Kari Swanson, Acting Head of the Science Libraries, took us on a tour of Second Life with her avatar Kari Meadowbrook. Second Life is a 3-dimensional online environment populated by graphical representations (avatars) of over 1 million people. Kari explained how Second Life offers the potential for radical changes in the way information and services are provided, and also in the way teaching and research are conducted in traditional and new, innovative ways. She walked us through some of education hotspots in Second Life such as Info Island, the New Media Consortium Island, and the ICT Library. While in the ICT Library she pointed out how users have access to educational materials such as powerpoints, blogs, flickr photos, posers, online newspapers, and other information sources. There is even something called Think Press, which allows Second Life users to publish a book in the virtual environment.

See Kari’s presentation for more information.

Kari explained that a Second Life account is free unless you want an island. The Instructional Technology Group at Yale has an Island, Elihu Island, where some experimentation is going on. Second Life offers free space to any first time teacher in the virtual environment and it was observed that distance education seems to be the primary educational use of Second Life.

Ken Panko, Manager of the Instructional Technology Group, spoke about ways in which his group has explored Second Life. He made it clear that, although there are many educational spots in Second Life, there are also many places and interactions that happen in Second Life that are not appropriate for education, i.e. mature content. Ken mentioned a few education projects:

1. student curated exhibitions using digitized images from the Yale University Art Gallery. The gallery walls were replicated in Second Life and students can hang an exhibit in the virtual space.
2. the industrial ecology department (engineering, environmental studies, and chemistry) is using Second Life for meetings and collaborations.
3. the Mudd Library may undergo renovations in the near future so the ITG group is partnering with the New Media Consortium to build a model of the Mudd Library in Second Life for planning purposes.

Many of us are familiar with the most basic capabilities of Google Maps: finding a street, getting driving directions, and switching to “Satellite” view to see our homes and other favorite places from above.

In this week’s Teaching with Technology Tuesdays presentation, Sandy Isenstadt, Assistant Professor in History of Art, shared two examples of activities he conducted with his students that made use of Google’s tools for creating custom maps.

First, Sandy showed his class blog for BRST440, Modern British Architecture, from summer 2007. The blog linked to a custom Google Map of London, which showed the locations of building students had chosen for their final projects: studying and writing about buildings on which no secondary literature was available. Locations on the map can link to notes and other information about the buildings.

This spring, students in the course HSAR462, Shops and Shopping, are using Google Maps to organize their study of the histories of New Haven retail establishments. As he planned the course, Sandy knew he wanted to impress upon students that where things occur in space matters to their histories. Google Maps met his need for a visualization tool–a way to help students become accustomed to thinking in urban terms. Students used a variety of sources found online and in Yale’s own collections (such as directories, athletic programs, and student publications) to conduct a spacial and temporal study of New Haven shops. The class’s Google Map shows retail locations and their movements over time, and links to detailed write-ups submitted by students.

( A portion of the custom map created by the students in the Shops and Shopping course.)

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Seth Fein, Professor of History, demonstrated and discussed how class blogs have been used for the last few semesters in his classes. In his current course on Film and History he and his students are using a WordPress blog set up with the help of Yale’s Instructional Technology Group. Fein uses a lot of multimedia in his teaching and the blog offers an easy-to-use tool for him and his students to engage with primary source material, creating posts that include images and video clips (some of which the students have created and edited).

Fein was careful to point out that the use of the blog technology is driven by the pedagogical objectives of his course which include understanding history beyond the screen and analyzing how historical periods, particularly the 1930s, are portrayed in film. The blog enables students to spend more time with the media used in class, and are therefore more engaged with that media. He cited three impacts the use of the blogs is having in his courses. They improve the use of class time because students are more prepared; the uploading of video clips prepare students for a final project involving the production of a video; and finally, the public forum of the blog has seemed to encourage the creativity and quality of the students’ writing.

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Gregory Eow, Kaplanoff Librarian for American History, demonstrated Zotero’s features and discussed the research and teaching applications of Zotero. He explained that Zotero was developed at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Zotero is Albanian for “to grab.” It is a free extension for Firefox that helps with digital research to collection, manage, and cite research sources. Similar to Refworks and Endnote, Zotero allows you to retrieve citations from library catalogs, Amazon, and databases. Unlike Refwords and Endnote, Zotero allows you to go beyond citations enabling tagging, annotations, the downloading of full-text articles, and capturing images and other media (tour of functionality).

Greg demonstrated how you can bring in citations from Orbis, the Yale Library Catalog, and from Historical Newspapers Complete. Zotero is only 18 months old so there are issues related to the import of citations that are not fully worked out yet. Some catalogs and databases work better than others. Another caveat that Greg gave is that Zotero is at the moment essentially client-based, meaning all your saved citations, notes, tags, etc. are all saved to you computer, not to a server as they are with Endnote and Refworks. This means you can only use Zotero from your own computer and you have to back up your Zotero files occasionally in case something happens to your computer. A server version of Zotero is forthcoming that will solve both these problems.

Zotero supports all media files including video, audio, and images. A snapshot features enables you to capture full text articles from databases such as JSTOR. When you have captured the snapshot you can then highlight within the article and also insert annotations. It is possible to import citations form Endnote or Refworks directly into Zotero.

For those interested in a hands-on demonstration of Zotero, there will be a workshop on April 11 from 11:-00 – 12:00 in Bass Library L06. Please bring your laptop if you have one so we can help install Zotero on your computer.