Learn-gasm post 100 Best iPhone Apps for Serious Self-Learners
From Open Culture…
April 28th, 2009
The most popular article in yesterday’s New York Times was an Op-Ed calling for a thoroughgoing overhaul of the traditional university. For Mark Taylor (chairman of the religion department at Columbia University), it’s time to get rid of the mass-production university mode…
Read the Posting at:
http://www.openculture.com/2009/04/ending_the_university_as_we_know_it.html
NY Times Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1241017230-97aIrp3ccrgtRYZ8P6NcUg
From The Chronicle of Higher Education…
“Cole W. Camplese, director of education-technology services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, prefers to teach in classrooms with two screens – one to project his slides, and another to project a Twitter stream of notes from students. He knows he is inviting distraction – after all, he’s essentially asking students to pass notes during class. But he argues that the additional layer of communication will make for richer class discussions…
Once students warmed to the idea that their professors actually wanted them to chat during class, students begin floating ideas or posting links to related materials, the professor says. In some cases, a shy student would type an observation or question on Twitter, and others in the class would respond with notes encouraging the student to raise the topic out loud. Other times, one of the professors would see a link posted by a student and stop class to discuss it.”
Get the full story here.
From Harry Ransom Center at the University Of Texas at Austin.
Back before 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace had his own TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, which aired from 1957 to 1960. And what you get is Mike Wallace asking probing questions to celebrities of the day (and peddling cigarettes). An archive of the television series is hosted by The University of Texas, and features talks with Frank Lloyd Wright, Eleanor Roosevelt, Salvador Dali and many others.
On Thursday, we announced the launch of YouTube EDU. Now, as promised, it???s time to give you some more details about the new university video hub.
I had a chance to chat with Obadiah Greenberg, a key Googler behind the launch. And he gave me some insight into the genesis of the project. As you can imagine, YouTube EDU wasn???t built overnight. It took about a year to move from concept to launch. The work was driven along by a team of five, and they did it using Google???s famous 20% time policy. That is, they each committed essentially one day per week to bringing this project to fruition…
Read the entire post at Open Culture
Audio file from NPR’s Futuretense
This in from CNet Download.com
There are several well-regarded, free ways to take advantage of the Print function to transform just about any file to a PDF. PrimoPDF and doPDF sit at the top of the list, but what about reverse engineering that conversion? Converting in the other direction, from a PDF to a Microsoft Word-compatible format like DOC or RTF is trickier.
For one thing, there’s a lot of crap out there. Many PDF-to-DOC converters have similar or even identical names, differentiated sometimes by nothing more than a cunning tap of the space bar. Many offer features that are hamstrung in various ways unless you pay for an upgrade, and just about all of them offer imperfect conversions. Even with these problems, though, you can get a reasonable conversion from the four programs and three Web-based services listed below…
This from Lifehacker:
Photovisi Creates Advanced Collages
By Jason Fitzpatrick, 4:00 PM on Sat Mar 21 2009, 12,082 views
Photovisi is a surprisingly sophisticated collage maker with an assortment of options for tweaking your collage to your liking.
Photovisi has eighteen collage templates for groupings of pictures ranging from only a couple up to 30 pictures. Once you select the pictures you can shuffle their order and crop them. On templates where there is some order to the photos, like a ring around primary photo as seen in the screenshot here, Photovisi lets you select which one will be the focus. You can bulk upload images from your computer or pull photos from Flickr.
quietube: YouTube without the distractions
To watch YouTube videos without the comments and crap, just drag the link above to your browser’s bookmarks bar. On any YouTube page, click the bookmark button to watch in peace.
Recently, at the ConnectED summit, someone at Northwest College of Agriculture captured a demonstration of the upcoming Blackboard application for iPhone and iPod touch. The Blackboard rep explains the application will allow you to connect to your schools Blackboard server and get important information from your account and will not save your password on the device, but uses a single sign-on token. Also, the representative mentions the application will be free when it launches. Northwest College Agriculture also has a sharper photo of the layout on their Flickr page.
“Welcome to Academhack.org. The goal of this site is to serve as a resource for academics trying to navigate the world of computing and technology. There are many sites that do a good job of exploring and theorizing how the growing digital presence is changing the world of academia, and there are also a host of sites that catalog ways to use technology effective, there certainly seems to be a lack of sites dedicated to bridging this gap. That is, outlining the more concrete ways technology and computers can be used to improve both teaching (how to get beyond the use of Power Point) and scholarship (did you know there are more effective, cheaper, alternatives to MS Word-how does a $30 word processor designed by academics sound?). To that end, this blog is going to try to chronicle how I use technology in an effort to teach and write more effectively.”
