As you know, the Office of the Provost encourages SMU faculty to explore meaningful and innovative use of instructional technology. These grants provide faculty members with funds to improve teaching and learning through the use of technology. Over 85 Instructional Technology Grants have been awarded since 1992. This year, one maybe awarded to you.

Grants are awarded in the Fall with funding available this semester. The work outlined in your grant must be completed no later than Fall 2010. The maximum amount of an individual grant is $5,000.

Read more at http://smu.edu/ucit/ttg/ Click the link for (Faculty Technology Grants 2009 Announcement)

CourseSmart, a revolutionary online subscription service for textbooks, has released a new iPhone app. The "eTextbooks for the iPhone," allows users to access more than 7,000 titles from it's CourseSmart library covering over 900 course areas across 113 disciplines. According to CourseSmart, "When you purchase eTextbooks from CourseSmart you will have access from any computer with Internet access as well as the iPhone application. Study the way that fits your schedule, whether that's viewing text in the screen, printing out pages to read, or copy and pasting important passages into study guides."

Beyond the benefit of having your textbook always with you, many of the eTextbooks are 60 to 75 percent of the cost of their physical cousins. Nice for an app that is free from Apple's App Store.

Check out the app for yourself or read more about it.

Also, Todd R. Weiss of PC World has a nice write up of the app, including some questions that faculty may need to answer. The Todd R. Weiss article is available at http://shar.es/9RIr

HOW DIGITAL LOCKERS WORK

The SMU Digital Locker is your own private web-based digital repository - kind of like your high school locker, except much better. With Locker, you can easily create folders to organize, store, and distribute digital files, anything at all from text to video to web. Most importantly, you can share some or all of the files with anyone on campus or off. So, individual files and/or entire directories can be shared with anyone in the world - and you control their level of access. These collaborators can be limited to just reading, reading and writing, or administering your files. But, you are always in control and can change that access at any time. You can't do that with your shared network drives.

To access your Digital Locker, open a web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome), and navigate to http://smu.edu/its/locker/. Log in with your email alias (the name before the @ in your SMU email address) as the username and your normal network password for the password, hit enter, and you are in. Your SMU Digital Locker can be accessed by you anywhere, anytime, as long as you have access to a computer and an Internet connection. SMU Digital Lockers are available now for SMU students, staff, and faculty. Lockers can also be set up for organizations on campus as well. Just call the help desk at 8-HELP to get that simple process started.

SMU DIGITAL LOCKER KEY FEATURES

Your Digital Locker is designed to be a single space where you can manage all of your important files and share them with others in several different ways. To help you do this, Digital Locker has many Web 2.0 collaborative features, such as RSS, Wikis, content tagging, version control, and commenting. Here's a short list of what is possible:

• Email - Your Locker works together seamlessly with your SMU email. When you add or change content in your Locker, you can easily send secure email notifications right from your Locker to your customers, friends, students, or colleagues.
  
  
• Library Services - Digital Locker has a complete set of library services, including file check-in, check-out, version control, audit history, and comments. This service allows you to monitor what goes in and out of your Locker as well as keep track of all of the previous versions of a document authored by several people at the same time.
  
  
• Integrated Wikis - You can quickly set up and host a Wiki (or several) on your Locker to share information and resources to whomever you wish. Your Wiki could be used, for example, to organize and selectively share ePortfolios with your academic advisor, professors, parents, or prospective employers.
  
  
• RSS - This feature allows users to subscribe to any folder, document or Wiki through the Digital Locker RSS system and receive automatic updates when content is added or changed. Using this feature, for example, will enable automatic email notifications to be sent to you, whenever your students submit assignments to your locker.
  
  
• Secure File Sharing - Digital Locker eliminates problems and risks created by email file attachments. It replaces attachments with secure file links (a URL or Web address) that allow users to safely share content with people on campus or off. This feature allows you to share important documents and other kinds of digital resources with your peers and colleagues in other organizations, research centers, and universities worldwide.

To get started using your SMU Digital Locker, login to locker.smu.edu, set up your Locker, and begin to use it right away. It's free, it's easy, and it works!

USEFUL LINKS TO INFORMATION ABOUT SMU DIGITAL LOCKERS

Locker.SMU login page
http://smu.edu/its/locker/

Windows users - Adding Digital Locker to your network place:
http://smu.edu/its/locker/network%20place.asp

Basic operating instructions for Digital Locker
http://smu.edu/its/locker/locker_instructions.asp

I could spend all day discussing the ethical and Fair Use issues that arise from this, but to save time, I will just cover the technical part.

First, if you haven't already, download the new version of VLC. To enable recording, in the menu bar select View -> Advanced Controls. Click the record button to start saving the video, and when you have reached the end of the clip, click the record button again to stop. The video clip will be saved in MPEG format within your Documents folder.

For illustrated instructions, please visit the How-To Geek for the instructions of How To Copy a DVD with VLC 1.0.

This, sadly, does not work with the OS X version of VLC. :-(

POINT OF VIEW
Will Higher Education Be the Next Bubble to Burst?
By JOSEPH MARR CRONIN and HOWARD E. HORTON

The public has become all too aware of the term "bubble" to describe an asset that is irrationally and artificially overvalued and cannot be sustained. The dot-com bubble burst by 2000. More recently the overextended housing market collapsed, helping to trigger a credit meltdown. The stock market has declined more than 30 percent in the past year, as companies once considered flagship investments have withered in value.

Is it possible that higher education might be the next bubble to burst? Some early warnings suggest that it could be...

Read the full article

Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art writes:

Some enterprising readers (faculty? student-journalists?) have gone through the dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan, highlighting every passage in Meehan's that can be found, word for word, in Boening's. Neither the University of Alabama (which granted Boening and Meehan their doctorates) nor Jacksonville State University, where Meehan is president, has chosen to take up the obvious questions about plagiarism that Meehan's dissertation presents. As another recent story suggests, plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer's status rises.

What plagiarism looks like

Cobocards is a free, web-based flash card application with an emphasis on collaboration, so you can create and study a set of flash cards alongside your friends or fellow students.

We've covered several flash card apps in the past, but Cobocards sets itself apart with an impressive feature set. Not only does it do all the basics, like tracking your progress as you study, but it also sports several useful features we haven't always seen from its competition, such as several printable templates, an activity feed and message board for keeping track of your friends' and collaborators' activity (like if they've added new cards to a deck), and, of course the collaboration itself.

For a fuller understanding of how it works, hit up the video demonstration on the homepage. If you've already got a preferred study companion for this sort of work, let's hear about it in the comments.

Cobocards

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

"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."

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.

See the videos here.

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

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...

See the list here.

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.

Photovisi