For most of us, search makes use of the same tool and the simple process of entering a couple of words we think will surface useful information. Nothing very sophisticated even when advance options are available for our use.
We encourage students to explore search options by trying the same search with different search engines.
This process has been automated through a clever hack by Michael Kordahi. BlindSearch submits a search to three search engine and returns the results in three columns without identifying the search engine responsible for each search. The idea is to examine the results and identify the column you feel provides the most useful results. The search engine associated with each column is then revealed. A link on the search page offers a running total of best search performance for the past 8 weeks.
I tried several different searches and my selections of “best” results were all over the place. This would make a useful classroom activity.
Late last evening after exploring lala, I tweeted the following:
Wow – you can now scrobble from lala to last.fm – update for the digital natives. Check under beta.
It was kind of a challenge from one 60-year-old to the digital natives of the world.
For those needing a translation (digital natives included) – LaLa and Last.Fm are online music services with interesting features. LaLa allows you to purchase music for download (or in CD format), but you can also play any song once for free and for 10 cents play any song any time. In addition, LaLa knows what music you own (if you enable the LaLa music mover) and you have access to these songs without payment even when accessing from different machines.
Last.Fm is a social music service. It offers streams based on your interests and your neighbours (British company), but the feature I like most is that it keeps track of the music you play on your computers (I guess to be more accurate I also have an app on my iPod and other apps may exist for other devices). I have been a pro member since Nov. 2006 (you need not pay the $4 per month if you want fewer services) and in this time it knows I have listened to 82944 songs. It knows my favorite artists and songs (Guns N Roses – Sweet Child of Mine with 80 plays). I can examine data for the last week, 6 m., year and for the duration of my membership. Lots of data to mine.
The discovery feature works this way. The service uses your musical preferences to identify those with similar interests. You can visit their public profiles and possibly identify new artists/songs you may want to investigate and purchase. When I explain the use of online social tools as opportunities for discovery, I tend to use this example. Imagine visiting the home of someone with similar tastes and browsing through their CD collection. Would you locate something new? Of course! Might it interest you? Perhaps.
Discovery works in a similar fashion across different tools (Twitter, blogs, social bookmarking) and content domains. Identify individuals with similar interests and pick up on what else they are reading, listening to, or viewing.
Scrobbling? Try Wikipedia for a formal definition. I think of it as a centralized accumulation and aggregation of data about your behaviors. LastFM accumulates and aggregates information about the music I listen to whether I use LastFM, PandoraFM, or iTunes. Until recently, Lala did not offer scrobbling and I really liked the LaLa features and cost. Not an unusual tech dilemma – stick with a service you have invested a lot of time in and have used to accumulate a lot of useful information or move on to a better system (think delicious vs diigo). Anyway, LaLa added scrobbling so I am happy (BTW – you find the scrobbling option by going to edit personal information and then selecting the Beta tab (not the easiest feature to discover).
And that, digital natives, is how to get your geek on 😉
D. Warlich offered a post in which he commented on Personas – a MIT Media Lab application that categorizes Internet “references” to an individual. I guess he liked the representation of himself (looks like a genetic representation to me) and is using it as a header for his blog. Clever.
I decided to create a persona and contrast it with the persona of the individual I think I now best (cg).
Now, I am attempting to understand what the categories mean and what about our online presence would reveal differences. My wife is certainly more social and she has cause to be more involved with medical issues, i.e., she is a two time cancer survivor. I think the “books” priority for me makes sense (although Cindy’s Kindle did arrive today). Giving me any credit for “fashion” seems foolish (I guess one cannot assume mentions are necessarily positive).
BTW – your genetics seem to change a bit with each run – not sure what that means. I must be mutating.
I noted a couple of weeks ago that my professional responsibilities had changed as a function of my new role as department chair. The one component of this position that may be relevant to this blog is my administrative role associated with two department online programs (a graduate program in forensic psychology and the undergraduate major). The forensic program has been operating for a couple of years, but we are just rolling out the online undergraduate program. As I indicated in my previous post, my administrative role offers a different perspective than my previous roles as online instructor or graduate faculty member preparing other academics to teach online or design for online instruction.
Here is a concrete example – the financial challenge of an online program.
As a department, we have committed to a faculty in which all members are involved in teaching, research and service. We believe these roles are interdependent in that each is necessary and each role supports the others. When we moved last year to the initiation of the online major, we started by having existing faculty teach a few courses as overloads (with pay). However, this year with have added three faculty members. These individuals are not in tenure-track lines, but are given some expectation of stability. These individuals are expected to teach 5 “group” courses during the year (a 3-2 or 2-3) and all have research expectations. Nearly all of us are involved in teaching online courses, so the new hires both teach online and cover FTF courses when tenure-track faculty members teach online.
Here is a mathematical description of the money challenge. One can calculate the amount of return from tuition (approx. $225 per credit) that must be generated to cover instruction. We must generate approx. $13,300 per 3 credit course. The department receives approximately 55% of tuition dollars after money is taken out for Continuing Education and the college so we make about $370 per enrolled student. We do make some additional money in fees from 300-400 level courses. Here is the problem. We do very well in lower division courses and a few other courses taken by many majors. The problem is that we cap courses at 40 students and we must enroll approx. 36 students to cover instructional costs. So there is little room on the up side to generate a little extra money for administrative costs and GTA support (40 students online is a challenge and far more time consuming than 40 students FTF). When we get to courses likely to be taken by majors only we do receive an additional fee ($50 per credit), but we have far fewer students. The limited upside in fully enrolled courses does not compensate for the struggles to generate enrollments from online majors. We are pretty much breaking even.
I think we are doing what we should be doing to offer a quality program. We want those who take online courses to experience the same faculty members campus-based students experience. I offer this information as a concrete way of explaining what it takes. If our experiences are typical, universities need to be doing this because it is the right thing to do and not because they anticipate large financial gains.
I have been reading and commenting a lot lately about the free alternatives to commercial information products (e.g., newspapers, textbooks). My latest read is Curt Bonk’s “The world is open” (ironically a book I bought).
We have been attempting to get our publisher to consider a different model for some years without much luck. However, it does look like there is now some movement among commercial providers. I am guessing the hardware (e.g., Kindle) is available that will offer the providers some assurance their basic products will not be passed around.
I read today (ReadWriteWeb) that CourseSmart now offers content for the iPhone. I am familiar with CourseSmart as a provider associated with textbooks I have used and I own an iPod Touch (close enough) so I downloaded the app (the RWWeb article contains a link) and tried some of their demonstration materials.
A display from a psych textbook involving an entire page.
A display from a biology textbook zoomed to one column. This offers a better idea of how one might actually use the iPod to read.
The screen captures from the iPod are larger than actual size.
I find this interesting and a useful mobile tool, but I am not certainly I would be willing to read a thousand pages a semester (multiple books) in this format.
We are taking an end of summer break and spending some time camping in Northern Minnesota. The attached image was taken on the way in a sun flower field near Crookston, MN. This post originated in Flickr and takes advantage of a flickr feature allowing posts to various blogs (including Twitter). The entire process has been accomplished using my mifi from a camper in the woods. A weak cell signal, but still functional.
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