NERCOMP -- March 2007

Technology Across the Curriculum members --

Recently I returned from the NE Regional Computing conference, one of the "local" groups sponsored by EDUCAUSE.

Here are my notes of some of the sessions I attended -- other sessions didn't prove interesting enough to include in this package. I took the notes for myself and they reflect my idiomatic style -- or lack thereof -- so please let me know if you have any questions. Notes in parentheses represent either post-conference additions or me talking to myself.

Robert Harris, harrisr@wpunj.edu

Opening Session
Plymouth State U. Learning Commons
Worcester Polytech Inst. Learning Suites
Pedagogical Uses of XML/TEI
Brewster Kahle

Opening Session: Vest, MIT President Emeritus 03/20/07

Starts w/ Vannevar Bush – communication between he and Roosevelt in a university-centered plan intellectual and innovative design. Although the report itself was ignored his plan really ruled until the 80s.

In the 80s the Japanese model – and money – changed things. Although their RD/innovation model was borrowed from the US it had lagged here and was renovated there. In the 90s US corporations re-discovered entrepreneurship.

Computer, Laser In net GPS WWW genetic revolution, etc. Some of the innovations developed in part or largely on at universities.

Science, the academy, and industry must co-exist hand-in-hand.

Pasteur's Quadrant – an exploration of how we got away from Bush's linear plan.

(I found this when I was preparing my report -- it makes the Bush => Pasteur connection:

http://www.cspo.org/products/conferences/bush/Stokes.pdf )

Engineering degrees – he sees Japan increasing slowly. US decreasing slowly, and China jumping beyond all expectations. Other sciences have similar numbers, though China is a little behind.

US investments in R&D are down – way down. He sees something like Wilsonian geopolitics – that is it good that other nations are rising in strength to reach our own.

Sings the praise of The World is Flat by Friedman. Thesis: in the 8os the walls came down and international trade rose. But we laid 1.5 trillion in fiber cable – we made the world flat.

He insists that location does matter – and he stresses the importance of the Silicon Valley, and also the proximity of important universities and corporate innovation – naturally he draws connection to MIT and corporate partners.

Is manufacturing migration inevitable (Michigan => S. Carolina => Japan => Korea => Vietnam => ???

This can be viewed as good because the wealth is being spread around. This can be viewed as bad because the wealth is leaving the US. We are losing the connection between university R&D and the corporate connection. Although it is still strong, we are still the king of the hill, we can not be complacent.

How do we secure the future? 1) Maintain the R&D connection we have now; maintain the international cooperation.

He sees the Friedman book as important. See also NII report Innovate America. See also Rising Above the Gathering Storm a report that Vest worked on. Was commissioned by two Senators – wanted a 20-point plan on how the us can remain competitive:

Ten thousand teachers, ten thousand minds
Sowing the seeds --
Best and Brightest – Get US students edumacated
Incentives for Innovation

See also the America Competes Act – the legislative outcome of all this.

(http://chronicle.com/news/article/1798/capitol-hill-rally-highlights-bills-to-enhance-economy-through-scientific-research)

[top]

Plymouth State U. (5000 FTE) Learning Commons

Elaine Allard eallard@plymouth.edu

Dwight Fischer dfischer@plymouth.edu

United IT and Library

Tutorial and Writing Centers

Café

Centered on students.

Important to have buy-in from the administration. Originated as a idea to move the help center into the library for reasons that had nothing to do with learning, but space. They put together a plan, got buy-in from the top, and went from there.

Team involved all members of the university community, including students.

IT support, circulation, reserves, all in one place. Obviously they needed an architect to change the library entrance.

Walking into the library one no longer sees the circulation desk, but the circulation desk, laptop help, computer support, Web CT support. All students are cross-trained in library and IT duties. Can check out a book or help out with a laptop. (How do they train their students? Ask.) Reference desk is separate – they wanted to combine, but that didn't work. May happen eventually.

They did not add any staff – had to make everything work with what they had. Their library floor plan looks a lot bigger than ours does.

They do some special student training for student workers on service.

They were worried right about increasing gate counts. Increased by almost 46% in the first year.

Someone asks if that is because of the café, and the answer is no; there is a separate entrance. However they have had to relax food rules throughout the library, as they are serving food.

How about reference services? Has not increased, but has not decreased. There had been some decrease over the years as students began to use the Internet services, but now at least it has leveled off. Students do not do reference.

Buy-in from the top at the very beginning was very important. They seem to be open late in the evening.

They do walk-in, phone, and chat support.

There is always a cross-trained supervisor on-duty, taken from IS, IRT, and Library. They report to a kind of a joint position. This is the kind of thing for which we need an AVP. They have a =lot= better cooperation between units than we do.

(Answer on student training -- they have a one-week pre-semester training orgy, one day of which is dedicated to customer service. See Allard for more information.)

[top]

How Suite it Is

WPI – Worcester Polytech Institute

2,000 UG, 1,000 G – Mostly science – draws from around the world

They needed a tech center, and why the library? Because that's where students hung out. Also there was construction going on, so it was convenient. Interesting that the other Virtual Commons presentation started the same way – the campus was moving space around so creating a new facility was either necessary or convenient.

Pix shows small rooms with modular couches

50” plasma display VHS VCR, DVD

network ports

laptops can connect to display

tables and chairs for 5-6 people $16,000 per suite (though the price has come down -- started out at twice that).
cables, webcams, and microphones are available for borrowing.

Again, great cooperation between IS, academic computing and Library.

IT liaison program – academic tech reps are paired with library reps.

Students can reserve rooms by using a paper tool – a form. They tried an online tool but it didn't work.

Students can sign out a room for one or two hour blocks. That means that a five-person group can reserve a ten hour period. Can reserve up to two weeks in advance.

They've hooked up reservation and checking out equipment with Endeavor so they know who is eligible to check out a room. When they check out a room they are given a kit with a key and several cables. Students can use their own laptop or check one out. One person will often use a laptop and share it out on the plasma screen.

Why are they successful?

Students are from the millennial generation
More learning is taking place outside of the class
Social interaction is becoming more important to learning
Technology is natural to them
Students are being asked to create content – that is, not just a paper, but a portfolio or a web page, etc. Course group work is becoming more common. Capstone projects are becoming more common.

Businesses are demanding that students demonstrated ability to work collaboratively, and the suites help to create this atmosphere.

“We don't have a learning commons but we consider the suites to be a baby step in that direction.”

There are three main uses for the suites:

Group projects
Library instruction sessions
Web conferencing
“Other” -- sometimes faculty will meet with students in the suites.

They whacked out 70% of their reference stacks because so much is online. That area is now open space for group tables. There is noise – it is not a quiet atmosphere. The second, third and fourth floors are for quiet study.

A lot of the workshops that our library holds in the basement or the BI room take place in the tech suites here.

They do web conferencing here. (Is there any way we could make at least some of our existing web conferencing rooms into tech suites?)

Their numbers show that the usage is going up and up.

Problems:

Students at one point didn't want to surrender any more free library space to these tech suites.
Students sometimes use the suites to have parties, watch football games, that kind of thing.

Future:

They have seven of these suites now and have space/plans for three more.
Are thinking of adding IP video-conferencing
Videotaping kits so students can record themselves and practice their presentations. Webcam?
Upgrade replacement – PCs are on a three year cycle, the rest are on a four year cycle.
Tech suites are moving out of the library; four more are going up in dorms that are under construction (to be run by reslife.)

[top]

Pedagogical uses of XML/TEI Technologies in the Classroom

Nicole Vaget, French professor (not present), nvaget@mtholyoke.edu

Shaoping Moss, Tech Consultant, smoss@mtholyoke.edu

Encoding a French manuscript --

Started as a collaboration between Wheaton and MHC – four other tiny liberal arts colleges participated: Exploring Applications of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for Small Liberal Arts Colleges, Dec. 2003. Three-day workshop – learned the systems, planned some projects. Met a year later to talk about the projects.

The Mount Holyoke people started with a French poem from Tahiti -- see:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/csit/lrc/projects/nvaget/haiti/

See the poem. The parts in red are pop-up translations of difficult parts of the poem – helps the student learn French. The pop-out is just Javascript.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/library/arch/col/msrg/mancol/wells/wells_xml_tei.html

Later on she lists XML and XSL tools – the first costs $50 and the second two are open source.

oXygen:

http://www.oxygenxml.com

XML Pro:

http://www.vervet.com

jEdit:

http://www.jedit.org

I asked her which DTD she used – she said Lite, but they had to moderate it for their own use.

[top]

Brewster Kahle

Noted that we have the opportunity of our generation to record everything in human development. He says his students tell him that “it's already” there, but of course it's not. And unless we make that information available to them we'll get the generation we deserve.

Starts with the question – what roles are the various players going to take? Government? Public? Private? How does the transition from shelf to server happen – who does it? Who takes responsibility?

Universal Access to All Knowledge

26 terabytes – server the size of the podium, $60,000 – could store all the information in the Library of Congress. What do you get? Searchable information. Now, how hard is it to take a digital book into a real book? Rather easy, he suggests. The idea is that kids can make their own books. Small books can be made for about a buck – that's cheaper than storing them in a library and lending them out. The example he shows is a really small book. (Where do the trees come from? Print on demand sounds good, but still takes resources, and those resources have to come from what we have available to us on this world today. A $3 book still uses paper).

He does not address my point above, though I will ask in the next session. He does show off the $100 laptop, and he passes it around. (I don't understand that – why a laptop? If you can make a $100 laptop why not a $15 e-book reader? Another question for later).

Million Book Library

He bought a bunch of books, sent them to India, had them scanned. He says it was bulky and it did not really work, so now they (in India) are “scanning their own books (Why didn't he scan them here and send the bytes over there?!). He shows special scanners that really require humans only as page turners – can be done for 10 cents a page. They appear to be installed in major libraries across the country. He goes through the cost to use this system in the LoC. (Of course a lot of those books are really old and can't be done in this v-shaped scanner he's on about. Others are too big to fit in. His numbers sound good but have some corners he does not address).

Stresses -- again and again -- that he doesn't want to get all caught up in books, that there is a lot more media out there in desperate need of saving.

Audio

How much audio is there? Hard to figure out, but audio has not been around as long as books, of course. He makes a guess about the amount of audio out there, but it strikes me as a wild guess. In any event a lot of it is caught up in copyright. They've been able to record some folk music and stuff, and are also posting live recordings in what he describes as the Grateful Dead model. He is the anti-Gates, though he doesn't describe himself this way. If he was hanging around in Cambridge in the 80s he and Bill might have come to blows. The Internet Archive has 100,000 audio items in 100 collections. He has a staff of maybe 2 dozen, plus the local page-turners.

Film

He gives a number of the movies that are out there – 100-200,000? Something like that. The IA only has (But that's not even the point – what about home movies and the like?). What they do have are the old government educational videos – the kinds of thing that used to be voice-over on the MST3K shorts. The Duck and Cover film comes to mind. Apparently there is a huge collection of stop-action lego movies. (Now the question here is do we =really need this crap? No, it doesn't cost that much, but it doesn't cost that much to keep all that crap in my basement, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use any of it).

He does now address the home movies bit – he says if you have movies, send them to us. He's also interested in lectures. Yeah it's shovelware, but it's cheap. This guy is excitable.

Television – 400 channels of TV. They've been recording 20 channels for , I dunno, ten years. Not much of it is available, but some is. The 9/11 stuff – he says they can't find Palestinians dancing in the streets as relayed by some of the news channels (Gee, guess which one). He doesn't say which channels they are recording.

Software

How much software is out there? Who knows. The question is what do you do with Commodore 64 (and the like) stuff? There are emulators for that – see the online gaming community.

Web

Every two months they take a snapshot of the entire public web. 100 terabytes every two months. That adds up.

Sooooo --

What do you do with it once you have it? The great library of Alexandria is best known for having burned. So the best lesson to learn is don't keep only one copy of something. (Like copying my NERCOMP notes to Google Docs). There is the Alexandria Digital Library Project, of course, and they are trying to digitize as much as possible from around the world. He says if we had about six copies of that library he'd be able to sleep soundly at night.

They've got a couple of petabytes spinning right now. Showed a picture of his server room in SF – it makes my head spin. So where to store it? The stuff has got to be kept in circulation. Drop it into a basement and we'll never see it again. Hence the Wayback Machine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petabyte

Talks about Google – what is not mentioned in the Google library project is that the books that go back to the library belong to the library. So the question is who owns what?

Now we are getting back to the beginning. What is the future going to bring? Who is going to do this work, who is going to store it, who is going to control access? There is the Human Genome (open access) model or the Elsevier model (near monopoly on scientific publication).

Will the free library system that we grew up with go away if we let the commercial companies take control of all this information? On the top of the door to the Carnegie library in Pittsburgh is the inscription Free to the People. Of course Carnegie himself is not the greatest model of open access.

So there is the Open Content Alliance:

http://www.opencontentalliance.org/

Join! He exhorts.

Someone asks – books start on MS Word, then get published, and now you're talking about getting it back into the Word Processor. Have you thought of cutting out the middleman? He says sure, but he has to work with what is around. He also doesn't want to stress books at the expense of all other media.

BK talks and talks and talks -- he is an evangelist. More of an idea man than a details person. Throughout our chat he kept referring to Fedora as "Pandora." I don't know if he was truly mixed up, or wants to demonstrate that the details are beneath him, or thinks he's funny (he is sometimes) or all three. As I held the $100 laptop I asked him why not strip away the productivity software and make a $15 ebook. He swept that aside and immediately went on to talk about that SONY monstrosity -- which of course was not my point at all. I think that if we want people to read ebooks we have to produce a cheap, single-function tool and I told him that, but he was already on to something else.

He is very single-minded and very, very dedicated to his cause. Wee particulars like the legal system seem not to bother him. We need the BKs of the world, no doubt, and he has done/is doing some great things. But we need to temper his brand of enthusiasm with a down-to-earth common sense approach as well.