Shift Happens

I stumbled upon the latest version of the provocative Did You Know? video this weekend. This presentation was first created a few years ago, but went through a nice revamp in late 2008. Watch the most recent version below and leave your thoughts in the comments section.

My main question for you:
What skills does the university need to provide to our students so that they will be able to thrive in this new era?



...and here are some of the more interesting figures they withheld from the current version:

2006 College Graduates:

• United States: 1.3 million


• India: 3.1 million


• China: 3.3 million

Other figures:

• 100% of 2006 college grads in India speak English


• More than 50% of 21-year-olds in the United States have created content on the web.


• More that 70% of 4-year-olds in the United States have used a computer

The History of the Internet

I came across this video which gives a brief (7 minute) history of the Internet. Visually appealing and entertaining, it's quite simple and straight forward. It's not comprehensive of course, but the video does a good job of getting at some of the big ideas. The complete accuracy is questionable in places, but even so I think it's a good overview, especially for those who know little on the topic.

Enjoy!



History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

The art of explanation and the credit crisis

"Explainers" are important these days. That statement alone needs a solid explanation (hence the hyperlink).

Unfortunately in our information age, people are left behind when it comes to understanding complex ideas. This is why it is important (as the article to which I've linked above explains) to sometimes shift your focus from information to explanation. This is part of my job everyday: to translate "geekinese" to English, and explain the complexities that inherently come packaged with most technologies.

Our current credit crisis is very difficult to understand if you're not big into financial lingo. I've seen many different videos that attempted to explain our current credit crisis, but often came away more confused as to how home owners, lenders, bankers, brokers, and investors all fit together into this complex puzzle.

I stumbled upon a video (below) that does an outstanding job of explaining it in plain English. The creator, Jonathan Jarvis, completed this visualization as part of his thesis work in the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.



The video is a little over ten minutes long, but does an outstanding job of keeping the viewer engaged by scaffolding their understanding throughout.

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.

Omnisio: Online video editing

Omnisio is an easy way to edit videos online. For example, you can take a few Youtube videos and splice them together. Academhack found another interesting use for Omnisio:

Omnisio solves one of the problems with making your presentation available online. Before you had to either sink your audio to the slides, and not show yourself talking, or show the video of your presentation at the expense of not always being able to see the slides. No longer. Omnisio allows you to synchronize the video with the slides and show both.