The Distant Librarian

Educause - 7 Things You Should Know About Collaborative Editing Tools

Found via the Kept-up Academic Librarian, the latest in the Educause series of "7 Things You Should Know About": 7 Things You Should Know About Collaborative Editing Tools (2 page PDF).  Collaborative Editing Tools include things like wikis and Writely, but this factsheet doesn't mention any tools by name; it starts with a scenerio and then moves on to discuss the following topics: 1) What is it? 2) Who's doing it? 3) How does it work? 4) Why is it significant? 5) What are the downsides? 6) Where is it going? 7) What are the implications for teaching and learning?  Very nice way to get up to speed.

Incidentally, some of the other topics in the 7 Things series might be of interest to you as well: Instant Messaging, Augmented Reality, Blogs, Video Blogging, Wikis, Podcasting, Clickers, Social Bookmarking.

Handout from Internet Librarian 2005

 I'm doing some work updating files etc and ran across the handout Sherri and I made for Internet Librarian 2005.  There's nothing you haven't seen in here, but it is all in one spot and attractively presented :-).

Web Tools for 21st-Century Learners (PDF - 3 pages)

Canada's Version of the Google Book Search Fight - Michael Geist

Canadian copyright legal scholar Michael Geist writes about a mini version of the Google Book Search copyfight happening in Newfoundland.  "The President of the Writers' Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador has expressed concern that the plan will make it harder to sell books."  Sigh.  Michael points out that it's more likely people will find out about the books for the first time and then want to buy them. 

The University of Calgary also has a couple of heritage digitization projects, one called Our Future Our Past: the Alberta Heritage Digitization Project, and the other, in conjunction with the Université Laval  in Quebec (among others), called Our Roots.  I do know that copyright permission is obtained for everything that's scanned and posted on these two sites, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has raised a red flag about potential lost sales.

CIT Infobits and Distance Education

"CIT Infobits is an electronic service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Center for Instructional Technology. Each month the CIT's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators." - http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/

I've been a subscriber for a long time, and usually find at least one new thing in each issue.  The December issue is particularly interesting with two mentions of significant distance ed articles.  The first is a study from the e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology, in which 76,866! distance students were compared to the same number of traditional students to see how effective distance learning was.  The second article comes from the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, entitled "Addressing Faculty Concerns About Distance Learning".  Good stuff.

Google Video Store and Distance Education

The Google Video Store has launched with paid content. I haven't visited Google Video for some time, so a lot of this may have been in there for a while now, but I thought I'd see what was available for the search library or libraries, and got 1,171 results!  There seems to be a whole series of profiles of public libraries around the US, but there are also introductions to library skills and research for sale.  Of those 1,171 results, you can buy 17 of them.  Most of those come from the Nobel Video Library, but there are in fact three videos, Library Skills, A Kid's Guide to the Library, and A First Look at your Library Media Center, that can be purchased for between $2.49 and $4.99.  Very interesting.  I wonder if someone would buy one of my screencasts for a nickel?

There are 42 hits on a search for distance education or distance learning, all of which are available for free.  Except fully half of those are a 21-part series on Hypnotherapy Certification from The Orca Institute.  Most, but not all, of the rest seem to be promo-type spots for distance education opportunities at various institutions.

What an interesting resource for the distance student.  One of the more difficult types of resources for us to obtain for our distance students is video content, and while the pickings are currently a little slim online, they'll only improve with time, and before you know it students will be able to access high quality resources via the web.  Got a student who's looking for information about the Rainbow Warrior?  Why not include the results of a Google Video search, which include a few free pieces from Greenpeace on the 20th Anniversary bombing of the ship?

We're going to have to starting putting together new guides to evaluating online content.  I don't think I've seen any that address how to tell if a video is propaganda or authoritative!

BTW, the Google Video bookmarklet that I built one year ago(!) still works with the Google Video Store.

Technorati Tags: Google, Video, Bookmarklet, Libraries, DistanceEducation

inflite :: University of Evansville Libraries Tutorial

Michael at The Information Literacy Land of Confusion points to inflite :: University of Evansville Libraries Tutorial.  This is a tutorial that combines elements from TILT and SearchPath.  I haven't gone through it all, but it looks nice and might provide some inspiration.

How many users use RSS?

Back in August I noted a study that showed only one in 10 visitors used the RSS feed provided by blog sites.  Alex Barnett now points to another study by Yahoo (PDF) released in October 2005 that shows similar numbers.  Apparently there was some confusion about this report on Slashdot because people were picking up on one key number and not reading the whole report.  Alex takes pains to note that in this study, 4% of users knew they were using an RSS feed, while "27% of internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology."

It's still a big minority, and I continue to espouse the virtues of offering your readers an RSS-to-email option :-)

Thanks to Geoff for the pointer to the Barnett page.

Technorati Tags: RSS

Skype on a handset

As far as I know, it's not yet possible to call a Skype account from a landline phone, but Voice Over IP (VOIP) is definately a way for you to reach your distance students on the cheap.  IPEVO is now offering a handset for $30 that plugs in to your PC or Mac and allows you to use your Skype account as though you were on the phone.  This is going to be really useful when your students can pick up their phone and call your Skype account at no cost to them!  Goodbye paying for a toll-free line!

Technorati Tags: Skype

Useful Tools - blog software comparison and file sharing

Lifehacker points to these two useful posts today.  The first is a blog software comparison chart from the Online Journalism Review.  If you're thinking about starting a blog as your New Year's resolution, this chart may be helpful in deciding which software to use.  One thing it doesn't include is the cost though, so you'll have to do some additional research on that front.  I guess you won't have to do much research though, as the chart accompanies an article that does include pricing and additional useful information.

The second post looks at 50(!) free file sharing services.  Long ago I looked at YouSendIt, which can be used to send very large files (poor-man's electronic document delivery) to other people w/o breaking an email inbox.  Turns out there are at least 50 of these services, and they're all free!  This list comes from the CreativeGuy, who notes, "Today, I have a list of 50 similar services that are absolutely free and require no e-mail registration to use. Included in the list are file size limits, download limits and the amount of time the file remains on the server for download."

Excellent - definately keeping this one tucked away for future reference.

As an aside, I'm posting this using Performancing for the first time - it's pretty darn slick!  The only thing I don't see here is the ability to trackback, so I may have to enter with the native interface to plug those in...

Technorati Tags: blogsoftware, filesending