This session was delivered by Ian McDermott, Yale’s Visual Literacy Instruction Fellow. Ian began by showing a number of examples of interactive timelines you can find on the Internet. They included:

• the SIMILE project out of MIT which has created an open source timeline. Pam Patterson from ITG showed an example of SIMILE in action at Yale for the Ancient Jewish Diaspora Archive.
• the Timeline of Art History on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website. Their timeline allows you browse thematically or by era or region.
• a timeline from the Digital History initiative at the University of Houston.

He also demonstrated a feature that Google has made available to plot Google search results on a timeline. You can use this by typing something like the following in a Google search: John Steinbeck view:timeline

Ian then switched gears to go in depth on the Andy Warhol Timeline, a project he worked on as the Research Coordinator at the Andy Warhol Museum before coming to Yale. The timeline is available on the Internet but is also available in the Museum to interact with on a touch screen.

[youtube QZE6MmEo9HY&rel=0]

Continue reading →

Barbara Rockenbach welcomed everyone to the Collaborative Learning Center, an entity created to bring together course supporters and others across campus interested in teaching and learning. After remarking on the great turnout for our “spring break edition” of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays, Barbara introduced Ian McDermott, Visual Literacy Fellow in the University Library.

Ian’s topic was Flickr (www.flickr.com), a website on which users can store, organize, and share their own photos and search photos shared by others. Users can attach metadata to their own photos, including tagging them with keywords, and they can also contribute to Flickr’s usefulness by adding tags to others’ photos. Ian began by asking for a show of hands to see how many people use Flickr now. About half of us in the room use it already, mostly for posting our own photos or looking at other people’s personal collections.

Continue reading →

Yesterday’s Teaching w/ Technology session highlighted funding opportunities for teaching at Yale. Most of the instructional innovation grants discussed can be found at http://www.yale.edu/iig/.

Brad Gano from the Center for Language Study (CLS) spoke about funding for language teachers for purchasing course materials, travel for course enhancement, and support for instructional innovation. He also explained how the CLS can be helpful in the grant writing process. He also mentioned the opportunity for all non-ladder faculty to apply for a 1 semester leave for research and course preparation (this is not limited to language faculty).

Continue reading →

Emily Horning gave an introduction to social bookmarking. Demonstrating del.icio.us, she pointed out misspellings and tag inconsistency. She showed citeulike.org and demonstrated PennTags where the scope of the sites bookmarked is more focused. However, I’m still not sure what distinguishes the user experience on these sites from other social bookmarking sites.

Jen Pollock from the Yale Center for British Art then showed a del.icio.us project she’s working on while auditing Tim Barringer’s History of Art class HSAR305 – London: Capital of the 19th Century. The students jump to del.icio.us through a link in Classes*v2. The students in the class all login using the same account to add their bookmarks and the tagging structure is evolving. Ms. Pollock prefers showing the tags as a tag cloud because of the way it visually represents popular tags.

Continue reading →