Archives: September 2003
Tue Sep 30, 2003
MIT Open Courseware Reaches 500 free course offerings
The MIT Open Courseware Project has reached their initial target of 500 courses posted to the web. Some of the courses that caught my attention included the following:
Law and Society Spring 2003
Causes and Prevention of War Spring 2001
Competitive Decision-Making and Negotiation Spring 2003
Communication Skills for Academics Spring 2002
Argumentation and Communication Fall 2002
Wed Sep 24, 2003
Open Source online Learning Objects Development Toolset (Pachyderm) receives big funding boost
The Pachyderm 2.0 Project is a partnership led by the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ( SFMOMA ), in which software development teams and digital library experts from five NMC universities are working with five major museums to create a new, open source authoring environment for creators of learning objects. The new tool will be based on Pachyderm, the multimedia online authoring and publishing tool developed by SFMOMA to author its successful series, Making Sense of Modern Art.
The NMC just received notice that they were awarded a hoped-for grant of $499,500 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grants program to support their work.
Developed by SFMOMA with IMLS support a number of years ago, Pachyderm has allowed non-programmers to easily publish modular and updateable rich media, drawing on the digital collections of SFMOMA. The result has been detailed interactive learning programs such as Ansel Adams at 100.
Mon Sep 22, 2003
Peace Process 2001 - a ThinkQuest web project
This collaboratively developed website was developed by students and staff at a Eugene Oregon High School and entered in the 1997 ThinkQuest competition. It was designed to introduce students to some of the history of peacemaking. It includes brief biographies of peacemakers and a fun "evolution of technology" spiral. The site is described by its creators in this way: "Peace Process 2001 is a collection of peace studies created to be an evolving library using the theme of past, present and future. Contributors of all ages are invited to enjoy original essays and artwork, as well as adding their own thoughts and ideas to the site. "
Sun Sep 21, 2003
MyCampus-adr Flash Site in Beta Testing
This weekend I'm putting the finishing touches on a new Flash-based interface for the Campus Conflict Resolution Resources website. Stay tuned!
Tue Sep 16, 2003
Free to Access and Use: A New Repository of Legal Scholarship Goes Live
The just launched NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository comes from New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO) and The Berkeley Electronic Press. According to an announcement the resource, "provides a free and persistent point of access for working papers, reports, lecture series, workshop presentations, and other scholarship created by faculty at NELLCO member institutions. Five NELLCO members - Yale, Cornell, University of Connecticut, Suffolk, and Fordham - have created publication series within the repository for launch. Over 75 publications have been posted to date (all freely available) , in series such as Yale's Occasional Papers and Cornell's International Speaker Series. Based on the results of early adopters, the NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository may expand to include other participants from NELLCO's membership roster of sixty-five law libraries. Every publication series within the NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository has its own unique identity, including a description of the sponsoring research unit, logos, and links back to relevant faculty pages. These series feed into a single, searchable collection. Visitors to the site can easily browse papers by subject, author, and so forth. Because of Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliance, content is discoverable from a variety of locations and methods, including web search engines. Readers can also sign up to receive custom email notifications of newly posted papers. Citations are delivered directly to their desktop, with links to full text."
Sun Sep 14, 2003
Education and Medical Tech News Feed Aggregator
A searchable RSS News Aggregator is now available at David Davies MedWeb Scripting and XML Demonstrator site. Now you can search RSS news feeds from the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN), National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH) and other medicine and education information providers at this experimental site. This site has a UK focus...
The linked page also permits you to browse the top 5 newest feeds from this ed tech aggregation if you're just in the mood to she what the collective web mind is thinking lately.
Thu Sep 11, 2003
Webquest - Perspectives on the U.S./Iraq Conflict
The Perspectives on the US/Iraq Conflict WebQuest was developed in 2003 by teacher/educator Carolyn O Burleson. Students (grades 9-12) are called upon to employ analytical and evaluativeÜthinking to analyze reports of the war and its aftermath from various news media in various countries and gain an understanding of the messages of propaganda.
Webquest - Quest for Peace in the Middle East
Quest for Peace in the Middle East. This recently updated webquest (written at the highschool level, but could work with college students as well) takes students through a process of exploring options for middle east peace. Students analyze both sides of the conflict and prepare a persuasive speech to convince Arabs and Israelis to accept a permanent peace settlement.
Wed Sep 10, 2003
Chronicle of Higher Ed Jobs Page adds email alerts and RSS feeds
The Chronicle of Higher Education, the "paper of record" for colleges and universities, has added a new email notification and RSS news feed to it's jobs listing service. You go the the jobs page, and then browse by job category until you reach a category that might work for you, say student affairs/residence life. On that page you'll see a new orange xml tag to be used to subscribe the to newsfeed in an RSS reader, or you can sign up for email alerts. Too bad it doesn't let you add a keyword or two (like conflict studies or mediation) to the alert to filter it further as well...
Open Access Initiative Search Engine adds RSS feeds
Those of you who are are watching the growth of free, open-access databases of information (such as our own field's wonderful CRInfo initiative) may be happy to know that the already full-featured "MY OAI" metasearch engine now permits you to save searches to their growing collection of open access databases, saving the searches in the form of an RSS newsfeed that gets refreshed weekly, displaying the current results of your search in your RSS news reader for browsing whenever you wish. The developer of this tool, Francois Schiettecatte, has also created Feedster, a search tool that harvests the info found in the wide world of weblogs.
More info on the my.oai search tool is provided below. It can be accessed at http://www.myoai.com/
Details about the my.OAI Search Engine:
my.OAI is a full-featured search engine to a selected list of metadata databases from the Open Archives Initiative project. The current list of databases included are:
arXiv
BioMed Central
Chemistry Preprint Server
Cite-Base services
Hong Kong University Theses Online
Humboldt University of Berlin
Langley Technical Report Server
Library of Congress OAI Repository 1
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
NCSTRL Historical Collection
OCLC Theses and Dissertations
Open Video Project
PhysNet, Oldenburg, Germany
State and University Library Bremen
my.OAI can be tailored by the user to suit individual interests and provides the following features:
Forms based query formulation.
Viewing search results either merged together, or as meta-results, or separated by database.
Automatic display of summaries when viewing search results.
Display of similar documents when viewing documents.
Display of recommended documents when viewing documents.
Automatic mark-up of retrieved documents with search links.
Search history listing searches made and documents retrieved.
Saving searches for later re-use (with an SDI option).
Saving documents in folders.
Emailing documents to others.
my.OAI Account Information: my.OAI can be accessed either as a guest user or by creating an account.
Creating an account will allow you to access a number of features which are not available to guest users, namely:
The ability to set preferences.
The ability to save searches with the possibility of running them on a regular basis.
The ability to save documents folders for later use.
The ability to maintain search history.
The ability to create annotations on documents.
You will need a user name and password to create an account and you will need to login every time you want to use the search interface.
The authentication mechanism is cookie based, so your browser will need to access cookies for you to be able to use the interface.
Tue Sep 09, 2003
Facilitating Difficult Discussions: Processing the September 11 Attacks in Undergraduate Classrooms
This article by Jennifer Taylor of Humbolt State University, available as a downloadable pdf, may be of great interest to faculty preparing to revisit the Sept. 11 attacks on it's second anniversity. The article appears in a special issue on Terrorism and Its Consquences published in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (ASAP), an electronic journal sponsored by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). The journal is designed as an outlet for timely and innovative psychological and related social science scholarship with implications for social action and policy. The article abstract is provided below.
ABSTRACT
College and university educators have a unique and appropriate forum in which to address social issues, the classroom environment. On September 11, 2001, this opportunity became very real. With it came the challenge of facilitating classroom discussions that include myriad views and feelings. Instruction on conducting difficult discussions in a productive, versus destructive, manner is not commonly included in graduate training, leaving many educators without the tools of effective facilitation. An overview of some of the literature on conducting difficult discussions is presented and applied to classroom discussions of the September 11 events. Recommendations on the process component of facilitating are provided, as well as a rationale for why faculty may want to accept this educational challenge.
Online Conflict Studies Syllabus Collection
The campus-adr.org website features a searchable collection of sample syllabi from a broad range of conflict resolution-related courses. The bulk of the collection is available as pdf files, with some of the newer additions providing links to an online copy of the syllabus. Please note that access to the collection is limited to folks who register at the campus-adr.org site, but this process is brief and opens access to a number of different databases offered by the project.
Fri Sep 05, 2003
Article on Developing Educational Simulations
Simulations and the Learning Revolution: An Interview with Clark Aldrich
People interested in developing educational simulations may find this interview useful. Clark Aldrich, the featured author, spent 2 years leading an international team that built an example of simulation learning software; the software has the look and feel of a modern computer game, but with a central emphasis on leadership content. He is the author of Simulations and the Future of Learning , a new book that helps educators understand, design, construct, and use computer simulations for an upcoming generation of students. The interview appears in the September/October issue of the Technology Source.
Thu Sep 04, 2003
The EduResources Portal — a Gateway to Higher Education Instructional Resources
Dr. Joseph Hart, Director of Distance Education at Eastern Oregon University has created an online portal to materials supporting teaching and learning . The collection is searchable, and divided into the following classifications for browsing purposes.
General Multi-Discipline HE Repositories
Guideline Referatory Sites for HE Faculty
Search Tools for Academic Resources
Discipline-Specific Selected HE Repositories
Experimental/Developmental Resources
K-12 Selected Repositories/Referatories
Sample Certificate/Vocational Prog. Collections
Sample Commercial (Fee-Based) Collections
Sample Learning Objects Information
Sample Metadata Information/Organizations
Sample Open Source Information
Sample Student Learning Resources
Selected Associations/Organizations
Selected Digital Libraries
Selected Scholarly Resource Sites
Today's "Joy of Tech" Cartoon
Here's a thumbnail of the current days Joy of Tech cartoon. The image should refresh with a new cartoon each day if my code works right. Click on thumbnail to see full cartoon...
Wed Sep 03, 2003
Campus-adr Game Room Provides Fun Distractions
Our parent site, Campus Conflict Resolution Resources, has a growing collection of games and distractions available for folks needing a break. Check it out sometime at http://www.campus-adr.org/Fun/funcenter.html
Video of Carrie Menkel-Meadow Lecture on Race, Gender and Culture in ADR
Back in February of 2001 Conflict Resolution scholar and legal theorist Carrie Menkel-Meadow presented a lecture on "Race, Gender & Cultural Issues in ADR" to a Law class at Washington University. A Real Video stream of the lecture is available for viewing online. It provides an example of one way to start a discussion with students about race, class and gender issues. Menkel-Meadow is a Professor of Law at Georgetown University, and Chair of the Georgetown-CPR Commission on Ethics and Standards in Alternative Dispute Resolution, and formerly was Director of the Center for the Study of Women, at UCLA. She is the author of the book Mediation: Theory, Practice and Policy. Her presentation was part of a series of lectures at Washington University on the theme Access to Justice: The Social Responsibility of Lawyers.
Mon Sep 01, 2003
Collaborative Learning Environments Online Sourcebook
This is an online?sourcebook for?academics and students?who want to develop collaborative learning environments?(or communities of practice) in which lecturers, students and others can work together to create new knowledge while learning new skills.
View it at this location
The?collaborative learning environments project was started in late 2002 by lecturers in the psychology department at the University of South Africa.