Scholar's Square @ F&M An institutional repository for scholarly publications at the College Scholars Square is a dynamic, web-based institutional repository featuring the intellectual output of the College. As students and faculty create research material and scholarly publications in increasingly complex digital formats, there is a need to collect, preserve, index, and distribute this ever-growing corpus of digital research. Scholars Square can manage these materials in a professionally maintained archive giving them increased visibility and accessibility over time. Scholars Square is built around customizable, open source software called DSpace, which captures data in any format - in text, video, audio, and data - and distributes it over the web. The online database application also indexes the information, so users can search and retrieve items remotely. Best of all, Scholars Square preserves digital work over the long term and provides a way to manage research materials and publications in a professionally maintained repository to give them greater visibility and accessibility over time. Patrons of Scholars Square can view items from Scholarship Collections like Art and Art History and Business, Organizations, and Society, student theses, as well as browse visual representations from the The Phillips Museum of Art Pennsylvania Folk Art Collection and the College's Fraktur Collection. Franklin & Marshall, via Scholars Square, is part of the DSpace Standard Service offered by the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) in which other well-known national liberal arts colleges are participating. For more information, visit Scholars Square online! To ficlet or not to ficlet Short stories enabling writers to collaborate with the world A Matter Of Perspective   "Master," Timmins said, somewhat nervously, "I don't understand." "Understand what, my boy?" Mordecai the Red asked, as they walked back to the old mage's tower. "Well, sir..." Timmins hesitated. "Out with it, boy!" Mordecai's normally calm demeanour slipping a little. "Yes, master. Well, they had spells to detect any lies, did they not?" "Of course they did," he said, sounding almost bored again. "They always do, especially when an accused murderer is brought directly before the king." "Were they faulty in someway? Perhaps cast by an inexperienced wizard?" Timmins asked, curiously. "Oh, no," Moredecai answered proudly. "The spells were perfect." "But," Timmins said, lowering his voice, "you told them you didn't kill Father Bremen." "Quite right." "But, sir, you summoned the spirit that did." "Ah, I see," Mordecai smiled. "They asked the wrong question. They asked if I killed him. While the spirit did my bidding, I never laid a hand on him. The truth, you see, is all a matter of perspective." ficlets are shorter than short stories. Well, no, actually, they are short stories, but they're really short stories. Really short, as in there's not a maximum word count ... there's actually a maximum character count (1,024). There is also a minimum character count, and the number of that beast is 64. If you wish, the site offers inspiration (photos, themes, suggested beginnings and endings, even other ficlets), but you're completely free to blaze your own trail. Now, here's where the real fun comes in: Each and every ficlet is modular in that, though you may have written a stand-alone story with a beginning, middle, and ending, your fellow ficleteers may choose to write a prequel or sequel to your story. In this respect, you can think of ficlets as literary Legos. All ficlets are covered under Creative Commons, which means that if you wrote it, you own it. Period. To give you an idea of what you can do with 1,024 characters, the length of this description, including spaces, is precisely 1024 characters. Really! Learn more about creating your own ficlets online... Blog Comments vs. Peer Review Which Way Makes a Book Better? Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, has been running an unusual experiment with his latest academic book, which is about analyzing video games. For several weeks in February and March of 2008, the scholar has posted a section of his draft each day to a popular blog he contributes to - called Grand Text Auto - and he has invited readers to praise it or tear it to shreds. They've done both. And by late March, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin had posted the whole tome, and the first phase of the experiment will be over. Speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ben Vershbow, editorial director at the Institute for the Future of the Book, conceded that comments on blogs are unlikely to fully replace peer review. But he says academic blogging can play a role in the publishing process. "The conversational modes of reading and writing on the Web in things like blogs and wikis really chime well with the essential idea of peer review, which is putting out work in development to a peer group and refining the work," he says. So how is Wardrip-Fruin's experiment going? Read on... Google TiSP "Dark porcelain" project offers self-installed plumbing-based Internet access Sick of paying for broadband that you have to, well, pay for? Introducing Google TiSP (BETA), the new FREE in-home wireless broadband service, a service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system. Sign up today and you will receive your TiSP self-installation kit, which includes setup guide, fiber-optic cable, spindle, wireless router and installation CD. Around the Web A snapshot of what's going on around the World Wide Web New Medium, Old Stories: A High-Tech Look at the City's Black History A new website called MAPP, presented by Columbia University, uses video, audio and maps and images to showcase 52 historic sites and people in the city, ranging from the familiar (the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan) to the rarely acknowledged, including the Oyster House and the Colored Orphan Asylum. "It gives students an opportunity for detailed study in a way that would never be possible in traditional textbooks," said Frank A. Moretti, a professor of communications at Teachers College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The New York Times First Online Resource Dedicated to 21st Century Skills Teaching and Learning is Launched The Partnership for 21st Century Skills has emerged as the leading advocacy organization focused on infusing 21st century skills into education. The organization brings together the business community, education leaders, and policymakers to define a powerful vision for 21st century education to ensure every child's success as citizens and workers in the 21st century. The Partnership encourages schools, districts and states to advocate for the infusion of 21st century skills into education and provides tools and resources to help facilitate and drive change. Partnership for 21st Century Skills New Jersey Investigates Juicy Campus Gossip Site New Jersey consumer-affairs officials are investigating whether Juicy Campus, a campus-gossip Web site, violates state laws that protect against consumer fraud. Juicy Campus has sparked outrage on campuses across the country for publishing hateful or malicious comments about students, posted by anonymous users. The Chronicle of Higher Education Wikis and Podcasts and Blogs! Oh, My! What Is a Faculty Member Supposed to Do? The gaps between students' and faculty members' use of technology have widened. Many faculty members today have become so inundated with digital communications from students that it is not unusual for communication protocols and limitations to be specified in course syllabi. Most faculty members have home access to campus resources and use a course management system. But most evidence, though limited, indicates that faculty have not embraced and utilized technology to the same extent as students. Students live in a separate reality from faculty members, who are typically not motivated or rewarded by institutional incentives to change their practice. However, as higher education institutions struggle with limited budgets to support faculty and to move courses online, technology seems to change daily. Given the demands of teaching, service, and (for most) research, faculty are now expected to embrace learning technologies along with everything else, challenging the institution to help them make sense of what works and how to work it. In this article, the authors discuss some faculty members' instructional technology challenges. EDUCAUSE Review

Scholar's Square @ F&M To ficlet, or not to ficlet Blog Comments vs. Peer Review Google TiSP Around the Web How many of us use mobile phones? About 68% of the US population had at least one mobile phone at the end of 2006, and this is expected to grow to 76% by 2011. The mobile phone is arguably the success story of the modern electronics industry. Starting as a rare, high-end business tool less than 20 years ago, mobile phones are now in the hands of almost a third of the planet's population. In contrast, less than one person in six uses a PC. Mobile handset sales topped 1 billion units worldwide in 2007, about four times that of PC sales. Mobile phones are not just devices for occasional use. For example, the average U.S. subscriber spends a half an hour a day on the mobile phone. The usage of this nearly ubiquitous device is rapidly changing away from purely voice communications. The mobile handset is becoming a platform for a wide variety of data applications, from taking and sending pictures - virtually all new handsets will have cameras by the end of the decade - to listening to audio, watching video, and getting information from the Internet. Text messaging continues to be the largest single component of mobile data usage, but audio and video (both streaming and downloaded) and information services, is the fastest growing segment. Source: Adobe, Understanding the Mobile Ecosystem [PDF] Blackboard: Dropping the Lowest Grade How to drop students lowest grade from the gradebook while maintaining a running weighted total. IET QuickStarts are designed to provide short, concise instructions for using hardware, software, and facilities managed by IET. Featured Podcast: Future Learning Producer: EDUCAUSE George Siemens, Associate Director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. and Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University talk about future learning. Do you have a favorite podcast you'd like to share? Institutional repository An institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating -- in digital form -- the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. For a college or university, this would include materials such as research journal articles, before (preprints) and after (postprints) undergoing peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations, but it might also include other digital assets generated by normal academic life, such as administrative documents, course notes, or learning objects. The four main objectives for having an institutional repository are: to create global visibility for an institution's scholarly research; to collect content in a single location; to provide open access to institutional research output by self-archiving it; to store and preserve other institutional digital assets, including unpublished or otherwise easily lost ("grey") literature (e.g., theses or technical reports). TLT Discussion April 8 Lunchtime presentations about the ways in which faculty are using technology to enhance teaching and learning - lunch provided. Third Thursday Brown Bags April 17 Informal lunchtime conversations about using technology to support teaching and learning. More information about upcoming IET Events is available online. Printing PowerPoint Slides in Black and White Many PowerPoint presentations use background colors on the slides in order to make them more attractive, but these colors pose a challenge when trying to print out the slides. In order to be able to print these slides as a handout (say, with three slides a page in order to conserve ink and paper), please follow these steps: Click "File > Print" to open up the Print Dialog Box Adjust the outputs to display handouts, 3 a page, with black and white as the output type Click OK or Print to print this out. Professor Dasgupta, Economics, engages his students in an exercise using the state-of-the-art eLearning Laboratory (eLL). IET eNews April, 2008 Volume 3, Issue 6 Tips, techniques, and tools for using technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research IET eNews is published by the Office of Instructional and Emerging Technologies. http://ats.fandm.edu/enews/