- University of Michigan Press to Go Digital
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The University of Michigan Press, a scholarly, peer-reviewed publication, announced this week that it was planning to move to digital publication. "We believe this helps the university to use leading communication technologies to greatly improve the dissemination of the U-M Press imprint and thereby cultivate discourse on the ideas inherent in scholarly works," said University of Michigan Provost Teresa Sullivan.
According to the University of Michigan Press blog, "to maintain its leadership role in scholarly publishing in the digital age, the University of Michigan will restructure its largest publishing affiliate, University of Michigan Press. With the changes, the press will shift its focus to the recruitment, production and dissemination of primarily digital monographs."
Of course, the move aslo enables University of Michigan Press to take advantage of technological advances digital media have over traditional print. From the blog: "Among the most significant changes from printing on paper to making scholarly works available in digitized formats will be an emphasis on interactive design, which will include much enhanced digital options, including hot links, graphics, 3D animation and video. 'The multimedia options for authors to communicate the subtleties of their work will be greatly enhanced,' Phil Pochoda, director of U-M Press, said. Print on demand—the ability to turn electronic works into bound volumes quickly and in small batches—will be used extensively by the revamped Press."
Another, and perhaps more significant aspect of the changes at University of Michigan Press is a realignment away from the traditional, financially self-sustaining unit. Instead, the Press will be a part of a department that reports to the dean of libraries. Several other university presses, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press and New York University Press, have similarly structured arrangements.
- Think COBOL is Rare? Try Chorti.
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UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has released the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, which is intended to raise awareness about language endangerment and the need to safeguard the world’s linguistic diversity among policy-makers, speaker communities and the general public, and to be a tool to monitor the status of endangered languages and the trends in linguistic diversity at the global level.
The latest edition of the Atlas (2009) lists about 2,500 languages (among which 230 languages have become extinct since 1950), approaching the generally-accepted estimate of some 3,000 endangered languages worldwide. For each language, the Atlas provides its name, degree of endangerment and the country or countries where it is spoken.
The online edition provides additional information on numbers of speakers, relevant policies and projects, sources, ISO codes and geographic coordinates. This free Internet-based version of the Atlas for the first time permits wide accessibility and allows for interactivity and timely updating of information, based on feedback provided by users.
If you search for languages in Honduras that have between zero and 50 speakers, you get Chorti, which Wikipedia describes as "a direct descendant of the Classic Maya language in which many of the pre-Columbian inscriptions using the Maya script were written. This Classic Maya language is also attested in a number of inscriptions made in regions whose inhabitants most likely spoke a different Mayan language variant, including the ancestor of Yukatek Maya."
Someone looking for a dissertation topic?
- Can You "Teach" Web Design?
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This is an interesting approach:
Let’s face it. Technology moves fast; academia doesn’t. So how do we teach web design and development—a subject that is constantly changing? How do we prepare our students for the real-world and for real-world expectations? And how do we, as educators, stay up-to-date about the information we are teaching?
The best way to approach this topic is to seek the expertise of leaders in the web design and development fields. As the people who will hire our students, they should have input about what type of students we are producing. With that in mind, I interviewed thirty-two leaders in the fields of web design and development, each of them is acutely aware of the importance of formally educating the next generation of web designers and developers. (my emphasis)
Rather than trying to put a curriculum together, why not just go to the folks who are practicing the art, ask them each five open-ended questions, and let them create a running text book of what is current thought in web design? Why not, indeed? While it's not quite the same approach as Wikipedia (there's no peer editing, for one), it does lend itself to a certain democracy by virtue of the over thirty respondents.
The interviews and the rest of the site are prepared by Leslie Jensen-Inman, an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who teaches a mix of art, design, business, and technology.
- MIT Releases Biz School Case Studies to the Public
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MIT pioneered the gifting of teaching resources years ago, making much of their undergraduate materials available online for the general public. More recently, MIT's Sloan School of Management has released a great deal of case study material. In effect, any entrpeneur can now partake of the learnings that these case studies offer:
MIT Sloan Teaching Innovation Resources (MSTIR) is a collection of teaching materials, including case studies, simulations, deep dives, and industry, business and country overviews that MIT Sloan provides as a free teaching resource open and available to the world.....
...The various materials posted on this site have been developed by MIT Sloan faculty and students. Although the collection covers a wide array of companies and organizations, industries, and geographies, it focuses on areas in which MIT Sloan’s innovative research and teaching are on the cutting edge and for which teaching materials are not as widely available as in more standard areas of management. These areas currently include sustainability, industry evolution, and global entrepreneurship.
I always wanted to get an MBA. This is a small substitute, but I'll take it. The paper on Sony's Battle for Video Game Supremacy seems like a good place to start.
- Video Games as Teaching Tools? Get a (Second) Life!
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I randomly came across a very good article about learning and games, "Public Pedagogy through Video Games," written by James Paul Gee and Elizabeth Hayes. In it, Gee and Hayes argue that today's large, complex, and multifaceted video games use myriad techniques of learning in order to make players into experts, as well as producers (rather than mere consumers). Witness the example of "Jade," a woman who ends up selling clothing to Teen Second Life participants:
Obviously, this girl had learned from her interactions with popular culture a theory of learning that she could articulate. Such a theory could, indeed, be the beginning of discussions with this girl about learning, school, and society that could become deeply “critical,” remembering, however, that she starts from a working class position of non-affiliation with school. The afterschool program recruited her affiliation because it deliberately avoided replicating typical school structures: she was able to pursue learning related to her own interests, not tied to a set curricula or timeline, and thus came to a new view of herself as a learner that was not shaped entirely by the measures of school. We are not claiming this girl is a “critical thinker” or not—only that she can now most surely engage in critical discussions about learning, school, and society and that she will very much have something to say. We won’t be able to impress her with our political views, we will have to argue for them with her. And we may not win.
Usually, one hears accusations that video games rot the mind, take time away from real learning, and teach repetitive behaviors rather than critical thinking. While that may be true for Space Invaders, it's hard to determine who does not partake in some sort of learning when interacting with Worlds of Warcraft, The Sims, Zoo Tycoon, and the like. This article spells that out quite neatly and nicely. The real challenge is to take the example of successful game-playing learning and transfer that into a classroom-bound technique that involves students with the same energy and enthusiasm that they use to approach a Bakugan battle.
- I'm a PC -- No, I'm a Tablet PC
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Those whacky, pen-weilding educators over at WIPTE put together a YouTube video in which they proclaim their affinity for my favorite form factor. Me?
I'm a Tablet PC and I build Windows!
Take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNe-zO-shu4
- Windows 7 Developer Blog
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Ooh, another blog! But wait, this one's different.
The Windows 7 Blog for Developers.
Sounds so, well developer-oriented. And about Windows 7. "Uh, Duh," you may very well say.
This one's got at least one member of the ISV Evangelism team in Windows participating in this one. And there may be many other writers and developers contributing to the blog (even me, too). The elusive "J"---well, for now he's elusive---is hoping to take a more developer bent than the E7 blog. So far that one's been interesting from the perspective of the dynamics and theoretical operations inside the Windows machine, er, organization. But "J" is getting into the bits. Down and dirty with the API peeps. Look for it; it should be good times. And you don't see that every day. No you don't my man; no you don 't. (episode 11)
- And The Winner Is: "Windows 7"
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Well, the name is official, and it's been announced that it will be shown at PDC and WinHEC. At least according to Mike Nash, and he should know. From Mike's PressPass page:
As corporate vice president for Windows Product Management, Mike Nash heads the team responsible for market intelligence, pricing models, competitive strategy and incorporating Live services into the Microsoft Windows operating systems.
From the Windows Vista blog:
And, as you probably know, since we began development of the next version of the Windows client operating system we have been referring to it by a codename, "Windows 7." But now is a good time to announce that we've decided to officially call the next version of Windows, "Windows 7."
"Windows 7" I like it. Clean. Simple. Effective. Now, I'd better get back to making it great....
- Anyone Going to PDC?
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With PDC just a few weeks away, I figure I would toss this out there and see if anyone responds.
I'll be at PDC the the afternoon of the 27th, and then all day on the 28th, 29th, and 30th. I'll mostly be spending time in the Windows pavillion and proctoring some hands-on labs from the Tablet and Touch team, but I am also very keen on hearing from attendees, especially about ways that we at Microsoft can improve the developer documentation and the developer content processes and properties. If you want to give feedback directly to the machine, drop me a line and we can set up a time to meet. I work on the team that writes the majority of the Win32 topics in the Windows SDK. I own the content for the Tablet and Touch technologies for both Win32 and the .NET Framework parts of the Windows SDK, all the content for the Windows Developer Center, and the Mobile PC dev center; and I help coordinate the content for the IE dev center, the Accessibility dev center, and the Windows Media dev center. I work directly with MSDN on all of these properties, so if you have feedback for MSDN, I can convey that to the right hands, too.
Heck, if you just want to grab a cup of coffee, let me know when you're available.
eliotgra@microsoft.com
- Engineering Windows 7 (E7) Blog Is Alive and Well and Living in Cyberspace
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The Engineering Windows 7 blog, or E7 for short, is hosted by the two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven, along with members of the engineering team will post, comment, and participate in this blog. So far, there have been eight posts, with titles like:
The idea is that the Windows 7 engineering team will have a central outlet for blogging to the Windows developer community. This blog will feature the men and women who have been planning, creating, refining, and promoting the next release of the Windows opperating system. And, of course, there is the opportunity for the community at large to comment about the content that gets promoted. We are such a large organization that I, too, am frankly looking forward to hearing what we have to say. Hopefully, most of the posts won't be news to me, but I am sure that there's a ton of good stuff happening in these halls that I am unaware of.
And I have to tell you, this blog is being done in earnest. To quote Steven and Jon (my emphasis):
The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. With this blog we’re opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7. Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project—picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers. As a team and as individuals on the team we continue to be humbled by this responsibility.
- Duke U Press Goes Online
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The e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection includes online access to at least 100 news scholarly books published by Duke Universty Press in the humanities and social sciences in a calendar year. With the purchase of the current year's titles in the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection, libraries will also receive access to all of the Press's backlist books now available in electronic form.
http://www.dukeupress.edu/library/edukebooks/index.html
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Duke publishes about 115 books a year in the social sciences and humanities, according to Michael McCullough, the press’s sales manager. Subscribers to e-Duke Books will have online access to all those and to all backlist titles available in electronic format — 900 and counting. Although many university presses have partnerships with ebrary, Mr. McCullough said he believed that Duke’s program is unique because it offers access to the press’s full list, not just to individual titles.
- Facebook Is Going Back to School
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This article is from PC World:
A small start-up company called Inigral is trying to bring back some student-centric functionality to Facebook with one of the first enterprise applications for the social network. The new application is called Schools and will allow students to view their courses via Facebook and communicate with classmates and friends that have opted in to the application.
Facebook users currently can track your courses and communicate with classmates and friends. In fact Inigral already has a Facebook app called Courses, which the company says is the most popular Course Management System on Facebook. Schools is different. The Facebook application is managed by the institution not the students and is plugged in to the school's database giving educational institutions more control over how and what information is shared.
Students who opt in to the application can view their entire course calendar within Facebook and if they add or drop a course at the registrar's office those changes will be immediately reflected in the Schools application. Schools is more than just course registration though, it includes functionality for student organizations such as clubs and teams, residence halls and so on. Each organization, class and friend has a wall within the app where students can interact with members of the various facets of their lives.
Schools is in private beta at Abilene Christian University in Texas at the moment, but according to TechCrunch the company hopes to go public in time for spring semester 2009. You can see an introductory video of Schools here.
- Tablet PC in K-12 Education Book Released
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The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) just released a new volume, Tablet PCs in K-12 Education. Here's the description from their site:
Despite the many advantages of computer-aided instruction, standard notebook computers are restricted by their keyboard and mouse inputs. Not so with tablet PCs. Using the tablet PC—basically a notebook computer with an interactive screen—teachers and students can write, draw, and sketch directly onto any computer document, in real time, and at a fraction of the cost of hard copy documents. Teachers can transmit lessons to student computers for their annotation. Students can respond in their own hand. A math teacher can show how a function changes over time. A Japanese language teacher can demonstrate the sequence of strokes to draw a character. Students can go home after school, go online, and review both lessons as they happened. This book is a practical guide for educators who would like to use tablet PCs to instruct, communicate, and collaborate in the classroom.
The book contains background materials about the Tablet PC form factor, methods for implementation in 1-to-1 learning, and even lesson plans! Two of my passions rolled into one source. Sweet! And it's not even my birthday.
- A $10 Computer Announced in India
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From Computerworld
"BANGALORE -- India is developing a laptop to be sold at $10 that will target higher education applications, a minister of the federal government said today in Delhi.
Research on the new low-cost laptop is being carried out at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai, said D. Purandeswari, minister of State for Higher Education, at a conference in Delhi. This measure will help raise the quality of higher education in India, she added."
The next day the Indian govern published a correction. The computer will cost $100, not $10. Still, that's pretty remarkable, especially considering the OLPC cost of close to $200. The other thing that caught my eye is that this model is for higher education rather than for lower ed. I've read glowing reports about the use of technology in early education, but those are most universal linked to great resources and immersion. I've heard of programs that have used technology intermittently and seen minimal or no results. Luckily, I've never heard of children's education being harmed by computers. This attempt to enable all higher education students access to a working computer looks good, at least on paper.
- The $100 Windows SDK Question
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I try to get your attention in devious ways. But this is worth being tricked.
The Windows SDK is looking for feedback about that gigantic product, The Windows SDK. More than feedback, they are dying to know what you'd change and what you want to see added. So, in their own words:
The Windows SDK Team is looking for customer input into what should change/improve in the Windows SDK and how it interfaces with Visual Studio. Please participate in the short surveys:
How would you spend $100 to improve Windows SDK components?
What NEW Windows SDK Features do you want?
Speak up. You want changes and they're listening!!!!!!
