Archive for the ‘White Papers’ Category
Hot Team: Grassroots Video
Most of the content in YouTube is grassroots video: short videos posted by ordinary people who are recording what is going on around them. Most of these videos don’t have special lighting, sound, scripts, costumes, or props. In a 2008 survey of Penn State students, we found that 85 percent of them were watching videos on YouTube or a similar service and 17 percent were uploading videos of their own. That means that 14,000 students at the university are creating and uploading video. These videos are easy to search, rate, share, comment upon, and embed in other locations, such as blog posts.
How does grassroots video work and what are the implications for teaching and learning? To answer these types of questions, we formed a Hot Team, which wrote a Grassroots Video White Paper.
Hot Team: Social Ratings
Allan Gyorke recently lead a Hot Team to explore the concept of Social Ratings for content. He and his team looked at a couple of approaches and worked to expose some interesting use cases. Social rating systems are open systems that allow users to collectively evaluate the quality of nearly anything (e.g. books, blog posts, broadway shows, movies, news stories, hotels, etc…). In its simplest form, this may involve applying thumbs up/down or star ratings to a resource, and this can be extended to include reviews and discussions of the resources by multiple contributors. As more items are ranked, it is possible to utilize the rankings to generate sets of popular or important items, by sorting by applied relevancy ranking. In order to help maintain relevance, subsets of resources, and of people, may be required in order to rank items within the context of a course, semester, or group. This approach has huge implications in a distributed environment where courses are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State and faculty are looking to bring content into one location with ratings to help pull top posts to the surface.
An example can be found here.
Read the Social Rating Hot Team white paper as a PDF.
Hot Team: Zotero
Recently ETS’ Elizabeth Pyatt was the lead for a Hot Team that looked at Zotero. Zotero is a Firefox plug-in which allows users to capture and record bibliographic information about Web pages, images, and online journal articles, and export them as both a formatted bibliography or a text file suitable for EndNote import.
The white paper is now available for download as a PDF.
Hot Team: Location Aware Technologies
I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks, but we never posted the white paper results from a Hot Team we did in cooperation with Purdue University looking at Location Aware technologies. Chris Millet guided this team through exploring how things like GPS and Google Maps can be used to create teaching and learning opportunities.
Get the white paper and please post any comments you may have.
Hot Team: The Facebook Platform
A few months ago, Some of us here at ETS and faculty from the University Libraries were discussing Web 2.0 tools in the contexts of the Libraries. The meeting was really just to get an idea of the types of things they are thinking about and we started discussing the Facebook and the new FB Platform opportunities. The librarians showed us what some other higher education libraries were doing in that space, and we decided to form a Hot Team to look at it so we could understand the potential. Part of the team’s exploration included building a simple library search application. In looking at the it, the team sees some opportunities to mash up learning with the most popular web application among students at the University.
Download the white paper to learn more about the Facebook Platform.
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