Cell Phones Serve a New Purpose for Writers

A new trend is emerging in Japan as writers are finding a new use for their cell phones. Keitai shosetsu, or cell novels, are written entirely on handset and posted online. The novels are written in an autobiographical style and are generally published under pen names.

What makes this style of writing increasingly popular is that writers are able to discretely write their personal accounts from anywhere via their cell phones and publish their writing anonymously. Readers enjoy these novels because they are able to connect with the writers at a personal level and learn things about them that the writer might otherwise be uncomfortable sharing. Sites such as Maho no i-rando (Magic Island) boast billions of readers, and some of the more popular novels have been published as paperback novels.

The emergence of this style of writing is just another example of the shift in the use of technology as a tool to create community and personal connections (such as Facebook and Twitter). Even though these writers are not exchanging dialogue with their users, they are able to share personal information that connects them with their readers.

Here is CNN's article

Podcasts Make You Smarter

Well, sort of. In a recent study conducted by Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York, university students who downloaded digital lecture material fared better than students who went the traditional route- sitting in a classroom.

In a class of 64 students, half were chosen to attend lecture in person. The other half were sent home to download its podcast episode. After administering a test on the introductory psychology material, to examine how effective learning was via each method, results showed that those who attained the podcast received a 'C' average while those who attended the in-person lecture scored a 'D' average.

While it is still too early to take these results and start reformatting every college curriculum in the country, they do show some promise. We have increasingly become aware of the current shifts in styles of educational delivery and reception. In order to keep up with these shifts, it is important for those involved to adapt and apply these new methodologies to the traditional educational setting.

You can find the article here.

Learn more about what Rutgers is doing with Podcasting here.

I'm teaching a course with HOW many students?

I teach part time at Rutgers, in addition to my full time position in OIRT. I'm expanding my teaching repertoire this fall to include a large, 100 level lecture class. To date, I've taught primarily 400 level courses with between 8 and 40 students. Fall 2009 will be my first foray into the world of the LECTURE HALL (notice the big, scary letters), where 200 students will be staring at me expecting to hear my "pearls of wisdom" on the course topics, hoping that the multiple choice exams I give are easy, and wondering if they really need to be in the room to pass the course.

So, here's my problem. I don't lecture when I teach. I ask questions, assign in- and out-of-class group work, have students create final projects, and give essay exams. I'm not sure how I can use this teaching style with 200 students. I'm looking at some cell phone applications that increase interaction (more on these in a future blog post), possibly conducting some of the classes using web videoconferencing (group work would work well with this, I think), and, of course, walking around the room, creating panel discussions, etc etc etc.

I've read a few old but good articles on this and found some good material at Princeton but I would really like to hear how people are addressing the issues inherent in large lecture classes here at Rutgers. Anyone have some thoughts to share?

A Virtual Human?

People have talked for years about human-computer interaction becoming more natural. Justine Cassell, Director of the Center for Technology and Social Behavior, is conducting research about it.

She will present "Making (Virtual) Friends and Influencing People: Computational Systems that Establish Rapport," as part of Douglass College's L'Hommedieu Lecturer Series on Wednesday, March 11, beginning at 7pm in the Douglass College Center.

This sounds fascinating to me, so I thought I'd share the information with many of our blog readers, especially those interested in human-computer interaction.

No, we haven't discovered Atlantis....

There's been some hype about Google Earth's new Ocean app, allowing users to dive under water and explore the ocean floor, learning about marine animals, research, and more. The hype hasn't all been about the app itself, though. Many users have been asking questions about strange patterns on the ocean floor picked up by the satellite images. Could this be the lost city of Atlantis?

It turns out that no, these strange patterns aren't the mark of an ancient city. The geometric shapes etched into the ocean floor are not streets, but rather marks made by ships using echosounding to map the ocean floor. (Read the full story on Google's official blog here.)

Even though no great discoveries were made, I find this story interesting. (And not just because I'm a fan of Google Earth and related products.) It reminds me a bit of the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlisted thousands of volunteers online to help classify galaxies. It turns out that with minimal training in what to look for, humans can identify galaxy types faster than the world's supercomputers. People got to help further research while having fun and looking at some pretty incredible images.

Google didn't create the Oceans app to get people to further marine research, but this "Atlantis discovery" still shows that it's pretty natural for people to want to explore the world and see what kinds of neat things are out there. Google put some new information and images out there, and people took to it, searching for new things and asking questions. Instead of research and discovery being limited to a lab, the information is made available online for the world to explore as well. This is a trend we seem to have been following for a while now. And it makes me wonder: What other sorts of things could the general public find that a small team of researchers - or computers - could miss?

Should you be wary of the new Facebook Terms of Service?

UPDATE 2: In addition to scaling back the terms of service, Facebook is letting their users help them write the next version of the terms of service. How's that for treating your users right?

UPDATE: It seems that enough people got angry and voiced their concerns. Facebook has scaled back the Terms of Service to the previous version as they revisit the privacy needs of their users.

A few weeks ago, the folks over at Facebook edited their Terms of Service (ToS) to reflect the current thinking in the online social networking space. It's making a lot of folks a bit nervous, however, as it states that they have full rights to everything that you add to Facebook forever, no matter what you do. Should we worry about this?

The recent ToS change wasn't a major change from the previous language. Facebook used to have rights to everything that you put on their network until you removed said content. At that point, they no longer maintained rights to your stuff, though they would keep copies of it on their servers.

As an aside, for a great comparison of different social network ToS agreements, check out Dr. Amanda French's post here.

This recent language change stripped that crucial part from the ToS. Now, if you delete your content, they will retain that content and their right to use that content. The language shows that they have a perpetual worldwide license to your content, with the right to sublicense it (i.e., redistribute it). Also, if you don't like it, you automatically agree to arbitration!

Why are they doing this?

Facebook promises that they're not out to get you. They claim that they made this change because the emerging social network landscape demands it. The folks at Facebook believe that even if you close your account, the content that you shared with other users should persist, not disappear. Think about what would happen if I left the university and every e-mail that I ever sent disappeared from each recipient's archived mail. It seems weird, right? By that logic, they want your stuff to stay and exist in perpetuity even if you decide to go.

I can't say that I disagree with their point, but it does raise some interesting issues:

Privacy - What happens if you run for public office and all of the embarrassing pictures of you that you thought were removed from Facebook are easily mined from the system by your opponent? You lose the election!

Benevolent dictator argument - They don't claim actual ownership of your material now...but what happens when they do? You lose actual ownership of your content!

The landscape itself - I agree that the system needs to function properly. Content should show up where it is meant to show up for as long as it is meant to show. If it doesn't show properly, you get what you see out on the web when stuff disappears: links to ghost content, 404 (site not found) errors, etc. While I know that it is extremely difficult to code the logic that gives users elegant control over content, I still believe that it will prove necessary to do so as the social networking landscape develops.

I hope that users will demand control over their content, and that they demand that that control be as effective as the control that they have over the content on their own desktop machines. I think that this blanket statement of ownership is a lazy response to the very valid problem that Facebook face.

RU faculty member empowers female inmates

I had the opportunity last week to film an event at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Clinton, NJ. The event, titled "Share the Wealth Expo Day", was the culmination of Community 101, a 14-week education/enrichment program being run at the facility. Dr. Nancy Wolff, director of the university's Center for Behavioral Health Services & Criminal Justice Research, runs the course and invited me to the Expo Day to see what it was all about.

Dr. Wolff is an economist by training, and she spent some time explaining the economics of all of this: 97% of all inmates are going to leave the penal system at some point in their lives, so it makes sense for us to help them become functioning members of society, contributing wealth back into the system, instead of spending taxpayer money only on retribution by simply punishing people for their crimes.

The goal of the program is to help inmates succeed once they leave the prison system. Among other things, inmates learn about anger management, money management, stress management, and how to get identification and other documentation once they leave the prison. They also learn interpersonal skills which will help them while they're incarcerated and once they've left the system.

The bottom line is that Dr. Wolff is trying to build empowerment for these women so that once they're released, they can show society that they are confident and pro-social individuals. She wants them to be able to step away from their labels and become what their potential will allow them to be.

We'll be publishing a Faculty Research Spotlight episode about her research once we've completed the video work that we were hired to do for this program. I look forward to sharing her work with the community.

Sakai Updates - 2/17/09

The following updates were made to Sakai on the Feb 17th restart. Questions about changes can be sent to sakai@rutgers.edu.

Interface

• The "more" dropdown box is now another tab titled "My Active Sites". This tab brings up a menu with your additional sites categorized by semester. Hidden sites will still not appear on this list. You can still change the sites you see in this list and which you always see as tabs through My Workspace -> Preferences -> Customize Tabs.

Resources

• Improved performance for sites with large file repositories

Tests & Quizzes

• Auto-save feature to save student work every 2 minutes
• Ability to import publisher content in more formats

Post'Em

• If a student appears on the spreadsheet to be uploaded but not in the worksite, the error message will now give the student NetID or RU ID# - whichever was listed on the spreadsheet. Previously, only the NetID was returned.

Adding Users to Sites

• Users can now be added to sites via NetID or RU ID#
• When creating a guest account for someone via email address, the site owner has the option to include a first and last name for the user immediately (note: this option is only available if the guest user has not already specified a name)
• Changed wording of notification email sent to users when added to sites
  

Other

• Documentation updates
• Changed wording on some buttons to clarify functionality

Siftables: Computerized Toy Blocks

Information overload

I joined Facebook yesterday, and subscribed to a few RSS feeds using Newswire. I also downloaded a couple of podcasts to listen to on the way to the Mobile Learning 2009 conference next week. And I'm blogging.

But I need help. I am completely overwhelmed with all of the information moving in my direction and don't really know how to filter it. I used to know how to filter information--when it was on paper and microfilm. There were a limited number of books or journal articles to look at--and it was relatively easy to figure out who the experts were in specific areas (citation indexes are a wonderful thing). But now, there's just too much. I scan blogs and want to read everything that a person has posted and everything that they link to. There seems to be an endless number of podcasts that look interesting. And I don't know at all how to get started with Facebook--I "friended" some people I know and looked at their Facebook pages--but I'm not sure what comes next.

I spoke with a "digital native" about this yesterday--and he told me to start with one or two people's blogs--which I did. But they link to SO much interesting stuff--and there are only so many hours in the day.

How do people keep from going insane with information overload?

The Net Generation

I've been reading a lot of books lately about the Net Generation in preparation for a new course I'm teaching at Rutgers. Two of the books are "must-reads" for anyone involved in planning for the future of higher education:

The first book is Mark Prensky's Digital Game Based Learning. Don't let the title fool you--it's about much more than video games. The first five chapters examine the natural ways that the Net Generation learns and how educators are causing students to "power down" in school. Prensky coined the terms, "digital native" and "digital immigrant" and talks about making education learner-centered instead of content-centered.

The second book was released last month. "Grown Up Digital," written by Don Tapscott, identifies eight norms of the Net Generation. In brief, they want freedom, the ability to customize and personalize, entertainment and play in work and education, opportunities to collaborate, speed, opportunities to innovate, corporate integrity and openness, and transparency.

New Undergraduate Research Spotlight episodes posted

I just posted a bunch of new episodes in the Undergraduate Research Spotlight section of our iTunes U site. The students are:

• Niti Mehta - Spanish & Portuguese
• Samantha Farris - Center of Alcohol Studies and Psychology
  
• Preeti Khanolkar - Sociology
• Kristin Howell - Center of Alcohol Studies
  

You can see the videos by going to our iTunes U repository, http://itunes.rutgers.edu. You will need iTunes in order to access the videos. Click here to download iTunes (Mac or PC).

Look for more episodes coming soon!