TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

Google Docs has recently released two major additions that continue to make it one of the most powerful collaboration tools on the web. If you haven’t tried Google Docs yet, do yourself a favor and spend an hour exploring it. If you already use it, take a moment to check out these two new big features:

Integrated Discussion

Borrowing from the functionality of Google Wave, new Google Docs now have the option of a discussion page where authors can have an asynchronous conversation about the document they are editing. The feature effectively adds the Discussion Page feature offered by many wiki tools, which lets you separate the planning of your document from its production.

Check out this video about the new discussion feature:

Collaboration via Microsoft Office (Google Cloud Connect)

This is a big addition for those more comfortable with the look and features of the standard Microsoft Office suite. Google Cloud Connect is an add-on for Microsoft Office (Currently only available for Windows) that allows you edit GoogleDocs through the Microsoft Office interface. This effectively gives you the benefits of sharing and storing your files in the cloud, but use the tools and the interface in Microsoft Office with which you may be more comfortable.

Check out this video about Google Cloud Connect:

In his TeachOIT post “Twitter: What’s the Point?“, Tony explained a few ways Twitter has been useful to him both socially and professionally.  I’d like to add a further way that Twitter has improved my academic life.  As a graduate student, finding the motivation to do academic writing can be…elusive at times.  Many doctoral candidates find membership in academic writing groups to be one way to overcome this obstacle.  But whereas such groups sometimes can be too formal or rigidly scheduled, building an academic writing community through Twitter offers a flexible network of writing buddies.  If I make an impromptu plan to go to a local café for two hours of academic writing, I can instantly let my Twitter writing buddies know where I’ll be.  If they want to join me, they can simply show up.  If they’re otherwise occupied, they can ignore my post. 

Twitter has served me well in this capacity.  You might try it yourself or recommend it to graduate students you advise or teach.  A variation might even be fruitful for undergraduate class projects.

To see the nuts and bolts of creating a writing network, see the next page…

(more…)

During last week’s “Overview of Emerging Technology” a good portion of the audience indicated an interest in hearing about Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service that is receiving lots of press coverage. The general question people asked is “what’s the point?” I’ve been using Twitter for a little over a year so I demoed how Twitter looks and mumbled through an ad-hoc explanation of why it is useful to me. The short version of what I had to say was: “If there are no people you care about who use Twitter, chances are you won’t care about Twitter; but if there are people you care about who use Twitter, maybe you will care.” 

(more…)

In the first of our two-part series “Catching Up with Emerging Technologies” Tony and Fred discuss the social bookmarking tool Delicious. Why should you care about social bookmarking? Listen and find out!

TeachOIT Podcast #2 (10 minutes)

TeachOIT Podcast Episode 02: Delicious 

More about social bookmarking with Delicious:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English 

7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking

Podcast Opening/Closing music is “The Future Soon” by Jonathan Coulton, used under a Creative Commons license. 

In a perfect world, updates from all your favorite news websites and blogs would appear instantly in one place, ready for you to access.  You wouldn’t have to hunt.  It would be like getting your meals delivered from the best restaurants in town, everyday.

I’ve often wished for just such a service.  And then I found it…right under my nose.  It’s called an RSS reader, and you’ve probably seen everywhere the little orange squares that signal its feeds.

We’d like to take away some of the mystery from RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) and get you to try it out!  You’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Here’s a brief summary of how it works: most news sites and blogs generate constantly updated “feeds” of all their latest content.  An RSS reader tracks your favorite feeds and delivers them to you in one location.  Think of it as an email inbox filled with your very own, personalized Web content.  Just imagine… no more checking the same websites day in and day out to see if anything new has popped up.  And you’ll never miss a thing.

For example, in my RSS reader, I am tracking the New York Times‘s “Most Emailed Stories,” my best friend’s blog, the comments my students post on our course website, and (of course) the TeachOIT blog.  As soon as a student posts a comment or another story moves into the NY Times‘s most emailed list, it appears in my reader — complete with a description (and sometimes the full text), a link, and an option to share by email.

Although there are many RSS readers available, I use Google Reader because it is straightforward and requires no download.  All you need to do is create a free Google account (which also gives you access to Google’s email, photo, calendar, and other services).

Once you have set up your reader, you can start adding “subscriptions” to your favorite websites by clicking on the site’s RSS link (which usually appears like this: ) or you can add the site’s URL directly in your reader.

And don’t forget: if you have your own UMass Blog, you can create a visible link to your blog’s feed to help your students and colleagues subscribe to your posts.  Under the Design tab, click Widgets and then add Meta if you have not already.  When you visit your blog, you should now see a link for “Entries RSS” and “Comments RSS” on the side menu.  Visitors can now subscribe to your blog in the manner outlined above.

That’s it!  Turns out, RSS really is Really Simple.

“If you build it, they will come” doesn’t always work with technology, and wikis are no exception. How do you get students to go to the resources you establish as part of a class, and how do you get them to engage with the material or the tool once you’ve gotten them there? If you are setting up a wiki for your students, or just thinking about using one, consider these tips:
(more…)

Kansas State Univeristy’s Michael Wesch present a fascinating overview of some of the history, trends, and themes observed as part of his ethnography of YouTube.

At 55 minutes this is  somewhat of a commitment to watch, you might want to wet your appetite  by checking out two short videos Wesch has made with his student that received a great deal of attention last year:

A Vision of Students Today

The Machine is Us/ing Us 

Read more about their project at:
http://mediatedcultures.net/youtube.htm 

For our first Emerging Technology & Pie event of the semester Steve Fox, lecturer in the Journalism Department, joined us to  present on his use of Facebook and Twitter in undergraduate Journalism courses. We had a good number of new faces showed up, and a wide range of ages and departments were represented in the group that came to hear about Steve’s use of Facebook for instruction.

(more…)

The Amherst Wire has an article discussing the use of micro-blogging tool Twitter by UMass Journalism students to cover the presidential debate. UMass journalism professors Steve Fox, Scott Brodeur and BJ Roche asked their students to contribute to a “#umassprez2″ topic that would group all of their posts together. Posts were automatically grouped on an updating page that would continually show the live play-by-play comments from the students watching the debate. Instructors were interested to see if a tool like Twitter would cause students to transition from observer to participant.

Traffic from contributing students on #umassprez2 was so fast and furious that it got picked up as a “hot topic” on Twitter, thrusting it into the spotlight for other Twitter users to see. This in turn caught the eye of representatives of the Obama and McCain campaigns who joined in with responses, links to resources, and general spin based on the students’ comments and questions. Professor Steve Fox said, “This was an experiment in an emerging new technology and it had the hidden benefit of engaging students in the political process.”

Reade the full article at:
http://www.amherstwire.com/2008/10/08/on-debate-night-umass-classes-aflutter-over-twitter/

More on Twitter:

• Our Overview of Twitter
• “Ambient Awareness” in Social networks?

Clive Thompson has an interesting piece in the last New York Times Magazine that explores the concept of “ambient awareness” as manifested in social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. I find this concept of ambient awareness fascinating, and the article presents an interesting perspective on the potential effects, and even possible value, of using these tools.

(more…)

Virtual worlds are an emerging technology that has received a decent amount of coverage in mainstream press over the last year. Popularized by Second Life, virtual worlds are three dimensional spaces in which people can communicate, explore environments, and construct their own virtual objects and spaces. Research into the possible applications of virtual worlds frequently refers to them as MUVEs, Multi-User Virtual Environments. Second Life has popularized virtual worlds by providing free access to expansive worlds, populated with objects and environments created by the users. Though Second Life is the most well known, there are a variety of other tools for creating virtual worlds, including tools such as Active Worlds for building closed virtual spaces that only a select group of individuals would participate in.

(more…)

As we move into the last few weeks of the semester our Wednesday Web 2.0 posts will be looking at some of the more “emerging” Web 2.0 services. This means we’ll be looking as some tools that are probably not as well established as things like wikis and blogs, but you’ll get a chance to hear about some of the newer, weirder, and wackier tools out there. Some of these tools are just beginning to creep into instructional use; you may seem some of them in a classroom near you soon, others may simply be the awkward precursors to a new generation of tools that has yet to emerge.

Today’s Web 2.0 tool is Twitter, a web services that has been receiving a great deal of press coverage in the last few months.

(more…)

Wikis are an increasingly popular Web 2.0 tool being used for educational purposes, but wikis are also a tool that can be difficult to understand at first. Read on to learn more about what a wiki is, how you might use a wiki in your teaching, and where you can go to setup a wiki.

(more…)

We’ve already touched on the potentials of YouTube for locating educational materials, but a topic we have not directly addressed on this blog is the potentials of authoring your own video content, or having students author their own original video content. This week’s Web 2.0 blog post looks at incorporating video into the classroom, specifically the type of video creation referred to as “Digital Storytelling.”

(more…)

Library Guides (http://guides.library.umass.edu/) are Web sites created by Subject Specialist Librarians. These sites contain links and resources which help your students do research by highlighting books, databases and other resources that are most appropriate for the topic. Once a Library Guide has been created for your course, it is possible to “embed” a small, Flash-based version of the guide on a page in SPARK or any Web site (note, the embedding code will not work in a Blog).

(more…)