Teaching with Technology @ Tufts

At this year's UIT Summer Institute for Teaching with Technology, faculty participants were intrigued with the variety of opportunities and challenges Web 2.0 technologies and mashups are presenting to higher education. Guest speaker Joan Getman, Senior Strategist for Learning Technologies at Cornell took us on a whirlwind tour of the world of possibilities and David Grogan, UIT Manager, Curricular Technology Group, demonstrated creating a mashup with Spark blog and wiki tools, RSS feeds and Google Maps.

In my web wanderings this week, I came across two mashups that demonstrate wonderful examples of interactive learning. These examples came from the Web Designs for Interactive Learning site (WDIL), a "community-driven source of information and inspiration for developing interactive educational websites."

This site is sponsored by the Informal Science Education program at the National Science Foundation, and maintained by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) and the Exploratorium.

The first mashup that intrigued me was The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr.

This online exhibit explores photographer John Collier Jr's work depicting daily life in America during World War II and was developed with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. "Flickr mashups are used to pull in photographs that make up the Collection and one of the interactive activities. In addition to exploring Collier's photographs, visitors can create their own short videos using graphics, photographs and clips from that era."

Continuing with the theme of mashups, the revamped EDUCAUSE Connect site pulls in resources and contents from throughout the EDUCAUSE site (replacing the old Resources section) and highlights member blog and wikis posts.

Other features of the new site include an improved interface, taxonomy and folksonomy integration, the ability to comment on content, and extensive RSS capabilities.

The topic-centered Browse pages now have tabs for both new and popular content, enabling you to see trends that emerge over time. You can find what you're looking for more quickly with the faceted information search feature and view content in either tabular or table formats.

A posting in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired News about Columbia University and Google caught my eye recently.

"Nearly 100 hours of lectures, interviews, and courses from Columbia University will go up on Google Video, the Columbia University library system announced today. Much of the newly available video will be science-related, such as the Seminars on Sustainable Development, at Columbia's Earth Institute, and the university's Frontiers of Science courses.Among other offerings will be lectures and interviews on the architecture of New York City from Andrew S. Dolkart, a Columbia professor of architecture who is a nationally known expert on the city's history and design."

UC Berkeley was the first university with its own page on the Google Video Web site