 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
Wired Campus e-newsletter | RSS
| Atom
Contact us with feedback, story ideas and tips.
Recent Posts
Turn Your Laptop Into an Earthquake Sensor | Comment
Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online | Comment [4]
Educause Issues Statement on RIAA's Methods of Catching Music Pirates | Comment
ABC News to Open 5 University News Bureaus | Comment [10]
How a Lawsuit Over Electronic Reserves Could Affect Colleges | Comment [5]
Categories
American Library Association, Phildelphia, 2008
Business
Campus Innovations
Distance Education
Educause 2007
Law
Libraries
Most Discussed
Peer-to-Peer
Research
Search Engines
Second Life
Security
Social Networking
Student Life
Teaching
TechForum2008
Video
Blogroll
May 7, 2008
UC-Berkeley Marching Band Does Nintendo-Themed Show
This is a few months old, but it’s still pretty cool. Back in November the University of California at Berkeley’s marching band did a Nintendo-inspired half-time show. Check it out:
There’s also, of course, a similar classic from Gordon College, where students performed a live-action version of Super Mario Brothers for a talent show.—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | CommentMay 5, 2008
Techie Video Contests
Creative types interested in digital culture may want to enter a couple tech-related video contests.
In one, Total Recut has solicited video entries that answer the question “What Is Remix Culture?” Participants should submit videos that remix previously published video footage. The contest is intended to “promote awareness of remix culture in an educational capacity and to encourage the fair use of a wide variety of content.” It is being judged by a number of well-known scholars and artists, including Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology comparative media studies program Henry Jenkins. (Find some examples of video remixes here.)
In another opportunity, college students are asked to submit computer security awareness posters and videos for a contest sponsored by the Educause/Internet2 Computer and Network Security Task Force in cooperation with the ResearchChannel and CyberWatch. Entries should “explain computer security problems and specific actions college and university students can take to safeguard their computers or personal information.”—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Monday May 5, 2008 | Permalink | CommentMay 1, 2008
Purdue U. Installs New Supercomputer -- in One Day
In a feat of electronic “barn-raising,” 200 people will install a new supercomputer at Purdue University in a single day.
The machine will be the size of a semi trailer when it is installed, on May 5, and it will be able to perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second. It would rank in the top 40 of the current Top 500 list of most powerful supercomputers in the world.
To stoke campus involvement in the installation of the new machine (named “Steele” after a former faculty member), organizers created a movie trailer called “Installation Day,” a parody of “Independence Day.” Here it is:
—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Thursday May 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]February 13, 2008
More Colleges Show Interest in Hooking Up With YouTube
Today Research Channel, a nonprofit consortium of colleges and universities that runs a TV channel featuring videos of campus events and lectures, started a page on YouTube, joining a growing number of colleges and educational organizations using the popular video-sharing site.
Since we wrote about professors on YouTube, officials from three different colleges have asked us, via e-mail, who to call at YouTube to find out more about setting up a YouTube channel. “I am having trouble contacting YouTube about signing up,” said one. Indeed, the site seems to offer no information about how to become an academic partner, and so far officials from the company have not answered follow-up questions from The Chronicle about the project.
It is not even clear how many colleges have set up channels. It turns out that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has one, though the company did not mention it when supplying a list of college YouTube channels to The Chronicle last month.
Meanwhile, several academics gathered the other day at the DIY Video Summit to discuss the social impact of Internet video, especially the kind of homemade creations made by Internet users around the world (some of them professors). Naturally, some video from the event is available online. —Jeffrey R. Young
Update: Just got an e-mail message from a YouTube spokeswoman with a list of additional colleges that have set up channels on the site: Auburn University, Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, and Texas Tech University.
Posted on Wednesday February 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [15]February 8, 2008
'Big Think' Video Site Not Attracting Much Feedback?
Big Think made a splash when it hit the Web last month. After all, the site boasts hundreds of video clips of intellectual celebrities talking about pressing issues, has the former president of Harvard as one of its investors, and got plenty of glowing press coverage (including a mention in The Chronicle, of course).
But when T. Mills Kelly, an associate professor of history and art history at George Mason University, took a close look at the site, he says he felt like he was visiting a ghost town. “There’s virtually no discussion going on — hardly anybody has participated in ways that were anticipated,” he says in the latest issue of the Digital Campus podcast, where he is a host, along with two colleagues.
He and his co-hosts noted that Big Think, which features three-to-ten-minute clips of talking heads, does not seem to be getting the kind of response that the University of California at Berkeley’s YouTube page has. Berkeley’s page offers entire lectures from the university’s professors.
Indeed, of the 10 questions featured on the front page of Big Think as of Thursday afternoon, none of them had comments from readers. A few other videos had drawn some feedback, with the most being for a clip about “What is happiness” by Dan Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. That had 26 comments.
Victoria R.M. Brown, a founder of Big Think, says the site is sparking far more discussion than the front page suggests.
“Content is certainly getting buried at the moment and we’re trying to address it — in part that’s why some of it is not being commented upon,” she said in an e-mail interview.
“We are addressing it in several ways: We are adding the ability for users to track their conversations and have implemented alerts so that users know when their comments have been commented upon. We are adding tickers to the home page to more clearly surface new activity. We are changing the algorithms so that most popular content surfaces more accurately. Also, we’re adding the ability of users to identify like-minded thinkers.”
What’s being discussed? She points to a clip on atheism, which has drawn more than 110 comments; one on favorite quotations, with 72 comments; and one on Marijuana legalization, with 40 comments.
Perhaps it’s too soon to judge, but just browsing the site, it is hard to find clips that are attracting a buzz.
But Ms. Brown said the number of comments is the wrong measure of the site’s popularity.
“We have had millions of video views and know that Big Think is not only about commenting,” she said. “Many people are using the site as an educational and informative tool.” —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Friday February 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]February 7, 2008
Video Report: Students Use Dancing Robots to Show Lighter Side of Computer Science
A robotics team at Spelman College, called the Spelbots, has programmed robot dogs to dance, in hopes of attracting new students to study computer science. The students on the team are clearly enjoying their technology education, as evidenced in our video report about the team.
The team’s coach, Andrew B. Williams, an associate professor of computer science at Spelman College, talked about the importance of attracting more women and minority students to computer science in an interview in this week’s Chronicle. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Thursday February 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]January 30, 2008
Dueling Videos: Scholar Creates Remix of Another Academic's YouTube Hit
Mark C. Marino wanted to respond to a scholar’s video that was causing a buzz on YouTube. So he made a video of his own, remixing the original as a critique. The dueling videos might point to a future in which scholarly arguments take place in visual rather than written form.
The four-and-a-half-minute video that sparked the discussion was produced by Michael L. Wesch and the 200 students in his cultural-anthropology class at Kansas State University (which we wrote about back in October). The work presents startling statistics about college life; students hold up signs that read, “I bring my laptop to class, but I’m not working on class stuff,” “I spend 2 hours on my cellphone” per day, and “I will be $20,000 in debt after graduation.” The statistics were drawn from a survey of the 200 class members—a small sample for a video titled “A Vision of Students Today.”
The video was a mega-hit on YouTube, with more than 1.4 million views and more than 6,000 comments. That’s a lot, even by the chatty standards of YouTube. In fact, the video was the most-discussed on the entire site in October, when it was posted.
When Mr. Marino saw it, though, he was struck by the fact that the 200 students shown are surprisingly lacking in racial diversity—most are white—and he felt that the statistics might not be true for students beyond that one Kansas classroom. In his remix, he replaces several of the statistics from the original video with some of his own, including “I am on the winning side of the digital divide” and “I will meet eight people of color this year.” His version, called “(Re)Visions of Students Today,” was posted on Martin Luther King Day.
Mr. Marino, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Southern California, said in an interview on Tuesday that the video took him a couple of days to make. He decided to do that rather than just post a comment, so that his viewpoint wouldn’t get lost in the thousands of other responses. He even noticed that someone had already expressed a similar reaction to Mr. Wesch’s video, but that the comment had been largely ignored.
“My little video certainly hasn’t caused a tidal wave, but it has caused conversations on various blogs and message boards,” Mr. Marino said. Besides, he added, “it would be harder for me to show people what I saw in Wesch’s video just by writing it out.”
Mr. Wesch said in an interview that he was excited when he saw Mr. Marino’s video. “I didn’t read it as a critique, but I saw it as adding to the discussion we wanted to spark about the state of education,” he said.
Mr. Wesch wrote a reaction to the remixed video in his blog, in which he says that at one point in planning the original video, students had discussed mentioning race. “We felt like in some ways the race issue is such a hot issue that it might draw attention away from some of the other points we were trying to make,” he said. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday January 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [12]January 29, 2008
Professors on YouTube, Take 2
Since writing about how professors are finding celebrity on YouTube, several people wrote in to point us to other efforts to offer lecture videos online. So here are a couple of more, with some updates on what they are up to:
* Research Channel: This non-profit consortium of colleges and universities broadcasts video of campus lectures and presentations in a variety of formats. Its largest reach comes from its satellite and cable-TV channel, which reaches more than 30-million homes in the U.S. But the group has long had a Web presence as well, and its leaders say the online audience is growing rapidly. Amy Philipson, executive director of Research Channel, says to look for the channel to offer its videos on YouTube soon. And she says they’ve recently set up a page on iTunesU, the educational section of Apple’s iTunes Store.
* UChannel: Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs runs this Web-video network that pulls together audio and video recordings of campus talks. The effort started back in 2005. Donna M. Liu, director for strategic initiatives for Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, says that UChannel was on YouTube long before the University of California at Berkeley set up its channel there. And the group even offers a Facebook application that pops lecture videos into your online social profile.
* DoFlick: On a much, much smaller scale, recent graduates of the University of Maryland at College Park set up this site featuring instructional videos about science and engineering. One of the founders, Luis Corzo, says the site is getting about 5,000 to 10,000 visits per month. One of the stars of the site so far is Richard E. Berg, a professor of practice at College Park who produces videos of physics demonstrations.
Finally, I produced a short video report with footage from some of lectures featured in my previous article.
What’s your favorite lecture video online? —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Tuesday January 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]January 24, 2008
Information Officer Sees Virtues of Learning in Virtual Worlds
What’s the value of virtual worlds in education? Alfred H. Essa, deputy chief information officer of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, writes in his blog that one answer can be found in a YouTube video.
In it, an unnamed MIT researcher demonstrates the Assist program, which allows users to design moving, mechanical systems by simply drawing on a screen.
Mr. Essa writes:
“All human creativity, including science, art, and literature, are imaginative activities. The ability to imagine different possibilities and interact with them is one of the virtues of virtual worlds.”
He seems to imply that virtual worlds with known object-creation systems such as Second Life and Dryad are particularly useful in education because they allow a user to explore physical concepts in a virtual space.—Hurley Goodall
Posted on Thursday January 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]January 18, 2008
Air-Cannon Technology Gets College Sports Fans on Their Feet
The craze among college teams’ fans for air cannons that shoot T-shirts has one company going great guns. Jake Wilson (above) always has something cool to say at parties: “‘I build air cannons for a living.’” Read an article in this week’s Chronicle about t-shirt guns, or check out our video report.