Category: Web Publishing

Educational Wikis

From CUNY Academic Commons

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7 Things You Should Know About Wikis This article explains how students–and faculty–can use wikis to collaborate on.

Using Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools This webtext focuses on the use of wiki as a tool for writing and for teaching writing. (by Susan Loudermilk Garza and Tommy Hern)

Teaching and learning online with wikis from the conference proceedings of the ASCILITE (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) in 2004. Pretty basic and focused on online teaching, but a good overview (it’s early–2004 is a long, long time ago in internet time).

Wikis and Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool From the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. Very comprehensive, and includes both wikipedia and using your own wikis in class. And also provides a good overview of other research.

50 Ways to use wikis Great suggestions on how to use wikis in the classroom.

Three Wiki Uses The author breaks wiki use down into three general categories: knowlege repositories, collaborative writing and situation awareness.

Using Group Wikis Online Bill Ashton, from York College, posts an in-depth presentation about using group wikis online on one of his blogs on the Commons, Things I say to my BlackBoard students. Also included in Bill’s June, 2012 post are links to his group wiki grading rubrics and a screencast overview of wikis in Blackboard.

Related Pages


WordPress Tutorials and Useful Links

From CUNY Academic Commons

  • WPCandy tutorials – WPCandy has many useful tutorials that provide tips on configuring your blog.
  • FLOSS – general how-to manual for WordPress (in TWIKI format)
  • WordPress.org – Here you will find complete documentation for WordPress, including available plug-ins and themes and free downloads. As an open source project, WordPress depends on its community to develop plug-ins and themes, and to document each of these by using its Codex, a collection of blog pages which serve up wiki pages that members of the community can collaborate on.
  • WordPress TV Screencast how-tos created by WordPress developers
  • WordCamp NYC 2010 – The folks at WordPress organize “camps” at major cities throughout the year, and they are very interesting to attend. Cheap and highly recommended, if you are interested in WP.


Open EdTech Projects at CUNY


From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

Introduction

Brian Lamb and James Groom are working on an article for EDUCAUSE about “the state of public institutions, open edtech, and the fate of the free world.” They plan to showcase examples of how open source tools and “networked collaboration” shape various open ed projects. Five such projects at CUNY are highlighted below, and Brian and James will use this page as a resource for their article.

e-Portfolios at Macaulay Honors College

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At Macaulay Honors College, students are encouraged to create e-Portfolios to collect school work, reflect upon it, and “present it to a range of different audiences.”  EPortfolios@Macaulay provides a way for students to creatively record what they have learned through blogs. Students can think of e-Portfolios as  “museums” which contains artifacts of their thinking and learning, and they can invite others “to take a look.”  Some rooms may be private, others exposed to the public.

Macaulay has created a 30-second “commercial” to help students see the variety of uses to which these eportfolios can be put.

And, hot off the press, a 7-minute introduction to what we’ve found and what we’ve gained from using WordPress for this purpose.  “Open Source and Open Directions

CAC.OPHONY Weblog

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CAC.OPHONY is “a weblog on communication-intensive instruction at the college level and its implications for students about to face the challenges of writing and speaking publicly in professional settings.”  Developed at Baruch by the Fellows of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute,

Blogs at Baruch

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Blogs at Baruch is “an on-line publishing platform platform” for the Baruch Community developed and maintain jointly by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute and the Baruch Computing and Technology Center.

The site is based on WordPress MU.

Here’s a partial list of projects on the system.

Here are some blog posts that detail its history:

Luke Waltzer, The Path to Blogs@Baruch

Blogs@Baruch Tag Archive at Cac.ophony.org

CUNY Academic Commons

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Officially launched less than a year ago, the CUNY Academic Commons pulls together professors and graduate students from the 23 separate campus of the City University of New York (CUNY). Members can have individual blogs, join groups, share ideas on group forums, and collaborate on a wiki. There are currently over 1000 members.

The Commons uses Buddy Press as its hub, with WordPress MU and MediaWiki as its spokes.

Looking for Whitman

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Started in 2009, Looking for Whitman is a “multi-campus experiment in digital pedagogy” involving four separate schools: New York City College of Technology (CUNY), New York University, University of Mary Washington, and Rutgers University-Camden.

Funding was provided by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities.

The site is set up using WordPress MU.

Drupal

From CUNY Academic Commons

Introduction

The Drupal Open Source Project was started in 2001, and has a large community surrounding it.

Drupal Logo

‘Drupal’ comes from the Dutch word “druppel” or water droplet. (Legend has it that the project was originally going to be named drop.org but a typo in the domain application form (“dorp”) led to its final, more appealing name.)

Drupal is immensely popular, and is downloaded over a million times each year. Follow this link to see who is using Drupal.

Sample sites using Drupal

Links

Wordle

From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

Wordle example generated from the Commons URL on 05/09/10 – courtesy of wordle.net

Introduction

Wordle is a web-based tool that creates cloud-like images from text you feed into it. You can cut a block of text and paste it into Wordle’s interface, or just provide a url, and Wordle will generate a customizable cloud. You can choose colors, fonts, layouts, or just click on randomize until you find one that suits your needs.

Possible Uses

Tired of searching the Web for an appropriate image for your web page? Just wordle it! According the terms of service, you can capture the images from the screen and use them anywhere, as long as you cite Wordle as the source. Just do a screen print, and paste into photoshop, crop out the stuff you don’t want, adjust the size, save it as a image, and you are good to go.

Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Omeka Basics

From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

Omeka Plug-ins — Image created using RTENOTITLE

Introduction

This page provides some basic information about using Omeka. It does not in any way try to compete with the documentation found on Omeka’s wiki, screencasts, and group forums.   Definitely go there for technical help, and contribute to the Omeka community by asking questions, sharing insights, lessons learned, and best practices.  

Omeka’s Technology in a Nutshell

Omeka is a LAMP Application. It runs on Linux (operating system), Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (scripting language). On a simplistic level, the application can be broken down into three parts, it “core”, its plug-ins, and its themes.

Omeka’s “Core”

This is the heart of what makes Omeka work. As with all open source software, it is freely available to look at and modify. But in general, unless you have a really good reason, it is probably advisable to leave the core untouched. If you do modify this code, make a note of what you did, so that when you upgrade to a newer version, you can make you changes there too, if necessary.

Omeka’s Plug-ins

Plug-ins enhance Omeka with new functionality. They are purposefully left separate from Omeka’s core code. Developers from the Omeka’s community create plug-ins

Omeka’s Themes

Can Omeka play nice with WordPress?

The answer is up in the air. An interesting post on Omeka’s group group suggests that you can use a couple plug-ins to make it work. And check out the final result here.

Related Pages


Open Source – Digital Libraries

From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

Introduction

There are several studies that focus specifically on open source digital library software, and it is important to see if this subset of OSS has any specific evaluation concerns.

Comparing Digital Library Packages

Goh et al. (2006) conducted a comparative study of four OSS digital library packages and compiled a checklist to evaluate such programs. The framework they developed breaks down the products into five criteria for evaluation: (1) content management; (2) user interface; (3) User administration; (4) system adminstraction; and (5) other requirements. Each of these major sections is further broken down into features, and each evaluator checks a box if the feature is available. Scores are weighted and tallied and then compared.

Omeka Case Study

The recently published case study by Kucsma et al. (2010) investigates Omeka as a web publishing tool. The authors worked on a project for METRO whose goal was to build a directory of 30 digital collections. Three different digital collection management systems were considered: WordPress, Omeka, and Content DM. Omeka was chosen because it was attractive, easy to install, extensible, and was compatible with web and OAI-PMH standards. (p. 1). While METRO has a long history with ContentDM, the product was not selected because, as the author write, it lacks many of the “characteristics of a modern digital exhibition tool” (p.2). WordPress was not chosen because of its lack of collection building tools and they was not enough time to write a plug-in. The authors provide a good synopsis of Omeka’s functionality and describe the plugins they employed in the process. In general they liked their experience building this collection of collections with Omeka. The weaknesses were primarily with Omeka’s administrative functions. The authors found the “Item Add” function clumsy and time consuming and complained about the lack of support for controlled vocabulary in tag fields. They admitted that these were fixable, but would hesitate using Omeka for a large scale project before the issues were addressed. Search and retrieval functions were found to be weak, by library standards. In general, they found Omeka’s control over data to be “loose.” (p. 8). They also found that documentation of the core processes had lagged behind. The incomplete Codex was felt to be slowed down development of new plugins. Of the many strengths, the authors point out Omeka’s exhibit building ease.

References

Related Pages


Open Access Publishing

From CUNY Academic Commons

Contents

The Right To Research

Open Access publishing aims to free readers and libraries from the subscription costs of scholarly journals. Emphasizing “free availability and unrestricted use” (PLoS, 2009), Open Access (OA) relies on the collaboration of authors, sponsors and institutions to absorb publishing costs. Its peer-reviewed journals are distributed freely on the Web. Repositories and archives are established on university campuses, and preservation tasks are shared.

Also known as “royalty free literature” (Suber, 2007, para. 5), OA literature is primarily scientific and medical in nature, although many social science journals can be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Largely free of most copyright and licensing restrictions, OA literature can be read, downloaded, copied, crawled through for indexing purposes, and passed as data to software programs (Suber, 2006, para 2). The Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 concluded that no “financial, legal or technical barriers” should restrict this literature’s use. It may be distributed and reproduced freely and “the only role for copyright … should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” (para. 3).

Besides addressing the Serials Pricing Crisis, and making scholarly literature available to researchers worldwide, OA publishing allows researchers and institutions to show what they do with their funding. Research funded by institutions or taxpayers should be freely visible to the public (Shulenburger, 2008)

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition, plays a key role in the coordination of OA in research libraries and institutions. SPARC’s student brochure, The Right to Research, clearly explains the need for OA publishing, and reinforces the notion that everyone benefits when research is openly shared. SPARC is a founder of the Alliance of Taxpayer Access, a group composed of taxpayers, patients, doctors, and researchers who support open access to tax-funded research, and advocate for the public’s right to freely access research.

Types of OA Publishing

Many permutations of OA Publishing currently exist. Suber (2007) breaks them down into two models, Gold OA and Green OA:

  • Gold OA – journals in this category do peer reviews, and allow the author to retain copyright. Some are for profit, some are not. They charge a fee to publish each article (paid by the author, or the sponsor of the research, or the university). These journals may run advertisements or priced “add-on” articles to help defray the costs of publishing.
  • Green OA – refers primarily to archives and repositories, often hosted by universities committed to long-term preservation. Peer review is not necessary, as articles in this category have already gone through their initial publishing process. The repositories are typically organized by discipline.
  • A cross between Gold and Green is what Suber calls the “delayed open access journal” which allows OA to begin after an embargo period (i.e. a set period of time after publication).

There is also the situation of articles previously published in non-OA journals. As the copyright holders, the publishers may or may not allow OA archiving. But, as Suber points out, there are actually three versions of an article: (1) the pre-print version; (2) the post-print version (after peer review, but before copy-editing), and (3) the final version. The author typically holds the copyright for the pre-print version. And according to Suber, 70% of journals allow for post-print archiving. So in essence, an author can often decide the extent of an article to expose in an archive (para. 6).

OA Publishing “by the Numbers”

According to the OAD website (2009), hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, there are currently around 4,344 Open Access journals. Its page “OA by the numbers” provides many useful statistics and links to their sources, including breakdowns by Gold and Green OA.

Prerequisites for OA Publishing

The advent of the World Wide Web made OA publishing possible. Shulenburger (2008) points out the obvious: OA is just not possible in a print world. Publication, indexing and distribution costs are just too high. But what else enables this model to thrive? First is a group of authors who do not publish for profit, and who, in fact may actually pay to have their articles published. The third is dedicated group of scholars whose collaborative spirit of scholarship.

  • online material
  • academic journals
  • authors who do not get paid
  • authors who need immediate access to research
  • metadata
  • preservation
  • funding (college, public, private, personal)
  • Content Management System with searchable front end

Repositories

Digital repositories are very effective ways to publicly distribute information. Shulenburger (2008) notes that taxpayers are “eager” to see the results of the research they fund, and correctly feel that the “right information” at the “right time” can benefit them enormously. But he concludes that universities do a rather “lousy job” of promoting the availability of digital collections, and fail to inform current and future funders of the fruits of their scholarship. Academia needs to break out of the historically closed feeling that its scholarship for its students only.

OA depends on repositories set up by institutional unit (i.e. a university, a foundation, a governmental agency) that provide access to its scholarly work. These repositories are accessed through the institution’s portal not just by members of that institution, but by the public at large. In many cases OA provides proof of its scholarly work, a justification for the tax payer monies, or grants.

Each repository uses a content management system (CMS) to organize its information. Metadata may also be created to enable searching across portals, to truly provide open access. OAI-PMH is a Dublin Core based XML schema that is used to enable harvesting of metadata.

Benefits for Faculty and Researchers

In the traditional scholarly publishing model researchers give up the copyright on articles they’ve written, and the journal publisher retains copyright. In addition, faculty volunteer (unpaid) service as peer-reviewers and editors for subscription-funded scholarly journals. OA journals allow researchers to keep the copyright to their work, and, by extension, to reproduce the work wherever they see fit, for example, an institutional repository or distribution to students.

By removing the paid subscription barrier from scholarly publishing, OA journals increase access to scholarship for faculty, researchers, students and the general public. Academic work can be found more easily on the internet, making our research more visible. Faculty can have greater access to scholarship in their field, as do unaffiliated scholars or those at institutions that cannot afford to pay high subscription prices for traditionally-published academic journals.

There are many high-quality, well-respected, peer-reviewed open access journals across the full spectrum of academic disciplines and subjects. The process of peer review is similar to subscription-based journals, double-blind and rigorous. Additionally, applications like Open Journal Systems include a built-in process to facilitate submission of articles, reviews and revisions.

Implications for Librarians

OASIS (2009) provides an entire tab in its website to describe how libarians can use OA to extend their mission: Open Access is an answer to the “Serials Pricing Crisis”. Scholarly output has doubled since the mid 1980’s and shows no signs of stopping and the current publishing model is not sustainable. Funding is just not available to purchase the number of journals scholars now require.

Shulenburger (2008) suggests seven steps to take to encourage OA publishing, and though he does not assign them to any particular group, academic librarians should surely be aware of his suggestions, as paraphrased below:

      1. Ensure a digital repository is available on campus for faculty to deposit research.
      2. Ensure faculty and administration are aware of the “real benefits of broadening distribution of scholarly product”.
      3. Arrange workshops with faculty and administration to discuss intellectual property policies and OA’s implications.
      4. Advertise public access and set up policies for all funding agencies and foundations.
      5. Win the support of everyone on campus. Demonstrate how OA will benefit all.
      6. Work with departments and faculty to develop habits of depositing into digital repository.
      7. “Brand” information from your repository. Engage public relations staff to spread the word: come here first for quality information.

Indexing, Retrieval and Preservation

Open Access Journals are typically accessed from their institutions’ portals or through the Directory of Open Access Journals or DOAJ.

OpenDoar is another directory of repositories.

In addition, the metada of OA articles can be stored OAI-PMH and then harvested by aggregators such as OAISTER OAI_PMH protocol was established in 1999 and allows metadata harvesting of archives across repositories making them searchable and interoperable.

Archiving and Preservation of OA Journals

Related to Open Access Publishing, the Open Archives Initiative attempts to provide a common framework for the archival of all digital information (not just OA journals) through the use of OAI metadata standards. OAISTER is a remarkable front-end retrieval system that harvests metadata from institions world-wide, and makes it searchable.

Videos

Recommended Links

This list is presented in an order that will hopefully make sense to the OA novice:

  1. Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview is an excellent place to begin learning about Open Access. Suber is a researcher for SPARC and compiled ths digest for those unfamiliar with OA.
  2. Simmons College has an excellent wiki called OAD (Open Access Directory) that provides current information about Open Access. It is hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and has on its board of supervisors many key players in OA. Check out its Table of Contents that provides easy access to OA information.
  3. Open Access Videos – there are 19 of them
  4. DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) lists OA journals, and provides a user interface to search them. DOAJ
  5. The Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook or OASIS
  6. LOCKSS – is short for “Lots of copies keep stuff safe.” In this wiki, you can find out ways institutions are colloborating to preserve each others repositories by using disk space on older computers.
  7. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is integral to OA. This is thick reading though, and a resource that should perhaps be used after some of the others listed here. Peter Suber is one of researchers for SPARC, and his Digest, is concise and perfect for OA novices.
  8. The Public Library of Science is a great resource … Known as PLos, The Public Library of Science is a key player in the OA field

References

Educational Blogs

From CUNY Academic Commons

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Blogs

Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson, 2006, Corwin Press. This book provides a comprehensive explanation and is an outstanding pedagogical resource.

Exploring the Use of Blogs as Learning Spaces in the Higher Education Sector Into the Blogoshere  Here are opening lines of this site: “This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities.”

Language and the Internet This is an excerpt from a recent book by the linguist David Crystal, who describes the language of blogs as,  “. . . .written language in its most naked form.”

Tomorrow’s Professor Blog This collaboration between MIT and Stanford describes itself as “a place for discussion about teaching and learning, and general issues concerning higher education.”

WordPress a Better LMS The author discusses using a blog as an alternative to Blackboard or other Learning Management Systems.

HOME | Web 2.0 Teaching Tools and Resources

Related Pages

Wikis in the Classroom

From CUNY Academic Commons

Image:Teachingandlearning.jpg

7 Things You Should Know About Wikis This article explains how students–and faculty–can use wikis to collaborate on.

Using Wikis as Collaborative Writing Tools This webtext focuses on the use of wiki as a tool for writing and for teaching writing. (by Susan Loudermilk Garza and Tommy Hern)

Teaching and learning online with wikis from the conference proceedings of the ASCILITE (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) in 2004. Pretty basic and focused on online teaching, but a good overview (it’s early–2004 is a long, long time ago in internet time).

Wikis and Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool From the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning. Very comprehensive, and includes both wikipedia and using your own wikis in class. And also provides a good overview of other research.

50 Ways to use wikis Great suggestions on how to use wikis in the classroom.

Three Wiki Uses The author breaks wiki use down into three general categories: knowlege repositories, collaborative writing and situation awareness.

Using Group Wikis Online Bill Ashton, from York College, posts an in-depth presentation about using group wikis online on one of his blogs on the Commons, Things I say to my BlackBoard students. Also included in Bill’s June, 2012 post are links to his group wiki grading rubrics and a screencast overview of wikis in Blackboard.

Related Pages