For the explosive growth and
influence of user-generated Internet content
The
'Great Man' theory of history is usually attributed
to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote
that 'the history of the world is but the biography
of great men.' He believed
that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who
shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory
took a serious beating in 2006.
2006 is a story
about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.
It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the
million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis
MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and
helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change
the world,
but also change the way the world changes.
The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not
the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago,
according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research.
It's
not
even the over hyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web
is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together
the small
contributions of millions of people and making them matter.
Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were
a new version
of some old software. But it's really a revolution. Continue
reading the Time article...
Will 2007 Bring
Another YouTube Phenomenon?
Experts predict what will make waves in 2007
YouTube was the Web phenomenon
of 2006, but what should we expect in 2007? Melissa
Block, National Public Radio correspondent,
speaks with a number of tech-savvy individuals about what they think
the next big thing is.
The Experts
Say...
Sites the NPR experts predict will
make waves in 2007:
Melissa talks with Danah
Boyd, PhD candidate at UC-Berkeley in the School
of Information and graduate fellow at the USC
Annenberg Center. Boyd was also a grad student in
the prestigious MIT
Media Lab, studying in the Sociable
Media Group. She currently advises Yahoo!
about human representation in online communities.
We also talk to with Erin
Ali, a blogger and game-development student in Tempe, Arizona.
She blogs on the 1up.com network,
is an avid gamer, and wants to make games for a living.
And for clues of 2006 that could lead to a big thing on the Web (or
in tech) for 2007, we talk with Hiawatha
Bray, technology reporter for The
Boston Globe.
Second Life, a virtual world in which many people assume the identities
of animated characters and roam around socializing, building virtual
houses, and trading virtual goods, has become a popular teaching tool
among professors because it allows students to experiment with architectural
design, to study monetary policy, and to do sociology research -- to
name just a few educational
uses -- in an enclosed, relatively risk-free environment. And professors
at colleges
other than Harvard have held a portion of their classes in Second
Life.
The Nessons helped create a three-and-a-half-minute
video to promote their class, available below from blip.tv,
a video sharing service with a serious focus on video
blogging and podcasting. In it the Nessons explain the
substantive focus of the course, as well as how everything
will be coordinated. To learn more about virtual
worlds, read 7
Things You Should Know About Virtual Worlds. For
more information about this course, please visit http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone.
Around
the Web
A snapshot of what's going on around
the World Wide Web
MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion
The Modern Language Association has released
the long-awaited report of
its Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. The report
describes a series of problems affecting the humanities profession and recommends
broad solutions to the problems, including"developing a more capacious conception
of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph" and "recognizing
the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media." The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright
eased for clips offered by Grouper
Video-sharing site offers snippets from Sony Pictures'
library that fans can post to blogs and webpages pages.
Film clips featuring stars such as Jack Nicholson, Tom
Cruise and Cameron Diaz can now be shared online without
violating copyright law. This is the latest attempt
to solve the copyright issue plaguing the video-sharing
sector. Hollywood studios and other media companies
are cracking down on sites that allow users to upload
their copyright material without compensating them. c|net News.com
The
Rise of "Crowdsourcing"
Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China
is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people
using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems,
even do corporate R & D. Other examples of crowdsourcing
include microstock photo agencies. Online sites like
iStockphoto,
ShutterStock,
and Dreamstime
offer professional-quality royalty-free stock photos
at a fraction the price of the industry players like
Getty Images. Wired
Vista
Arrives With Limited Fanfare
Twelve years ago, Microsoft
introduced a new operating system, Windows 95, in a
frenzied global marketing blitz that was unlike anything
the industry had ever seen. But shortly after midnight
on January 30, 2007, when Microsoft put its latest Windows
successor, Vista,
on sale, there was considerably less hoopla.successor,
Vista, on sale, there was considerably less hoopla. New York Times
How many websites on
the internet?
At the end of 2006, there were more than 100 million
web sites on the Internet, according to a November
2006 survey. The 100 million site milestone
caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet
added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous
full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005.
The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004,
when the survey hit 50 million. Blogs and small
business web sites have driven the explosive growth
in 2006, with huge increases at free blogging
services. Domain industry companies also saw strong
demand for low-priced domain names and shared
hosting accounts.
Free, weekly podcast of the award-winning radio
show, "This American Life." First-person
stories and short fiction pieces that are touching,
funny, and surprising. Hosted by
Ira Glass, from WBEZ
Chicago Public Radio.
Podcasting, a portmanteau of Apple's "iPod"
and "broadcasting", is a method of
publishing files to the Internet, allowing users
to subscribe to a feed and receive new files
automatically by subscription, usually at no
cost. It first became popular in late 2004,
used largely for audio files.
Do you have a favorite podcast you'd like to
share?
Managing
Threaded Discussions in Blackboard
The Discussion Board feature in Blackboard
is used as a communication tool for posting
and responding to messages. The Discussion Board
is used asynchronously, which means users in
a course do not have to be logged on to the
course at the same time to communicate.
ATS
QuickStarts are designed to provide short,
concise instructions for using hardware, software,
and facilities managed by ATS.
YouTube
is a video-sharing service that allows users to
post personally developed videos of nearly any
variety online, from animations to personal recordings.
YouTube is one of an emerging class of social
applications that allows users to share and form
communities around their content. It draws users
into engaging content as commentators and creators,
activities that heighten students' visual literacy.
Professor Andrew deWet, Earth
and Environment, instructs students in the
department's Remote
Sensing and GIS Laboratory. Professor deWet
has been instrumental in exploring the use of
geographical information systems (GIS) at the
College.
ATS
eNews
February, 2007
Volume 2, Issue 4
Tips, techniques, and tools
for using technology to enhance teaching and research
The
'Great Man' theory of history is usually attributed
to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote
that 'the history of the world is but the biography
of great men.' He 
ATS
eNews
