I’m happy to note that Blogs@Baruch received a mention in the annual Horizon Report, a document produced by Educause, an international non-profit organization “whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology.”  Every year the report is read by IT and instructional technology professionals at universities and colleges across the world to get a sense of the current state of technology in higher education, and future directions.  It identifies key trends and critical challenges facing higher education as we attempt to keep pace with the technological needs of modern life, and to continually look for innovative ways to integrate technology into our  functioning and curricula.

The bulk of the study is focused on describing, analyzing, and sharing prime examples of six “technologies to watch,” which are organized by their “time-to-adoption.” Click the image above to download a copy of the report; it’s interesting reading for techies and non-techies alike.  Here’s a summary of the “technologies to watch”:

Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

• Mobiles: making services and information readily available to students and staff on portable devices such as iPhones and Blackberrys.  For an example of what this looks like, see Stanford’s iApps Homepage. 
  
• Cloud Computing: a new way to think about computers, software, and files, which takes advantage of “data farms,” or collections of computers that distribute processing and storage.  You no longer need to run productivity software on your hard drive; Google Apps, for instance, supports word processing, presentations, spreadsheet design, presentations, and calendars that are accessible, shareable, and functional through a web browser, wherever you are.   The vanguard in this development is data intensive cloud computing used by the hard sciences, but this also has implications for students and staff, who, perhaps, need not rely so heavily on Microsoft Office in coming years.  (Though not mentioned in the Horizon Report, last September, CUNY’s Online Baccalaureate began a “Virtual Application Streaming Pilot Project,” a local cloud computing experiment).       
  

Time-to-Adoption: Two to Three Years

• Geo-Everything: mobile phones, cameras, and other handheld devices can now automatically attach “geolocative” information to data they produce, such as photographs and videos.  Researchers and teachers are exploring ways to integrate this functionality into their work via annotated maps, visual narratives, and game-based learning.  See Community Walk and Paint Map for examples.
• The Personal Web: individuals and groups are exploring the “creation of customized, personal web-based environments to support their social, professional, and learning activities using whatever tools they prefer.”  At the Institute, we call this “personal publishing,” and it is the core idea behind Blogs@Baruch, which was mentioned as one of five exemplary “Scholarly Community Blogs” cited in this section.  Other examples of “The Personal Web” include Omeka, an open source software developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which allows anyone with access to a server and a MYSQL installation to build and share online collections of artifacts; and SMARTHistory, an “edited online art history resource to augment or replace traditional art history texts.”

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

• Semantic-Aware Applications: the “semantic web,” according to Wikipedia, “is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” Some refer to this as Web 3.0, or “using the web as what to write with.”  Educause sees the development of “tools that can simply gather the context in which information is couched, and that use that context to extract imbedded meaning.”  Woah.  Few examples of the semantic web in higher education exist.  Patrick Murray-John, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, is exploring what opportunities new tools that look treat online materials as data may have for the studying of teaching, learning, and thinking.
• Smart Objects: “a smart object is simply any physical object that includes a unique identifier that can track information about the object.”  Think about a package that’s tagged with a bar code that is scanned and allows you to track it; or the library book you have that’s way overdue.  Products based on this idea are entering the consumer market, and could be used in archaeology, medicine, and in combination with Geo-Everything approaches.  An example being developed by researchers at the University of Florida would continuously monitor patients for a variety of conditions as they went about their normal lives.

We’re pleased to be included in a report of this magnitude, and to see such a wide variety of innovative deployments of technology.  These are interesting times!

I was recently inspired, no surprise, by a post on Jim Groom’s Bavatuesdays: “A Childhood Without Proof.” This was about as close to schmaltz as the right Rev. Groom comes, and being a sap myself, I appreciated both the content and the tone.

Jim, the 6th of 7th children, was aware of only one photograph of himself as a baby. One.  But last week a Facebook friend from his old neighborhood tagged an image of him at 3.  Jim’s post praises Facebook for being good at connecting people with the past, and at making the sharing of memories so much easier than it was just a few years ago.  It’s not that any of this would have been impossible without Facebook; but it would have been more difficult, perhaps to such an extent that it wouldn’t have happened at all.  That’s a powerful argument that connectivity tools don’t just impact the way that we relate to one another, but also can impact the way we relate to our individual and collective pasts.

This post was on my mind when I began playing with Google Street View, a component of Google Maps that offers street level views of particular locales.  This isn’t a new tool, but Google has been steadily adding images as its van tours and shoots different localities (here’s a list of what’s been added).  I was surprised to see that the neighborhood in which I grew up has been photographed.  North Genesee Drive is of no great consequence — beyond being sandwiched between the neighborhoods that produced Magic Johnson and Malcolm X — but there it is, ready for your virtual tour.

I haven’t been back to my old neighborhood in years, and was pleased that I was able to recreate the bike rides and explorations of my youth, even if through a somehwat antiseptic, Googleized filter.  There was no cutting through yards, lemonade sales, or bullies to run from.  My memory can fill those things in.  Mostly, it was pleasant to visit from my desk in New York.

Here’s a gallery of screen captures; click through for captions.

I recognize that this particular application of the tool appeals to me on a nostalgic level, and while that’s fine for personal blogging and Facebooking and all that, it’s hardly a pedagogical argument.  The images above affect me and the kids I grew up with more than they’ll affect you.

But it’s also pretty easy to see how tools like this, free tools available from your desktop, can be integrated into college curricula.  Studying the Lower East Side at the turn of the century?  Compare the built environment of Hester Street from Jacob Riis’s photographs to images of the area on Google Maps.  Use Google Maps to explore planning and architecture in urban, suburban, and exurban neighborhoods.  What can we learn about Barack Obama from a virtual tour of Hyde Park?  Find images of parks in three different European cities; how does their location and construction reflect their usage?  Locate five “Chinatowns.”  How are they alike or similar in organization?  Writing a term paper on the Atlantic Yards?  Use Google Maps to show how construction will restrict traffic.  The possibilities are endless. Google Maps won’t tell us everything we need to know about any of these topics; but then, no single source will.  A virtual tour of a street or a neighborhood can impart a sense of location and feeling that can augment other information on the path to knowledge.

In the movie below, I use Google Maps to recreate the walk from my home to Verlinden Elementary School.  Yes, again, I know, the nostalgia trap; but I was struck my the sheer number of possible jumping off points for discussion, reflection, and investigation produced just by reliving that two block walk.  There’s something exciting about an exploratory process that encourages one to explore even more.

 blip.tv ?posts_id=1538546&dest=-1]

But, you still need to find the other applications.

Alan Levine, who operates under the nom de bloggue Cog Dog, maintains a master wiki of web tools for digital story telling… it annotates and links to over 60 tools.

Here’s a link to his list.  Feel free contact us with requests for help using these tools, or integrating them with your very own blog on  http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/?p=896 It’s very easy to integrate one, two, many Twitter feeds with a WordPress weblog.  Bring microblogging to your course macroblog.

For feeds that just display your own tweets, you can go to the Twitter badge page  http://twitter.com/badges), select the bottom option (”Other”), and then on the next page choose either the first or third option– “Flash/Just Me” or “HTML Javascript.”

After doing so, and selecting how you want your widget to display, copy the code Twitter gives you, and paste it into a Text widget (available through your Design>Widgets menu).

If you’re interested in having your entire Twitter feed displayed on the sidebar, select the “Flash, With Friends” option.  You can fully customize how your feed displays, and choose whether you want to slap it into a text widget on your sidebar, or embed it somewhere else on your blog (contact me for help with that one).

For faculty members, Twitter offers a unique opportunity to extend the reach of a class into your students’ lives.  All students (should) think about course material at times other than when they are doing their reading of sitting in class; this technology offers you a method to capture those thoughts for later reflection, or to have an ongoing, asynchronous conversation about course material.  Or, if you’re just interested in blasting your students with some short thoughts throughout the day, get yourself a Twitter account, link it into the blog, and let er rip.

If you are working on a blog with native support for Gravatars, or you have activated the WP-Gravatar plugin, you can allow users on your blog to display their Gravatars when they leave a comment on a post.

You can go to Gravatar.com to set up a free account, which will link an image of your choice to one or many email addresses

This is a great way to add some easy customization and personalization to your blogging.

Videos from YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Metacafe, MySpace, AtomFilms, Break, and Revver will embed into your site if you simply paste the URL for the video into the window that opens when click on the yellow “A” button on the right side of the top line of the visual editor.

It looks like this:

You can still embed video from other sites… you just need to turn off the Visual editor and turn on the HTML editor by clicking on the “HTML” tab at the top of the “Write Post” field.  Simply copy the embed code that HULU gives you, and paste it into your post before publishing.  Maybe you’ll also learn a little html in the process.  That never hurt anynobody.

I recently implemented a new design for the homepage for our installation of WordPress MultiUser– Blogs@Baruch.

I tried to accomplish a few things with this redesign. Mostly, I wanted to update the look of the site… the previous version was a bit clunky, a bit 2003 1999, and I didn’t feel it was popping. As I usually say when Mikhail critiques my design (which is often): I’m no great aesthete, and certainly not a graphic artist. But I think this version is markedly better, cleaner, and more inviting. 2008. 2009, even.

The inviting part is really the key, because we’d like to make this page not just a portal to the wide range of blogging being done throughout the Baruch College community, but as a sort of digital commons where ideas and resources and teaching and learning can be shared within the community and beyond. So I’ve tried to structure the new site in a way that makes it easy to share a lot of different kinds of information, and for visitors to peer in and get a sense of how folks are using this technology at Baruch.

The site includes:

A Home Page with featured blogs and links to recently updated and particularly active blogs on the system At the bottom of the homepage, RSS feeds pull in posts from the CUNY News Wire, from the Baruch College Teaching Blog, from Cacophony, and from the Ticker. I’m working on a links list that will be customized for particular pages within the site, and will be using this as a space to tinker, to play with, and to show off the functionality that the Wordpress community is constantly building. All of this is living, and will evolve.

An “About” page with a mission statement about this project :

Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:

• College students should write regularly in all disciplines and in a variety of formats and genres
• Faculty should have available support for their efforts to create avenues for student communication
• Open-source technology has an important role to play in the future of higher education, and colleges will gain much from experimenting with a wide-range of open-source technology solutions
• Community users of centrally-administered software should share both the burden and excitement of innovating with technology. While a strong support network is necessary, a do it yourself ethos should be prominent
• WordPress Multiuser is the most powerful and flexible blogging system available, and can be effectively customized to fulfill a wide range of the communicative needs of the college community

A “Projects” page where visitors can take a look at current and past blogs and sites supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute. About three dozen blogs are linked, though some are password protected. Student blogs– we’ve got about 140 going right now– are not linked from this page.

A “Blog on Blogging,” where we’ll draw attention to specific things happening throughout the system and make announcement that might be of interest to our users. This space will, over time, we hope, merge with what’s under the “Support” area, where I’m going to be adding to and refining what I hope are helpful materials– FAQs, a manual for Wordpress customized for users of this system, suggestions for using weblogs in college teaching, instructional screencasts, and handouts for faculty to use and adapt. The manual is in need of an overhaul, and this section will be tightened considerably in the coming weeks.

A “Contact” page for visitors to easily contact us. Features a reCaptcha, for those curious.

Ultimately, we hope users and visitors will find this helpful, and will share in and contribute to the information it provides. Scott Leslie recently wrote a powerhouse blog post on the ethics of and obstacles to sharing in higher education. Leslie argues that institution-driven, overly-organized approaches to sharing tend to halt and stutter, while organic, individualized networks are more likely to thrive. He posits lots of ideas about why and how this is, and concludes ultimately that planning to share gets in the way of actually doing it. I take and sympathize with his point.

At the same time, I think the technology that eases sharing is still relatively underused and also undertheorized at Baruch and throughout CUNY. One of our goals is to model just what a distributed learning environment is. We’ll be using this new space to push, to compile, and to provide paths to useful information for our wildly diverse range of users. It will ultimately be up to the users of the system to find value, and maybe to contribute some of their own.

The beauty is that they can do that just by getting a blog and sharing their work with the world. If there’s value, and it’s put out there, it will be found.

In the interest of practicing what I preach– and since I totally relied on the fruits of the Google as I designed the new home for Blogs@Baruch– click beneath the fold for some techie detail on the redesign. If the words “CSS,” “widgets,” “plugin,” “Wordpress theme,” “hackalicious,” and “pwnd” mean nothing to you, no need to read on….

• This new site is based on the Thematic Wordpress Theme Framework, which offers 13 different widgetized areas, and the ability to develop child themes using CSS that will allow you to maintain your customized style through theme upgrades. I should have probably created a child style, but I didn’t figure out how to do so until I was already deep into hacking away at the some of the php and css files. This might come back to bite me later on, but I’m rather sanguine at this point that I can dig myself out of holes I’ve dug myself into.
• Customization, made possible by a secured version of the Userthemes Management plugin: in the Thematic file structure, I’ve hacked the following files:
  • Sidebar.php: added search and login code
  • Header.php: added click to get home, hacked out the branding code, and tweaked the menu
  • Footer.php: added “Baruch is CUNY” logo, and moved site info down a div tag
  • Library/extensions/hooks-filters.php: added code to make “home” button appear in menu
  • Library/styles/default.css, I hacked to bits; I also an images folder to hold the footer and header images.. the header image is from the Baruch College Visual Standards library of images
  • I made a couple of changes to Library/layouts/2-c-r-fixed.css, which controls spacing of the different areas of the blog
  • I created two Page templates for displaying mediawiki pulls and screencasts without interference from sidebars
• Active plugins:
  • Dagon Design Mailer for the contact page, with reCaptcha active
  • Flickr Badge Widget, to show those Baruch photos on the front
  • Widget Logic, to control what widgets appear on what pages
  • Wiki Inc, to link to the wiki where our manual lives
    • I had some problem with the Wiki Inc plugin, so much of the support section is actually written directly into Wordpress, save the FAQs and the screencasts. For some reason, I can’t get images to pull. Brian Lamb and Scott McMillan from the University of British Columbia, who work in the group that produced the plugin, generously gave me some of their time, but we couldn’t get it going. I’ll return to that, because it’s a kick-ass function.

That’s all for my anatomy of a hack. So easy, even a historian can do it. If you have any ideas for additional enhancements, please share them.