/technology-changing-the-nature-of-historical-research/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:28:46 +0000 Lynne O'Brien http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1071 The Boston Globe’s May 25, 2008 article, Everyone’s a Historian Now, describes how individuals’ contributions of photographs, descriptions and interpretations of historical events, including recent events, are changing the way historical research and writing are done. The article describes how non-historians are creating new types of digital archives - such as photographs and recollections of the September 11 attacks on New York, or Hurricane Katrina - and also adding information to established research sites such as the Library of Congress and National Archives. “By aggregating the grass-roots knowledge and recollections of hundreds, even thousands of people, ‘crowdsourcing,’ as it’s increasingly called, may transform a discipline that has long been defined and limited by the labors of a single historian toiling in the dusty archives,” says author Stephen Mihm, a history professor at the University of Georgia.

Mihm addresses the common criticisms of “amateur” contributions, stating that the vast increase in the volume of materials available and the tendency for individuals to correct the errors of others make the sites valuable. Long-standing historical research sites are legitimizing such contributions. For example, the September 11 Digital Archive, set up by history professor Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University for people to post photographs, videos, documents, e-mails, and recollections of that day, was so successful that the Library of Congress made it their first digital acquisition.

Minh concludes: “So far, only a handful of professional historians have begun to exploit crowdsourcing, which remains a relatively crude tool for gathering and organizing knowledge. But as the power of crowds meets the practice of history, these online repositories represent a remarkable change not only in how historical materials are gathered and organized, but, perhaps most important, in how deeply and broadly the past can be understood.”

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/06/02/technology-changing-the-nature-of-historical-research/feed/ The Emergence of Multi-Touch Interfaces http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/05/29/the-emergence-of-multi-touch-interfaces/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/05/29/the-emergence-of-multi-touch-interfaces/#comments Thu, 29 May 2008 12:06:15 +0000 Neal Caidin http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1061 Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch got the ball rolling, by showing the value of a multi-touch screen as a user interface. Now Microsoft is getting into the act with a new operating system, Windows 7, slated for release in 2009, that natively supports touch screens and with a new system that can turn existing hardware into a touch screen for relatively little money, a couple of hundred dollars.

What does this all mean for education? Do touch screens represent the potential for new ways to collaborate in the future, with groups huddled around a screen manipulating images, workflows, designs and ideas? Any other ideas for how multi-touch interfaces could impact teaching and learning?

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]]> http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/05/29/the-emergence-of-multi-touch-interfaces/feed/ Digital resources about the Civil Rights era http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/05/28/digital-resources-about-the-civil-rights-era/ http://cit.duke.edu/blog/2008/05/28/digital-resources-about-the-civil-rights-era/#comments Wed, 28 May 2008 13:50:33 +0000 Lynne O'Brien http://cit.duke.edu/blog/?p=1051 The University of Georgia has produced the Civil Rights Digital Library, with primary sources and educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives along with educator resources and contextual materials. CRDL is a partnership among librarians, technologists, archivists, educators, scholars, academic publishers, and public broadcasters. The initiative receives support through a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Another resources on the civil rights era is The Amistad Digital Resource Web site. Although it was developed to be a multimedia resource for secondary school teachers, the Amistad site contains primary resources, audio and video clips, maps, timelines and other materials which could be useful in any level course studying this time period. The Amistad Digital Resource Web site was developed by the Columbia Center for Digital Research and Scholarship with funding from the Ford Foundation.

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