YouTube EDU

YouTube now has a page devoted to clips from tertiary institutions. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Spencer Crooks, a spokesman for YouTube, said in a statement that the site now features complete lectures for some 200 full college courses. “Subjects range from computer science to literature, biology to philosophy, history, political science, psychology, law, and much more,” he said. “You can search within YouTube EDU to find videos on topics of interest.”

Facebook for academics

An article from the latest Chronicle of Higher Education on a new social networking site set up by Oxford University research fellow, Richard Price. As it says:

So far, Mr. Price says, about 2,300 researchers from about 15 disciplines have set up profiles on the site. He says the service was born out of his own frustration finding peers to talk to while he was finishing his dissertation on philosophy and human perception. “I couldn’t find anyone else in the world who was really working on it,” he says. It was only after three years that he finally bumped into someone at an academic conference with similar research interests.

Encyclopaedia Britannica Goes — Gasp! — Wiki

One of the questions I ask in the Q&A to staff on this blog is: Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica? Apparently Britannica has itself decided that the answer to this question is … From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Long a standard reference source for scholarship, largely because of its tightly controlled editing, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced this week it was throwing open its elegantly-bound covers to the masses. It will allow the “user community” (in the words of the encyclopedia’s blog) to contribute their own articles, which will be clearly marked and run alongside the edited reference pieces.

Worldcat identities

 

 

WorldCat have developed an interesting new site they call WorldCat Identities. It uses the library holdings information from WorldCat (a combined catalogue mainly focused on the US but with international holdings also) to draw together information about an author.

You can see from this page for education writer Peter McLaren that it draws together cover images, book descriptions, a publication timeline, books about the author, related subject areas and so on.

It works with published authors with holdings in the libraries covered by WorldCat. Here are some more local RMIT School of Education authors.

UNSW on YouTube

The SMH reports that the University of New South Wales is publishing some of its lectures on YouTube in Lectures online for YouTube generation. According to the university’s own press release:

 UNSW on You Tube will be a channel for communicating research and selected teaching material to a wider audience. This will broaden public access to some of Australia’s top teachers and researchers.

See the University’s YouTube page for the range of available videos.

When Wikipedia is the assignment

There is an interesting article from a recent issue of Inside Higher Ed reporting on a paper at the Educause conference in the US. Martha Groom tells how she had her students submit their term paper to Wikipedia as an article. This allowed them to immediately engage with the idea of peer review, give consideration to copyright and references, think about the tone of the article and so on.

Another very good reason for this kind of exercise is that it allows students to understand what type of resource they are getting with Wikipedia. They’d be able to see that Wikipedia is open to all to contribute; that has a transparent editing and discussion process; and most importantly, it would emphasise the need to assess whether the information is credible or not.

New library books on LibraryThing

The Library moved to a new catalogue this year and hopes to eventually allow users to access a new titles list. In the meantime, I have created a “widget” on this blog (on the right hand side, scroll down) that features new education books coming into the Library.

TeacherTube

TeacherTube an interesting educational version of YouTube with an emphasis on k-12 education. From the Factiva database, the June issue of University Business quotes co-founder Jason Smith describe it as “an open community for all educators to share their best practices.” Smith adds that: “Our goal is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. It is a site to provide … professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill.”