Back It Up!

You are backing up your important files, aren't you?  I was reminded just last week in a discussion with a faculty member that not everyone is, but most of us would be devastated to lose the stuff we keep on our computers.  Here's a quote from New York Times technology columnist David Pogue, whose computer's hard drive failed several years ago, leading to the loss of all of his files: "There's two kinds of people in the world: those who have good regular backup systems and those who will."  Pogue was able to recover most, but not all of his files through a data recovery company, but it cost him a lot of money. 

An external hard drive is a good place to start, but it may not be a sufficient solution alone.  The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) has a good article that details the issues, threats, and options concerning backups.  They advocate the 3-2-1 rule: three copies (primary and two backups), two types of media,  with one copy stored off site.  While professional photographers might find the expense of online backups to be prohibitive due to the size of their professional archives, scholars and students may wish to consider a service like Dropbox. See Ryan Cordell's article over at ProfHacker for more information.

ASMP reminds us that the threats to are data are numerous:

• Device failure
• Viruses
• Malicious damage
• Volume and Directory glitches
• Transfer corruption
• Lightning strike/Voltage surge
• Theft
• Fire or water damage
• Human error

There is a reason why the data recovery company with whom David Pogue worked keeps a suicide counselor on staff.  If you haven't already, find a good, automated system for backups today.  Start with these articles written by Jason B. Jones,  Merlin Mann, and John Gruber. 

Image: Eric Hart (Eqqman), Filed,  2009.  Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year

Looking for ways to incorporate more technology in the classroom?  Over at Free Technology for Teachers Richard Byrne has shared 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year.  Each of these entries is accompanied by suggestions for free resources that educators can use.

1. Build a Blog or Build a Better Blog
2. Build a Wiki With Your Students
3. Build a Website
4. Create Videos Without Purchasing any Equipment
5. Create Maps to Tell a Story
6. Try Backchanneling in Your Classroom
7. Join a Social Network for Your Professional Development
8. Use an Online Service to Save Your Bookmarks
9. Get Your Students Searching More Than Just Google.com
10. Have Your Students Create Podcasts
11. Eliminate Inbox Overload

Richard Byrne's blog is well worth following. Recent entries include Tech Tip - Easy Sharing of Long URLs; Wetoku - Conduct, Record, and Share Video Conferences; An Overview of the History of Visual Thinking; and How to Choose a Safe Password.  I have just added his blog to my RSS reader.

Via Ellyssa Kroski at iLibrarian.

Image: Vernon Fowler (vfowler), computers, 2007, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.

ARTstor Subject Guides

ARTstor now offers twenty-two subject guides on a broad range of topics.  These one-page PDF documents "highlight relevant collections, unique interdisciplinary content, search strategies, and search terms that greatly aid discoverability across disciplines in the Digital Library."

These guides illustrate that, despite the emphasis on "art" in ARTstor's name, its content is useful to scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines, especially across the humanities and social sciences.

The current subjects covered are: African and African American Studies; American Studies; Anthropology; Architecture and the Built Environment; Asian Studies; Classical Studies; Design; Decorative Arts; Fashion and Costume; History of Medicine and Natural Science; Languages and Literature; Latin American Studies; Maps and Geography; Medieval Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Music History; Native American Studies; Photography; Religious Studies; Renaissance Studies; Theater and Dance; and Women's Studies.

Visual Literacy Standards

I am back from an incredible month in Uganda (highly recommended, especially if you are not too attached to hot water showers), and waiting for me in my inbox was an announcement about a new blog on developing Visual Literacy Competency Standards from the Image Resources Interest Group (IRIG) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).  ACRL brought us the much used Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, so this is a very welcome development for educators who teach visual literacy.  As our culture and so many others have increasingly adopted images to communicate, including selling, convincing, illustrating, etc., visual literacy is really an important topic for everyone, not just those in the arts.

IRIG has posted five potential definitions of visual literacy proposed at their meeting during this year's American Library Association conference in Washington, DC.  What do you think about these definitions?  I look forward to the final product, which will be an especially helpful instruction guide for academic librarians and visual resources professionals.

Image: Trey Ratcliff (Stuck in Customs), The Sunset of Your Childhood, 2008.  Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 GenericLicense.

Oldie But Goodie Just for Fun: Creature Comforts on Art

If you have not seen this clip on art from the Creature Comforts America series, do yourself a favor right now and spend seven minutes watching it.  You won't be sorry -- it's a hoot.  It's been around for about three years now, but it's just too good to let it slip into obscurity.  The Aardman Animation folks recorded interviews with a variety of Americans about their views on art, and then used their signature stop-motion animation to accompany the best responses.  Many instructors for both studio art and art history courses have shown this clip to their students not only for an entertaining change of pace, but also as a departure point for a serious discussion about what art is and the variety of ways that people view and appreciate it.

Buy Creature Comforts America Season 1 here.

YouTube Offers Online Video Editor

It won't replace Final Cut Pro, but now you can perform simple edits on video clips in your YouTube account.  For more information see the announcement on YouTube's blog and the overview at the Getting Started: YouTube's Video Editor page.

As described by YouTube,  the Video Editor lets you:

• Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video
• Trim at the beginning and / or ending of your videos
• Add a soundtrack from our AudioSwap library
• Create new videos without worrying about file formats, and publish the new video to YouTube with one click (no new upload is required)

This is sure to be a popular tool and I am guessing that YouTube will eventually add more features to supplement this basic functionality.  If the comments on the blog posting are any indication, there is great demand for simplifying video production, editing, and delivery.

To dive right in and start playing around with the Video Editor, head directly over to the editor page. 

Distributing Teaching Presentations, from JISC

JISC provides yet another helpful advice document, this time on distributing teaching presentations.  Because of its market share dominance among presentation tools, PowerPoint is the main focus of this piece, although some options for Keynote users are mentioned.  The document includes information about SlideShare, PDFs, and screencasting.

The document closes with a noteworthy statement: "It is important to ensure that in making the presentation more widely available the user is not breaching the copyright of the material (including the text) within the presentation."  Slideshare allows you to restrict access to selected people on a contact list, such as students or colleagues.  And of course, the University of Colorado's learning management system, CULearn, provides the same functionality.  Instructors should contact Steve Bailey, our Academic Technology Coordinator extraordinaire, for more information about using CULearn.

Image: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, Portrait with PowerPoint, after Pieter Jansz van Asch, 2009, available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

COLTT Conference: Wednesday August 11th and Thursday August 12th, 2010

Yeehaw -- here comes COLTT!  Early registration rates are available through July 15th for the Colorado Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference. COLTT will be held Wednesday August 11th and Thursday August 12th, 2010 on the CU-Boulder Campus.  While this is conceived as a regional event, the quality of the programming attracts people from beyond Colorado's borders.  This year's sessions promise to continue the tradition of excellence.  The following is just a sample of the offerings we can look forward to -- see the COLTT Web site for a complete list of sessions.

• Twitter in Education: What, How, and Why
• Google Scholar: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• Web 2.0 in Practice Across Disciplines
• Teaching the forgotten aspects of media literacy
• Death to boring PowerPoints, using Web 2.0 tools
• Journey to Webinar City
• Prezi: Finding the forest AND the trees
• Facilitating Learning with Technology in Diverse Classrooms
• To Ban or Not to Ban, Digital Distractions in the Higher Education Classroom
• Digital Pedagogies and the Student 2.0
• Participatory Media and Civic Engagement
• Enhancing Class Discussions with FREE Web Tools

In addition to many other great sessions, there will be a keynote address from Adrian Sannier and a featured talk by J. John Cohen. And don't miss the Café Pédagogique, which "provides a forum for public discussion of interesting and controversial issues related to teaching and learning with technology. Several audience members speak for a few minutes on their single most provocative idea, radical move, fondest wish, or related thought-provoking topic, which invariably generates lively small-group and large-group discussions." This year's Café Pédagogique will be held at Carelli's restaurant in Boulder.

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.