.EDU Tech Roundup





Back Issues Fall 2006 Issue Home IT Connections Home IT Home UO Home			.EDU TECH ROUNDUP

			Vickie Nelson vmn@uoregon.edu
			PennTags Librarians at the University of Pennsylvania have opened their catalog to social bookmarking and tagging like that seen on sites such as flickr and del.icio.us. With PennTags, members of the Penn community can add descriptive or evaluative key words and comments to library catalog records and other electronic resources. People are using the tags to create reading lists for themselves and others and to work on collaborative projects. Check out Penn Tags at http://tags.library.upenn.edu/ Peer Review By Blog McKenzie Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at New School University, has posted a draft of his latest book on a blog, where readers can post their opinions on style and content. Each paragraph appears in a boxed blog entry, and people, both expert and not, are offering their opinions and even copyediting. See how it works at http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/ or read The Chronicle of Higher Education’s cover story on digital publishing at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i47/47a02001.htm Rice Announces All-Digital Academic Press The high cost of producing and selling scholarly books put Rice University Press into a ten-year hiatus. Now it has emerged as the nation’s first all-digital academic press. Peer-reviewed books accepted for publication will be edited and placed on a web site, where they will be free to read as ebooks. Readers will have to pay to download a copy or to purchase a bound volume from a commercial print-on-demand service. Read more at http://www.media.rice.edu/media/2006.asp?SnID=966489297 Wireless Off Switch Needed Suspecting that students bent over laptops might be playing online poker, shopping, or chatting, Bentley College professors asked officials for a wireless on/off switch on a classroom by classroom basis. Not an easy task, according to Todd Marsh, principal network engineer at Bentley, however, his team managed to cobble a system together and introduced it last fall. Called the “classroom network control system,” the system is still being fine-tuned. Read The Chronicle report at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i39/39a02801.htm Berkeley on iPod Visit http://itunes.Berkeley.edu to see how the University of California at Berkeley is using Apple’s iTunes store to make audio and video recordings of course lectures and other campus information available free to anyone — on campus or off. You can take a tour of campus or listen to lectures for almost 30 courses on your MP3 player or computer. Web-Based Cultural Design Tools Increase Student Interest in Math Ron Eglash, a researcher at RPI, has uncovered the mathematics that lie behind various native and contemporary designs, ranging from cornrow hairstyles to Navajo rugs and Pre-Columbian pyramids. Based on his discovery, he’s developed a series of web-based teaching tools that are capturing the imaginations of students in math classes across the country. Called “culturally situated design tools” (CSDTs), the programs educate students about the mathematics expressed in cultural artifacts. Research suggests CSDTs may raise math achievement and improve tech career aspirations, especially for ethnic minority students. Read more at http://news.rpi.edu/update.do UC Davis Powers Wireless Mesh ‘Frognet’ with Solar Energy Mike Benard, an ecologist in Michigan, is making use of a solar-powered wireless mesh network developed by UC Davis to check in on frogs living in an isolated pond near the Davis campus nearly 3,000 miles away. The unique wireless mesh network, which uses the sun’s energy and a series of low-cost relay stations, is an innovative and comparatively inexpensive technology that may one day allow children in remote villages around the world to go to school online or bring information to workers in hard-to-get-to disaster areas. Read more at http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=8861