Celestia

An update to the World Wind post on Boing Boing, reveals another cool app: Celestia

"The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X."

NASA World Wind

Saw this on Boing Boing:

"World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there."

Their newest version also includes the moon. A lot like GoogleEarth.

Google's new service

Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing reports: "Word is ripping around the web that Google is testing a new subdomain called base.google.com. A screen shot - the site has been up and down - shows a Google database of sorts where you can 'Post your items on Google.'"

Writely, the Web Word Processor

Came across Writely while roaming around the web tonight and thought I would share it here:

"Writely is a web word processor that provides simple and secure document collaboration and publishing on the web using only the browser."

Doesn't work with Safari, so Mac users will need to use Firefox... but you should be anyway ;-)

Macworld: Feature: The power user's guide to Firefox, Page 1

via Educational Weblogs:

Macworld: Feature: The power user's guide to Firefox, Page 1: "Mozilla Firefox is rapidly catching on with Mac users, and for good reason: It’s free, fast, and flexible, and it does an outstanding job of displaying most Web pages. (This cross-platform browser is also increasingly popular among Windows users, largely because of its excellent pop-up-blocking features). And beneath Firefox’s simple interface are some surprisingly powerful features."

PowerPoint Book

I came across this book review from Cool Tools that I thought folks might be interested in -- especially considering the faculty PowerPoint session that was held last week. Looks like a good read:

"A great PowerPoint presentation is a story well-told. A bad PowerPoint is a mind-deadener. Thousands of businesspeople are snoozing away at this moment as slide after slide of fancy-transitioned words, words, and more bulleted words evaporate a fortune in productivity.... It doesn't have to be that way! Beyond Bullet Points shows you how to achieve excellence in presentations."

Content Management Systems for Teaching

In case you didn't see it on the MANE IT Blog, here's a good article: "How to choose a Content Management Tool according to a Learning Model"

Thought it might be of interest to some of us since Wheaton will be looking more at its web presence in the coming months. I like the article, because it provides an overview of CMS's in a way an educator would best understand them: based on three Learning Models: 1) To transfer knowledge (Teaching I), 2) To acquire, compile, gather knowledge (Teaching II), and 3) To develop, to invent, to construct knowledge (Teaching III).

Blackboard and WebCT will soon merge

According to a post on Slashdot: "Blackboard will acquire WebCT in a cash transaction for $180 million, which values the offer at approximately $154 million, net of WebCT's August 31, 2005 cash balance of $26 million."

More details can be found on Blackboard's site. What will this mean? Does Blackboard have a monopoly? Will costs end up going up for educational institutions? Will the two systems be integrated? Do any other competitors out there have a chance?

Games and the Digital Humanities at 2005 NMC Regional Conference

This is my second day back in the office after having attended the 2005 NMC Regional Conference at Yale last week. I have to say, I was impressed...

The predominant topic of the conference was Online Gaming (e.g. Massively Multiplayer Online Games like World of Warcraft) and its implications for teaching and learning. Many of the undergraduates who attend our colleges and universities play these games, and rather than villify them (as the press often does) many of the presenters instead portrayed gaming as a very engaged style of learning. Gamers solve complicated problems, they work collaboratively, do all sorts of research, try on different roles and identities, participate in and develop complex story lines... and they do all of this with great zeal. That should give you a taste of the arguments for gaming as a valuable learning exercise. The question (still largely unanswered), then, is: how do we harnass/reproduce this enthusiasm and engagement in learning processes that we design in higher education? In the opening plenary for the conference, Marc Prensky suggested that we could 1) try to use commercial games as pedagogical tools, 2) create custom games, 3) talk about games with students in class (thus placing value on what interests students), and/or 4) use the principles of gaming in designing learning experiences. These gaming principles include: 1) focusing on the users' engagement, 2) involving frequent, important decisions, 3) building in the ability to "level up" toward clear, important goals, 4) adapting to each "player" individually, 5) allowing "players" to test out theories and ideas through play, and 6) realizing that game play is more important than the look and feel ( or "eye candy").

I attended one fabulous panel discussion (actually four mini-presentations) in this track which gave a great overview of the gaming landscape. Bryan Alexander presented on the eery and intriguing world of Alternate Reality Games. Marc Prensky spoke briefly about the value of games in general and his excitement about Spore -- a forthcoming online game that will allow users to shape the evolutionary process of entire virtual worlds. Constance A. Steinkuehler talked about MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) like World of Warcraft. And Nick Montfort presented on Interactive Fiction. Here's a website of resources that the presenters put together -- well worth a visit.

Though the gamers certainly dominated the conference, I did notice a slight trend that others at the conference did not pick up on... probably because of my own interests: introducing Digital Scholarship in the Humanities to undergraduates. As I mentioned already, I helped present on our work here at Wheaton with TEI. I was surprised and pleased to see that we are not alone in this type of work. Immediately after we presented, Krista Terry and Erin Webster-Garrett from Radford University gave a presentation entitled "Teaching and the Web of Mind." As with our TEI projects, they too had undergraduates help create (and research) digital editions of texts (in this case a long out-of-print work of fiction by Mary Shelley). And the next day, a group from Lehigh University presented on a similar project, where they had undergraduates transcribing and researching primary resources/archival material from the University's Special Collections. We didn't all use the same technology (we used TEI; Radford used OCR, wikis, blogs, and text files; Lehigh used WYSIWYG editors to create HTML). But the projects' goals and results were the same: We wanted our undergraduates to have a meaningful, deep experience with primary resource materials using techniques found in the digital humanties. And most students came away from the project feeling a sense of engagement with the process and a sense of ownership of the work they did.

NMC Regional Conference

I'm in New Haven today at the first NMC Regional Conference and will later be giving a talk with Kathy Ebert-Zawasky, Kathryn Tomasek, and Domingo Ledezma about our work with TEI in the classroom. This is the webpage that we will be using during the presentation.