Ancient History Ramblings

New Path?

There is a new photo-sharing site – Path. This site opened last Sunday and is a bit different from other, more traditional photo-sharing sites. What makes Path different is that it places limits on how many people you can share your photos with – you are limited to 50 people.

• “We chose 50 based on the research of Oxford Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who has long suggested that 150 is the maximum number of social relationships that the human brain can sustain at any given time.  Dunbar’s research also shows that personal relationships tend to expand in factors of roughly 3. So while we may have 5 people whom we consider to be our closest friends, and 20 whom we maintain regular contact with, 50 is roughly the outer boundary of our personal networks. These are the people we trust, whom we are building trust with, and whom we consider to be the most important and valued people in our lives.” (http://blog.path.com/)

The argument the company makes is that with this site you do not have to worry about who will be seeing your photos since your circle of friends is limited to 50, unlike Facebook where the average user has more than 100 friends  The site is being first launched as an app for the iPhone, but it can also be viewed through the web.

RSM

Color E Ink Readers

Color E Ink has finally arrived. Some E-readers, like the Kindle, use E ink which can be easier on the eyes since it looks like real ink and is not backlight. Hanvon, an e-reader manufacturer in China, has announced at the FPD International Trade Show.that it will be manufacturing a new e-reader with a color screen. It will be interesting to see how this affects the market since the color E ink screen is not as bright as a color LCD screen, like the iPad.

RSM

New E-reader

The e-reader wars continue to heat up. The new, lower priced Kindle has now been answered by the new Nook. Barnes & Noble now has a color Nook available. The new version has a color touch screen and Wi-Fi –(no 3G) and runs on the Android platform. For a preliminary review of it, check out CNET. As the gift-buying season approaches, it ill be interesting to see what else is unveiled.

RSM

Changes coming due to online growth?

The Chronicle has an interesting article (“Will Technology kill the Academic Calendar?”) on how online education is changing the way some programs and colleges offer classes. Since one of the benefits of online education is that it can allow students to work at times that better suit their schedules, some schools have started allowing students to enroll in a class any day they wish (open-entry courses), and then work through the class at their own pace. In fact, the Chronicle describes a student who completed a humanities course by turning in 6 writing assignments and taking 113 quizzes in a 46 hour period. Only 46 hours to complete the class. This type of open-entry course obviously eliminates any interaction between students and makes you question the amount of professor-student interaction. What are the positives to this approach? The only one that I saw in the article was that the adjunct they interviewed who was teaching these type of courses is earning $120,000 a year.

RSM

Digitizing Books

With the advent of better and faster scanners, more people are considering whether to investigate digitizing their own personal libraries. The publicity that Google has garnered for its various scanning projects has made people aware of the possibilities that now exist – there is even a site that explains how to build your own book scanner. The question that this raises is whether scanning books is legal or a copyright violation. The answer depends on who you ask – the book’s owner or the book’s publisher. While Google has had its issues and been in court a bit concerning copyright issues, the question of whether a book’s owner can own it in multiple formats is one that has not been explored yet.

One other interesting article to checkout is “5 more tech movies we’d like to see” – a fun read.

RSM

Thoughts Before Teaching Online

Bill Caraher pointed out an excellent blog to read if you are thinking about or are preparing an online course. It is part of the Teaching Thursdays blog which is a teaching Blog from the University of North Dakota Office of Instruction Development and often has very intriguing posts to read.

RSM

Internet Censorship

If you are interested in how censorship is affecting the web, you can check out a new report from Google on the subject. Google's Transparency Report lists the number of requests from a particular government about specific users, and its requests for content to be removed. The report is in an interactive format and is quite interesting to look at - with some unexpected numbers.

RSM

Course Management System Carousel at IUP

When I first started teaching at IUP, the university was using WebCT. WebCT was eventually purchased by BlackBoard and phased out - leaving IUP to go out and choose another system. After a fairly exhaustive process, IUP chose to go with Moodle. I resisted making the switch until the last moment - which was this summer. I was a bit unhappy about how much work it took to learn the system, much longer than I expected. So, I spent some time before the semester started converting my classes to Moodle and am finally set and actually feel pretty good about my abilities with Moodle (in most areas). So, it should not have surprised me to learn last week that IUP is being forced to go with the new CMS system used by the State system - D2L. Needless to say, the faculty at IUP are a bit unhappy...including myself. Should I learn this one or wait for next year's choice?

RSM

Back to School

So today was the first day for my fall semeter at IUP. As usual, it was quite chaotic. As, is usual, I often find myself on the first day of a new semester thinking back to last semester. I had several people ask me about how my Digital History class went and to be honest I wasn't really sure. I feel better today though, one of the students from the class came up to me and told me that the skills she learned in the class got her a full-time job offer at her work. So, that was a nice way to start my semester.

I am going to give Read it Later a try. I ran across this site while looking for a good calendar program. I have installed it on my computer and on my phone. The program allows you to save webpages to read later at your leisure. It will be interesting to see if this helps me, I often see things I want to read and then never go back to see them.

 

RSM

Gambling on Grades?

A new website called Ultrinsic is letting students bet on the grades they will earn in college. According to the website:

• "Ultrinsic is a web-based college platform that provides incentives to students for academic achievement. Ultrinsic exclusively dedicates itself to motivating students to improve their grades...Ultrinsic incentives are beneficial because they motivate students to succeed in school.  Notwithstanding if the student won the incentive or not, if the student tried harder and improved their academic standings even slightly, the experience was well worth it."

Hmmmm......Not sure what to think about this. I am all for motivating students, but I am not sure that this is the correct way. Right now, the site is available at 36 campuses. It will be interesting to see what happens with the site.

RSM