New Staff, New (Temporary) Location, Same Great Service!

We would also like to introduce our new members of the IC staff and welcome our GAs Aaron Zachmeier and Justin Whiting. Both are doctoral students in Instructional Systems Technology and have extensive consulting and teaching experience in the academic and corporate world. Aaron and Justin will be joining Dr. Karen Hallett-Rupp (Director), Peter van Leusen (Assistant Director), Eulho Jung (GA), and Ingu Kang (GA), who are continuing in their current positions. Please stop in and say hello.

Aaron Zachmeier

Aaron Zachmeier is a PhD student in the IST Department. His research interests include apprenticeship and job design. Aaron has a varied work history. He has taught English in Russia, written for newspapers in the Deep South, edited textbooks in Mexico, and developed training in India. He has also helped faculty integrate technology into their teaching at San Diego State University and Empire State College. He can be reached at azachmei (at) indiana.edu.

Justin Whiting

Justin Whiting is a PhD student in IST at Indiana University. His research interests focus on motivational factors of online, informal, and even extreme learning with the use of technology. He loves seeing innovative uses of technology to help people learn in new and exciting ways. Of particular interest are areas in music and the arts where technology is being used to create unique learning environments.  He also has past experience in corporate learning & training with Humana, Inc. and Qwest Communications. He can be reached at JusWhiti (at) Indiana.edu

IC Office Renovation

The Office of Instructional Consulting (IC) is undergoing renovation to include several new and exciting features available this fall. Stay tuned for more information about our grand re-opening. During the construction, IC staff and services (including b/w & color printing) are available in room 1235 on the ground floor of the School of Education. Please visit us at our temporary location or contact us at ic (at) indiana.edu.

Cloud Computing in Higher Education: Launch of IU SharePoint

IU SharePoint is a web application platform originally developed by Microsoft in 2001. During the summer of 2011, University Information Technology Services (UITS) at Indiana University integrated SharePoint into the Indiana University environment. SharePoint provides a set of key features for team collaboration and content management. IU faculty, staff and graduate students are provided with 20 GB space to store files in MySites (think about it as the current o-drive). While some features require some time to learn, many aspects that IU SharePoint offers seems to be promising. Here are the some of the main functions:

1. Collaboration and Project Management

When you are involved in a team project, you might have realized that even group e-mails are a cumbersome method of sharing information. At present, rapid advancement of information technology such as mobile devices allows for collaboration anywhere at any time. SharePoint allows users within organizations to collaborate and share work within a commonly accessed Web-site framework. Graduate student, faculty, and staff can create personal sites as private work places where a number of individuals come together to engage in a group work. Group members are not only able to share their documents and files but also have an active collaboration through group discussion forums. For example, instructors, who supervise a course with sections taught by graduate assistants, could repeatedly use the same resources stored on MySite. Therefore, archiving resources on MySite enables to save a large amount of time in communicating with graduate assistant and locating course-related files from a hard drive. In addition, built-in features such as calendar and announcement tools are also useful tools to update and remind necessary information in a timely manner. In the case of Twynham School, a comprehensive school in   England, students have developed increasing sophistication in how they interact and share information via forum collaboration. Although teachers initiate the discussions, the vast majority of discussions are taking place between students and this form of collaboration is growing through SharePoint forums. (For more information http://sharepointineducation.com/student-collaboration-in-sharepoint-forums)

2. Social Networking and Individual Space for Education

One of the biggest aspects in today’s computing environment is the influence of social networking, and its influences for educational uses. With that said, IU SharePoint is also current with the cyber social movement and networking. SharePoint MySites is quite straightforward and self-explanatory.

In Overview, a quick snapshot of one’s social contents is shown along with basic profile data, one’s picture and presence information linking back to Microsoft Lync (formerly MS Office Communicator).

• Under the Organization, a bigger organization chart is displayed with more detailed information than in the Overview. It also shows an organizational hierarchy including your peers in parallel and your superiors above you. Colleagues and tagged notes are shown in the other categories as well as a distribution lists for to which one belongs.
• Creating Blogs is also beneficial to keep others informed. SharePoint provides rich blogging functionality for both internal and external purposes. This blogging functionality provides all the features you’d expect, with blog creation and management, blog posting, support for multiple authors, and more.  Instructors could benefit from blogging activity, for example, one might create a course-specific blog and encourage students to use it for reflective journaling. By articulating students’ thoughts and opinions without strong restrictions, students could reflect on what they learned during a class activity or project which would lead to sharing ideas based on one’s own practice.
• Furthermore, SharePoint provides users traditional wikis along with wiki-specific web parts for customizing the experience. Wiki allows collaborating with a specific group of peers and, therefore, is more private than blogs.

In conclusion, SharePoint provides users with plenty of options for social networking, web-portal function as it collects information from diverse sources on a central page, and content management tool for collaboration. Even though some features might not be intuitive for those new to SharePoint, anyone who is familiar with the current services such as Oncourse (IU’s Course Management System), Facebook, or Microsoft Outlook should feel comfortable with using these tools. As we are moving towards the Cloud Computing Age, we see some great potential in SharePoint for educational use. (For more information about IU SharePoint: https://www.sharepoint.iu.edu IU authentication required)

Images are from:

• http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/5-ways-social-networking-has-improved-in-sharepoint-2010-007325.php
• http://sharepointlogics.com/2008/03/windows-sharepoint-services-overview.html

A quick overview of digital citation managers

Faculty and staff, take heart! Your bibliography-building and library-management tasks need not be a source of stress or boredom. A swell bunch of tools are at your disposal to support the technical end of academic activity.

In this post, we’ll talk briefly about three digital citation managers. You’re likely to be familiar with EndNote, but there are two others – Zotero and CiteULike – that might be new to you. The idea is to offer three points for each tool: the developer’s overview (The Pitch); the application to your own work (The Potential); and how much it will set you back (The Price). Think about each one and pick what’s best for you!

EndNote

The Pitch: This citation software has been around the longest, and therefore claims itself as the “industry standard” for digital reference management. Since the mid-90s, EndNote has helped researchers build bibliographies, search for academic resources, and compile personal research libraries online. When this tool came out, the prospect of spending bleary-eyed hours manually building and checking – and re-checking, and re-checking, and re-checking – bibliographies became distinctly less likely.

The Potential: While digital reference management might not yet be the standard, it is at least a viable alternative. If you’re a researcher yourself, you have either used or heard about EndNote, so maybe it’s a good place to introduce your students to online resource management. Bibliographic style output includes MLA, APA, Chicago, and oh yeah, roughly 2,800 others. Keep tabs on current releases and new features here: http://www.endnote.com/eninfo.asp. Learn tips and tricks for using it, including Google Scholar integration, here: http://icoblog.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/afraid-to-use-endnote-here-are-some-tricks/.

The Price: If you want to require EndNote for an assignment or a whole class, just send students to http://iuware.iu.edu to download the locally-free version or to http://www.myendnoteweb.com to use the free online version. However, note that the downloadable version is pay-to-play if you don’t have an Indiana University account. Price tends to hover around the $100 mark.

Zotero

The Pitch: The Firefox plug-in Zotero has adopted four terms to describe its functionality: collect, organize, cite, and share. What this amounts to is a process that technologically aids the basic steps of scholarly research. As you locate valuable sources, you can arrange them in an order that works for you and automatically generate bibliographical citations for them. It kind of acts like EndNote’s cousin, only it lives inside a browser.

The Potential: Zotero is generally designed for academic research, but it really shines at the beginning and end of the process. When you’re browsing for sources online, you can save them to Zotero in one click. And later, when you’re building your bibliography, you can export citations from Zotero and paste them in a word processing document in formats including APA, MLA, Chicago styles, or any number of other popular citation styles. Zotero also accepts user-submitted, custom styles. This is almost certainly going to be useful to research for established scholars and graduate students, but it could be a good starting point for undergraduates, as well.

The Price: Free. But for now, it only works with Firefox. Check it out: http://www.zotero.org/.

CiteULike

The Pitch: CiteULike is a web-based, browser-driven citation manager has a lot in common with Zotero. It draws citation info from documents that you’re browsing online, and it provides a structure to help you organize your research, among other features such as library sharing. It was developed in 2004 for academic research in science, but its functionality makes it more widely applicable.

The Potential: This product does much of what Zotero does, but in a slightly different way. You can use it at any stage of academic research, either for your students or for yourself, but expect more of a do-it-yourself aesthetic in terms of filling in the details of your individual citations, attaching copies of articles, etc. The functionality is all there, you’ll just have a larger hand in making it work. Also be aware that CiteULike does not support bibliography building internally, like EndNote and Zotero; however, it does allow for easy export of bibliographic information to such tools.

The Price: This one’s another freebie! Create your account at http://www.citeulike.org/.

This has been what you might call a breakneck introduction to digital citation managers. There are features not covered in this post for lack of space, but click on those links to learn more. Our purpose has been to quickly orient you toward a few options for this specific type of technological assistance. Hopefully it’s been helpful!

Free virtual storage to upload and share files!

Have you ever wanted to copy files from one computer to another and just realized that you forgot your USB flash drive? Well, there is nothing to worry about thanks to the dozens of websites that provide free virtual storage. You can simply upload your documents from the containing computer and download them to any other computer in the world later on.

Most of these websites provide additional free services than just virtual storage such as the ability to share files with multiple people. This is very handy if you have, for instance, a big file (like a video file) that you want to share with your students.  Sending big files as attachment is very problematic because some email systems can’t handle them; besides, some email accounts have a specific quota and start rejecting emails that are likely to exceed it.  A more appropriate way to share big files is simply uploading them to one of these websites that provide free space and just send the link to those who you want to share the files with. Some websites (like drop.net) will even tell you when a person has downloaded the file.

Synchronization is another cool feature provided for free by some of these websites. This means that your home computer and office computer will always be referencing to the same documents without having to copy files back and forth.

Here is a brief list of some of these websites. You can find a more comprehensive list here. http://alternativeto.net/desktop/dropbox

Slashtmp.iu.edu

This is a service provided to everybody associated to Indiana University. It provides up to 1GB of space.  This is the best option if you need to password protect the files that you are sharing with others. There is no need to download any software.  This is one of our quick tips with more detailed info.

SkyDrive

This service is provided by Microsoft so if you already have a Hotmail, Messenger or Xbox Live accounts then you should be able to access SkyDrive using those accounts to login. There is no need to download or install any program. Persons you are sharing files with do not need to have a SkyDrive account. It offers one of the biggest amounts of free space in the web for file storage: 25GB. The downside is that it doesn’t provide the capability to upload entire folder structures but just files.

Dropbox

The main goal of this service is to provide synchronization between 2 or more computers. For this reason, it is necessary to download and install a program that will keep your files and folder structures synchronized.  The free version provides up to 2GB of space. It provides other features such as monthly backups and ability to share folders. The downside is that when sharing a file with others, they will have to sign up for an account in order to download it.

Box

The free version of this service provides up to 1 GB of space. Individual files should not exceed 25MB. It is possible to share files without having to create new accounts to access the shared files. A neat feature is that it will tell you whenever someone has accessed the files that you have shared.

Web-based Concept Mapping Tools for Learning

Do you use concept maps to show relationships among different topics/sub concepts in your classes? Or do you draw diagrams to brainstorm or organize your thoughts?

Concept maps (similar to mind maps, topic maps, or semantic maps) are a popular education tool to represent relationships between different ideas by visually connecting links through arrows, lines, and labels. In addition to words and lines, maps can be color-coded and include images, photos, and hyperlinks to other websites to support messages. Common uses of concept maps are include outlining projects, communicating abstract topics, presenting ideas, brainstorming and organizing thoughts.

Although proprietary mapping software has been in existence for quite some time (e.g., Inspiration), several different websites now provide interactive tools and interfaces to create these maps online – often free of charge and with an option to collaborate with others over the web.

Here is a listing of a few tools including the features in the free versions (in no particular order):

Minddomo (http://www.mindomo.com/):

• Have up to 7 private maps / or unlimited public maps
• Share and collaborate on maps
• Import maps from Mindjet’s Mindmanager™ and Freemind
• Export map as TXT, RTF and PDF
• Print / Save maps as image PNG, JPG and GIF
• Publish maps in blogs and websites
• Free version includes advertisements

Gliffy  (http://www.gliffy.com/):

• Professional look
• Multiple applications (e.g., mind map, flowchart, etc.)
• Have up to 5 public maps
• Upload up to 2MB in images
• Share and collaborate on maps
• Export map as PDF
• Print / Save maps as images
• Access full shape library
• Publish maps to blogs and websites

Flowchart (http://flowchart.com/): still in beta testing

• Real-time multi-user online collaboration with chat.
• Works with popular browsers. On any Operating System.
• Multi page flowchart.
• Embed Flowchart in your website.
• Drawing Tools (Lines, Arrows, Bézier curves).
• Extensive Clipart object library or Upload your images.
• Record/Playback your Flowchart.

Bubbl.us (http://bubbl.us/):

• Email / Print mind map
• Save as an image
• Share and work with friends
• Embed your mind map in your blog or website

Mindmeister (http://www.mindmeister.com/):

• Have up to 3 mind maps
• Share and collaborate on maps
• Import maps from Freemind and MindManager™
• Print / Save maps as image / PDF / RTF
• Publish maps to blogs and websites

Freemind (http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page):

• Completely free / Open-source
• Download required
• Color-coding only (no images but icons)
• Publish maps to blogs and websites

For more mind mapping & brainstorming tools, check out Learning Tools Directory provided by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies or the Office of Instructional Consulting Delicious account.

Copyright and Fair Use Scenarios and Resources

Here in the Office of Instructional Consulting (IC), questions regarding copyright and fair use are continually posed in regard to using and repurposing digital video, images, and other online resources for educational purposes.  Although there are lots of checklists and rules available for working within the bounds of copyright and fair use, most lists are only helpful in very cut-and-dry situations and often fail to account for most common instructional scenarios that involve complicated and cloudy situational factors.  Every scenario is different and situational or contextual factors can always cloud the final recommendation.

Having dealt so often with questions of copyright and fair use, We felt it would be useful to share some of the resources that we use in our office on a regular basis to make recommendations.  One type of copyright/fair use resource we find particularly useful that goes beyond a simple fair use checklist, and provides somewhat of a problem-based approach utilizes scenarios and recommendations.  The scenario approach is becoming more popular, but we have our favorite resource, which comes for the University of Minnesota.  We are find these scenarios very helpful not only for the context, but also because most of the scenario recommendations also provide justification and links to additional resources.

Our recommendation to faculty and instructors is to have a look at the copyright scenarios, and to use those in conjunction with a good copyright checklist when conducting their own fair use analysis.  Below are a list of some of the resources we use here in the IC:

Copyright / Fair Use Scenarios:

• University of Minnesota Libraries:  http://blog.lib.umn.edu/copyinfo/scenarios/

Copyright & Fair Use Information and Resource Centers:

• Columbia University:  http://copyright.columbia.edu
• Indiana University:  http://copyright.iu.edu/resources/
• Stanford University:  http://fairuse.stanford.edu
• Center for Social Media:  http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/
• Cornell University:  http://www.copyright.cornell.edu

Also of interest and usefulness for your own work may be alternatives to copyright that are growing in popularity, such as Creative Commons.

Store and share any file with Google Docs…

Are you working on multiple computers and tired of hauling an external hard drive with all your files? Looking for a way to easily share your files with other users?

Recently, Google Docs (http://docs.google.com/) added the new feature to upload and store your files online either for your own backup or to share with other people. In addition to collaborating on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with multiple users, one can now use Google Docs as a regular file storage system similar to external hard drive or flash drive. Moreover, one can now easily share these files with other users.

One can upload any type of files (e.g., PDF, mp4, mp3, ppt) as long as a file size is less than 100MB. Overall, the free version of Google Docs limits users to a storage quota of 1 GB but additional space can be bought for $0.25/GB.

While you can simply upload and store file in Google Docs, users can also choose to convert some filetypes (e.g., word, powerpoint, excel) to Google Docs format for later online editing. For details on file formats and sizes that can be converted, click here (http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603).

To upload a file, simply click on the Upload button on the Docs list homepage (see image).

Potential Use:

This might be an alternative to Oncourse Resources to store and share files with a group of people (e.g., students).

World Digital Library – Great New Online Resource

The World Digital Library became a reality today.  This great new digital archive will be particularly useful for historians, scholars, and teachers.  Lead primarily by the Library of Congress and UNESCO, with financial support from partners such as Google, Microsoft, and the Carnegie Corporation, the World Digital Library aims to ”create an Internet-based, easily-accessible collection of the world’s cultural riches that would tell the stories and highlight the achievements of all countries and cultures, thereby promoting cross-cultural awareness and understanding”.  The collection includes manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings, and users will be able to navigate through the digital library in seven different languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian).  The collection currently contains about 1,250 artifacts, with much more to be added.

The initial collection features some very interesting and useful educational materials.  Take for example the Tale of the Genji, a Japanese text from the early 11th century that’s often considered the first great novel in world literature, or these iconic Dorothea Lange photos from The Great Depression,or these images of the great Jackie Robinson.  To learn more about this new digital archive, read this article from The Washington Post.

YouTube EDU and other good websites for finding educational videos

Using video has always been a popular instructional tool. However many find it surprisingly difficult to quickly find useful and appropriate educational video sources on the web.  

It has been an busy week for those of us interested in finding educational video content on the web.  On Tuesday, Academic Earth officially announced their launch, and Today Google announced their new service called YouTube EDU. 

The recent announcements got us talking here in the IC about the best websites for finding educational video content, beyond YouTube.  We have posted below, for you perusing pleasure, a short list of our favorite websites for finding instructionally useful video on the web.  Note that each of the websites provide different content, viewing options and formats, so if you have further questions regarding any of these resources, or want help with instructional strategies for integrating these video resources into your course please drop by the IC. 
       Specifically Educational: 

• Academic Earth-  http://academicearth.org 
• YouTube EDU-  http://www.youtube.com/edu
• TED Talks-  http://www.ted.com
• Big Think-  http://bigthink.com
• Fora.tv-  http://fora.tv
• Internet Archive-  http://www.archive.org (see moving images)
• TeacherTube-  http://www.teachertube.com
• PBS Video-  http://www.pbs.org/video
• iTunes U-  deimos3.apple.com/indigo/main/main.xml  (launches iTunes)
• Discovery Education-  http://streaming.discoveryeducation.com  (free 30-day trial)

       Other Popular Sites:

• Hulu-  http://www.hulu.com
• Joost-  http://www.joost.com
• Veoh-  http://www.veoh.com
• TV.com-  http://www.tv.com
• Google Video-  http://video.google.com
• YouTube-  http://www.youtube.com
• Crackle.com- http://www.crackle.com

Video Display Resolution Information

We located this useful information visualization to reference when thinking about video resolutions. This can be very useful when doing digital video conversion, and when deciding which video format/size to convert to. This image was initially found on Wikipedia, and we have adapted it slightly for our purposes…

Here is the original image.