951MB of Waste Land

A compelling example of how far eBooks have come in recent years is the new The Waste Land app for the iPad (currently $13.99), developed by Touch Press in partnership with Faber Digital.

The app celebrates T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem by juxtaposing the text with a rich array of contextual media and study tools:  manuscripts, audio recordings, video performances, digital images, text search/browse tools, and a broad selection of commentaries.  A particular strength of the UI is its touch-optimized design and how it seamlessly synchronizes the text with relevant media.

In future updates, it would be great to see some key research tools for literary scholars and students added: a space where readers can add their own study notes, advanced text searching of both the text and critical notes, a comprehensive bibliography of critical literature, morphological analysis tools, etc.

As it stands, however, The Waste Land is a remarkably well-designed eBook that appeals to a broad audience and sets a new standard for interactive digitized texts on the iPad.  Highly recommended.

Takeaways from ELI 2011 Annual Meeting

Among my major “takeaways” from this year’s Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) Annual Meeting, held in Washington, D.C from Feb. 14-16, were “next gen” mobile apps for teaching and learning and an exciting set of tools dubbed “learning analytics.”

Instructional technologists, faculty and students are quickly moving beyond the notion of simply repackaging existing academic and library content for display on mobile devices to using handhelds in the classroom for organizing group activities, impromptu assessments, creating and sharing personal research, and more.  One session, featuring faculty from the University of Maryland, that captured a number of these applications “from computer science to journalism to digital storytelling” was Mobile Learning: Faculty Stories (video not available).

The topic of learning analytics returned again and again throughout the ELI sessions. In Open Education Resources and Learning Analytics: Shaping the Future…, David Wiley argued that we can systematically improve the quality of education and identify students who need special assistance (even before problems arise) by studying the structures and patterns of their interaction with course web sites.  John Campbell deepened this theme the next day with his presentation, Opening the Door to New Possibilities Through the Use of Analytics.

Additional videos of selected sessions from the ELI 2011 Annual Meeting are now available online.

E Ink’s Pearly Whites (and Colors!)

Cambridge, MA-based E Ink Corporation, the manufacturer of e-book reader displays for the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader Digital Book, Barnes & Noble’s Nook and others, is making great strides with their next generation display technologies, E Ink Pearl and Triton. In addition to 16 levels of grayscale, Triton is capable of displaying thousands of colors. The Pearl display creates a dramatic increase in contrast, giving eReaders a contrast ratio close to that of a paperback book. E Ink has also improved the rendering performance of their displays (a common complaint of first generation Kindle owners) by 20%.  Ruggedness (see video below) and low power consumption are additional benefits of the latest E Ink displays.

All of these innovations add up to significant benefits for researchers: extra battery life for those conducting remote field research; color for teaching and learning applications that require maps, charts, images, and other graphics; ruggedness for K-12 learning activities on mobile devices; long-form reading comfort (when compared to LCD backlit displays) for scholarly books and articles, etc.

Google eBooks: Good for Scholars?

Of the many features offered by Google’s new eBooks service–access to  3 million+ titles (many in the public domain), cloud storage and synchronization, broad cross-platform and device compatibility–the one that is perhaps most significant for researchers is Google’s unique pagination scheme that preserves the original numbering of the print edition.

Unlike its competitors, whose “virtual” page numbers change every time you resize the text, Google has developed a unique solution that creates a referential continuum between the print edition and the digital version of a book. They offer readers the option of viewing the actual scanned page (in addition to the “flowing text” display) and show the book’s original page numbers, so that even if you have the text set to very small, it adjusts the range (Ex. “pages 153-156″).

This simple feature may sound insignificant, but the impact for researchers (particularly in the humanities and social sciences where historical research is critical) is enormous. Regardless of whether students are consuming content using pixels or paper, they still need to meaningfully interpret and engage with the historical discourse surrounding their particular research topic.  Page references, quotations, footnotes, works cited, annotated bibliographies–the basic ingredients that for centuries have defined how scholars communicate, demonstrate evidence, and develop argumentation–continue to be essential for today’s scholars, even as they explore new modes of inquiry that rely on “born digital” sources and online tools for experimentation and analysis.  We are still, unfortunately, not in that Tron-like age when the bibliographic universe has been seamlessly woven together with full-text links to every scholarly article, book, data set, map, dissertation, etc.  Without a doubt, good progress is being made on many fronts, but, until we get there, we need the right page numbers!

Google eBooks certainly still has a long way to go to fulfill the promise that  digitized books have for today’s scholars. Unlike the Kindle and Apple’s iBooks platforms, Google’s service currently offers no option for adding even basic notes, highlighting text, adding bookmarks or looking up word definitions. It’s probably a safe bet that these and other features of interest to teachers and students will be rolled out in future releases of the application.  In the meantime, at least “digital natives” can feel confident that their “print edition profs” will be able to locate their citations!

Calculating in the “Cloud”

One of the most amazing (and often neglected) features of modern search engines is their ability to calculate formulas, solve math problems, and covert a broad range of units, currencies, and measurements.  Here are some examples:

Here are some useful examples provided by Google:

WolframAlpha, a self-described “computational knowledge engine,” returns some truly amazing results when you enter a chemical formula (ex. “H2SO4″) , speed (ex. “45 mph”), temperature, or even musical notes (ex. “C Eb G C”).

Check it out!

Psst…Use Bing for Bronte!

Researching major literary figures using a typical search engine like Google or Yahoo has always been a challenge. Many students quickly discover that the results are invariably a jumbled mix of encyclopedia entries (often of questionable authority), author interviews, random images, book and author pages, and fan Web sites.  Unless you actively refine your search terms, the hits are rarely grouped into meaningful categories that can provide a coherent “portrait of the artist” and their works.  Suddenly, with Bing, there is a glimmer or hope!

The Bing results page groups results nicely into categories such as Images, Quotes, Books, Blog, Interviews, Videos.

You can browse the top results in any one of these categories by scrolling down the page or focus on all of the results in a specific category by simply clicking on the left hand menu.

Clearly, we are still many years away from Web search engines being able to present students with a coherent and deep set of primary and secondary materials for researching a literary figure, period or genre.  Bing is a surprisingly thoughtful step in the right direction.

ELI 2009 in Orlando

Last week, I attended the 2009 Educause Learning Initiative Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL. Some of the major themes this year included: the role of play (and gaming) in teaching an learning, social media in the classroom, instruction using tablet PCs and mobile devices, and innovative learning spaces.

Highlights included Michael Wesch discussing his classroom experiments in new media literacy, mobile learning initiatives at Smith College, Amherst College, and Cornell, and a discussion on developing “21st Century literacies” by Susan Metros, Deputy CIO and Associate Provost at USC.

Videos for the general and featured sessions are available here:
http://hosted.mediasite.com/hosted5/Catalog/pages/catalog.aspx?catalogId=116d33f7-5fd2-420a-a843-b4aadbd3cedd

Enjoy!

On Learning Assessment

Our latest Plug & Play Meeting in the Harvard College Library (yesterday) featured Cassandra Volpe Horii (Bok Center for Teaching and Learning) and Katie Vale (Academic Technology Group) discussing “Learning Assessment Tools & Techniques. ” Susan Gilroy (Lamont Library, HCL) discussed some early findings from focus groups with Harvard undergraduates as part of the Project Information Literacy study. Fantastic presentations all around!

Agenda:

Learning Assessment Tools & Techniques
“With all the buzz about (and demand for) assessment these days, it’s easy to rush headlong into data collection without first defining our purposes. To address this problem, we’ll develop a framework of inquiry as the guiding force behind intelligent assessment and use it to generate sound assessment questions. We’ll also demonstrate how to relate questions to specific and measurable learning outcomes, and give examples. Finally, we’ll discuss how to select appropriate assessment tools and techniques that are aligned with one’s questions and objectives, and showcase examples that range from low-tech and in-the-moment, to quantitative survey methods, to qualitative analysis techniques assisted by technology.”

Project Information Literacy
Project Information Literacy is a two year, multi-phase national study based at the University of Washington’s Information School. Its goal is to investigate the ways undergraduates on different college campuses conduct research for course work but also how they seek answers to the “everyday research” questions that arise in their daily lives. Harvard was selected to participate in the first phase and on October 28. Lamont Library will host two focus groups, led by PIL’s principal investigator, Dr. Alison J. Head. In this short presentation, we’ll review what the researchers asked and what the students revealed. We’ll also tell you what we learned by watching how pros get focus groups done.

About PnP
Plug and Play, hosted by the Harvard College Library, is a monthly gathering of Harvard librarians, campus technologists, faculty, students and invited guests interested in discussing current/emerging teaching, learning, and research technologies in libraries. Visit PnP online (Harvard access only): http://hcl.harvard.edu/plugplay

Open Educational Resources: WGBH Videos

Yesterday, WGBH representatives visited Harvard’s Lamont Library to present some recent video-based projects their teams are developing. The session was sponsored by the ABCD Technology in Education Working Group and focused on some of the opportunities and challenges of using video resources for teaching and learning, including search-ability, contextualization, rights clearances, and open content production. Most examples derived from their Teachers’ Domain initiative.

Featuring an online library with over 1,000 free media resources from public television programs like NOVA, Frontline, and American Experience, Teacher’s Domain offers instructors and students a superb collection of multimedia assets, Flash interactives, images, documents and lesson plans for the classroom. The three “flavors” of Teachers’ Domain are: K-12 Edition, College Edition, and VITAL on Teachers’ Domain (for New York State educators).

Teachers’ Domain allows anyone who registers with the site to “Download,” “Download and Share” or “Download, Share and Remix” the Open Educational Resources (OER) on the site. Rights restrictions determine the level of use or repurposing of the content. The “Download, Share and Remix” option is particularly exciting, allowing teachers and students to create their own educational media mash-ups. “Download and Share” enables integration of the media assets into any kind of free, education presentation. “Download” allows users to view the video clips on their own computer or handheld device.

Teachers looking to engage their “visual learners” will be delighted by this extraordinary resource!

Inventoriana: Digital Manuscripts & Beyond

An innovative, Web-based tool called Inventoriana is enabling scholars to collaborate on indexing and annotating digital library materials, such as liturgical manuscripts, with exciting results. Harvard medievalists have embraced the software, and it was recently used in a seminar on Ambrosian chant taught by Professor Tom Kelly.

Browsing a manuscript record in Inventoriana

Created by Drew Massey, a Harvard graduate student in musicology, Inventoriana allows researchers to:

• View “public” manuscripts in the Inventoriana database.
• Create private “buckets” of digitized materials for personal or group collaboration.
• Add tags to precise locations on the manuscript image.
• View a “revision history” for a particular item.
• Search and export to an Excel Spreadsheet.
• and more…

Multiple tags can be added to a manuscript image in Inventoriana

Inventoriana is a wonderful complement to the digitization initiatives currently underway in academic research libraries, museums, and archives. It adds a new dimension to online research and pedagogy by promoting transdiciplinary collaboration and transcending institutional boundaries, creating new pathways to philological and iconographical analysis and discovery. The extensibility of the software makes it appealing not only for medievalists studying manuscripts, but also art historians, cultural studies researchers, and virtually any scholar working with electronic texts and images.

Inventoriana is currently implemented in PHP, with data stored in a MySQL database. Direct specific questions about Inventoriana to Drew Massey.