A new search tool is available to help scholars search the growing collection of open access journals. Jurn.org enables searching on almost 2,400 journals in the arts and humanities. Take it for a spin, you might like what you find!

Faculty developing a new course or modifying an old one might want to have a look at the Phoebe project. The aim of the project  is to guide practitioners working in higher education in designing effective and pedagogically sound learning activities. The project, based at Oxford University, has developed a prototype online planning tool known as the Phoebe Pedagogic Planner that offers users both flexible and guided paths through the planning process and encourages them to explore new approaches and tools in their pedagogy. The design guidance is provided via a wiki-like tool that offers content and explanations that help structure the course development experience. 

This week Google released another application (still in beta) that may have utility for faculty and/or anyone running large group meetings in wifi enabled spaces or labs. The tool, called Moderator, provides a method for gathering questions from a group and then using a voting method to push favorite questions to the top of the list. It does require participants to have a Google login, so it may not be as useful as it might be for groups that aren’t heavy Google tools users. There is an option to permit anonymous voting, but you still need to login to Google to create questions or vote on your favorites. Worth watching…

The folks at MIT’s SIMILE project have released a new free tool entitled Citeline that is designed to display bibliographic data on timelines and as a faceted collection that can be sorted and filtered within one online view. You create displays of your bibliographic data by importing reference collections and making some decisions about what aspects of the data you want to sort on. The tool also nicely connects the open source Zotero plugin for Firefox with the wonderful Exhibit widget-builder.

A great collection of writing about wikis in the higher education context is available online as a wiki (no surprise there, eh?). It is entitled The Wild Wild Wiki/Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Perhaps more interesting is the news that the University of Michigan press will be turning the collection into a book. Here’s the contents you can read online.

Volume Introduction “WhatWas a Wiki, and Why Do I Care? A Short and Usable History of Wikis”
Wikis and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
- “Wikis in the Classroom: A Taxonomy”
- “Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaborations”
- “Building Learning Communities with Wikis”
- “Content and Commentary: Parallel Structures of Organization and Interaction on Wikis”
Wikis in Composition and Communication
- “Disrupting Intellectual Property: Collaboration and Resistance in Wikis”
- “Wiki Lore and Politics in the Classroom”
- “An (Old) First-Timer’s Learning Curve: Curiosity, Trial, Resistance, and Accommodation”
- “Above and Below the Double Line: Refactoring and that Old-Time Revision”
- “Success Through Simplicity: On Developmental Writing and Community of Inquiry.”
- “Wiki as Textshop: Constructing Knowledge in the Electronic Classroom”
Wikis and the Higher Education Classroom
- “Is there a Wiki in this Class? Wikibooks and the Future of Higher Education”
- “Agency and Accountability: The Paradoxes of Wiki Discourse”
- “One Wiki, Two Classrooms”
- “Glossa Technologia: Anatomy of a Wiki-Based Annotated Bibliography”

While you or may not be library staff, you might still appreciate an opportunity to participate in a self-paced exploration of some of the cool features of Web 2.0. It could be the perfect summer learning task. The tutorial, developed by the California School Library Association, provides 23 Things for you to do. Each Thing will show you one more web tool. There are many places for you to explore, experiment with, and think about creative ways to use this in your own work. If you are interested, visit http://schoollibrarylearning2.blogspot.com/ and get started exploring.

This year’s workshop on Harnessing the Interactive Web held during Xtreme week was fun. Attached are the slides (2.9 MB pdf) from the session. Thanks to all who participated. 

Yesterday I presented a campus workshop entitled “Empowering Educational Resources: Moving from a Culture of Control and Containment to One of Sharing and Reuse”  The description I cooked up is as follows:”This multi-media session will provide a review of an growing shift by academic and civic organizations toward promoting open-access, reusable learning materials. We’ll look at the activity of several large foundations committed to promoting open educational resources and take a tour of a collection of fascinating new tools designed to help users create, locate, annotate, collate, rate, repurpose and exhibit digital resources for learning. And the good news is that the bulk of these tools are free and open-source…”      The slides from the session (all 75+ of them!) have been posted online at slideshare.net

The free online service known as TouchGraph lets you take an idea or web address and visually explore the universe of related websites or concepts using a java-based graphical browser.  Three tools are now available, one that draws on content provided by Google, one that shows relationships within Amazon’s catalog of books, music and videos, and the newest browser which lets you explore connections within Facebook. I did a quick TouchGraph using the Google Browser and the Inside Higher Ed website URL. Below is a clip from the results. You can filter or expand results and change the display type to focus your graph. Definitely an interesting tool that gets better with each revision. 

Alan Levine, one of the better known digital pioneers in higher education, put together a great tour of 50 different tools that can be used to tell a narrative tale with pictures and more online. A narrated slideshow walks you through them, and a wiki points you to the sources discussed. Very interesting…