Chronicle - Wired Campus

New Media Consortium Names 10 Top ‘Metatrends’ Shaping Educational Technology

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 19:58

A group of education leaders gathered last week to discuss the most important technology innovations of the last decade, and their findings suggest the classroom of the future will be open, mobile, and flexible enough to reach individual students—while free online tools will challenge the authority of traditional institutions.

The retreat celebrated the 10th anniversary of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, whose annual report provides a road map of the education-technology landscape. One hundred experts from higher education, K-12, and museum education identified 28 “metatrends” that will influence education in the future. The 10 most important, according to a New Media Consortium announcement about the retreat, include global adoption of mobile devices, the rise of cloud computing, and transparency movements that call into question traditional notions of content ownership concerning digital materials.

Larry Johnson, the consortium’s chief executive, said the meeting was important because it brought together groups from three different education sectors that don’t often collaborate. He said the retreat intended to “drive a conversation around how to think about the future.”

Of the top 10 trends the group flagged, Mr. Johnson said one of the most interesting conversations to emerge was about open data and open-educational resources. As the group discussed these issues, he said, the participants began to think about transparency “as a value” rather than a buzzword.

Later this year, the consortium will build on its retreat by publishing videos of the event, hosting a series of social-media conversations, and writing a more extensive report on its findings.

UPDATE: Here are the top 10 trends from the report:

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and time zones. Not only are teams geographically diverse, they are also culturally diverse.

2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone, tablet, and ereader. People now expect a seamless experience across all their devices.

3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network — and already is at its edges. Mobithinking reports there are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts. 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well, and 85% of new devices can access the mobile web.

4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. Our current expectation is that the network has almost infinite capacity and is nearly free of cost. One hour of video footage is uploaded every second to YouTube; over 250 million photos are sent to Facebook every day.

5. Openness — concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information — is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media.

6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. In an age where so much of our information, records, and digital content are in the cloud, and often clouds in other legal jurisdictions, the very concept of ownership is blurry.

7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. Access to learning in any form is a challenge in too many parts of the world, and efficiency in learning systems and institutions is increasingly an expectation of governments — but the need for solutions that scale often trumps them both. Innovations in these areas are increasingly coming from unexpected parts of the world, including India, China, and central Africa.

8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information and media are paramount.

9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia — and worldwide. As a result, credibility, validity, and control are all notions that are no longer givens when so much learning takes place outside school systems.

10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Libraries are deeply reimagining their missions; colleges and universities are struggling to reduce costs across the board. The educational ecosystem is shifting, and nowhere more so than in the world of publishing, where efforts to reimagine the book are having profound success, with implications that will touch every aspect of the learning enterprise.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Brett Jordan]

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Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics

Mon, 01/30/2012 - 23:50

The eminent mathematician Timothy Gowers vows to do no work for Elsevier.

Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important journals; the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning mathematician.

Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900  scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal.

The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available.

Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an open-publishing advocate, signed the pledge and wrote that “With the moves of these megapublishers, we [are] seeing the beginning of monopoly control of the scholarly record.” Benjamin R. Seyfarth, an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote that “nearly all university research is funded by the public and should be available for free.”

The idea has echoed around the academic blogosphere, picking up endorsements. Elsevier itself has remained silent, though it may release a statement on Tuesday. There are occasional defenders in the blog comments, such as this response to the blog Crooked Timber’s rallying cry for the boycott: “As a neuroscientist, Elsevier journals are an important factor in publication choice. Losing a crucial set of publication outlets to a poorly informed rally against this company will certainly damage the integrity of the scientific record in my field.”

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Stalled ‘Hubble Telescope of Supercomputers’ Resumes Construction

Mon, 01/30/2012 - 22:56

A football-field-size computer room at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been sitting nearly empty for months, waiting for parts, in a stalled effort to build what researchers are calling the “Hubble telescope of supercomputers.” IBM, the original supplier, abruptly withdrew from the project last summer just as it was to deliver racks of computer servers, forcing the university to shop for new parts for the unique project.

Last week dozens of computer servers began arriving—this time from Cray, the project’s new supplier. IBM had fallen behind its original schedule to have the supercomputer up and running sometime in 2011. Officials at Urbana-Champaign say that Cray will now deliver a computer more quickly than IBM actually could have, and that the resulting machine is expected to be faster and 10 percent cheaper to build.

“It will be much more attractive to the overall science community,” argues William Kramer, deputy project director for the supercomputer, which is known as Blue Waters. When the building-size machine is completed later this year, it is expected to be the fastest computer devoted entirely to civilian research.

Naturally there are some drawbacks to the new system compared to the original plan. The IBM computer would have included some experimental “interconnects” between servers, which are becoming a key aspect of supercomputer design. The Cray system uses a different technology, and Mr. Kramer acknowledged that the IBM design had “different and possibly some better aspects.” That said, the Cray machine is expected to run all the same experiments as originally planned.

[Photo of Blue Waters supercomputer building courtesy of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign]

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Some Associations, Scholars Protest Bill That Would Curb Public Access to Research

Wed, 01/25/2012 - 23:16

Opposition to the Research Works Act continues to spread. In a statement posted today on its Web site, the Modern Language Association said it opposes the bill, HR 3699, which would prevent federal agencies from requiring researchers to make the published results of federally supported research available to the public without publishers’ consent. That would undo public-access mandates such as the National Institute of Health’s, under which federal-grant recipients must deposit copies of their papers in the PubMed Central repository within a year of publication.

“Unnecessary limits on the free flow of ideas compromise a robust exchange of information and knowledge,” the MLA’s president, Michael Bérubé, said in the statement. “In reviewing the language of the Research Works Act and considering the implications of its provisions, the MLA concludes that this legislation has significant negative ramifications for the future of public access to scholarly material and research.” Mr. Bérubé is a professor of English at Penn State University.

The association is also a publisher, and in today’s statement it said that “a publisher’s ability to earn revenue from the services that it provides need not be hindered by the provision of broad public access to scholarly work.” The Association of American Publishers supports the bill, although not all of its members agree with that position. The open-access advocate Peter Suber has created a running list of scholarly publishers and associations who support or oppose the bill. Other associations on the opposing side include the International Society for Computational Biology, the American Physical Society, and the Society for Cultural Anthropology.

Opposition has also taken root among researchers. Some scholars have called on colleagues to withhold scholarly labor from publishers who support the act. Meanwhile, almost 400 researchers have signed a pledge to boycott the journal publisher Elsevier over high subscription prices and its support of controversial legislation, including the Research Works Act. A separate petition against the bill has gathered close to 10,000 signatures. “Results of scholarship (particularly that which is funded by the public) is a global public good,” one signer wrote. “The commercialization and commodification of scholarship is not acceptable.”

Librarians are also tracking the Research Works Act. At the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting this week, David Prosser, the executive director of Research Libraries U.K., described the bill as “audacious in the extreme,” according to a report in Library Journal. He said, “It just seems quite bizarre that they should attempt to appropriate the intellectual capital of researchers that has been funded by the taxpayer and then call it a private research work.”

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Fair-Use Guide Seeks to Solve Librarians’ VHS-Cassette Problem

Wed, 01/25/2012 - 14:32

The Association of Research Libraries might have a solution to what some librarians call “the VHS-cassette problem.”

Here’s the scenario: An academic library has a collection of video tapes that is slowly deteriorating, thanks to the fragile nature of analog media. A librarian would like to digitize the collection for future use, but avoids making the copies out of fear that doing so would violate copyright law. And the institution’s attorneys have advised the librarian that the fair-use principle, which might offer a way to make copies legally, is too flexible to rely on.

When the Association of Research Libraries and a team of fair-use advocates surveyed librarians to find out how they navigate copyright issues, many of them described that exact conundrum. But they may soon have a way out. Tomorrow the group will announce a code of best practices designed to outline ways academic librarians can take advantage of their fair-use rights to navigate common copyright issues.

The new code is one of a series published with the help of Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, a pair of American University scholars known for pushing back against the restrictions of copyright law. The duo has helped several professional communities develop similar codes. Brandon Butler, director of public-policy initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries, said this guide is different than early fair-use guidelines for libraries, which he described as narrowly crafted “safe harbors” that had the unintended effect of making it more difficult for librarians to do their jobs. Mr. Butler said this version gives librarians a collective voice that they haven’t enjoyed in the past.

“It’s not meant to be a legal memo handed down from on high telling librarians, We the lawyers have told you here are your rights,” he said. “It’s meant actually to be exactly the opposite of that. It’s meant to be a brief from the librarians to the lawyers saying, We know a little bit about fair use too, and here’s what we think are our rights.”

The team assembled the code during nearly 40 hours of group discussions with research librarians, Mr. Butler said. It identifies eight common library practices to which the fair-use principle can be applied, like making special-collections items available electronically and creating digital versions of library materials for patrons with disabilities. Each principle includes a set of limitations and enhancements that further specify how a fair-use claim can be made. A consensus about the eight items did not emerge immediately, Mr. Butler said, especially when some of the principles discussed material posted on the Web.

“There’s a kind of feeling that if you do something on the Internet, that’s especially dangerous,” he said. “We’ve been doing physical exhibits for time immemorial, but once it’s on the Internet, anyone in the world can see it and maybe they could even copy it. And that creates a special heartburn.”

Eventually, the groups realized that self-censoring their online activities would be contrary to their mission as librarians.

“Should we really be limiting what we do out of this kind of generic fear of the Internet?” Mr. Butler asked. “Or can we think this through and find a way to make it fair use if we do it right?”

Despite its well-meaning mission, the code is not devoid of controversial statements: It says explicitly that it was not negotiated with rights holders. Mr. Butler said the group chose not to include them because negotiations between rights holders and professional communities often result in what he called “really weak tea.” The groups usually only agree on principles that scratch the surface of what they really believe, he said. And the librarians thought it was essential to articulate some common fair-use principles, even if there are risks involved.

“There’s a risk of liability in the fair-use realm, but there’s also a risk to the mission if you don’t do anything in the fair-use realm, and these are some things that we think are important to do,” he said.

Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by MikeBlogs

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Stanford Professor Gives Up Teaching Position, Hopes to Reach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

Mon, 01/23/2012 - 21:53

The Stanford University professor who taught an online artificial-intelligence course to more than 160,000 students has abandoned his teaching position to aim for an even bigger audience.

Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford, revealed today that he had given up his teaching role at the institution to found Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online classes. He made the surprising announcement during a presentation at the Digital–Life–Design conference, in Munich, Germany. The development was first reported earlier today by Reuters.

During his talk, Mr. Thrun explored the origins of his popular online course at Stanford, which initially featured videos produced with nothing more than “a camera, a pen, and a napkin.” Despite the low production quality, many of the 200 Stanford students taking the course in the classroom flocked to the videos because they could absorb the lectures at their own pace. Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with the interactive tools of the Web that recreated the intimacy of one-on-one tutoring, he said.

Mr. Thrun told the crowd his move had been motivated in part by teaching practices that evolved too slowly to be effective. During the era when universities were born, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information. We had the industrialization, we had the invention of celluloid, of digital media, and, miraculously, professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago,” he said.

He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a traditional setting. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said.

One of Udacity’s first offerings will be a seven-week course called “Building a Search Engine.” It will be taught by David Evans, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Virginia and a Udacity partner. Mr. Thrun said it was designed to teach students with no prior programming experience how to build a search engine like Google. He hopes 500,000 students will enroll.

Teaching the course at Stanford, Mr. Thrun said, showed him the potential of digital education, which turned out to be a drug that he could not ignore.

“I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill,” he said. “And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”

Correction (1/26, 11:54 a.m.): This article originally reported incorrectly that Mr. Thrun was leaving Stanford in order to pursue his start-up venture. In fact, Mr. Thrun has only left his tenured teaching position at the university, and remains an untenured research professor there. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.

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Campus Reactions to Apple’s Entry Into E-Textbook Market

Sun, 01/22/2012 - 21:42

Last week Apple released free software to make e-books for the iPad, declaring that the company intended to “reinvent the textbook.” Apple also updated its iTunesU service, first released four years ago, to make it possible for professors to put syllabi, lecture videos and audio recordings, and e-textbooks into one spot for students.College administrators and professors had mixed reactions to the news: some said it could spur far greater adoption of digital textbooks, while others criticized the product for relying too heavily on Apple products, leaving out key support for PC’s and tablets running Android software.

Below are some points made by campus leaders, in interviews or on their blogs:

Making it easy-to-create books will help authors keep textbooks more up-to-date.
“Providing constant content updates through the Cloud is key,” argues Jed Macosko, associate professor of physics at Wake Forest University, in an analysis he published on the university’s PR Web site. “Educators will be able to create more quickly and for free, which lowers costs and improves accessibility for students. Some people might worry that content will become unreliable, but what we’ve seen with Wikipedia is that the cream of the crop typically rises to the top.”

Apple’s announcement is far from revolutionary, and in fact locks content in the company’s products.
“What a lost opportunity,” wrote Audrey Watters, on her Hack Education blog. “If this is a revolutionary announcement about reshaping textbooks and educational content, we must ask revolutionary for whom? For wealthy schools? For students who have iPads at home and parents willing to pay out of pocket for supplementary textbook materials? For publishers?” The passionate post drew cheers on Twitter from many professors. As David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, Tweeted, “this isn’t about ‘changing everything’ for education, is about reconfiguring the business models of textbooks ie who profits.”

Apple will likely refine its e-textbooks over time, as it did with the iPod and iPhone.
“Instead of expecting Apple to save education, why don’t you appreciate the waves they’re making in the water and use that momentum to keep the conversation focused and moving?,” argued Tim Owens, on his blog. He noted that the iPhone was criticized at first because it lacked some hoped-for features, but the company has added many of them in subsequent releases. “We got a lot of interesting things today, and all I hear are people unhappy,” he added. “When we set the ship on fire before it has even made it out of the dock we’ll never get to sail.”

The spotlight on e-textbooks will help all players.
Even if Apple’s new products don’t catch on, the media frenzy around its announcement helped raise interest in digital offerings, said Kyle D. Bowen, Purdue University’s director of informatics. “The most important outcome of yesterday’s announcement was to bring mainstream attention to textbooks and the issue of e-textbooks,” he added. “Textbooks are really kind of an outdated form of delivering this content, and we see somebody trying to come up with something slightly different.” Mr. Bowen and his team at Purdue have built their own build-a-textbook tool, called JetPack.

More professors will try making custom textbooks for their courses.
“If there were a way to ‘publish’ a book only targeting my class, by converting those outlines I’ve made into short chapters on each topic, well… Why not?” writes Chris Wolverton, a biology professor at Ohio Wesleyan University, on his blog. He says he could quickly take his notes and slides and crank out an e-book with Apple’s new authoring software. Though only students with iPads could easily view the full multimedia version, he could distribute a PDF for other students. “Having the freedom and flexibility to put together a little book to accompany a specialty course is an attractive idea to me, one that I plan to experiment with.”

Alumni offices and other departments can now enter the e-book world.
“While Apple is aiming this at textbook authors and publishers, there’s no reason we can’t easily create rich multimedia versions of our college magazines using it,” argued Mike Richwalsky, director of marketing services at John Carroll University. “Apple just made it redonkulously easy to put your alumni magazine on the iPad—and, best of all, they did it for free.”

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

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Students’ Video Game Tests New Artificial-Intelligence Engine — at the Prom

Fri, 01/20/2012 - 16:54

Few rituals conjure a storm of emotions like the high-school prom. Some remember the night forever, and others try to forget it as soon as they leave the gym.

A team of students at the University of California at Santa Cruz saw opportunity in that pre-prom angst. They used their new artificial intelligence engine to build an online game that re-creates the prom and all of its attendant social scheming. The designers say their experiment, dubbed Prom Week, makes social interactions richer and less predictable than those of other games on the market.

In the game, players help high-school characters realize their prom-night dreams, such as claiming the prom king’s crown or brokering peace with a rival. Players lead characters through social interactions with their peers, and each choice influences how the characters’ relationships evolve. Prom Week lets players achieve their goals by developing relationships organically instead of embarking on a predetermined path.

On one game level, the player directs Chloe through “the most terrifying moment of her life”: asking Doug (identified as a cute boy from algebra class) out on a date. The player can tell Chloe to flirt, brag, share an interest, or use other tactics to woo her would-be date; Chloe’s relationship with Doug changes based on the player’s choice. Her prom-night experience, good or bad, is dictated by the player’s success in accomplishing her goals. As the player progresses, other characters are unlocked, leading to levels at which the player has to interact with more characters to change the social landscape of the digital high school.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz and member of the team that developed Prom Week, said the game is unique because its characters’ actions have meaningful, realistic consequences. Many social interactions in popular games like The Sims, he said, are either scripted or so routine that they reduce complex relationships to simple transactions. Prom Week’s characters, by contrast, have complicated histories and personalities, thanks to the game’s innovative “social physics engine” that governs behavior.

“Social physics is an attempt to make game play that’s about relationships, where you still have strategy, you still have actions you can take and not take, but what you’re thinking about is how these characters feel about each other and what they want to accomplish in life,” he said.

The game captures the “human messiness” of real-life social interactions, which are not always predictable, said Mary Flanagan, the director of Tiltfactor, a design lab at Dartmouth College that investigates social issues through games.“Sometimes, in a lot of our computational models, the reactions we get are logical,” she said. “And in real life, they’re not.” The emotionally charged setting of the high-school prom, though it may seem melodramatic, is really a useful place to explore how people process cause and effect in emotional ways, Ms. Flanagan said.

Mr. Wardrip-Fruin said he hopes social games like Prom Week can have an influence beyond the gaming community. His lab is part of the Siren Project, an effort to create conflict-resolution games that will be used in European schools.

Prom Week has been selected as a finalist in technical excellence at the upcoming Independent Game Festival in San Francisco, and is the only nominated work created by a university team. It will be released on Facebook and other platforms on Valentine’s Day.

[Image courtesy Noah Wardrip-Fruin]

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Company Powering Apple’s Siri Introduces Education Site of Its Own

Thu, 01/19/2012 - 22:22

The influential company providing brainpower for the iPhone personal assistant, Siri, has joined the group of education firms debuting new products around the time of Apple’s entry into the e-textbook market.

Wolfram Research, whose Wolfram Alpha engine provides Siri’s fact-finding abilities, unveiled its Wolfram Education Portal yesterday. The new site brings Wolfram’s learning tools and teaching resources together under one tent. It includes an interactive textbook, lesson plans, and demonstrations created with Mathematica, the company’s computing software. Course materials for algebra and calculus have already been posted, with more soon to come.

Students who are working on a problem can click on “hot spots,” which will take them to Wolfram Alpha’s site for the solution and an explanation, according to Crystal Fantry, a senior educational outreach specialist at Wolfram Research. Ms. Fantry added that the demonstrations section allows students to work on visual representations of problems by sliding bars and clicking on boxes.

“That’s a very easy way for students to hands-on understand a concept,” she said.

Wolfram’s new site arrives during a week full of educational-technology announcements. Yesterday, the e-textbook rental company Chegg showed off a new e-reader that allows students to read texts on any device. The browser-based reader is powered by HTML5, and it will let students highlight text, add notes, and ask questions of fellow readers as they go along. Wolfram’s portal, Ms. Fantry said, will evolve to include problem generators for practice and videos.

Students will have to register for a free account to access the material, though Ms. Fantry said the company might create a subscription model after the portal is officially released (the site is now in beta). Visitors also need to download a copy of Wolfram’s document-player software to see the content.

As for the fortuitous timing of the site’s introduction, which took place on the eve of Apple’s big event, Ms. Fantry said it was a fluke and not part of Wolfram’s strategy.

“It just happened to be a happy coincidence that both were released very close to each other,” she said.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by lednichenkoolga]

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Online Course Provider, StraighterLine, to Offer Critical-Thinking Tests to Students

Thu, 01/19/2012 - 17:29

As alternatives to the college diploma have been bandied about recently, one question always seems to emerge: How do you validate badges or individual classes as a credential in the absence of a degree?

One company that has been hailed by some as revolutionizing introductory courses might have an answer.

The company, StraighterLine, announced on Thursday that beginning this fall it will offer students access to three leading critical-thinking tests, allowing them to take their results to employers or colleges to demonstrate their proficiency in certain academic areas.

The tests—the Collegiate Learning Assessment, sponsored by the Council for Aid to Education, and the Proficiency Profile, from the Educational Testing Service—each measure critical thinking and writing, among other academic areas. The iSkills test, also from ETS, measures the ability of a student to navigate and critically evaluate information from digital technology.

Until now, the tests were largely used by colleges to measure student learning, but students did not receive their scores. That’s one reason that critics of the tests have questioned their effectiveness since students have little incentive to do well.

Burck Smith, the founder and chief executive of StraighterLine, which offers online, self-paced introductory courses, said on Thursday that students would not need to take classes with StraighterLine in order to sit for the tests. But he hopes that, for students who do take both classes and tests, the scores on the test will help validate StraighterLine courses.

StraighterLine doesn’t grant degrees and so can’t be accredited. It depends on accredited institutions to accept its credits, which has not always been an easy task for the company.

“For students looking to get a leg up in the job market or getting into college,” Mr. Smith said, “this will give them a way to show they’re proficient in key academic areas.”

Mr. Smith said many details of the program, dubbed My Line, still need to be worked out, including price. He expects the cost of a test will probably be under $100.

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Live Blogging the Apple Education Announcement

Thu, 01/19/2012 - 11:52

New York — Apple managed to make news simply by announcing that it would hold a press conference on the topic of education. All week long, other education-technology companies have seized the moment to push out their own announcements, trying to ride a wave of mainstream attention to how technology is changing education.

This morning starting at 10 a.m. EST, the company is set to make its announcement, and The Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog, along with the ProfHacker blog, will be there, posting live updates.

[Update: Below is an archive of our live blogging. For more coverage, see a story in The Chronicle and a post on the ProfHacker blog.]

——

10:57: Presentation is over. Now we’ll have a chance to demo the new software tools here. Stay tuned for a Chronicle article later today.

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@kfitz: Back to Phil. “Apple exists at the intersection between liberal arts and technology.”

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10:54: Phil S. back on stage: Sounds like things might be wrapping up. Will there be “one more thing”?

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10:52: Universities have already created over 100 full online courses in iTunesU, and they’re free. As of today, K-12 schools can sign up too.

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@kfitz: Outline for course gives complete syllabus; can be customized with stuff like office hours.

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10:49: Integration between iBook reader and iTunesU, so it can keep track for students how far along they are in their homework.

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10:47: Want to let teachers create full online courses. Everything you need to make a course. New app announced to support this new iTunesU.

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10:45: Apple rep back on stage. Next announcement, something new with iTunes U. They call it the world’s largest catalog of educational content. Not sure if that’s really true though.

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@kfitz: Superintendent of LA Unified School District: interactive textbooks will create huge leaps in what’s possible for students.

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@kfitz: Video demo of textbooks: fast, fluid navigation, interactive objects, note taking, etc.

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@kfitz: “There is no reason today to assume that students have to use the same tools as 1950. To do so is to prepare them for a world already past.”

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10:37: Another video of high-school teachers talking. They’re complaining about negatives of current textbook model.

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10:36: E.O. Wilson biology book: Life on Earth (again K-12). This will be exclusive on iBookstore, and first two chapters are free.

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10:35: Announced initial partnership in K-12 textbooks with three companies: McGraw Hill (5 textbooks so far), Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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10:31: Apple said biggest need for e-textbooks is high school. iBookstore will feature e-textbooks that cost $14.99 or less.

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10:30: Announces that this book-making tool will be free, and is available today.
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10:29: Philip S. back on stage. Sums up and mentions that users can publish right to iBookstore.

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10:27: Calls it a “total miracle in terms of time-savings” in designing and publishing books. Must say it looks pretty easy to build these books with interactive features and galleries, and show it on iPad in a few clicks.

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@kfitz: Adding content to book is drag-and-drop; slick automatic text layout, but manipulable, too.

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10:25: Combined Keynote and iBooks2. Interesting. PowerPoint-type tool meets book-creation.

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10:24: “How about adding some media … super-simple,” says demo man.

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@kfitz: iBooks Author, Mac application, feature-rich authoring tool for creation of any kind of book, but amazing textbook authoring experience.

—–

10:21: Next announcement: “iBooks Author.” Yep, it’s the rumored tool to make books. Not just for textbooks, but focused on textbooks.

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@kfitz: How do we get these awesome textbooks? iBooks Store: new categories view includes textbooks category.

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10:19: “You own the book forever.” That’s a big difference from many publishers e-textbooks are, which self-destruct after a semester.

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10:18: Shows tool that automatically turns student notes and highlights into study cards. “No more ever having to make paper flashcards.” First big applause from audience.

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10:16: Demonstrating highlighting and note-taking. A few mis-swipes get a nervous laugh.

—–

@kfitz: Rosner: authors have total freedom in laying out text and graphics. (KF: One assumes that the authoring tool that allows this is to follow.)

—–

10:15: Lots of talk about book navigation, but nothing too new and different yet.

—–

@kfitz Kathleen Fitzpatrick: Text has nice layouts, embedded videos, pinch-and-zoom drilling in. Pretty awesome visualizations, 3D models.

—–

10:10: He says “These are gorgeous, gorgeous books.” Also shows interactive features, like an animated 3D model of structure of a cell.

—–

10:08: Brand new iBooks2. Brings a new textbook experience to the iPad.

—–

@kfitz: Schiller: iPad #1 on teen wish lists at Christmas this year. The iPad’s many virtues include 20K+ ed/learning apps.

—–

10:06: First area he will talk about: Reinventing the textbook.

10:05: “No one person or company can fix it all.” Apple will focus on student engagement. Now he’s saying how cool iPads are. He says iPad is affordable. Some spin going on there (it’s more expensive than many other tablets).

—-

10:05: Showed video of K-12 teachers.

—-

10:02: Giving bleak education statistics in math and science education. “We can do better than this.”

10:00: Philip Schiller from Apple. … “We try to same passion and energy we put into every product we make into our education business as well. Something profound starting to happen. (He means students buying iPads.)

“We’re on the cusp of something really great.
But there are challenges in education both old and new, and they’re pretty profound.”

9:55: Seated at the event, they just asked us to turn off our iPhones. Well, our electronic devices.

We’re doing this coverage in coordination with our ProfHacker blog, so Kathleen Fitzpatrick is sitting next to me, and she’ll be adding her thoughts as we go. Follow her on @kfitz and we’ll put her tweets here.

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Syracuse U. Won’t Expel Graduate Student Over Facebook Posting

Thu, 01/19/2012 - 03:27

A Syracuse University graduate student who had been prohibited from student-teaching because of a Facebook posting will be allowed to finish his degree this spring, the university said on Wednesday. The decision came just a few hours after a free-speech group publicly denounced Syracuse’s handling of the matter.

Matthew S. Werenczak, a master’s student in social-studies education, made the comment on Facebook last July while he was a tutor at a local high school as part of a Syracuse class.

Mr. Werenczak said that during a field trip, he had heard a local NAACP representative say, “We need to start hiring our teachers from historically black colleges.” Since he and another tutor had just introduced themselves as Syracuse students, Mr. Werenczak said he found the remarks offensive.

On his personal Facebook page, he wrote that the comment was an example of “racism” and implied that his hard work tutoring at “the worst school in the city” was not being valued.

A few months later, after a fellow student brought the post to the attention of the School of Education, Mr. Werenczak’s adviser wrote him a letter saying he might be removed from the program because the Facebook post was “unprofessional, offensive, and insensitive.”

Mr. Werenczak said in an interview that he had been shocked at the school’s reaction, and he thinks his outspoken criticism of parts of the program’s curriculum and classes was a contributing factor.

“You don’t always have to agree with the material presented to you in a college class,” he said. “I had differing opinions. It’s disappointing that freedom of expression at Syracuse only extends to certain people, or it only goes so far.”

Mr. Werenczak also said he was frustrated by a lack of due process at the university, which did not formally charge him with any violation of its policies or code of conduct.

In the letter, the adviser, Jeffrey A. Mangram, wrote that Mr. Werenczak could either voluntarily withdraw from the school or meet a series of conditions. Those included undergoing anger-management counseling, completing a diversity course, and writing a reflective paper to be reviewed by a committee. He was also prohibited from completing his required student-teaching in the fall semester.

Mr. Werenczak said he reluctantly opted for the latter choice, completing all of the requirements by early December. He said it was unclear whether the school would readmit him into the program until he was notified late Wednesday afternoon by Mr. Mangram.

Earlier Wednesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education issued a press release decrying the situation as a violation of free-speech and due-process rights. The advocacy group had also sent a letter to Syracuse’s chancellor, Nancy E. Cantor, on January 10.

“It’s a pretty clear-cut case of someone being punished for their off-campus speech,” Robert L. Shibley, the group’s senior vice president said on Wednesday before the school reinstated Mr. Werenczak. “He was effectively suspended without any real due process. There was no disciplinary hearing.”

Kevin C. Quinn, Syracuse’s senior vice president for public affairs, dismissed any due-process concerns, saying in an e-mail that “the matter was handled in accordance with the school’s standard process.”

Mr. Quinn said that Mr. Werenczak “will be allowed to continue his student-teaching this semester on the same terms and conditions as all other students.”

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by west.m]

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Internet Sites Go Dark to Protest Anti-Piracy Bills

Wed, 01/18/2012 - 20:12

Students counting on Wikipedia today to help them finish papers or prep for exams are out of luck. The online encyclopedia’s English-language site has gone dark for 24 hours as part of a Web-wide blackout to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (HR 3261), or SOPA, a bill being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives, and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (S 968), or PIPA. Both bills have come under heavy fire from the tech industry and from Internet-freedom advocates because they would make it possible to shut down Web sites that link to unauthorized content. That puts sites with a lot of user-generated content especially at risk.

Many Web sites joined Wikipedia today in going dark, including the Internet Archive, Wired.com, and Reddit. Boing Boing put up a “503: Service Unavailable” page. Google censored its own iconic logo with a black bar. One site, The Oatmeal, has an especially funny/irreverent take on the protest, asking readers to “please pirate the [expletive] out of” the animation it posted today to mark the blackout. “This is what happens when you make the Internet mad,” The Washington Post said in one of many mainstream-media reports on the blackout.

A number of higher-ed sites joined the protest with blacked-out screens and links to more information about SOPA and PIPA. The School of Information Studies at Syracuse University made its Web site and blog dark for the day. “The iSchool is taking a strong stance on this issue because a free and open Internet is critical for growth and innovation in the areas of study that we focus on,” it said. MediaCommons, an online scholarly network, announced it was offline for 24 hours “in protest against legislation that threatens our ability to explore new forms of scholarly communication.” The Association for Computers and the Humanities blacked out its home page with a “Stop SOPA!” notice, which also turned up on the digital-humanities DH Answers site and elsewhere. The CUNY Academic Commons posted a notice telling readers that “these bills, intended to curb online piracy but excessively overbroad, threaten the existence of sites like the CUNY Academic Commons that allow people to share information on the Internet.” The home page for Baruch College’s blog network greeted visitors with an information page about the controversial bills, and the MIT admissions site also went dark for the day.

Have you seen other higher-ed sites participating in today’s blackout? Did you black out your own site—or do you think the reaction is overblown? Let us know in the comments.

 

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You Can Summarize Your Thesis in a Tweet, but Should You?

Fri, 01/13/2012 - 20:55

Call it the ultimate exercise in brevity. Or the digital equivalent of an academic elevator pitch.

Just don’t call it simple.

Students across the world are using the Twitter hashtag #tweetyourthesis to shrink their academic thesis work down to single 140-character posts. The concept isn’t new: Boston University held a #BUthesis contest in April 2010, and #TweCon, a Twitter conference, has happened twice. But this week, the thesis-shrinking idea went viral and #tweetyourthesis sparked a debate among academics on Twitter about the social network’s potential for sharpening an idea.

Susan Greenberg, a senior lecturer in English and creative writing at the University of Roehampton, in London, first used the #tweetyourthesis hashtag on Wednesday. She said the idea was hatched over dinner with some research students from University College London, where she is a part-time doctoral student in the department of information studies. She boiled down her own work, tentatively titled “Editing and Meaning,” into the following tongue-in-cheek tweet: “Editors are god, except when they are all sacked.” She wrote that her thesis explored the question, “How do we assess invisible work like editing?”

Before anyone else could chime in with their own miniaturized thesis topics, users began asking the question that helped propel #tweetyourthesis worldwide: What does it mean if a student can condense an idea for such a long project into 140 characters?

“If u can’t summarise ur research in a tweet u need to do a lot more work on ur question,” wrote Claire Warwick, a professor of digital humanities and head of the department of information studies at University College London.

@david_colqhoun cautioned that such a rule might not apply to long-winded science topics, and @shanemuk was even more critical: “If you CAN summarise your research in a tweet, you’re not working hard enough or on important qs!” he wrote.

@ernestopriego suggested the thesis-shrinking exercise could be useful in the real world: “Think of #tweetyourthesis thus: funder/head of school/publisher in the elevator with you. You have one minute. How do you pitch your work?” he asked.

For her part, Ms. Greenberg said she appreciates the emerging debate, and thinks there are skills to be gained from the discipline of having to communicate quickly. She added that Twitter’s social nature injects a little humor into the grueling slog that some thesis writers experience.

“Writing a thesis can be a very lonely activity, so it can be nice to have an area of sharing,” she said.

And though #tweetyourthesis has grown quickly since users around the world began sharing it, Ms. Greenberg noted with a laugh that something familiar has kept her from tracking its every move.

“I wasn’t monitoring this minute-by-minute, because I was busy working on my thesis,” she said.

Herewith, a sample of #tweetyourthesis topics:

[View the story "#tweetyourthesis" on Storify]
What do you think of #tweetyourthesis? Let us know in the comments.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by bjornmensbear]

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JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles

Fri, 01/13/2012 - 15:32

It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.

But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.

To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals. Included in the beta phase are American Anthropologist, the American Historical Review, Ecology, Modern Language Review, PMLA, College English, the Journal of Geology, the Journal of Political Economy, Film Quarterly, Representations, and the American Journal of Psychology .

The 7o journals chosen “represent approximately 18 percent of the annual turn-away traffic on JSTOR,” the organization said in an announcement previewing Register & Read. “Once we evaluate how the beta is going, including any impact on publishers’ sales of single articles, and make any needed initial adjustments to the approach, we expect to release hundreds more journals into the program.”

Every year, JSTOR said, it turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles. “We are committed to expanding access to scholarly content to all those who need it,” the group said. Register & Read is one attempt to do that.

In September 2011, JSTOR also opened up global access to its Early Journal Content. According to Heidi McGregor, a spokeswoman for the Ithaka group, JSTOR’s parent organization, there have been 2.35 million accesses of the Early Journal Content from September 2011 through December 2011. “About 50% of this usage is coming from users we know are at institutions that participate in JSTOR (e.g. we recognize their IP address), and the other 50% is not,” she said in an e-mail. ”We absolutely consider this to be a success. In the first four months after launch, we are seeing over 1 million accesses to this content by people who would not have had access previously. This is at the core of our mission, and we’re thrilled with this result.  The Register & Read beta is an exciting next step that we are taking, working closely with our publisher partners who own this content.”

Ms. McGregor said that JSTOR would consider expanding the three-article, 14-day restrictions, depending on how the beta test goes. “We are testing whether we can provide more free access in ways that help people around the world but that also balance the need to sustain, preserve, and invest in services to support the use of this content going forward,” she said.

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Technology Is at Least 3 Years Away From Improving Student Success

Fri, 01/13/2012 - 12:34

Las Vegas—At the very start of the Higher Ed Tech Summit here this week, James Applegate threw out a challenge. Mr. Applegate, vice president for program development at the Lumina Foundation, told an overflow crowd that the United States needed 60 percent of its adults to hold high-quality degrees and credentials by the year 2025.

During the rest of the day, technology executives described programs that could improve graduation rates and learning, but won’t be able to do so for several years. They collect many points of data on what professors and students do, but can’t yet say what results in better grades and graduation rates. “We’re beginning to get lots of data on things like time of task, but we don’t have the outcomes yet to say what leads to a true learning moment. I think we are three to five years away from being about to do that,” said Troy Williams, vice president and general manager of Macmillan New Ventures, which makes the classroom polling system called I-clicker. “These are really early days,” agreed Matthew Pittinsky, who runs a digital transcript company called Parchment and was one of the founders of Blackboard.

There’s lots of technology out there that’s outcome-related. For instance, at the meeting, which is part of the international Consumer Electronics Show, the interactive textbook publisher Kno announced a suite of new features. One of them, a performance gauge callled Kno Me, gives students information about how much time they spend on different sections of a book, the results of quizzes, and the kinds of notes they took. “With thousands of students using these books, we can show them which of these variables are related to students—anonymous, of course—who get A’s, or B’s, or C’s, so students learn what kind of activity leads to the best results,” said Osman Rashid, the company’s chief executive.

But he admitted that the grades were self-reports: Students would have to add that information themselves, since colleges did not supply it to Kno. So the outcome data might not be reliable.

Video lecture capture is another tool that could help professors fine-tune teaching techniques, said Fred Singer, CEO of Echo360, whose lecture-capture software is used by more that 400 institutions. The software could identify parts of a talk devoted to a particular concept, and also detect how often students went over that segment, how long they spent on it, and all that information could be related to how students do on tests about that concept. If students don’t seem to be doing well, then a professor could try a different explanation. And even borrow one from a professor teaching the same subject whose students are doing better. But while all that information is available now, it isn’t being tied together, Mr. Singer said.

Technology companies are only beginning to realize that the tools they created for interactivity—last decade’s education buzzword—are powerful devices for learning analytics—this decade’s hot term. So now they are going to have to work with colleges to connect the dots to teaching outcomes, said Mr. Applegate.

He added that this will also require colleges to agree on desirable teaching and learning outcomes in the first place, something they don’t do now. And that’s another problem.

[Photo by Flickr user LGEPR]

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Facebook Deletes University’s History Project for Violating Social Network’s Rules

Wed, 01/11/2012 - 21:17

The two students brought back to life on Facebook by a University of Nevada at Reno librarian have been returned to the history books for violating the social network’s terms of service.

Facebook shut down the profiles of Joe McDonald and Leola Lewis this morning, according to Donnelyn Curtis, the director of research collections and services at the University of Nevada at Reno. Before the accounts were taken offline, Ms. Curtis used the couple’s profiles to give students a glimpse of university life in the early 20th century. When Ms. Curtis logged in to update their profiles today, she was greeted with a message that said the profiles had been suspended. The development was first reported early today on the social-networking news site Mashable.

Facebook’s rules specify that users may not “provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.” Ms. Curtis said she understood why the historical profiles violated Facebook’s policy, but added that she would have appreciated a warning before the company took action.

Ms. Curtis said the pair’s popularity boomed after receiving coverage in The Chronicle and other publications, sometimes approaching 30 to 40 new friend requests per hour. By the time they were shut down, Mr. McDonald and Ms. Lewis had amassed about 3,000 friends. Ms. Curtis said the extra attention ended up being “the kiss of death” for the couple’s virtual selves.

Ms. Curtis plans to create “pages” for the students, rather than profiles, which are permissible under Facebook rules. But she’ll have to do so from scratch, because she can’t recoup the questions and comments that their friends posted on their Facebook profiles. She’ll also have to choose a category for the pages, which are typically used by businesses and celebrities and don’t necessarily apply to historical figures.

“There’s a category that you can choose, but they don’t really fit into any of those categories,” she said.

Although the suspension presents a temporary setback for the project, Ms. Curtis said she’s encouraged by the amount of attention the couple received.

“From what I saw, there are a lot of people interested in learning history from simulated real people,” she said.

[Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Nevada at Reno libraries]

Update: Ms. Curtis has finished building the couple’s Facebook “pages.” Mr. McDonald can be found here, and Ms. Lewis is here.

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Professor’s Classroom iPad App Debuts at Consumer Electronics Show

Tue, 01/10/2012 - 23:00

A professor from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is trying to turn the iPad into a new kind of classroom tool that lets students draw on a shared canvas.

The new iPad app is being shown off this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by a company called LectureTools. The company grew out of a project created by Perry Samson, a professor of atmospheric, oceanic, and space sciences at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

For the app to be fully utilized, all of the students and the professor would need either an iPad or a laptop loaded with the software as they sit in the classroom. Then the instructor could use the iPad app to present slides that would show up on every student’s screen and allow any student in the room to annotate the slides or ask a question. For instance, students could highlight points on a map using their iPads, and the group of responses would be visible—anonymously—to the entire class. Mr. Samson said the app freed him from the podium.

An earlier version of Mr. Samson’s LectureTools software, which he first built in 2005 for a Pocket PC, evolved out of his desire to reach individual students by turning large lecture halls into small classrooms. He decided to use the laptops students already brought with them—better known for their distracting power than their use as learning enhancements—rather than invent a separate clicker tool used only during lectures. The goal, Mr. Samson said, is to occupy the devices students typically use to drift away from the learning environment.

“If we have the technology available, how can we use it in a way that’s going to keep the student engaged without them going off to Facebook?” he asked.

LectureTools can also be used to reach students remotely, through video streaming of lectures—a feature many nontraditional students appreciate, Mr. Samson said. Students without laptops or tablet computers can still participate by sending a text message with a standard cellphone. In the future, Mr. Samson said, the app will expand to include analytics functions, letting professors track classroom participation. He hoped the added features would allow professors to spot early warning signs in students who might be silently struggling with the material.

In addition to the nearly 20 classes that used LectureTools at Mr. Samson’s institution last semester, the software is also being used in classrooms at Ohio State University, Michigan State University, and others. As more professors adopt the software, which is subscription-based, Mr. Samson said faculty members across institutions might share material and engage in what he called “comfortable nudging,”—crowdsourced encouragement to improve teaching practices.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by mattbuchanan]

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Update: Top Technology Innovators in Higher Education

Mon, 01/09/2012 - 22:07

Last month we asked for your help in identifying the top technology innovators in higher education. The response has been exciting. So far we received more than 200 nominations, pointing us to groundbreaking professors and administrators in various areas of education technology. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

We wanted to provide a quick update on our project. A team of reporters and editors here held a series of meetings to narrow down the list of innovators. We’ve selected 12 to profile in an upcoming issue of The Chronicle. As we said in our previous post, our goal is to focus on some of the most influential new ideas out there and to provide a sense of who their champions are.

Chronicle reporters are in the process of writing those profiles, which we hope to publish next month. We also plan to organize all the online nominations and share those in an easy-to-read format.

Some readers have raised interesting points about the project itself. One blogger said that groups are now more important than individuals in forging new technology trends and ideas. Yet even her post named several leaders in articulating those ideas. In the end, we’re not claiming the people we feature are the “best” in an objective sense. Instead, we hope that by telling a few stories about leading ed-tech figures, their ideas might reach new audiences and spark a wider debate.

Stay tuned.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Daneel Ariantho]

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On Facebook, Librarian Brings 2 Students From the Early 1900s to Life

Fri, 01/06/2012 - 15:29

Facebook user “joe1915” writes wall posts that would be familiar to any college student these days: He stresses about tests, roots for his university’s football team, and shows off photos from campus dances.

But Joe McDonald isn’t an average smartphone-toting student. He died in 1971 — 33 years before Facebook arrived on the Web.

Donnelyn Curtis, the director of research collections and services at the University of Nevada at Reno, created Facebook profiles for Mr. McDonald and his wife, Leola Lewis, to give students a glimpse of university life during the couple’s college days. Ms. Lewis graduated in 1913, and Mr. McDonald earned his degree in mechanical engineering two years later.

With approval from Mr. McDonald’s granddaughter, Peggy McDonald, Ms. Curtis said she’s using archival material for a history project designed to appeal to a wider audience than the typical patrons of special collections.

“We’re just trying to help history come alive a little bit for students,” she said. At first, only extended family members bothered to “friend” with the pair’s profiles, but as the audience grew, Ms. Curtis said she had to find a humorous voice that would appeal to contemporary students who use Facebook every day.

“It’s been hard to walk the line between being historically accurate and making it interesting for college students,” she said. To help keep the pair’s virtual personalities consistent, Ms. Curtis composes all of their updates. Mr. McDonald’s favorite activities are boxing and “hanging out with friends,” while Ms. Lewis’ include ranching and shopping.

So far, Ms. Curtis has posted photos of the couple’s time on campus, including a picture of them together at a sophomore hop. They even talk to one another: When Mr. McDonald complained about his impending final exams, Ms. Lewis tried to lift her future husband’s spirits with a comment that began “My sympathies!” The pair married in November 1915, and Mr. McDonald went on to a long career in the news industry, retiring as president of Reno Newspapers Inc. in 1956.

Ms. Curtis said she may soon create a Facebook profile of a mutual friend of the couple who dropped out to work in a mine. She hopes that doing so will expand the project’s reach beyond her campus. She might also invite alumni who graduated in the 1950s and 60s to re-create their college-age selves.

She noted that the Facebook project has improved her own digital skills. Using Facebook and Google sites means she no longer has to seek assistance from IT staff members to create a rich, historically accurate online experience for library patrons. “It gives me some more freedom to get out of the institutional way of doing things,” she said.

Is your library using Facebook or others social media for an interesting project? Tell us about it in the comments.

[Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Nevada at Reno libraries]

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