John Steltz's Top Ten 2.0 Tools – 2010

A follow up to my last post: High school teacher John Steltz recently shared his personal list of Top Ten 2.0 Tools on his blog.  His experience and his list are informative for anyone interested in diving into social media in the classroom, whether in secondary or higher education.  His first step toward adopting these technologies was exploring the rather overwhelming site Web 2.0: Cool Tools for Schools (Steltz was overwhelmed by its comprehensive content; I was overwhelmed by its jarring color scheme, but don't let that overshadow the fact that this is a very useful site).  He then began to experiment, and has now used over 35 tools in his teaching so far.  The criteria for his top ten list were how user friendly the tool is and how well it presented itself to the class.

Perhaps most significant for academic educators is the fact that college students are coming into the classroom with these experiences from high school.  More and more they expect a dynamic and collaborative educational environment.  How might we in higher education most effectively build upon the foundations many of these students already possess when they arrive at college?

Image: nickrate, Web 2.0 Collage v2, 2010. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

Brian Croxall's Reflections on Teaching with Social Media

Blogs, wikis, Twitter, GoogleDocs, Zotero...  There are many social media tools that instructors are using these days to engage with their students and, more importantly, encourage their students to engage with the course and with each other.  We cannot ignore the Millennials' lifelong immersion in technology, and many studies have shown that this generation of college students tends to learn collaboratively.  Over at ProfHacker, Brian Croxall has posted an interesting piece reflecting on his experiences using these kinds of social technologies in his teaching.

Overall, he believes that adopting the tools is worthwhile, but he cautions instructors to be ready for technical problems from time to time and to watch for tool fatigue.  It's worth noting that, in his experience, students tend to not use these tools for coursework unless they are required.  It's a good reminder that while students these days may be plugged in, they are no more likely to voluntarily engage with these technologies for the class than they are to do their reading voluntarily.  Some will; many won't.  These are simply tools.

Brought to you by the Chronicle of Higher Education, ProfHacker is a great blog for those interested in using technology to enhance pedagogy.  It "delivers tips, tutorials, and commentary on pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education, Monday through Friday." Its content categories are editorial, profession, teaching, productivity, wellness, software, hardware, analog, and reviews.

Image: webtreats, Black Ink Grunge Stamp Texture Social Media Icons, 2009, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

accessCeramics

Looking for nice images of contemporary ceramics by recognized artists? Check out the growing collection at accessCeramics. A collaborative pilot project at Lewis & Clark College, it was created by the Visual Resources Collection of Watzek Library and the Art Department. It is "designed for use by artists, arts educators, scholars and the general public, and is intended to fill a void in contemporary ceramics digital image collections on the web." Juried submissions are available through Flickr pages and through the accessCeramics Web site, where access is enhanced by descriptive metadata which allow browsing and searching by artist, glazing/surface, material, object type, technique, and temperature. There are currently 151 artists contributing 2,464 images, numbers which will continue to grow in the coming months and years. Those of you with ties to the Department of Art and Art History at CU-Boulder may recognize the work of Tsehai Johnson and Jessica Knapp. Of course our department boasts many great ceramic talents, both current faculty and alumni, who are all encouraged to submit their work to accessCeramics. This is a fantastic example of academic innovation and collaboration, which over time will only become more useful as a research and teaching tool.

Image: Jessica Knapp, Memorial Wreath (detail), 2007. From accessCeramics, also available on Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

7 Things You Should Know About...

The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) offers an informative monthly series on emerging learning technologies and related practices called 7 Things You Should Know About... Each 2-page brief is provided as a PDF document and features a concise, jargon-free explanation of a specific technology or practice. The series is very helpful if you are interested in keeping abreast of new technologies or seeking models for quickly and clearly sharing information about these topics with students, colleagues, or administrators.

All previous briefs are available on the ELI Web site, with topics including Lecture Capture, Flip Camcorders, Second Life, Skype, RSS feeds, Twitter, Data Visualization, Creative Commons, Google Earth, Mapping Mashups, Virtual Meetings, Blogs, Clickers, Wikis, Collaborative Editing, Social Bookmarking, and much more. Accompanied by an introductory scenario to illustrate an educational application, each brief is presented with the following sections:

1) What is it?
2) Who's doing it?
3) How does it work?
4) Why is it significant?
5) What are the downsides?
6) Where is it going?
7) What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Other resources on teaching, learning, and technology issues are available at the main ELI Resources page.

Intro to Second Life and Art Education

You have probably heard of Second Life, but you may be surprised to learn about the magnitude and scope of  this rapidly growing 3-D virtual world. The 2 million residents of Second Life (SL), represented "in-world" by customizable avatars, can buy land, construct buildings, run businesses, and communicate using text or voice. Created in 2003, this multi-user virtual environment (MUVE)  offers just about any activity or service that you can imagine in our "real world." There are daily live concerts and performances, shopping malls, role playing sites, international embassies, dance clubs, art galleries, and sex shops. Among the more intriguing developments for teaching and learning in the arts is the rapid growth of sites within SL devoted to education, art, and librarianship. Many universities are purchasing SL properties and offering courses and other resources to their students and the public. An example is Vassar College's virtual recreation of the Sistine Chapel, which allows the viewer to experience the interior of the chapel in the context of space. To visit, one is first prompted to create a free (basic) SL account, then link to the "sURL" that transports users to the site. A growing number of museums have also created an SL presence, such as the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden's Old Masters Picture Gallery of the Dresden State Art Collections.  Visitors who are unable to travel to Dresden can view the 750 permanent pieces of the collection in a true-to-scale clone of the museum.  But Second Life does not lack controversy and criticism.  Educational administrators are expressing growing concerns about ethics and legal liabilities.  Others long for more innovative and revolutionary ways to articulate space and display visual works, which would not be bound by the limitations of real life physics and practices, nor simply replicate real world places.  The tools are in their infancy - much like film mimicked theater in its early days, these virtual worlds are largely expressed with real-world conventions.  It will be fascinating to see how they develop in the coming years.

Online Image Sources

Mining the Internet for images to use in teaching and learning can be daunting and frustrating.  One of many efforts to streamline this process is a wiki created by  Hollin Elizabeth Pagos for the Visual Resources department of Wellesley College.  The Digital Images Collections Wiki is a "resource of Free- and Fair-Use digital image collections that are available for anyone to use for personal or educational purposes."  It consists of a directory of links to web sites containing images, organized primarily by period and geographic region.  The image quality and size vary by source.  Projects such as this are increasingly common, and search results will improve over time as technology provides new tools.  Professional organizations, such as the Visual Resources Association and the Society of Architectural Historians, are working toward shared image resources for academic use.  The VRC maintains a page of image resources for teaching and research, with links to directories, guides, search engines, selected digital image collections.  Suggestions for links are welcome!

Image: Pellegrino di Mariano Rossini, Death of the Pharaoh, ca. 1450, © Kathleen Cohen, worldart.sjsu.edu.

Steve Bailey's Online Tutorials for CU-Boulder Faculty

CU-Boulder faculty members who are not already aware of the great resources available to them on Steve Bailey's web site should take a moment to have a look.  Steve, the Distributed Academic Technology Coordinator for Arts and Humanities at CU, has posted some very helpful tutorials he created, as well as some useful links on his 'references' tab.  The tutorials currently cover topics related to CULearn, CUConnect, CULink, Web Design, and more.  Steve is an excellent source of information for the enterprise software systems at CU, as well as all kinds of academic technologies.

ARTstor Image Downloads

Exciting news from ARTstor: more than 95% of ARTstor's images are now available at a download size of 1024 pixels on the long side.  Additionally, users may zoom and pan to create details of ARTstor images that may also be downloaded at this size.  These screen-sized images may then be used in the presentation software of your choice, such as Keynote or PowerPoint.  Of course, ARTstor's easy-to-use Offline Image Viewer (OIV) software still provides streamlined image presentation tools, with the ability to pan and zoom on the fly during presentations.