Richard Baraniuk
Rice University
 

DSpace
"Cooperative technology: Making institutional repositories and course
management systems work together"
DSpace is designed for the long-term storage and management of digital assets. Stellar is designed for managing and presenting teaching materials while a course is being taught. Stellar Images will use DSpace assets to present images as course materials, playing off of the strengths of each tool.

This approach encourages innovation, reuse, and cooperation. DSpace will be one of many repositories feeding Stellar Images, and Stellar Images will be one of many windows into DSpace content.

We will talk about our plans to connect the two concerns, and the practical requirements of the faculty and students using these tools. We will also touch on the role of OKI's Repository OSID ("Open Services Interface Definition") as an interface between these tools.

Related URLs:
Dspace: http://www.dspace.org/
OKI: http://www.okiproject.org/
Stellar: http://stellar.mit.edu/

Carl Jones and Ben Brophy
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
 

Image Annotation Tool
The Image Annotation Tool (IAT) is Web-based application designed for students and faculty to upload, organize, categorize, present and annotate digital images. The IAT provides students with a workspace equipped with tools to study images. Students also can annotate and organize images into meaningful categories to support their individual study of the course content. For faculty, the IAT enables the creation of slideshows and the ability to review student annotations on course images. The IAT was developed for a histology course in the Columbia School of Dental and Oral Surgery, but can be utilized in other disciplines. For example, any activity requiring the labeling of maps, illustrating art images, or highlighting elements of a graphic can easily be accomplished with the tool.

Michelle Hall
New Media Center for Teaching and Learning, Columbia University
 

VUE
Information is everywhere. Powerful search engines, digital repositories, online publications and perpetual streams of digital information are familiar dimensions of the information-rich world in which we live, and, in many cases, have helped to construct. The rapid development of tools and systems that enable us to create and distribute of massive amounts of data have outpaced the creation of tools that let us select, structure and make sense of digital information. The common expression information overload reflects our  awareness and frustration with this current imbalance. The focus of this presentation is the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), a tool designed to enable personal elaboration around and the organization of digital content. As will be demonstrated, VUE presents a visual, concept-mapping interface to digital libraries and online resources and produces information maps that can be used for instructional purposes. These maps consist of visual nodes representing digital content, resource metadata, personal annotations and labeled links and pathways that
communicate important relationships among the digital objects. Both students and instructors
have used VUE content maps to better understand and communicate how ideas and digital content are organized around specific topics. This presentation will discuss the underlying educational objectives that guided the development of VUE and provide a brief overview of VUE’s features.

David Kahle
Tufts

Lionshare
"Big and Little Interact:  LionShare's Peer-to-Peer Approach to Building and Sharing Collections."

LionShare is an enhancement of peer-to-peer software which has been developed as a response to the documented needs of picture users.  The Visual Image User Study (VIUS) was an extensive needs assessment project at Pennsylvania State University.  It examined the use of pictures in nearly 70 departments and research centers at Penn State's 23 campuses.  One of that studies' most interesting conclusions was that personal collections, maintained by both faculty and students, are critical resources that supply a large portion of the pictures used for teaching and independent learning.  People who maintain these personal collections are also intense users of institutionally managed collections and want easier interactions between official and unofficial collections.  The VIUS project recommended image delivery systems that provide greater permeability between institutionally managed collections and personal ones.  One technique for promoting this type of interaction is LionShare - an open-source software development project that has adapted peer-to-peer technology to academic uses.  LionShare uses peer-to-peer software (Gnutella and Limewire) to manage and share any type of media file - not just images.  LionShare adds authentication to the normal peer-to-peer tools - providing additional security and accountability, as well as a means for creating self-defined sharing groups.  LionShare adds metadata records, making discovery and management of files much more flexible than in normal peer-to-peer.  LionShare adapts peer-to-peer technology to small-group use by establishing persistent servers where users may share files even when their own machine is off.  The persistent servers also become ways of publishing "departmental" collections.  Interaction with large institutionally-managed collections may either be handled by persistent servers or by a gateway technology (the eduSource Communications Language.)  With these modifications, a LionShare search may simultaneously retrieve materials from the user's personal collection, from other personal collections, and from institutionally managed collections.  LionShare users may select several ways of sharing with large or small groups of peers.  Instant messaging adds to the collaborative interactions fostered by LionShare.  Penn State gratefully acknowledges the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for both the VIUS (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/vius/) and LionShare (http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/main/) projects.

Henry Pisciotta, Pennsylvania State University
 

Towards an Education Inflected Architecture
 In the course of the past decade we have seen the emergence of a whole host of applications and tools designed to assist faculty in their needs for instruction, research and publication. Overhead projectors have been replaced by Powerpoint; correspondence courses by WebCT based distance learning; and a trip to the library by a quick search on Google Scholar or Amazon.com. There is an abundance of courseware products, learning management tools, faculty repository systems, electronic journal banks, art catalogs, video libraries and cyber-cafes. All sorts of activity which taken in part is quite often useful and pragmatic but seen as a whole is more akin to the cacophony of frosh week at any American college.

  In fact, the past ten years have been very much like the struggles of undergraduates to get a handle on their new environment and to position themselves in the rapidly changing and unfamiliar mix of freedom and responsibility. For faculty and the organizational structures that support their work, it has been a bit of a rough ride - mastering the new tools for collecting, analyzing and organizing information and at the same time accepting the responsibility of managing the outcome of all the collecting, analyzing and organizing activities that so persistently carry on.

 But for software developers, including some very prominent academic ones, it has been a free-for-all, the ideal market for real life R&D and every week or perhaps even, every day, there is a new tool or a "better way" to do one's job, a new piece of software to have and to learn and to use, a new widget, gadget and for some, a new toy that needs no marketing other than to say it is a solution to a problem we didn't know we had. And so for a very long time the focus of administrative activity has been on this shifting, volatile environment and how best to adapt to the "new student" and how best to create the "new university" in order to meet the needs of the "users", generic-faced as they may be, even when the idea of the new university is not even well articulated by its greatest proponents.

 But amidst all the busyness, the balance and direction of the academe seems to have moved beneath our feet. The lauded best practices of instruction and research are often driven by software development and the overbearing individualist psychology of the consumer rather than by any higher purpose. We are encouraged qua instuctors to describe our work, even our passion as a "service" to others and to proscribe future work as a functional unit - a new economic widget; and qua researchers to insist on further resources to meet our individual needs.

 In my mind, the model is dysmorphic and very possibly unsustainable - certainly undesirable. I suggest that  for educational practice to right itself,  to flourish and evolve, and for students and academics to get back to the work of learning we need to shed the technology carapace and develop a new education inflected architecture. What this architecture might look like and what this means in terms of practice is controversial but certainly necessary if we wish to continue the cultural conversation that seems so abruptly to have stopped.

Barbara Taranto, New York Public Library

Pachyderm
The Pachyderm authoring software was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999-2000 to create Making Sense of Modern Art and other online/kiosk features for SFMOMA.  It offers users the ability to author media-rich interactive features using a flexibly structured set of screens that easily mix video, audio, zoom-able high resolution graphics, and text.  Designed for an art history environment, Pachyderm has been used to create features on artists such as Gerhard Richter, Eva Hesse, Ansel Adams, Romare Bearden, and many more.  These and other recent Pachyderm features on Richard Tuttle, Pippilotti Rist, Gary Hill, and Robert Bechtle are viewable at:  http://www.sfmoma.org/education/edu_online.html. Currently a new, open-source version of Pachyderm is being created by an alliance of six university new media centers and six museums, led by the NMC (New Media Consortium). This talk will trace the logic and use of Pachyderm, discussing ways in which non-linear, rich media interactive environments differ from traditional academic publications, offering differing challenges and opportunities to historians, critics, museum educators, faculty, and students.  Topics touched on will include writing for a non-linear environment, use of extensive video and audio in online publications, copyright issues, and the differences between Pachyderm and art historical tools and image banks such as ArtStor. 

John Weber
Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College
 

Scholar's Box
The Scholar's Box is a tool being developed at UC Berkeley that enables users to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research. It is designed to connect domains that are of particular importance to educational users: digital libraries, educational technology, social software tool, desktop content authoring.   The fundamental conviction behind the Scholar's Box is that teachers, artists, and researchers -- as part of their creative process -- should have easy-to-use tools that let them remix any digital content from any source with any software service. This talk will demonstrate how the Scholar's Box can be used to support the teaching of art and art history by allowing scholars to create annotated and reusable sets of images drawn from diverse sources.  The sources will range from brand name institutional repositories to personal image services such Flickr to the Web at large.

Raymond Yee
UC Berkeley