Playing with Technology» Presentations

The future of the Liberal Arts

Jon — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:36:23 +0000

I have written in previous posts about my fear that the Liberal Arts are losing their relevance in the eyes of society. In this TED talk ¹ Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College, highlights some of the things I have been thinking about the state of many Liberal Arts colleges. While I do not think that things are as dire as she makes them out to be, I do think that Wooster’s curriculum needs to change. We need to have more inter-disciplinary courses. It strikes me as odd that we offer over 400 courses a semester and yet less than 20 are inter-disciplinary. I’m not sure if our current curriculum was designed to address the principles she highlights (Rhetoric, Design, Mediation, Improvisation, and Quantitative Reasoning), but I would like to see us revisit the curriculum with an eye toward increasing inter-disciplinary work. I hope President Coleman’s remarks make you think about the nature of a Liberal Arts education and whether we have strayed from the path.

Video for The future of the Liberal Arts

Liz Coleman’s TED talk ↩

Bryan comes through again

Jon — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:41:14 +0000

Hmmm. So Liberal Education Today had a post about Web 2.0 technologies used in a class. This post was particularly interesting because the tools were used in the context of Moodle. Also of great interest was the use of Jing and Screencast. Screencast looks to be too expensive for campus use, but I’m going to suggest we look at Jing for screencaptures.

Timeline 3D, why haven’t I heard of this before?

Jon — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:30:31 +0000

Actually, I feel stupid for not thinking that there might be faculty that want to create timeline presentations. You can see some examples at Bee Docs’ Web site. I can totally see art history, history, or any presentations where the timing of events is important for understanding the overall story finding a use for software like this. Check it out and see what you think.

What can you communicate in 60 seconds?

Jon — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:43:08 +0000

My news feeds brought me a little tidbit today from Apple. The story that caught my attention was about 60 second lectures. The University of Pennsylvania is featured in the story but this is similar to projects that we had students do to emulate NPR stories. The idea is to pick a short time frame (we chose 3 minutes) and communicate as much as possible in that time in an interesting manner. The U Penn recordings can be found here. The projects our students did can be found here.

The Commons (or why flickr is awesome)

Jon — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 05:35:48 +0000

In following up on my idea for using flickr to create an image collection for Wooster, I happened to revisit The Commons. I had visited it when it was first announced and looked at some of the images put up by The Library of Congress, but I had not been back since. I was surprised to find that images had been put up by the Smithsonian, The Powerhouse Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, George Eastman House, and BibliothÃ¨que de Toulouse. These are some very well respected museums and some very significant photos. I think this is very positive as it points to the acceptance of flickr as a tool for the serious study of images. One of the concerns expressed about my idea was the longevity of flickr and I see the participation of such institutions as those mentioned above as a sign that flickr is here to stay. Hopefully Instructional Technology will have a chance to pursue the development of a Wooster flickr collection in the coming year. Stay tuned.

Life in the Australian Outback.

Blogging class

Jon — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 20:37:13 +0000

Talking about creating a blog.

One thing to do is include an image. To do this you go to upload and browse for the image. Once it is uploaded click to use thumbnail and link to image and then drag to post.

Blog session

Jon — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:19:17 +0000

I’m in Professor Holt’s FYS right now. We are talking about how to interact with the blog software. Image uploading is one of the things they need to know how to do.

Digital artifacts

Jon — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 23:39:45 +0000

Looking for music, sounds, moving images, or texts that you can use in your projects? You need to check the Internet Archive. The Archive has a large collection of images, sounds, music, and texts that can be used in your projects.

Organizing information

Jon — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 05:55:49 +0000

Dr. Havholm has asked me to give some pointers to his Digital Aesthetics class on managing RSS feeds to keep up with the blogs and stay sane. There are a few things I plan on talking about:

Mozilla Thunderbird
RSSOwl cross-platform RSS reader
Google Reader requires a Google account
Firefox extension Feedview will be in Firefox 2.0
Safari

Safari is nice if you have OS X 10.4. It will check your feeds at a specified interval and can be set to display the newest posts first. You can also put all of your feeds in one folder then clicking on that folder will allow you to read all your feeds at once.

However, in the interest of cross-platform compatibility, Mozilla Thunderbird is probably the best option. You can set up a news account in the most recent version of Thunderbird and read your news in the same application as your e-mail. You can also export your feeds in a format that can be imported into Google Reader or other applications that understand OMPL.

Google Reader requires you to have an account with Google and allows you to tag your feeds. Once a feed is tagged you can view all feeds with a particular tag. This is also a cross-platform solution, but does not have the polish of Thunderbird or Safari.

A third option is RSSOwl which a Java application and cross-platform. It is similar to Thunderbird and feels like an e-mail application, but it is not as stable as the other options and lacks the polish of the other applications.

Finally the Feedview extension allows one to read RSS feeds in Firefox. The feel is similar to Safari, but there is no easy way to display a folder of feeds like Safari.

In my opinion the best solution is Thunderbird, but any of these can be made to do what you need to manage your RSS feeds.

Digital Aesthetic class

Jon — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 18:15:23 +0000

Today I showed Peter Havholm‘s class how to create a blog on our blog server. I also showed them the basics of posting and maintaining their blogs. It seemed to go pretty well. A number of students already have blogs so I wonder if they should ask Peter to let them use their existing blogs rather than create a new one. We’ll see what happens. There has already been one issue with the title of a blog (which has been changed) and I think it is something to bring up at the next policy meeting (really need a name for this).