Author Archives: Michael Lynch

Massive Open Online Courses as Drivers for Change

A project briefing session presented at CNI’s fall 2012 membership meeting by Lynne O’Brien of Duke University. Now available on CNI’s two video channels:

Since announcing a partnership with Coursera in July 2012, Duke has launched two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and has eight more in development. Spanning humanities, social sciences and science topics, these courses have over 320,000 enrollments as of October 2012. Duke’s goals in experimenting with MOOCs are to drive teaching innovation in both campus-based and online courses, to extend Duke’s commitment to knowledge in service to society, and to expand Duke’s reach and reputation in a global environment.

Stressing about finals?

Refresh Your Mind with Guided and Drop-In Meditation, December 10-15 – Mitchell Green Lounge in McCullough will be open and set up for meditation from 6 AM to 11 PM during finals week.  Simple printed meditation instructions are available, so drop in anytime.

Guided meditations will also be offered at 9:00 AM, 12:30 PM, 4:30 PM, and 8:00 PM each day. These will be twenty minutes long and will be facilitated by faculty members Rebecca Gould, John Huddleston, Chris Shaw, John Spackman, and Catharine Wright, as well as experienced student facilitators Adeline Cleveland and Blake Harper, and Parton Counseling staff.   Meditation teaches relaxation and concentration: so come, take a break, and refresh your mind! Sponsored by Parton Counseling.

Friday Links – August 17, 2012

Five ways that social media can benefit IT – This article focuses on IT as a consumer of social media services, not as a driver in the organization

Considerations for libraries looking at SaaS (Software as a Service).

We’re NASA and we know it.  From Wired, “This music video is the reason nerds rule. Forever.”

Also from Wired: Google’s Dremel makes big data look small.

Friday links – July 6, 2012

Want to have better meetings? Ditch PowerPoint – For some, a PowerPoint presentation causes them to automatically tune out. Here’s what to do in your meetings instead.

The Classic, Beautiful and Controversial Books That Changed Science Forever – Without the work of intellectual giants like Einstein, Newton and Darwin, we might still be in the dark ages. But how many scientists still read the dust-ridden texts where these luminaries first expounded their theories? Here’s the story of 10 famous publications that spun the scientific world off its orbit.

This just in: Mermaids are NOT real, U.S. agency says

Friday links – June 22, 2012

Free topo maps from USGS – US Topo is the new generation of digital topographic maps from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Arranged in the traditional 7.5-minute quadrangle format, digital US Topo maps look and feel like the traditional paper topographic maps for which the USGS is so well known.

US Topo maps are available free on the Web through the USGS Store. Each map quadrangle is constructed in PDF format with geospatial extensions (GeoPDF®) format from key layers of geographic data – orthoimagery, roads, geographic names, contours and hydrographic features – found in The National Map.